Amritsar | The Wagah Tamasha - A border without enmity

A.J. Philip
When my wife, as secretary of the senior citizens’ wing of the Dwarka Mar Thoma Church, suggested that we join the trip organised by the Delhi Centre Senior Citizens Forum to the Wagah border and the Golden Temple, also called Harmandir Sahib, I readily agreed. It was not my first visit to either place, but curiosity and nostalgia got the better of me.
I had once taken my family to Wagah, the border post that separates India from Pakistan, and I still recall the thrill of crossing over into Pakistani territory. We were accompanied by a senior Army officer, which made that rare experience possible. I took a picture of my son Snehesh straddling between the two nations, one foot in India and the other in Pakistan — an image that remains etched in memory.

The Pakistani officers, standing a few yards away, looked the other way as I trained my camera, not a gun, at them. It was a small but telling moment — one that reminded me that those in uniform on either side of the border are not enemies. They are simply doing their duty, like clerks manning two adjacent offices of the same company, separated by a wall of suspicion built by history.

Two decades ago, the ceremony at Wagah — the opening and closing of the border and the lowering of the flags — was a modest affair. Today, it has become an elaborate spectacle of sound, light, and fury. What was once a brief, disciplined exercise has turned into a theatrical performance, choreographed for an audience that comes not to witness a ritual of military discipline but to indulge in a carnival of nationalism.

The officers posted there are invariably young, tall, and full of energy. The highlight of the parade is the spectacular leg-raising — so high that the boot almost touches the cap — followed by a thunderous stomp that seems to shake the earth. This act is repeated several times, with faces contorted into expressions of mock rage, as if each soldier were a gladiator in a Roman amphitheatre, performing not for survival but for the crowd’s approval.
Gladiators have long vanished from human civilisation, but their spirit lives on at Wagah — not in bloodshed, but in the exaggerated gestures of rivalry and power. The border ceremony is, in many ways, a reenactment of ancient combat — stylised, ritualised, and utterly pointless.

Years ago, I wrote in The Tribune urging then Defence Minister A.K. Antony to end this tamasha on the border, which only injures the spines of our soldiers who gain nothing by stomping the ground with such ferocity. Far from ending it, both India and Pakistan have since strengthened the infrastructure at the border, building grander galleries, taller gates, and more elaborate stages. The show has grown in scale, if not in meaning.

This time, I noticed that the whole event was managed exclusively by the Border Security Force (BSF). There were many women officers, guiding visitors to their seats with efficiency and warmth. To my pleasant surprise, they also participated in the march itself — raising their legs, stomping the ground, and scowling with the same theatrical intensity as their male counterparts. The sight was both impressive and slightly disconcerting.

The ceremony is officially called the Beating of the Retreat. Unlike in Delhi, where the annual Beating of the Retreat marks the formal end of Republic Day celebrations with the soulful strains of hymns like Abide with Me (recently dropped) and orchestral renditions of martial tunes, the Wagah version is all noise and motion. It is more a pep rally than a military ritual — designed to excite the crowd rather than inspire reflection.

Two young officers — a man and a woman — played the role of cheerleaders, urging the crowd to shout “Vande Mataram” and “Bharat Mata ki Jai” at the top of their voices. An adolescent girl sitting next to me, her cheeks painted with the tricolour, responded with infectious enthusiasm. Soon the entire audience was on its feet, waving flags, chanting slogans, and recording videos.

The BSF ensured that Pakistani slogans from across the border were drowned out by the Indian cheers. I’m sure the Pakistan Rangers do the same on their side.
Like last time, I noticed that the stands on the Pakistani side were three-fourth empty. There were a few spectators, mostly men, waving their green flags, but the contrast was stark. When I visited Pakistan some twenty years ago and went to the border from Lahore, it was the same.

The crowd there was thin, and the ceremony much less extravagant. I also witnessed a small but hopeful moment — two buses allowed to cross the border, carrying passengers and goods. One of the parcels I saw was addressed to a conference organiser in Lahore and, to my amusement, it contained bottles of fine Indian liquor.

Over the years, both nations have engaged in a kind of architectural one-upmanship. When India improved the infrastructure at Attari — the last Indian village before Wagah — Pakistan responded by building a taller gate and a larger gallery. This race for grandeur is a needless waste of public resources. The BSF’s job is to guard the border, not to stage nightly dramas of pseudo-patriotism. But who will listen? To question such displays is to risk being branded “anti-national.”

Once, Wagah was known for something far more meaningful — the lighting of lamps on both sides of the border. Every year, peace-loving citizens gathered there with candles, as if to remind the two nations that the light of humanity should never be extinguished by the darkness of hostility.

On the Indian side would be the late Kuldip Nayar, the veteran journalist who believed that people-to-people relationships mattered more than artificial enmity. He spent his life arguing that borders should separate states, not hearts. His quiet presence at Wagah, holding a candle rather than a flag, symbolised a gentler kind of patriotism — one rooted in empathy, not aggression. Sadly, that tradition of shared light has given way to blinding spectacle.

And yet, this ceremony exists nowhere else. India has borders with China, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bangladesh — but at no other point do we beat the retreat with such pomp. At Raxaul, all one needs is an identity card to walk across a small bridge into Nepal. The absence of theatrics there does not make either nation less patriotic or less secure.

I have visited a checkpoint between Canada and the United States, two countries with their own complicated histories. The officers there were busy checking travel credentials — no marching, no shouting, no chest-thumping. There are thousands of border crossings across the world, and none of them waste manpower or money on such pageantry.

It would be wrong to blame the BJP for this phenomenon. The Wagah border came into being in 1947, in the aftermath of Partition. The ceremonial lowering of the flags began modestly in 1959. It has since grown into a daily ritual of rivalry and pride, sustained by public enthusiasm and television cameras. The Pakistanis, our estranged brothers, also embraced the idea — perhaps because it allowed both sides to vent patriotic emotion without firing a single bullet.

We, Indians, have a weakness for spectacles. Our Republic Day parade, with its tanks, missiles, and tableaux, is another example. Muscle-flexing is not a mark of strength; it often betrays insecurity. Communist countries like the erstwhile USSR, China, and North Korea have long used military parades to project power. The only democratic country that still holds such grand displays is France, where the Bastille Day parade down the Champs-Élysées celebrates the spirit of revolution rather than state propaganda.

In India, the Republic Day parade once drew large crowds. Today, most people prefer to watch it on television — if at all. The crores spent on organising it could surely be used better elsewhere. But such reasoning has little place in a culture that celebrates grandeur and symbolism over substance.

The Wagah ceremony has now become part of India’s tourism industry. Buses from Amritsar unload thousands of visitors daily, and local vendors sell everything from tricolour caps to ice cream. The atmosphere is festive, almost carnivalesque. Patriotism, it seems, has become another form of entertainment.

Since nobody will listen to cries for ending such extravaganzas, it is perhaps wiser to do what the crowds do — sit back, enjoy the spectacle, wave the flag, and shout “Vande Mataram.” After all, as the evening sun sets behind the iron gates of Wagah, the only thing that crosses freely between India and Pakistan is the echo of applause — and the fading memory of those lamps once lit for peace.
ajphilip@gmail.com