FAISALABAD, Pakistan — Nasir Dhillon, a former policeman, is selling homes in a Pakistani town about 100 miles from the Indian border. His real estate company has four branches and he drives a Toyota SUV, a local wealth marker.
But Mr Dhillon, 38, is best known for his sideline: reuniting people separated from loved ones during partition, when Britain split its large South Asian colony into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan in August 1947.
Mr. Dhillon is the driving force behind Punjabi Lehar, a six-year-old YouTube channel that regularly posts interviews with survivors of this traumatic episode. He says it has allowed a number of Muslims and Sikhs – some of whom live in North America – to visit their ancestral villages and has led to around 100 in-person meetings.
The partition led to communal violence, mass displacement and the death of as many as two million people. Some of the young people who survived were separated from their parents or siblings.
“What did they do wrong?” They were children,” Mr. Dhillon said recently in his office in the northeast city of Faisalabad. “Why can’t they visit their family now?” »
Deferred dreams
In a typical case, Mr. Dhillon or his business partner, Bhupinder Singh Lovely, interviews a person who wants to meet a long-lost friend or visit an ancestral home or village. The video ricochets across social media and sometimes prompts advice from the public that leads to a reunion or a trip to the countryside.
This is a service that the governments of India and Pakistan have never offered. The neighbors have gone to war three times since the 1960s, and relations have remained locked in a deep freeze ever since, punctuated by periodic military clashes.
Many partition survivors on both sides of the border have expressed a desire to cross it and reconnect with the lives and people left behind, said Anam Zakaria, the author of “Footprints of Partition: Narratives of Four Generations of Pakistanis and Indians”.
“Too many people have already died with this unfulfilled desire,” she added. “In this context, the way Punjabi Lehar fosters connection and reunion offers a window of hope and closure, at a time when we are on the verge of losing the generation of partition.”
Create momentum
Other projects have sought to bring people from both countries closer together over the years, including student exchanges and art projects, said Urvashi Butalia, the author of “The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India”.
But she said Punjabi Lehar is unique as it celebrates the name of Punjab, one of the states of British India which was divided by partition. (It was also the site of several bloody clashes that pitted Muslims against Hindus and Sikhs.)
“It harkens back to an identity that existed before partition and, in some ways, continues after – a regional, linguistic and cultural identity, which connects people despite religious differences and rejects the assumption that the British made during the partition, according to which the only identity that should be in the foreground was the religious,” Ms Butalia said.
Mr Dhillon, who is Muslim, said his interest in the partition legacy came from his grandfather, who told the family stories about their ancestral village in Indian Punjab, and the Sikh friends and neighbors who ‘he knew.
“In the media and elsewhere, we were told a different story about differences and enmity between people,” said Mr. Dhillon, speaking in thickly accented Punjabi, a provincial language. “But our elders told of a time when Muslims and Sikhs lived peacefully together.”
In his mid-twenties, he started making friends with Facebook users in Indian Punjab, and then started a Facebook page on Punjabi language and culture. He befriended Mr. Lovely, a Sikh who lives nearby. They co-founded Punjabi Lehar in 2016, after Mr Dhillon left the local police.
Mr Dhillon said they chose the name, which translates to “Punjabi Wave”, because an ocean wave is hard to stop.
A useful escape
Early responses to the channel’s videos came mostly from Sikhs in Canada and the United States; some later traveled to their ancestral villages after receiving new information about their families, Dhillon said. As the news spread, he and Mr. Lovely also heard of people in Pakistan and India seeking to connect in person with long-lost friends and relatives.
Obtaining tourist visas for travel between India and Pakistan is notoriously difficult, and the official channels that sometimes allowed people to meet are now “almost frozen”, said Ilhan Niaz, a historian at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.
“There is no government support for this stuff,” he said.
There is a loophole: People from both states can meet in person at a handful of Sikh holy sites in Pakistan that Indians are allowed to visit, mostly on religious pilgrimage visas.
Mr Dhillon said around 80 of the roughly 100 in-person meetings Punjabi Lehar has enabled so far have taken place at Kartarpur, a visa-free shrine that opened along the border in 2019. He said that the channel’s work had also led to virtual family reunions and around 800 in-person trips to ancestral villages.
Mr Dhillon’s estimates could not be independently verified, but the channel has uploaded tons of videos that document emotional journeys and reunions in the Indo-Pakistan border regions.
A recent one featured Mumtaz Bibi, 75, born in Indian Punjab and raised in Pakistan by a Muslim family who adopted her as a baby after her mother was killed in riots fueled by the score.
This year, Mrs Bibi’s son contacted Punjabi Lehar to see if his trustees could help trace his Sikh parents in India. “The thing is, it’s a blood relationship,” she said in a video Mr Dhillon uploaded in May. “Now a fire burns in my heart to meet my family.”
She learned that her biological father had passed away but her three brothers were still living in the Indian town of Patiala. A video later posted on the Punjabi Lehar website showed her hugging them for the first time in Kartarpur, as they wept with happiness.
A missing journey
Punjabi Lehar now has over 600,000 subscribers and Mr. Dhillon employs two assistants. He said the site made money from advertising but was not his main source of income.
Most weeks, he said, he sets aside Fridays to cross the Pakistani border in his Toyota SUV, using his old skills and police contacts to search for partition survivors who are themselves looking for long lost loved ones.
He said the site’s reach was now large enough that it would normally receive a tip from the public – details of a missing friend, for example, or the address of a village – within a week of posting. a video.
There is one trip Mr. Dhillon has yet to manage to arrange: he dreams of visiting the ancestral village and Sufi shrine in India that his grandfather once told him about. So far, Indian authorities have twice rejected his visa application.
“The governments of both countries are too caught up in their own bickering” to help families seeking the shutdown, he said, echoing a widely held public perception.
Pakistani officials did not respond to requests for comment. An official at the High Commission in Islamabad, India’s diplomatic representation in Pakistan, said the commission recognizes the special needs of separated families, but visas are handled according to the rules.
Mr. Dhillon was however noticed. He said Pakistani intelligence agents had asked about his trips to the countryside and suggested he might be safer out of the country. He said his business partner, Mr Lovely, visited Germany last month after facing similar pressure from government authorities, but planned to return to Pakistan soon.
Mr Dhillon said his own family lives in a village and knows little about his work. “They ask, ‘What are you doing to keep traveling here and there?'”
Salman Masood reported from Faisalabad, Pakistan, and Mike Ives from Seoul.