It is a distance of a mere 30 minutes along the Shyok river but 86-year-old Haji Shamsher Ali has not been able to traverse it in 50 years. Across the border in the Gilgit-Baltistan area of Pakistan, Ali’s younger brother — Haji Abdul Qadir — looks up at the same canopy of stars, listens to the river murmuring across the land and thinks of his family, separated by a twist of fate.
On December 16, 1971 as India awakened to news of a victory that birthed a new nation, the residents of Turtuk woke up to find that their nationalities had changed. Overnight the Line of Control (LoC) along the India-Pakistan border had moved and with it the destiny of the 350 families living there. Turtuk and three other villages in Ladakh’s Nubra Valley, which had been under Pakistani occupation since 1947, had become part of India. Residents of the village, from the Balti community, were split across two hostile neighbours.
Ali’s son Ghulam Hussain Gulli, a travel agent, says that in those days, most young men who were studying or working would go to cities like Skardu or Lahore. “Only the very young or very old were left in the village.” So when the war ended, wives were separated from husbands, fathers from sons and brothers from brothers.
Read Full Story: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/fifty-years-ago-these-villagers-went-to-sleep-in-pakistan-woke-up-in-india/articleshow/87959397.cms
Your content is great. However, if any of the content contained herein violates any rights of yours, including those of copyright, please contact us immediately by e-mail at media[@]kissrpr.com.
