FAISALABAD, Pakistan – Nasir Dhillon, a former police officer, is selling houses in a Pakistani town about 100 miles (160 km) from the Indian border. His real estate business has four locations and he drives a Toyota SUV, a local marker of wealth.
But Dhillon, 38, is better known for his sideline activity: reuniting people separated from their relatives during the partition, when Britain split its large South Asian colony into Hindu-majority India and 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 that traumatic episode. He says it has enabled a number of Muslims and Sikhs — including some living in North America — to visit their ancestral villages, and has led to about 100 personal reunions.
Division 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 have they done wrong? They were children,” Mr. Dhillon said recently at his office in the northeastern city of Faisalabad. “Why can’t they visit their family now?”
Dreams Postponed
In a typical case, Mr. Dhillon or his business partner, Bhupinder Singh Lovely, interview a person who wants to meet a long-lost friend or visit an ancestral home or village. The video bounces off social media, sometimes eliciting tips from the public that lead to a reunion or a trip to the countryside.
It 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 essentially… locked in a freezer since then interrupted by periodic military clashes.
Many survivors of the separation on both sides of the border have expressed a dying wish to cross the border and reconnect with the lives and people left behind, said Anam Zakaria, the author of “Partition footprints: Stories of four generations of Pakistanis and Indians.”
“Too many people have already died with this unfulfilled desire,” she added. “Against this context, the way Punjabi Lehar promotes connections and reunions provides a window of hope and closure, at a time when we are on the brink of losing the divisional generation.”
Building momentum
Other projects over the years have sought to bring people from the two countries together, 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 in that it celebrates the identity of Punjab, one of the states of British India that was divided by partition. (It was also the site of several bloody clashes afterward, pitting Muslims against Hindus and Sikhs.)
“It seizes upon an identity that existed before the division, and in a sense continues after – a regional, linguistic, cultural identity, which unites people despite religious differences and rejects the British assumption at the time of division that the only identity that needed to come to the fore was the religious one,’ said Ms. Butalia.
Dhillon, who is a Muslim, said his interest in the legacy of partition comes from his grandfather, who would tell the family stories about their ancestral village in India’s Punjab, and the Sikh friends and neighbors he knew.
“We were told a different story in the media and elsewhere about differences and enmity between the people,” said Dhillon, speaking in Punjabi, a provincial language with a thick accent. “But our elders told of a time when Muslims and Sikhs coexisted peacefully.”
In his mid-20s, he started making friends with Facebook users in Indian Punjab and later created a Facebook page about 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 force.
Dhillon said they chose the name, which translates to “Punjabi Wave” because an ocean wave is hard to stop.
A handy loophole
Initial reactions to the channel’s videos came mainly from Sikhs in Canada and the United States; some later traveled to their ancestral villages after receiving new information about their families, Mr. Dhillon. As the news spread, he and Mr. Lovely also from people in Pakistan and India who wanted to personally contact long-lost friends and relatives.
It’s notoriously difficult to get tourist visas for travel between India and Pakistan, and official channels where people could meet occasionally are now “virtually frozen,” said Ilhan Niaz, a historian at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. .
“There is no government support for this sort of thing,” he said.
There is one loophole: People from the two states can meet in person at a handful of Sikh holy sites in Pakistan that Indians are allowed to visit, usually on religious pilgrimage visas.
Dhillon said about 80 of the roughly 100 personal reunions that Punjabi Lehar has enabled so far have taken place in Kartarpur, a visa-free pilgrimage site that opened along the border in 2019. He said the channel’s work has also led to virtual family reunions and about 800 in-person trips to ancestral villages.
Mr Dhillon’s estimates could not be independently verified, but the channel has uploaded piles of videos documenting emotional journeys and reunions in the Indo-Pakistani border region.
One recent was 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 sparked by partitions.
This year, Mrs. Bibi’s son contacted Punjabi Lehar to see if the administrators could help locate her Sikh relatives in India. “The point is, it’s a blood relative,” she said in a… video that mr. Dhillon uploaded in May. “Now a fire is burning in my heart to meet my family.”
She heard that her biological father had died, but that her three brothers still lived in the Indian city of Patiala. A video later posted on the Punjabi Lehar site showed her hugging them for the first time in Kartarpur, crying with happiness.
A missing journey
Punjabi Lehar now has over 600,000 subscribers and Mr Dhillon employs two assistants. He said the site makes money from advertising, but is not its primary source of income.
Most weeks, he said, he reserves Friday for driving through the Pakistani border region in his Toyota SUV, using his old police skills and contacts to search for partition survivors who are searching for long-lost loved ones themselves.
He said the site’s reach is now wide enough that he would normally receive a tip from the public within a week of posting a video — details on, for example, a missing friend or a village address.
There is one trip Mr. Dhillon has not yet been able to arrange: He dreams of visiting the ancestral village and Sufi shrine in India that his grandfather once told him about. So far, the Indian authorities have rejected his visa application twice.
“The governments in both countries are too preoccupied with their own bickering” to help families seeking closure, he said, echoing a widespread public perception.
Pakistani officials have not responded to requests for comment. An official from the High Commission in Islamabad, India’s diplomatic mission to Pakistan, said the commission recognized the special needs of divorced families but that visas were processed according to the rules.
Mr. Dhillon has been noticed, however. He said Pakistani intelligence agencies 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, went to Germany last month after coming under similar pressure from the government 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 that you need to keep traveling here and there?'”
Salman Masood reported from Faisalabad, Pakistan, and Mike Ives from Seoul.