Love across Indo-Pak borders: Broadband helps cross boundaries that politics can’t

In what sounds more like the plot of a geopolitical rom-com, Tahseen Shahid, a BJP corporator whose party is married to the nationalist, anti-Pakistan rhetoric, proudly arranged this unprecedented marriage. Haider, Shahid’s elder son, had been head over heels for Zahra, and everything was going swimmingly — love blossoming despite the usual family dramas. Except, of course, for one tiny hiccup: the lack of visa for either of the lovebirds to cross that most unforgiving of borders in recent years — the border between India and Pakistan. One can almost imagine it all: on one screen, the bride in Lahore saying ‘qubool hai’; on the other, Abbas in Jaunpur, uttering the same while staring at his bride across the digital divide, separated not just by borders, but by buffering and lag.

Together yet apart

While an average citizen on either side is likely too busy navigating the mundanities of daily life to truly nurture hatred for the other, politics ensures that weddings like the one between Abbas and Andleep remain as rare as a happy ending in a Dostoevsky novel. Now, Dostoevsky would likely have scoffed at the ludicrousness of this event — a virtual wedding conducted over a video call. If Abbas and Andleep’s families were characters in The Brothers Karamazov, the event would have led to existential musings about the futility of borders and bureaucracy, punctuated by long, drawn-out meditations on morality and the soul.

Indeed, the very setup of this marriage feels like a clash between 19th-century existentialism and 21st-century pragmatism: on the one hand, we have the insurmountable odds of politics and national identity; on the other, the slick, pixelated ease of modern technology trying to smooth over the rough edges. But Dostoevsky is perhaps too dark a lens to look at this merry episode. Instead, it feels more apt to recall Saadat Hasan Manto, that tragic chronicler of Partition and the bitter aftermath between India and Pakistan. Manto, in his biting, often sardonic short stories, captured the absurdity of nations torn asunder by borders that were drawn with the stroke of a pen, soaked in blood.

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In a story like “Toba Tek Singh,” in which a lunatic grapples with the farcicality of being displaced during Partition, we find echoes of the impossible love story unfolding between Abbas and Andleep. In some strange way, their virtual wedding is a modern counterpart to the displacement Manto wrote of — only, instead of people being forcefully uprooted, it is the notion of physical presence that has been displaced. They are together, but only in the digital ether, their vows hovering in cyberspace, unable to cross the heavily guarded Radcliffe Line.

Love in the time of visa denial

Perhaps we should, above all, take a moment to appreciate the sheer audacity of this match. Here we have a man whose party — let’s face it — has gleefully, and with gay abandon, vilified Pakistan, telling any of us who have a genuine grievance against authorities in India — from the municipal level to the higher-ups in one ministry or the other — to ‘go to Pakistan’ at the drop of a hat. On the other side of the border is a young woman from Lahore, the cultural heart of Pakistan, a city brimming with history but, of late, looked at with a dash of hostility due to the very strained relationship with its neighbour to the east. But love, as the poets say (or meme-makers, in this age), triumphs over everything, even foreign policy.

The trouble for Abbas and Andleep was, as it so often is with love that dares cross borders, the small matter of a visa. Despite all the paperwork, all the legal loopholes, all the diplomatic charm that could be mustered, no one was going anywhere. The corporator must have pulled all the strings, but the bureaucratic monster refused to budge. The groom stayed put in Jaunpur, the bride waited in Lahore, and the chance of an in-person wedding felt as distant as India and Pakistan coming together for a cricket match without the usual frenzy, chaos, bickering and acrimony that have come to define any engagement between the countries. (We saw this recently in the case of Fawad Khan’s blockbuster film The Legend of Maula Jatt the release of which has been indefinitely stalled in India). 

Meanwhile, matters took an even more tragic turn when the bride’s mother, Rana Yasmin Zaidi, was hospitalised and admitted to the ICU. Of course, this was not just any hospital stay but one that came with the emotional heft of a Shakespearean drama. How could the bride leave her ailing mother in Pakistan to join her husband-to-be in India? Even if she had managed to procure a visa, who could abandon their mother’s bedside for a mere wedding?

Now, instead of postponing the wedding indefinitely (which, honestly, in most cases would be the most rational decision), Shahid, a man apparently committed to not letting a little thing like international politics or illness get in the way of his son’s nuptials, decided to go digital. If you think of it, there is poetry to it all. The very technology that often keeps us distracted from our loved ones — what with all the doom scrolling and meme sharing — became in this case the means by which Abbas and Andleep could say ‘qubool hai.’ Whether they were lagged into saying it thrice by the internet gods or not remains a mystery best left untouched.

When cross-border romances bloom

In a country where weddings can often be extravagant affairs complete with band, baaja and baraat, the austerity and starkness of a virtual wedding is almost refreshing, for lack of a better word; no shor sharaba (noise), no rituals, no dramatic wedding processions or tantrums of the baaratis (all the groom’s men) — just two people looking at each other through a screen, kept apart by politics, geography, and that visa system, but brought together on the same screen by technology.

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You have to give it to Shahid. To marry someone from across the border today is to swim upstream against the political current. But he went ahead and defied the diktats of a party that has in recent years built much of its identity on standing firmly apart from Pakistan. Perhaps he understands what the rest of us don’t — that despite the hostilities, sometimes the simplest thing to do is click a button and make the best of the situation. After all, what’s a bit of nationalistic rhetoric when compared to the joy of seeing your son married, even if it’s through a laptop screen?

This wedding also states something deeper about the nature of borders themselves. Borders, as Benedict Anderson famously argued in Imagined Communities, are constructs created through the practice of granting nationality — more symbolic than real. They serve political ends, shape identities and reinforce the idea of the nation-state, but at the end of the day, they are imaginary. The border between India and Pakistan has always been more than a line in the sand; it is a chasm of history, a wound that has festered for over 75 years. For Abbas and Andleep, the border between India and Pakistan became a bureaucratic wall.

Of course, the story of Abbas and Andleep is not the first instance of cross-border romance nor will it be the last. We have all been witness to countless such tales, including the famous case of two PUBG players, Seema Haider and Sachin. Seema left behind her old life (and her first husband) to smuggle herself and her four children into India. Her destination? Sachin, her PUBG partner-turned-lover from Greater Noida. Sachin, poor Sachin, went from being a heroic lover to the butt of memes, courtesy of a neighbour who branded him ‘lappu sa Sachin’ and ‘jhingur sa ladka’.

Then, there is Mehvish from Islamabad, whose heartbreak from a failed first marriage led her to find solace in the virtual arms of Rehman, a transporter from Rajasthan’s Bikaner district, who, ironically, was working in Kuwait when they fell in love on social media. Rehman proposed in March 2022 and within three days, they were married via videoconference, but their real-world union had to wait until Mehvish’s Umrah pilgrimage in 2023. Anju, an Indian woman who, much like Juliet running off to her Romeo, travelled to a remote village in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in July 2023, converted to Islam, and became Fatima — all to marry Nasrullah, her Pakistani Facebook love.

Coming back to the latest love story, what will happen next for Abbas and Andleep? Will they ever get to meet in person? Will their families arrange a grand wedding reception once the political dust settles, complete with all the pomp and circumstance that was denied them this time? Only time will tell. But the irony, the romance, and the sheer practicality of it all might just be the stuff of legends in years to come. As for now, their story shows that even in the most complicated of times, love, apparently, will find a way — if not over borders, then certainly through broadband.