In May Sachin Meena and Seema Ghulam Haider met for a tryst in Nepal . The lovers then crossed to India and last month police in Noida arrested Seema a Pakistani national for illegally entering the country . A court has since granted her bail ruling that the applicant has not entered the borders of India with any wrong intention .
The audacity of love seems to have trumped the artifice of borders . Nationalist politics shape who can and cannot cross borders and who gets to the attention of who gets more lovers in all directions is needed to pay close attention to the politics of who get to cross borders .
The colonial IndiaPakistan border divides neighbours into citizens versus foreigners natives natives versus migrants. Neither would an Indian Hindu groom likely be welcomed in Pakistan. The union yokes Pakistan and India as mother and motherinlaw. A woman in love is both reviled and welcomed.
In a patriarchal Hindu nationalist India it is hard to imagine the converse where a Pakistani Muslim man falling in love with Indian Hindu woman would be welcomed. The Indian state making an exception for a Pakistani woman to stay so far in the country is touching and troubling in this moment of nationalist rule.
It is a familiar story of men trying to regulate womens decisions. The patron states of women since Partition both countries have made themselves patriarchal patrons of women. It seems to confuse the national and international pale. It has been difficult to define themselves.
It would be difficult to understand the difference between a woman in Love. It’s not to define the difference. It’s not to accept the boundary. It was not to welcome the boundary between the border. The border. It needs to define a boundary. We need to define our borders.
