When Edhi Became Silver Lining In India-Pakistan Ties

Sameer Arshad Khatlani
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Deaf and mute Indian woman Geeta returned home in 2015 from Pakistan after 12 years thanks largely to Salman Khan-starrer Indian film Bajrangi Bhaijaan’s success. The reel life story of the film’s main character, Shahida aka Munni, mirrored that of Geeta’s real life. Geeta was found alone at the Lahore Railway Station after she got off the Samjautha Express from New Delhi. She mysteriously boarded the cross-border train after attending a fair on the Indian side of Punjab, where her father worked as a mason. Likewise, Munni gets off a train in the film while chasing a sheep as her mother falls asleep en route to India for pilgrimage. 

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The waves the film made with its rare sensitive portrayal of cross-border characters and parallels it drew with Geeta’s story stirred an inept bureaucracy into action. The urgency worked when Geeta identified her family in a remote Bihar river island village, whose photographs were arranged based on the details she managed to scribble about it in Hindi. It ended her decade-long yearning to return home and also highlighted a silver lining in the schizophrenic relationship between India and Pakistan. Geeta was loved and cared for during her time in Pakistan. Her hosts built a temple with several deities for her to pray when they realised she was a Hindu. She brought the deities with her when she returned to India.

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The focus on Geeta’s extraordinary story coincided with the most difficult times in usually-thorny India-Pakistan ties. It again reaffirmed the innate goodness – something Bajrangi Bhaijaan too underlined — of ordinary human beings on either side of the divide. And such instances galore. Around the same time, Pakistani girl Saba, suffering from a rare disorder, returned home after ordinary Mumbai people crowd-funded her treatment on October 12. The generosity of Saba’s benefactors was overshadowed by Shiv Sena’s attack on activist Sudheendra Kulkarni for hosting ex-Pakistan foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book launch on the same day. 

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Mostly hate mongers hog all the limelight while men such as Abdul Sattar Edhi, who took care of Geeta in Pakistan remain virtually unknown in either country. Edhi and his wife, Bilquees, treated Geeta like their daughter for over a decade after she strayed across the border. She was sheltered at one of their shelter homes. Geeta is among tens of thousands whom Edhi has helped since the 1950s when he begged on Karachi streets to buy a rickety ambulance for his charity work. Edhi’s charity empire took off in 1957 when he established a tented hospital amid a flu outbreak in Karachi. The empire has come a long way since then and now owns air ambulances as well. Edhi remained a go-to person for tens of thousands of have nots whom the state has consistently failed.

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Edhi, who passed away in 2016 at 86, was synonymous with selfless service to humanity and charitable work in Pakistan. He has been likened to Mother Teresa for his ubiquitous network of orphanages, shelter homes, rehabilitation centres, hostels, and ambulances headquartered inside a small room near a Karachi slum. Edhi’s biggest contribution has been the dignity he gave to unwanted children in Pakistan. He would leave cradles outside Edhi centres to encourage mothers to leave their unwanted kids there instead of killing them. The unwanted children are fed, clothed, and educated at Edhi homes. They would fondly call Edhi ‘Abu (father)’. Edhi also embraced other outcasts — drug addicts and mentally ill — and sheltered them at his homes.

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Edhi, a bearded saintly figure, was known for his frugality and owned just two pairs of kameez shalwar. His austerity was his hallmark, which adds to his appeal as perhaps the second most revered Pakistani after another Gujarati, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Like Jinnah and his great contemporary, Mahatma Gandhi, Edhi had his roots in Gujarat’s Kathiawar Peninsula. Edhi was born there in 1928 into a Memon family at Bantva, barely 60km from Mahatma Gandhi’s place of birth – Porbandar. He attended a Gujarati-language school in his village before the horrors of partition uprooted from his village and forced him to migrate penniless to Pakistan in 1947.

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Tens of thousands of Gujaratis such as Edhi arrived in Pakistan in a state of virtual penury after partition. But they have since then punched much above their weight to contribute immensely to the economy of their adopted country. Gujaratis dominate businesses and stock markets in Pakistan. In the 1960s, 36 out of Pakistan’s 42 largest industrial groups belonged to Gujarati/kutchi/kathiawaris with roots in the Indian state of Gujarat. They accounted for 0.4% of  Pakistan’s population. But the Gujarati trading communities controlled 43% of the country’s industrial capital’ during the decade. They are concentrated in Karachi, which generates around 50% of the country’s GDP. Gujarati trading communities such as Memons, who belonged to Lohana mercantile caste and converted to Islam in the 14th century, Khojas and Bohras run multi-national companies, own five-star hotels, banks, multiplexes, and manufacture cars in Pakistan besides dominating the country’s biggest stock exchange. This too underlines the similarities that have endured between Indians and Pakistanis despite seven decades of separation. 

This is a slightly updated version of a piece first published in The Times of India, the author's former employer, in 2015

Sameer Arshad Khatlani is an author-journalist based in New Delhi. He has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper. Khatlani worked in a similar capacity with The Indian Express, India's most influential newspaper known for its investigative journalism, until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, he began his career with the now-defunct Bangalore-based Vijay Times in 2005 as its national affairs correspondent. He joined Times of India, one of the world's largest selling broadsheets, in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was a part of the paper's national and international newsgathering team as an Assistant Editor. 

Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan and covered elections and national disasters. He received a master’s degree in History from the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Khatlani is a fellow with Hawaii-based American East-West Center established by the US Congress in 1960 to promote better relations and understanding with Asian, and Pacific countries through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. 

Penguin published Khatlani’s first book The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan in February 2020. Eminent academic and King’s college professor, Christophe Jaffrelot, has called the book ‘an erudite historical account... [that] offers a comprehensive portrait of Pakistan, including the role of the army and religion—not only Islam’.