attari, india -- To say that the weight of 60 years of national rivalry and suspicion rests on Dharam Singh's shoulders isn't far from the truth.
Singh lives near this village barely a mile from where India and Pakistan meet. Every other day, he walks right up to the border and comes face to face with a man on the opposite side.
Hardly a word passes between them. Instead, they exchange heavy loads of buffalo meat, dried fruit and other trade items, which each man heaves onto his back or his head and carries, with a stagger or two, to a waiting truck.
Six decades of mistrust have kept trucks from crossing the divide, and provided work for about 1,300 Indian porters and hundreds of Pakistanis who shuffle back and forth through a virtual no-man's-land loading and unloading goods.
But starting Oct. 1, many of those jobs will be in jeopardy. The Indian and Pakistani governments have agreed to allow trucks to go through the Wagah border crossing and exchange contents directly on the other side, cutting out the need for large numbers of middlemen such as Singh.
Officials hail the new arrangement as a sign of slowly improving ties between two nuclear-armed countries that have fought three wars, along with another armed conflict less than a decade ago. Critics and analysts aren't so sure, noting that hardly any progress has been made on the most important sticking point, the fate of the Himalayan region of Kashmir.
Either way, opening Wagah's gates to truck traffic is a bane, not a boon, for the burly porters who toil on either side, the Indians in their sweat-stained blue tunics, the Pakistanis in red.
"Our livelihoods will be done away with. Our children will die from hunger," said Singh, 47. "We've been working here for 35 years. It's the only thing we know."
By streamlining logistics at the only land crossing between India and Pakistan, officials hope to boost a trade relationship worth less than $2 billion a year.
A handful of goods passes through Wagah: Only foodstuffs, including meat, tomatoes and onions, have been exempted from duties and are profitably transported overland. Allowing trucks to penetrate deeper inside each nation's territory, rather than stopping them at designated loading points just inside the border, also seems a far-off prospect.
