Festooned with flowers, the first passenger trains in 43 years began running between India and Bangladesh yesterday, resuming a service that was suspended when India started its second war with Pakistan.

The inaugural Maitree (Friendship) Express pulled out of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, at about 8.30am local time, carrying 418 passengers, and began its 300-mile (480km) journey towards Calcutta.

Another Maitree Express left Calcutta, the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, at about the same time, with 65 people on board. The train arrived in Dhaka about 14 hours later, coinciding with celebrations on both sides of the border to mark the Bengali new year.

“It’s an historic moment for both the nations,” Pranab Mukherjee, the Indian External Affairs Minister, said after sounding a horn to start the train’s journey from Calcutta.

Bangladesh — which now has a population of 150 million — used to be part of the British Indian province of Bengal but became East Pakistan when Bengal was split along religious lines at Partition in 1947. The rail link was suspended in 1965, when India went to war with Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir. Ever since, Bengalis have been forced to use more expensive air and bus services to visit the other side of the border despite sharing a language, culture and history.

K. S. Zaman, a passenger on the India-bound train, said that he had migrated to Bangladesh during the rioting that followed Partition and was going to visit relatives in a village near Calcutta where he was born 78 years ago.

“Everything changed after the 1965 war. People of Bengal who have been together for thousands of years became the victim of politics,” he said. “This train will bring all of us together again.”

India and Bangladesh resumed freight services in 2000 and signed an agreement to restart the passenger trains in 2001. The plan was delayed by India’s insistence on building a 150-metre-long security cage around the railway in the no man’s land between their borders.

India is particularly concerned about Islamic militants whom it blames for a series of bombings on Indian soil, including one that killed 68 people on a similar friendship train from India to Pakistan in February last year.

The Indian train to Dhaka was therefore guarded by more than 200 policemen, and passengers were required to pass through a metal detector when boarding.

In another sign of the enduring tension between the two countries, both trains were delayed by customs and immigration procedures that took about six hours.

The Indian train was also held up near the border by protesters sitting on the tracks to demand rehabilitation of Bangladeshi refugees in India.

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