60 years of remembering

descended on the village...
‘Train to Pakistan’, 1956 by Khushwant Singh

Partition, the largest peace-time migration in history, which involved an estimated 14 million people and saw another million killed, has been something of a meta-narrative for the subcontinent. Its grievous injuries, never fully forgotten, have endured in the collective memory despite the emergence of three post-Partition generations. Cynical politicians have periodically gained great dividends from it, not just in terms of the occasional episodes of riots and carnage, or indeed in the carefully constructed hostility between India and Pakistan, but in the suspicions and bad faith between Hindus and Muslims that continue to mark ordinary, everyday life, 60 years on.

Those grainy, black-and-white images of trauma, horror and pain from a lost era could have served as a ‘never-again’ lesson, rather than remaining a perennial source of animosity. Only one group of men and women, whom we somewhat erroneously term our “founding fathers”, having been witness to that turbulence at first hand, drew the right conclusions. The Constitution they drafted, in many ways, testifies to this. Several, including Gandhi and Nehru of course, spoke eloquently on the issue, but let me cite S. Radhakrishnan’s speech on the floor of the Constituent Assembly on August 14-15, 1947, before the clock struck 12: “Were we not victims, ready victims, so to say, of the separatist tendencies foisted on us? Should we not now correct our national faults of characters, our domestic despotism, our intolerance which has assumed the different forms of obscurantism... Now that India is divided, it is our duty not to indulge in words of anger. They lead us nowhere...”

ho’...” This found immediate echo in the Hindu bustees. “Then all of a sudden in the very storm centres of the most gruesome rioting of the past year, Muslims and Hindus ran across the frontiers and hugged each other in wild joy.”

... contd.