History is a great teacher. But it can also be a great tranquiliser. People, especially those societies that do not nurture a deep historical memory, tend to forget—indeed, want to forget—the tragic and bitter episodes in their collective life. As a result, new generations have only a faint knowledge and understanding of even cataclysmic events in the past that singed the lives of their fathers and forefathers. The natural going of painful happenings into oblivion may be regarded as welcome, if those happenings had no bearing on the present. After all, how can we at all live in peace if our conscious mind is filled with memories of all the wars, holocausts, genocides and injustices that took place in the past? But when events of the past, especially the recent past, have material bearing on a country’s present and its unfolding future, forgetting is not an option. It is a sure way to court more hardships. 

The bloody partition of India is one such event that Indians, Hindus and Muslims both, cannot afford to forget. Not just because it was accompanied by the killing of close to a million people in a fratricidal bloodbath, the worst in India’s millennial history. Also, not only because Partition resulted in the largest ever cross-migration in the entire human history—Hindus and Sikhs uprooted from their homes in those territories that constituted Pakistan, and Muslims from UP, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra and elsewhere in India migrating, some in duress and others voluntarily, to the newly created Muslim Nation.  Rather, we need to remember, examine, re-examine and learn from Partition history, principally because it has continued to determine the content and contours of the socio-political life of post-1947 India, also of the two other nations, Pakistan and Bangladesh, that were born out of undivided India. “The unexamined life,” says Socrates, “is not worth living.” He said it in the context of our individual lives.  However, in the context of a nation, the unexamined life is a prescription for inviting peril.  

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