"Partition’s pain can never be forgotten,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in 2021 as he announced that August 14th would be remembered as the Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.
The conference in New Delhi (June 7, 1947) where the partition plan was disclosed (left to right): Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first pirme minister, Lord Ismay, adviser to Mountbatten, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Viceroy of India, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, President of the All-India Muslim League.
We may look for all kinds of debates and argument; but the fact of the matter is the very concept of the nation had completely changed after the Partition. Ironically - that 'change or transition' element is still a permanent feature. Imagine the fate of Bangladeshi Hindus who happened to be supporters of Awami League and an elected PM named Sheikh Hasina.
Visit Kolkata and some parts of West Bengal and also in Assam - you will find these elements.
I hit upon a 10-year-old girl child from such a background and asked her casually - "Which city is better for you Kolkata or Dhaka". She did not answer specifically.
She merely said: "Kolkatae war nei (There is no chaos and violence in Kolkata)". Imagine what will permanently stay in her memories. Partition has been blamed on to Mahatma Gandhi as well. Partition and its impact on a Muslim family is depicted well in Hindi film 'Garam Hawa'.
In this film, Balraj Sahani gave a performance of his life and did not live long to see the release and the commercial success of the film.
Salim Mirza (played by Balraj) does not want to leave India.
Salim’s two siblings migrate to Pakistan. Halim, the politician, realises he must move to Pakistan to flourish, taking his son Kazim.
Salim’s daughter, Amina, hoped to marry Kazim. But there is a twist.
Once his marriage to a politician’s daughter in Pakistan is decided on, Kazim runs away to Agra to meet Amina but now he is "deported" for failing to register with the police as he is now a citizen of a hostile country.
'Garam Hawa' maps the real life stories how economic discrimination along with the curses of parition, property loss and societal shifts slowly break apart the Mirza household.
There is one dialogue in 'Garam Hawa' that should generate interests in contemporary polity.
Balraj Sahni asks the character -- " How come you are in Congress? You were all for Muslim League?"
And the response was == "These days (post-Partition) Congress party gives us much importance".
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| Salim Mirza and others lift his aging mom as they decide to migrate and leave Agra |
In Ritwik Ghatak's Bengali film 'Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud hiding the star) character Nita cries out ‘Dada, ami bnachtey chai’.
This is at the end of the film as she realises that all her life she has been exploited ... thanks to Partition and her selfish family members and siblings.
In the film, Supriya Chowdhury plays Nita. Her elder brother Shankar (Anil Chattejee) is unemployed but pursues his career as a classical singer, the younger brother wants to be a player and the father is a former school teacher and not doing much to run the partition-hit life.
Nita "shoulders" the burden of the family but continuously finds herself trapped. Even her fiancé Sanat ends up marrying her own younger sister Gita.
In real life and in political context...
It is said that like a drunk person making a good resolution in the morning – rioters stopped attacking helpless citizens in several parts.
Hindus and Sikhs even greeted Muslims with fruits.
The bitter truth was - Things were too good at times to be real.
Words spread that things were being stage-managed too. On the other hand, the "Hindu refugees" from Pakistan having suffered directly at the hands of Muslims felt outraged that Mahatma Gandhi was staking his own life to save Muslims.
Gandhi also wanted Indian government pay Rs 55 crore to Pakistan as was agreed upon before 1947.
Angry protestors often marched to Birla House to voice their protest.
In the words of Manohor Malgonkar in his book ‘The Men who killed Gandhi’,
-- “…when it turned out that the Muslim League was altogether unappeaseable, the Congress began to show signs of giving in to their demand for Pakistan, but Savarkar and his followers (that included Godse certainly) remained staunchly opposed to it till the very end, and so to be fair, did a large number of people within the Congress organization itself”.
It would be pertinent here to say that strangeness has always not only made history interesting – it has guided the course itself.
The two men – Narayan Apte and Godse (elder of the two) were so different in personalities - but - yet ironically both had become the closest of friends. And they set out on a mission.
On a different plane, the real blame for Partition should have gone to those who went off in search of paradise in the new country.
But the “real tragedy”, according to M J Akbar and I endorse that - the price of partition is not being paid by the people who got Pakistan but “by the Muslims in India” – who stayed back and trusted their Hindu and Sikh brethren.
This is the irony and a melancholic turn!
The fine line between moral courage and entitlement is often not understood well.
Hope is what rebuilds nations because people believe in its worth. In the case of Pakistan and India too ... this was the norm. India set out on its own journey of nation making and Pakistan opted to work for ways and means to defeat its bigger neighbour. The results are well known.
We may now examine -- What would have been the course of Indian history had not protagonists like Mountbatten come around to decide about India’s history? ......
Were the likes of Churchill .....
already looking for a scapegoat in Mountbatten to pull them out of the mess?
“On the other hand, the Indian political scene had offered five foremost protagonists then to be dealt with effectively and individually, then collectively. The famous five–Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Liaquat Ali Khan and Sardar Vallabhai Patel–were already divided politically .......".
The Muslim League didn't care about independence.
All it wanted was Pakistan.
So the archrivals, the Muslim League and the Congress - who had never seen eye to eye about anything, finally found a common cause: India-Pakistan split.
Both the parties were shocked to see the Radcliffe Line, the boundary that demarcated India and Pakistan. It was too late.
The subcontinent could never really recover from the bloody aftermath of the Partition.
But what was our partition? And more importantly, did the history makers and historians miss the bloodbath and the post-1947 sort of permanent hostility between India and Pakistan?
What's the Bangladesh paradigm ?
Would India of today be different without the chief protagonist of the Partition theory - Mountbatten himself ?
“If somebody had told me he’s going to be dead in X months, would I then say let’s hold back India together and not divide it? Would I have put back the clock and held the position? Most probably,"
-- Mountbatten reportedly told Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in exhaustive interviews later in the 1970s.
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