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Partition has made things difficult for ordinary people

Wagah Border. Source: Wikipedia

I was talking to my Indian friend yesterday about life. She said I was her friend which made me happy. I told the same thing to her. Our conversations have been relegated to texts only. We haven’t seen each other in person. A possibility of that is for me to buy an air ticket to India. I’ve heard people say India doesn’t give visas to anyone who have Pakistani connections. So I cannot see her in person.

If you read books about the Partition of India like Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence and Nisid Hajaris’s Midnight’s Furies, you will read horrific stories about what happened; families forced to migrate to India or Pakistan based on religion, families separated, mass murder, violence, rape. The stories of Partition will make you chill and upset.

Here’s the problem, are the horrors of Partition highlighted to the status it deserves by the Indian and Pakistani media?

It depends!

In my experience learning about Partition in Pakistan through state-sponsored textbooks, the horrors and atrocities that were afflicted on people were reserved for Muslims. Stories of trains departing from India to Pakistan that were attacked by Sikh militants on the way were highlighted. Stories of Sikhs living in Rawalpindi who were attacked and forced to leave by Muslims were not mentioned. I came to learn about it in books like Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence.

Even the word Partition is relegated to a minimum in Pakistan’s state-sponsored textbooks. The Pakistan Movement and Independence are more important as Muslims of India found a new homeland that didn’t include the city of Delhi in their centuries-long reign of the Indian Subcontinent from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughal Empire. The Muslims of India who were being ‘oppressed’ by the British and Hindus had found a safe haven in the western region of India.

I have never read India’s state-sponsored textbooks (and I don’t want to) but from my general understanding and through books like Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, the country accepts Partition as a tragedy because its two pieces were separated (West Pakistan, now Pakistan and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). However, India views Partition as kind of a ‘ Muslim rebellion’ or blame it on one man, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. There is a lack of acknowledgement on where the leaders of the Indian Independence Movement like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru went wrong.

There is no doubt Jinnah receives the most flak for Partition. He read the Lahore Resolution in 1940, he made speeches that advocated the Muslims of India to stand up against Hindu oppression, he used Pakistan as a trump card. But what about Gandhi’s alliance with the Ali Brothers in Kanpur to launch the Non-Cooperation Movement in their reactionary and unsuccessful attempts to save the Ottoman Empire? What about Nehru’s socialist views where one party (the Congress) had supreme control of India and not recognizing different stakeholders based on different parties and different religions?

These are important questions that need to be addressed by historians of both Pakistan and India. The problem is, when you write history, you just don’t write about what happened but what you believe in what happened. If the Partition of India happened because of Jinnah then you will write on where he is the culprit. If you believe the onus also lies on Gandhi and Nehru then you will write that. Yasser Latif Hamdani’s Jinnah: A Life does a great job in clearing out the misconceptions about Jinnah yet at the same time highlighting his faults. It also highlights how people from both India and Pakistan have misinterpreted and fabricated who he really was.

Whatever you want to read and believe, it has been 76 years since Partition. Both countries are in a state of disarray. One is on the verge of economic collapse while the other is on the verge of democratic collapse. Both, however, are descending to fascism. The revoking on Article 370 on Kashmir in 2019 and the Supreme Court of India upholding the verdict to the arrest of Imran Khan and jailing those who support him and oppose the Army are prominent examples. Democracy has always been ‘under-developed’ in Pakistan, something which India loves to show-off as being the world’s largest democracy and its rebel being a dictatorial state. However, that cannon is turning its head on Bharat.

All of this drama has only made things difficult for the ordinary people. My family hails from north India that migrated to Pakistan after Partition. I don’t think I can ever see my ancestral place. Plus, I want to see the Taj Mahal, Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and other parts of India the same way a lot of Indians want to see Mohenjo Daro, Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad, Peshawar. Dilip Kumar hailed from Peshawar.

Efforts had been made by both the governments of India and Pakistan to ease cross-country movements like the Delhi-Lahore Bus Service, the Samjhauta Express, the opening of Kartarpur. However, these efforts are tiny as compared to the unresolved historical disputes between the two countries, particularly the Kashmir Issue

Only time will tell if the two countries will come to a conclusion that Partition was bad and they need to get their s**t together. Perhaps the Indian Subcontinent will one day become the European Union where you can travel between London to Paris via train. I dream of a ferry service between Karachi and Mumbai.

Until now, let’s keep raising our anxiety levels when a Pakistan vs India cricket match comes up.

Let me know how you guys feel in the comments.

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Partition Of India
India
Pakistan
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