Since the mind can think of anything, I imagine a press conference where Prime Minister Narendra Modi answers questions and I am present as a reporter.
I ask: “Call for a ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’, you tweeted“Millions of our sisters and brothers were displaced and many lost their lives as a result of mindless hatred and violence.” My question is, are displaced or murdered Muslims among our sisters and brothers?”
It will be a new day when Mr. Modi answers this question with a clear “Yes”. Not that he needs a press conference for that. He could issue a simple statement, or send another short tweet saying, “Yes, Muslims who have been expelled or killed because of mindless hatred and violence should also be remembered.”
I don’t expect him to do anything like that. In fact, his tweet has already activated champions of Hindu victimization. For them, remembering horrors just means highlighting cruelty at the hands of Muslims.
Still, the tweet gives Indians who believe in the sanctity of human life – of the lives of all people – a chance. Teachers and parents can tell young people, quoting the Prime Minister, that horror is caused by mindless hatred and violence.
Moving on, some young and old can recall that in 1946-47 there were people who spoke the hard truth for their own side. They risked their lives and stood up for defenseless children, women and men of every group. Thanks to such people, many lives were saved, the equal value of all lives was emphasized, and our constitution enshrined this equality.
Mahatma Gandhi may be the most famous among them, but he was not alone. In Bengal, as well as in Punjab, where the massacre reached unspeakable levels in 1947, ‘ordinary’ people protected their neighbors and brought them to safety. Compassionate, courageous and resourceful, these heroes – Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs – were more than a handful. There were tens of thousands. Anyone who examines that period will find that when evil settled our soil in 1946-47, the nobility walked bravely on it too.
This was certainly what I learned when researching the Partition Story for my study of the history of Punjab from the death of Aurangzeb to the Viceroyalty of Mountbatten. Other scholars have also marked this astonishing insanity that graciously protected lives during the madness of 1946-47. Any “memory” that excludes this insaniyat would be insufficient.
And any “memory” that excludes the horrors of the “other” side would not only sound hollow, it would arouse new anger. On the other hand, a memory that takes an honest and complete look at the whole of the violence of 1946-47 can help us move forward. It could even become a step towards reconciliation within India and between the nations of South Asia. Truth and reconciliation go together. This is what the world learned in the 1990s from Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and South Africa as a whole.
As ‘remembrance’ results in a truthful study of the whole series of riots and murders in the subcontinent from August 16, 1946, when Jinnah’s ‘Direct Action’ call led to violence in Kolkata, to the assassination of Gandhi in Delhi on January 30, 1948, not only learning, but the cause of peace would win. “The spirit of unity, social harmony and human empowerment,” to quote words from a second tweet from Mr. Modi on “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day,” is said to be reinforced.
It is well known that the “Great Calcutta Killing”, as it was called in August 1946, was quickly followed by large-scale violence in September in the eastern part of what was still a single Bengal in a unified India, and then by larger-scale violence. murders in Bihar in October-November. In November 1946, a major violent episode also took place in Garhmukteshwar in Western UP. The Punjab massacre began in March 1947 with an outbreak of large-scale violence in and around Rawalpindi and Multan, and the months of July to September saw the height of the massacre in both halves of Punjab. This was the murder chain, which is not to say that the rest of the subcontinent was immune. It was not.
Unfortunately, very few thorough accounts of the 1946-47 killings are available, although two accounts of its magnitude were provided fairly soon after the Punjab massacre. One was that of GD Khosla Strict settlement (1949), the other was Gurcharan Singh Talib’s Muslim League Attacks on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab (1950). Perhaps the most complete account of the upheaval in Punjab can be found in the 2011 study by Stockholm-based scholar of Pakistani descent, Ishtiaq Ahmed, whose Punjab: Bloodied, Partitioned & Cleansed analyzes available literature and also includes hundreds of eyewitness accounts from each district of the undivided Punjab. Murders outside Punjab were not part of Ahmed’s meticulous study.
If most Pakistanis today seem to believe that Muslims were the main, if not the only, victims of the Partition killings, the opposite is the situation in India, where Muslims lost their lives in 1946-47 in Kolkata, Bihar, Western UP, East Punjab and elsewhere, have been almost completely forgotten by Hindus. Remembrance, if fair and complete, would show that in 1946-47 Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were equal in both receiving cruelty and committing it. A true memory would restore our awareness that people are the same regardless of the labels they give or receive themselves. For some, at least, the commemoration can therefore be a step towards reflection and even reconciliation.
But why limit the memory to Partition-related kills? Why should we forget the 1971 massacre in what is now Bangladesh, which may have surpassed the 1947 killings in the two halves of Punjab? And what about the post-independence and post-partition killings in various parts of both India and Pakistan? Are those who lost their lives after 1947 through “mindless hatred and violence” in Delhi, Muzaffarnagar, Bhagalpur, Gujarat and elsewhere in the subcontinent worth remembering?
The most crucial words in the first Modi tweet are “our sisters and brothers”. So I want to ask him the question set out at the beginning of this piece, and why the nation needs a simple “yes” or “no” answer from him. Are some groups of people not our sisters and brothers? Modi’s answer, and the reaction of the rest of us to his answer, will make a marked difference to India’s future story. In fact to all of South Asia, including Afghanistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka, not to mention Pakistan and Bangladesh.
(Rajmohan Gandhi currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.)
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