India always celebrates its Independence Day with pomp and joy, with various government and public functions all over the country. As India celebrates its 76th anniversary of Independence Day as a moment of triumph, one should also look back and reflect on the missed opportunities of being a much stronger and more vibrant nation. 76 years is a long time in present-day fast-paced developmental events. As we celebrate our Independence Day with the likes of other nations of the world, we should also remember that unlike others, the independence of India from British rule was also accompanied by the partition of this great nation into India and Pakistan. This partition had caused irreparable damage to the nation, which is undoubtably the strongest in the world. So while celebrating the Independence, we should also reflect and remember the horrors of the scars that the Britishers had left behind, i.e., the impact of the partition of this great nation called India.
A nation cannot know itself without knowing its past. Remembering the permanent scars left behind by the horrors of events during partition not only reminds us of the futility of such events, it also gives us an opportunity to pay homage to those souls who sacrificed their lives in the frenzy violence, in addition to realising the fact about the missed opportunities and ways in which such frenzy violence could have been averted. The memories and recordings of survivors of the violence of partition must be crucial in preventing intolerance and hostility among the different communities of this region.
The recorded history of the horrors of partition states that the partition induced a sense of hatred amongst Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs in India and Pakistan. Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s strong advocacy of the two-nation theory based on religion led friends and neighbours to become enemies instantly. This gave rise to the unprecedented horrifying accounts of partition—to what would have been the joyful moments for the nation.
Recorded history states that around 2 million people were killed in the most brutal ways, an estimated 100 thousand women were kidnapped and raped, and more than 15 million people were displaced, which has been termed the greatest event of migration in the world. Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, in their book “Freedom at Midnight,” gave a detailed account of the events of the partition, where every government property was divided between the two nations.
According to Nisid Hajari in his book Midnight’s Furies, some British soldiers and journalists who had witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were much worse! Pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits. For example, Sheikhupura, a city in the Pakistani province of Punjab that was earlier a non-Muslim stronghold, saw the worst violence during those days. The incidences of bloodshed continued for 2-3 days with the indirect patronage of people in power; out of approximately 15,000 non-population, only 1,500 survived. Rampage went on unabated, and one report speaks of the incidence in Newihatas locality, where men and women were forced to stand in queues, and then the young girls were chosen and distributed among Muslim men. Men who tried to object in between were shot dead. Trains carrying refugees between the two new nations arrived full of corpses; their passengers had been killed by mobs along the routes. These trains were called “blood trains, because they crossed the borders in gloomy silence with blood seeping from the doors of the train compartments. Residential complexes like bungalows and mansions were burned and looted; family members were killed in front of those who were able to hide; and children were killed in front of their siblings. The horrors of partition still haunt those who survived and are alive. Coupled with the pain of starting a new chapter in a new land and leaving behind their ancestry, the tsunami of brutal violence from both sides of the border created havoc for the migrants. As they tried to seek refuge on the other side of the border, they had their stories to tell. Even those who had been able to cross the borders had other horror stories in the relief camps and, later, in settlements. Britishers had done irreparable damage to the nation. Cyril Radcliffe used a poison knife to bleed the nation into two and to irreversibly draw blood-stained lines across the people and the regions. But unfortunately, outside southern Asia, the brutalities of partition were not widely publicised, which might be to keep the British reputation high. What could have been a friendly departure for the British people turned out to be the bloodiest one in the annals of the history of the modern world. Britishers played, and we got played into their hands by divisive politics. The vanity of saying “the sun never sets in the British Empire” was put to the test, and they could not digest it. The silent killer of divisive politics yielded sparks a decade before independence. Although Jinnah signed the infamous “Lahore Declaration” on March 30, 1940, the concept of a Muslim nation started way back in the 1930s. It is reported that the term ‘Pak-Stan’ was coined by Choudhry Rahmat Ali in the 1930s during his Cambridge University days. The demand for a separate nation for Muslims had been raised most famously by Allama Iqbal at a Muslim League conference in Allahabad in 1930. He positioned the idea of a Muslim nation within India.
An introspection after 76 years of these incidences’ points to the most pertinent question: was it inevitable? Was the two-nation theory a solution? In 1971, Bangladesh was curved out of Pakistan, which indicated that religious commonality could not be the basis for any nation. This has been incorporated painfully into the regional consciousness by memories of violence, which is unimaginable in any civilised national character. Partition occupies a central place in the history of modern India and Pakistan, as the Holocaust did for the Jews. Even after partition, the two nations would have lived like allies with commonality in culture and economy, but the poison of Redcliff’s knife had probably ripped the heart of the nation. The lessons of partition remind us that we as a nation need to be united, intertwined with our cultural identity, and strive to build a great and developed nation to lead the world in this century.