I did not celebrate the Independence Day on August 15 in 1947 because I was a refugee at that time. With my parents and two brothers I had taken shelter in the safer cantonment of my home town, Sialkot. Nor did I celebrate the independence day of Pakistan on August 14, a day earlier, because the shadow of partition had already cast gloom all over. News of killings and migration of people from their homes had spread to Sialkot itself. We too were leaving the house. And many outsiders, who were living in India, were pouring into the city, polluting its atmosphere.
Yet I felt a strange feeling of elation and depression. Elation was because we had freed ourselves from the clutches of the British after the 150-year-long rule of authoritarianism and untold atrocities.
Depression was due to the uncertain future that confronted me as a refugee. I did not know what to do next. I had just passed out from the Law College, Lahore.
Indeed, I heard Jawaharlal Nehru's midnight speech on the All India Radio. One could still catch it in Pakistan. Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.
I had earlier listened to Pakistan Radio broadcast of Qaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's speech, entirely opposite of what he had been saying before for emphasizing that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations. In his address, Jinnah said: You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the state.
Both speeches evoked hope but sounded like distant beats of drums, heralding a new era at a time when Hindus and Sikhs from the Pakistan Punjab and Muslims from India's Punjab were in the midst of proceeding from the places they had lived for generations to the other side of the border. Loud cries of their suffering at the hands of assailants had muffled the drum beats. In fact, they rubbed salt on the wounds of the refugees. One million of them died and 20 million left their homes and hearths, friends and neighbours to reconstruct a new life in new environments.
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| Motorcyclists hold Indian flags as they ride in celebration of India's Independence Day in Nagpur . AFP |
Was the tryst with destiny or freedom to go to temples meant a fresh start or destruction of our identity? Were the promises made by the leaders on both sides false? A new dawn was supposed to herald. People, particularly women and children, were victims of the fury of those who saw people of other religions as their enemy. How and why did the leaders imagine a peaceful transfer of population when the venom of hate was injected many years before partition?
I do not know on what grounds the proposal of transfer of population was rejected. But records show that at the time of partition the proposal was seriously discussed and discarded. It would have made sense if the two countries were to follow democratic and secular policies. But even before the advent of independence, the fanatics and criminals came to occupy key political and administrative positions with the sole purpose to exterminate members of the opposite community.
It would have been ideal if the people had stayed back at their homes. But could they have? There was no visionary in both the countries to tell the millions of them that you should prepare yourself to leave your homes because bias and alienation had gone too deep in the marrow of bones. Still when we left, we thought we would return after things had settled down. They never did. Even after 62 years they have not.
People were earlier pitted as Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims. Today, they confront each other as Indians and Pakistanis. The same enmity is there. Was independence the real independence?
This is what Urdu revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz said. I translate it in English:
This stained light, this night-bitten dawn
This is not the dawn we yearned for
This is not the dawn
For which we set out so eagerly.
Tragedies can never be treasured. Nor should they be. They scratch wound every time it begins to get crust, to heal. Peace and friendship are important, but they do not have to blot out the memories. Can we give the whole thing a new, positive turn and consider what happened during partition as a lesson for the next generations that religious bigotry can blind people to the basic values of respecting a human life and make them barbarians? It happened in 1947. It can happen again.
The case in point is the joint statement which the Prime Minister of the two countries have signed in Egypt. The hostility that Manmohan Singh has faced in his own country may well be because of the opposition's joint criticism of the statement. Prime Minister Yusuf Gilani is only making a mess of things by stoking fires of differences and playing up to the gallery in Pakistan.
Coming back to partition, certain steps need to be taken to stop the blame game that each one is playing on the 1947 holocaust. My proposal is to have a museum on partition. This is not to glorify the killings but to stir the conscience of people in the subcontinent to seek forgiveness from one another. I do not want the museum to show the killings by one community of another, but to highlight the loss of one million people and the disruption of the life of 20 million. I expect Pakistan to participate in this venture. People controlling the board jointly should be eminent in their country, above the pull of politics or religion.
The main purpose of the museum is that to make the people on both sides feel humble and humane. Both have seen murder and worse; both have been broken on the rack of history; both are refugees.
(The writer is an Indian freedom-fighter, journalist, politician and ex-diplomat) |
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