What happens is inevitable. That’s why it happens. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we come up with a view that what has happened could have been prevented from happening or could have been made to happen in a different manner. When we look at the conditions in a detached manner which gave birth to the problem in question, they would seem to offer more than one option in terms of finding its resolution.

At the end of the colonial era, it was theoretically possible to have a united India but it didn’t happen. All the major players involved failed to find a common ground and reach a consensus. The British colonialists, the Indian Congress, the Muslim League and Sikh leadership pulled in different directions as each had its own agenda to apparently safeguard its interests in the name of the entity it broadly represented. Their spectacular failure eventually resulted in the Partition with deadly consequences never seen before in the history of the subcontinent. The only other epochal event that caused a seismic shift way back in time was the arrival or incursion of Aryan tribes which interacted and clashed with the people of Harappa civilization and helped create a new society with a changed way of life.

The Partition, as a final solution to communal problem, may be called ‘double partition’ as it involved; 1), division of British India into two independent states, India and Pakistan. The former would be a majority Hindu state and the latter majority Muslim state. 2), a division of the Muslim majority Punjab and Bengal between India and Pakistan. The division of the former in particular had colossal repercussions for communities with diverse faiths, namely Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.

The colonial administration, which boasted of its competence and efficiency and supposedly had an eye for detail, proved to be a god with feet of clay when the crunch came. Political leadership representing different communities involved were found either unequal to the task or grossly derelict in their historical responsibility of ensuring the communal harmony while executing the agenda of the Partition they had agreed on reluctantly.

Punjab saw a horrendous mess never seen in its long history; within a span of a few months nearly one-and-a-half million people were killed in the bloody communal riots. It was an apocalyptic scene deadlier than what one finds painted in the books. It was all against all which left no one unhurt. Thousands of women were raped and abducted. In the western part of the Punjab the Hindus and the Sikhs were massacred while in the eastern part similar fate befell the Muslims. In this dance of communal madness, even death, to borrow a phrase from Lord Shiva’s Rudra dance, was destroyed. Between 15 and 20 million people had to cross borders in utter misery and dread.

The few months that witnessed the communal Armageddon got etched in the collective memory of the people irrespective of their faith. This collective ghoulish experience is marked by certain unmistakable features. It is independence from a potentially perpetual majoritarian rule for the Punjabi Muslims who would form a dominant segment in the new state. The sacrifices, they were forced to make, were worth the cause. The memory of their sufferings serves as a bulwark against fissiparous tendencies in the new state. The unintended consequences of this obsession with the centralist control of the state evoked and still evoke hostile reaction from the other nationalities that constitute the historically multinational state of Pakistan. Collective mind describes the Partition and what it entailed by using so many different epithets that have painful connotations. It’s called, for example, in Punjabi language ‘Loti/ Lotian (loot and plunder)’, ‘Ujaara (dislodging and devastation)’, ‘Dungay/Fasaad (riots)’ and ‘Harjula (forced migration)’ etc. All this evokes the cost of independence rather than a feeling of being independent.

The dislocation caused deep anguish among the migrants, especially in view of unfair and fraudulent allotment of evacuees’ properties left behind by fleeing rich Hindu businessmen and Sikh landlords to the rich and powerful at the cost of the displaced. Chicanery in bestowing official largesse on the undeserving resulted in the destruction of socio-cultural fabric and emergence of a class of nouveaux riches that craved for nothing other than crass material interests and unearned privileges. The far-reaching implications of such shenanigans surfaced in strengthening the hold of civil and military bureaucracy and judiciary as their authority had the power of making and unmaking in a new state where rules of the games were not transparent. The powerful, while not being part of the state apparatus, could easily circumvent the opaque setup.

The Punjabis, Sikh and Hindu, in the eastern part of Punjab carry, what they call, a wound inflicted by the division of Punjab. The Sikhs were deprived of their religious history whose broad footprints are largely found in the western part where Baba Guru Nanak, the pioneer of Sikh religion, and other early Gurus belonged. Besides, even after the collapse of Maharaja Ranjit’s kingdom, the Sikh nobility had large estates in the western part, which they had to abandon in 1947. Similarly, the Punjabi Hindus who were dominant in business and urban society had to flee their historical homeland, leaving their huge wealth and assets behind.

Sadly, official histories, both in India and Pakistan, fail to recognise and square with the peoples’ sufferings, which are indescribable even by the mightiest pen. All historical accounts carry disguised communal angles. What is lacking is the peoples’ narrative reflecting the actual sufferings of those who bore the brunt of division of Punjab. Muslims and non-Muslim Punjabis, in other words, all are haunted by the spectre of 1947 holocaust and the greatest exodus of their history. “You wept/ We wept too,” said poet Ustad Daman in Amritsar after the Partition. What is needed is the moral courage and intellectual integrity for all the communities concerned to face fairly and squarely the atrocities committed by them against one another at the time of independence in a collective communal frenzy. Denial or distortion of facts shall not square with our collective conscience. We shall never be at peace unless we admit our epochal insanity, inexcusable excesses and forgive one another with a promise never to engage again in a fratricidal struggle. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 15th, 2022