Birth Pangs - Indo - Pak History

[KashifAsrar]

There is an article in Times Of india, Today. I would like to share it with you all. This article looks at the partition related violence of India, in a little different way. Comments are welcome.
Kashif

Birth Pangs
August 14, and the bloody history of South Asia
Ashis Nandy

Let the people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh remember this day as a day of remembrance, atonement and reconciliation. Sixty years ago on this day in Calcutta began a carnage that went on for about 18 months, engulfing much of north and east India. The killings more or less ended in January 1948 with the Karachi riots and the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, disowned and isolated by that time not only by vendors of hate but also by statists of all hues. The carnage laid the basis of two nation-states, India and Pakistan. Another carnage was to mark the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 but many do not know that some of the most brutal and pointless killings in the second carnage were done by groups that were victims of the first. August 14, 1946, was the beginning of our journey as independent countries and to disown its significance is to disclaim a part of our collective self.
In this part of the world there is a belief that we must forget some things to reaffirm a moral universe, to ensure that the ghosts of the past do not haunt us. We do not live by history but by narratives and memories that have built-in principles of forgetfulness. But that is another kind of forgetting. It does not have as its underside an obsessive, private engagement with memories — stealthy, compulsive returns to the past to refresh paranoia and self-destructive fantasies of revenge. As we have built new nation-states and millions have rebuilt their lives, we have not been able to lay our ghosts to rest. The political cultures of all the three countries have remained mired in a past that can neither be owned nor disowned.
Yet, as I look into the data we at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies have collected on the violence of Partition, I am convinced that we can look back on those tempestuous days not only with shame but also some pride. There was grass-roots resistance to the violence. Genocide is not easy to organise in a society built on communities, not nations; 26 per cent of the respondents in our survey say that they survived because of help given by someone from the enemy community. No other genocide in the world yields comparable figures. And even that figure is an underestimation. Many victims are loath to admit that they have survived because someone from the enemy community helped. For in their bitterness they have since then embraced sectarian ideologies.
Salim Ahmed of Islamabad’s Sustainable Development Policy Institute, an important participant in our study, tells how an elderly Sikh was disturbed when his son brought home an abducted Muslim woman; he begged his son to release the woman. But the son was young and women were being abducted all over Punjab. He did not listen. The father took out his family gun and shot his son. This story, told by a member of the woman’s family, was the beginning of Salim’s interest in Partition violence. And he has already found more than a hundred such episodes. We have many reasons to be ashamed of, but we have some reasons to be proud, too.
For 60 years, we have been unable to mourn the more than one million dead. Pakistan considers the Muslims who died martyrs to the cause of Pakistan. Yet, no Pakistani regime has sought to commemorate their sacrifice. The Hindu nationalists consider Hindu victims to be martyrs who died for the idea of an undivided India but in their writings, too, propaganda has priority over anguish. Both sides sense that almost all of those who died had no inkling of the larger cause for which they died.
Perhaps the time has come for us to mourn for the victims in a different way. By acknowledging that they were not the foot soldiers of a freer, post-colonial world but the canon fodders for an ideology of state that saw conventional nation-states as the last word in human emancipation. Pakistan was a product of Muslim nationalism but this nationalism was no different from the nationalism that created the modern nation-states in Europe; nor was it in any way different from the kind of nation-state the Hindu nationalists wanted to build in undivided India. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, ever eager to force India to live by Europe’s history, recognised this when he said, “I have no quarrel with Mr Jinnah’s two-nation theory. We Hindus are a nation by ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations”. Both accepted Europe’s blood-stained history as the guide to state-building.
They were not wrong. Today’s ultrasecular France began to move towards its present culture of state only after cleansing itself of its Protestant citizens. The birth of the United States was accompanied by the most efficient genocide of all times, which wiped out more than 95 per cent of the native population of the Americas. That is the past of every major nation-state now singing paeans to secular, multicultural, multi-ethnic states. Understandably, Gandhi’s battle against the violence of Partition tried to bypass the state altogether.
We refuse to recognise that the birth certificates of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are written in blood and the memories of that first genocide constitute the dark underside of the cultures of state in South Asia. As a result, the dead are uninvited guests at every international negotiation among the states and every debate on collective security.
The writer is a cultural and political psychologist.