by RAJMOHAN GANDHI
Since the mind can dream up anything, I am imagining a press conference where Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking questions and I am present as a reporter.
I ask: “Calling for a ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’, you tweeted, ‘Millions of our sisters and brothers were displaced and many lost their lives due to mindless hate and violence.’ My question is, are displaced or killed Muslims included in our sisters and brothers?”
It will be a new day if Mr. Modi answers this question with a clear “Yes”. Not that he needs a press conference to do so. He can issue a simple statement, or send another short tweet, saying, “Yes, Muslims displaced or killed because of mindless hate and violence are also to be remembered.”
I don’t expect him to do anything of the kind. In
fact, his tweet has already activated champions of Hindu victimhood. For
them, remembrance of horrors only means underlining cruelty at Muslim
hands.
Still, the tweet gives Indians believing in the sacredness of
human life – of the lives of all humans – something of a chance.
Teachers and parents can tell youngsters, quoting the Prime Minister,
that horrors are produced by mindless hate and violence.
Going beyond this, some can remind young and old alike that in 1946-47, there were people who spoke the blunt truth to their own side. Putting their lives on the line, they championed defenceless children, women and men of every group. Thanks to such people, many lives were saved, the equal value of all lives was underlined, and our Constitution entrenched this equality.
Mahatma Gandhi may be the best-known among them, but he wasn’t alone. In Bengal, and also in Punjab, where carnage reached unspeakable levels in 1947, ‘ordinary’ human beings protected neighbours and sent them to safety. Compassionate, courageous, and ingenious, these heroes – Hindu, Muslim and Sikh – were more than a handful. There were tens of thousands of them. Anyone who researches that period discovers that if evil stalked our soil in 1946-47, nobility too walked bravely on it.
Certainly, this was what I learnt when I researched the Partition story for my study of Punjab’s history from the death of Aurangzeb to the viceroyalty of Mountbatten. Other scholars too have marked this amazing insaniyat that mercifully protected lives during the insanity of 1946-47. Any “remembrance” that excludes this insaniyat would be inadequate.
And any ‘remembrance’ that excludes horrors faced by the ‘other’ side would not only sound hollow, it would trigger fresh rage.
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