Revisiting partition: Peace is the only way to move on

When Reena Verma, an Indian national, was granted a Pakistani visa to revisit her place of origin in Rawalpindi after 75 years of living in India, she expressed her emotions by stating: “My dream came true. When I crossed the Pakistan-India border and saw signs for Pakistan and India, I got sentimental. Now I cannot predict how I will react when I reach Rawalpindi and see my ancestral home in the street.” Reena Verma was only 15 years old when her family had to leave Rawalpindi during the partition of the Indian sub-continent in August 1947. Deep down, her utmost desire had always been to revisit her ancestral home but she had to wait until 2022, when India and Pakistan celebrate 75 years of their independence from the British Raj, to realise this dream.

Reena Verma, now 90 years old, is not the only one who represents the generation that witnessed a bloody partition and the uprooting of millions of people. There are countless voices on both sides of the border who left their ancestral homes with a hope of returning - but as relations between India and Pakistan became tense, their wish also failed to materialise. Verma, while recollecting her old memories, said, “initially we could not understand what happened and kept saying that we will go back to Rawalpindi soon” since her father was a government servant and she believed he would have to return to his duty. However, it turned out to be wishful thinking. Eventually, Verma and her family, who settled in Pune, Maharashtra State, had to reconcile with the fact that India and Pakistan were two separate countries with hostility and antagonism deeply rooted in their mindset.

Revisiting partition remains one of the saddest parts of the history; when millions of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were uprooted because of their religious faith, and hundreds and thousands became victims of the carnage taking place, particularly in Punjab. Seventy-five years down the road, it is now the right time to analyse how partition affected the psyche of millions of people in the Indian sub-continent and why the legacy of partition still haunts them. Since Verma’s generation has almost phased out, her hope, which she expressed during her stay in Rawalpindi, needs to be taken seriously by the policy-makers of India and Pakistan. She said, “India and Pakistan are two separate countries but we can bring peace between them through love and people-to-people contact.” Organisations like the Pakistan-India Heritage Club, which arranged Verma’s visit, can play a useful role in reuniting the phasing out generation of partition so that the new generation can have an objective view about the tragic events that tore apart families.

Imran William, administrator of the FaceBook page of the India-Pakistan Heritage Club, rightly pointed out that although “we work to highlight the shared heritage of both countries and reunite families separated by partition”, it will continue to be an uphill task unless the governments of India and Pakistan follow an out-of-box approach and move towards reconciliation and peace by mending fences, especially considering that the generation which experienced partition like Reena Verma is phasing out. While visiting her house in Rawalpindi on July 20, Verma stated, “I would urge the new generation to work together and make things easy as humanity comes above everything and all religions teach humanity.” Will BJP, Shiv Sena and other ultra-Hindu nationalist parties and their Pakistani counterparts need to take Reena Verma’s advice seriously because enough damage has alreday been done to the two countries and the people with divided families will continue to suffer if this ‘Berlin Wall’ dividing millions of people is not dismantled. The unjust and unfair Visa policy of the two countries is responsible for denying people-to-people interaction, thus perpetuating hate and antagonism, which unfortunately suits the vested interest groups of India and Pakistan. The partition of the Indian Sub-continent after 75 years needs to be revisited from three angles.

First, the deep psychological impact of images and stories about massive migration, massacres (particularly in Punjab), and the suffering of millions needs to be reflected upon. Perhaps, the icons of partition: Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru and Sardar Patel, would not have been able to foretell that people of the two countries will not be able to meet each other freely and will eventually become victims of harsh visa policy and hostility. The armed conflict in Jammu & Kashmir and the 1948, 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistan further militarised the borders of the two countries, making it literally impossible for their people to visit families or travel for trade, commerce, educational, or tourism purposes. The legacy of partition still haunts the older generation of India and Pakistan. What Reena Verma narrated is the voice of millions of people, who in the last 75 years have been unable to get over the pain, agony, devastation and carnage, which took place in August-September 1947.

Second, it needs to be acknowledged that revisiting partition brings bitter and painful memories of carnage, forced migration, rape, looting and plundering to mind. People who were living with each other side-by-side for decades became strangers in their own homeland and had to migrate to areas completely unknown to them. Some reflections of the partition of the Indian sub-continent are mentioned in the articles quoted below.

Radha Kumar, a historian, raised the question, “whether a peaceful transition to partition is possible?” in his article: “The troubled history of partition”, published in journal ‘Foreign Affairs Vol. 76, No. 1, 1997. “India’s political leadership agreed to partition the country before the spread of large-scale conflict. The 1947 partition agreement between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League’s intention was partly to prevent the spread of communal riots from Bengal in eastern India to northwestern India, which could be divided. But the riots that followed in 1947-48 left more than a million people dead in six months and displaced an upwards of 15 million.”

An Indian writer, Gyanendra Pandey, in his article “Community and Violence: Recalling Partition” in a Mumbai based magazine Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 32, No 32, 1997 regrets that “the ‘truth’ of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 lay, at least for its victims, in the violence done to them. The businessman believed that, in the violence of the migration (his term for partition), he had lost his wife and children, since the press and radio reported that the train they were fleeing on from Sialkot had been stopped and all its passengers massacred. He recalls that for a month he believed he ‘was a dead man’ until he received a letter in his wife’s hand, telling him that they had safely reached Amritsar since a military officer friend, who was travelling by the train the next day, delayed their departure from Sialkot by a day. ‘I reached Delhi with a few pieces of gold and 300 rupees cash - that is all.’ With this, and with the money and jewelry his wife managed to bring with her, they started life again in Delhi.

Furthermore, David Gilmartin, another historian, in his article “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Nar rative” published in Vol, 57, No. 4, 1998 of The Journal of Asian Studies, argued that “caught in the violence of 1947, many viewed the partition almost as a calamity of nature. However, an examination of the events of partition in fact points us toward the critical ways that the structures of high politics and of everyday life in India are intimately related. The tensions between India’s diversity and divisions on one hand, and the search for moral unity on the other, shaped the dynamics of the demand for Pakistan and the movement toward partition.”

Chaim D. Kaufmann, a political scientist, in his article “When all else fails: Ethnic population transfers and partitions in the twentieth century” published in Vol. 23, No. 2, 1998 of International Security Journal, points out that “critics of 1947 partition blame it for causing more than 15 million refugees and hundreds and thousands of deaths. The independence of India and Pakistan on August 15, 1947 not only divided the Indian sub-continent; it also involved the partition of two of colonial India’s most populous provinces, Punjab in the North West, and Bengal in the East. Punjab accumulated for most of the refugees and nearly all the deaths from August to October 1947 as the province was convulsed by an intense communal civil war involving some of the largest ethnic cleansing campaigns in history. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Punjab, and the war sparked a large number of revenge killings elsewhere as well. More than 10 million people from Punjab and its adjacent provinces had to flee for their lives.”

Ian Talbot, an American historian, while analysing the tale of destruction in Lahore and Amritsar resulting from partition, lamented, in his article, “A tale of two cities: The aftermath of partition for Lahore and Amritsar 1947-1957” published in Vol. 41, No. 4, 2007 in Modern Asian, that “Violence was motivated by the desire to ruin the economic life of rival communities. Hundreds of houses, businesses and warehouses were burnt down in the walled areas of the both cities”. Voices of partition are almost phasing out but the legacy of separation has left its agony and pain for the people of India and Pakistan.

Finally, memories of partition documented in films, books and other publications tried to depict diversified perceptions of those who had witnessed bitter circumstances and hardened their level of hate and antagonism for each other. Reena Verma and others represent voices of sanity and peace, but are helpless to counter those who thrive on unfortunate historical events. Seventy-five years down the road, there is still time for India and Pakistan to launch a healing process of partition, which may help in transforming the highly militarised border of the two countries into a soft border so that people-to-people contact can be promoted and enemy images are mitigated. Furthermore, the new generation of India and Pakistan must stop carrying the baggage of partition and move forward by seeking just and honorable peace.

-The writer is former Chairman Department of International Relations and Dean Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Karachi. He can be reached at: amoonis@hotmail.com).