Second thoughts.

The other day, while watching Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, it occurred to me that the only victim of partition I witnessed at first hand was a hapless hack Victoria driver being butchered in the 13th Khetwadi Lane facing my 233 Khetwadi Main Road terrace. http://digbig.com/5bafde. Why the “cracking” of India as Bapsi Sidhwa called it could not be achieved without bloodshed and strife and monumental human tragedy is something that has always puzzled me.

Looking around for clues, I’m dumbstruck by the unconscionable haste with which partition was announced and carried out. On 4 June 1947, quite out of the blue, Lord Mountbatten announced at a press conference http://digbig.com/5bafnh that the British would quit the sub-continent by 15 August of the same year, i.e., in less than 3 months − instead of the earlier set deadline of June 1948 for the transfer of power. Eleven months earlier, on Jinnah-decreed Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, policemen in Bengal were allowed to go on a holiday by Governor Fredric Burrows with Lord Wavell’s tacit assent. The Calcutta massacre went on without police or military intervention for three days. http://digbig.com/5bafng. It is as if the British Raj had washed its hands of the erstwhile Jewel in the Crown and wanted to get the hell out of India at the earliest without involving itself further in the emerging mess.

Had Churchill been the British PM instead of Attlee, the holocaust might have been avoided or at least postponed for a while given that he would never have agreed to the colony’s independence readily. That would have been a blessing in disguise as it might have given the Indian leaders time to think up a cogent and workable plan of action for an orderly partition and the massive migration involved when the moment arrived.

History’s saddest lesson. Will we never learn?

Say what we may, India's record of inter-communal co-existence has been atrocious throughout the last century. On every occasion, the slightest breath of suspicion would fan tension into a major conflagration. In 1926, for instance, Hindu Mahasabha's national conference in Delhi, the ambiguous government policy on allowing music to be played near mosques and the opposition within the Indian National Congress to the Bengal Hindu-Muslim pact - painstakingly steered to fruition by the Deshbandhu (CR Das) - conspired to spark off a nationwide carnage, in Allahabad, Bombay, Calcutta, Dacca, Delhi, Hyderabad, Lahore, Panipat and Rawalpindi. 'Music near mosques' has a familiar ring. It has been the recurring bone of contention, even as late as in Mumbai's post-Ayodhya (1992-93) riots. Is secular tolerance, I often wonder, a sheer sliver of a veneer over the Indian psyche? "The more the two sides try and call attention to their religious differences by slaughtering each other, the less there is to distinguish them from one another. They worship at the same altar. They're both apostles of the same murderous god". That's how Arundhati Roy described the Gujarat episode of this never-ending gory tale. (Democracy. Who is she when she's at home?) http://www.zmag.org/content/SouthAsia/roy-gujarat-democracy.cfm.