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CITIZENSHIP
Pakistan may live

without minorities but

India is India only with

COUNTER-
VIEW all its Muslim citizens

MJ AKBAR
ime, that complex stream how people were spread in the actual
of contradictions, is said to localities where they lived. Indeed the
heal. Sometimes scars dis- multipolar cohabitation was living
He is a noted appear but wounds linger evidence of the syncretism and harmony
journalist & author. below the surface, particu- born from Indian values.
Views expressed are T larly when the trauma has Over and over again sensible people,
his own crossed generations. Few events have including Britishers like Glancy, gover-
been more traumatic in Indian history nor of Punjab, warned repeatedly that
than partition. partition was a concept drenched in
One practical argument against that blood, an invitation to civil war. But Jin-
brutal assault on India’s civilizational nah wanted a civil war, particularly after
philosophy, apart from the moral and he launched a Jihad from 16 August 1946,
political case, was that there was no true or Direct Action Day which witnessed
geography for vivisection. Populations the horrors of the Great Calcutta Killings.
across the land were mixed in virtu- The lava from this volcano spread to
ally every village, small town or urban Noakhali and then to Bihar. Thousands
conglomerate, particularly in the two were massacred. No one was safe. In
provinces that would constitute the January 1947 the Muslim League lit
demographic bulk of Pakistan, Punjab bonfires in Punjab, seeking to destroy the
and Bengal. Unionist government which had proved
Even as early as in 1916, when Con- for an decade that Punjab and India
gress and Muslim League announced could be governed in partnership.
the once-famous but now forgotten When Lord Mountbatten, last viceroy
In the melee of Lucknow Pact, the formula gave half the of India, saw the riot-affected areas of
Punjab he could not believe the horrors
seats in Punjab and 40 per cent in Bengal
rumours and to Muslims. This was slightly above their he heard about. Details that shake one’s
misleading political actual numbers. In other words, there faith in humanity are recorded in the
was no overwhelming majority for
sanitized accounts without the archives,
rhetoric, it needs Muslims in Punjab and they were far less and published in the Transfer of Power
to be clarified over than half in Bengal. papers. Gandhiji visited Punjab in the
The percentages had not changed
first week of August 1947 and with a
and over again that when Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a political broken heart uttered, “What barbarism!
the Citizenship Muslim rather than a believer, abandon- What bestiality!” Gandhiji left his young
protege Dr Sushila Nayar, sister of his
ing the principles of the first half of his
Amendment Bill life, launched a virulent tirade against secretary Pyarelal, in the refugee camp
just passed does unity in collaboration with the viceroy as hostage: she would be the first to give
her life if the refugees were attacked
Lord Linlithgow.
not take away This was proved again in the elec- again before they could be brought to In-
the rights of any tions of 1946 when the League, despite dia. This is what being a Gandhian meant.
an overwhelming bulk of Muslim seats,
Obviously India was the only natural
Indians, of any could not get a majority in either Bengal refuge for these victims of partition.
or Punjab. But statistics tell only a part
Many Indian Muslims who had believed
religion or category if the truth. There are no numbers of in the Pakistan movement left for their
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