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dreamland, only to be disillusioned and Bihar if Pakistan were created. Jin- the Rajya Sabha in 2003, that refugees
quickly. But that is a separate story. nah replied that he didn’t care. be granted citizenship. There is no
The compelling reality is that the huge ambiguity in his plea to the then home
majority of Indian Muslims remained ndeed, Jinnah did not care even minister, another refugee, L.K. Advani.
in their motherland. about Bengalis. In his only visit to Fortune made Dr Singh Prime Min-
The first accord signed between I East Pakistan he told his astonished ister in 2004, a responsibility he held
India and Pakistan on 8 April 1950 public audience in Dhaka that they for an decade. Dr Singh did nothing to
after six days of negotiations, known would have to forget about Bengali and fulfill a demand that he himself had
as the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, was about would be considered traitors if they did made. But his successor government
the safety and security of minorities not adopt Urdu as the lingua franca. In has done something about it.
in both countries. What happened a heroic war of liberation, east Bengalis In the melee of rumours and
over the next decades is illustrated by led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman ended misleading political rhetoric, it needs
a startling statistic: while the popula- the theocratic imposition of West to be clarified over and over again
tion of minorities in Pakistan dropped Pakistan in 1971 and reinvented their that the Citizenship Amendment Bill
from around 25 per cent to less than 2 country along a linguistic ethos that just passed does not take away the
per cent the population of Muslims in shelved theocracy. The process was rights of any Indians, of any religion or
India has risen in the same time. This interrupted by Sheikh Mujib’s tragic category. All it seeks to do as Dr Singh
is the difference between a democracy assassination in 1975 but the positive understands is to bring closure to one
and a theocracy. social forces he had set in motion were consequence of partition by granting
It was not as if the perpetrators of too powerful to be reversed. His legacy citizenship to victims of a traumatic
partition did not know of the contra- has been enhanced by his daughter, event in our history. That is all. It does
dictions and consequences; they were Sheikh Hasina. not take away any rights of Indian
simply callous. M.C. Chagla, who began Partition was a brutal business and Muslims, neither now or in the future.
his legal career in Jinnah’s chambers in who could have known this better Pakistan may become complete
Bombay and became foreign minister than a refugee? His name was Dr Man- without minorities, but India will be
under Mrs Indira Gandhi, narrates in mohan Singh. In 1947 Gandhiji had India only with all its Indian Muslim
his autobiography Roses in December visited a refugee camp in the vicinity citizens.
that he once asked Jinnah what would of Dr Singh’s birthplace in west Punjab.
be the fate of Indian Muslims in UP That is why Dr Singh demanded, in LETTERS@TEHELKA.COM

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