PARTITION - A HOLOCAUST

PARTITION! A massacre in the history of the Indian subcontinent. It was a holocaust in which several hundred thousand people were killed and innumerable women raped and abducted. Millions were uprooted and send to alien lands.

India-haters in Pakistan and Pakistan-haters in India are both products of Partition. People started believing that Indian Muslims lie with Pakistan. The journalist R. M. Murphy has shown that similar stereotypes proliferate in Pakistan that Hindus are dark, cowardly, polytheists and vegetarian. This gave birth to unstopped communalism.

Communalism is a particular kind of politicization of religions identity, an ideology that seeks to promote conflict between religious communities. Also called “RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM.” The Partition created the deeply problematic notion that Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims are communities with sharply defined boundaries, and fundamentally opposed interests.

THE BLOODSHED! The bloodbath continued for about a year from the Partition, 1947. Indian soldiers and policemen came to act as Hindus, Muslims or Sikhs. It is impossible to arrive at any accurate estimate of casualties but guesses vary from 2, 00,000 to 5, 00,000 people. Some 15 million were hostiled. The ashes of this massacre are still spread over every inch of the Indian subcontinent. The imprints can be seen in the riots happened after the partition till today.

THE GENDER PARTITION! During Partition women and girls become prime targets of prosecution. Attackers treated women’s bodies as territory to be conquered. Dishonouring women of a community was seen as dishonouring the community itself, and a mode of taking revenge.

Women were raped, abducted, soled, often many times over, forced to settle down to new life with strangers in unknown circumstances. Suffered and traumatised by all that they had undergone, some of their developed new family bonds in the changed circumstances. The Indian and Pakistani governments believing the women on the wrong side of the border, they started an operation of sending them back. They tore them away from their new relatives and sent them back to their earlier families or locations. They didn’t care to consult the concerned women, regarding their own lives. According to one estimate, 30,000 women were “recovered” overall, in which 22,000 Muslim women in India and 800 Hindu and Sikh women in Pakistan.

Women and girls became prime targets of persecution. During this time, the men feared that ‘their women, daughters, sisters’ – would be violated by the “enemy”, they killed the women themselves. Urvashi Butalia in ‘the Other Side Of Silence’, narrates a gruesome incident in the villages of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district. During Partition, in this Sikh village, 90 women are said to have ‘voluntarily’ jumped into a well rather than fall into the “enemy” hands.

THE WARS! Since the Partition of the British India, four wars were fought between India and Pakistan. The First Kashmir War of 1947, the Second Kashmir War of 1965, the Bengali War of Independence of 1971 and the Kargil War of 1999.

THE KASHMIR CONFLICT! Due to the Kashmir’s strategic position and unique and exquisite nature Kashmir has been of particular interest of both India and Pakistan. The main goal of Islamabad is to gain control of this region, thus completing the vision of an independent Muslim state outside of India considering that Kashmir is majority Muslim. New Delhi, on the other hand, has the goal of retaining Kashmir in order to support the portrayal of India as a secular nation.

The conflict is evidently an enduring one is the sense throughout the years of military fighting; there is a single goal of obtaining the prize, i.e. Kashmir territory.   

Of all incidents of the past if I could turn back the time; I would like to change the holocaust into a calm and peaceful division.