Tel Aviv: Pakistan may celebrate its independence and new found glory, but August 14 remains a day of mourning for unnamed millions of Indians — Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike — who perished as united India was torn apart, a tragedy born of Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s obstinacy and now echoed in Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir’s ambition, a report has stated.
Pakistan came into existence on August 14, 1947. In India, the day is observed as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, remembering the immense suffering, mass displacement and countless lives lost during the Partition of 1947.
Highlighting the human catastrophe that followed the partition, Vas Shenoy, a political researcher, consultant and entrepreneur, said, “Trains arrived at stations carrying corpses instead of passengers. Women were abducted, raped and forcibly converted to Islam. Families that had lived beside one another for generations suddenly found themselves on opposite sides of an international frontier.”
“The precise number of dead will probably never be known. Modern estimates have now grown to around two million. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust in over five years, two million Indians in the partition in a few months, the two-state solution. Somewhere between ten and fifteen million people were uprooted,” he wrote in ‘The Times of Israel’.
According to the expert, Pakistan survived, but not intact, as East Pakistan broke away in 1971 after years of political discrimination, repression and ultimately war, becoming Bangladesh. He noted that the supposedly shared Muslim identity that had justified partition proved insufficient to hold together Bengalis and West Pakistanis, divided by language, culture, economic interests and geography.
Shenoy argued that if Pakistan were solely intended to be a homeland for South Asian Muslims, tens of millions of Muslims would not have remained in India after 1947. If Islam alone were sufficient to constitute a nation, he said, Bangladesh should never have separated from Pakistan.
“The problem of Pakistani identity was visible almost immediately in its choice of language. Urdu became the national language despite not being the majority mother tongue of any of the principal regions that formed Pakistan. Its cultural heartland lay largely in northern India, particularly Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Lucknow, and it arrived with the Muhajir political and bureaucratic elite,” Shenoy stated.
“The contradiction was greatest in East Pakistan, whose Bengali speakers were the country’s largest linguistic population. Yet in Dhaka in 1948 Jinnah insisted that Urdu alone would be the state language. In 1971, Bangladesh demonstrated the limits of religion as a substitute for language, culture and identity,” he added.
Emphasising that Pakistan’s own history should make it cautious about grand political projects rooted in religious identity, he said, “The two-state solution of 1947 did not end Hindu-Muslim hostility. Nor did it create a unified Muslim nation: Pakistan itself broke in two within twenty-four years.”
(IANS)
