# 37 Remembering Partition, How Independent?

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Remembering Partition

“ Partition is a creation of politics. Lyallpur is my home, and I will continue to live here.”

My grandfather, Bhai Balmukand, was a lecturer at the Punjab Agricultural University in the cotton textile town of Lyallpur, now Faisalabad. He was to retire from teaching that year, which would allow him to devote more energy to the initiatives he and my Dadi had established over the decades - adult education and tailoring classes for women, income generation for the indigent, scholarships and supplementary classes for disadvantaged students.

By August 15th, the “creation of politics” was a river of blood between the Punjab of the East, and the Punjab of the West. My grandfather had been a furtive supporter of the more violent strands of the Independence movement; in my childhood, wisps of stories escaped from the blanket of silence over the past, of unauthorised experiments in the chemistry lab, of primitive bombs, of a train journey into an extended absence from home and college. For the larger part, though, Pitaji, as we called him, was a quiet social reformer, an idealist, and a philosopher. I can imagine him sitting by the radio that August, head bowed under his turban, listening to accounts of violence, contemplating the uprooting of millions of homes, billions of human connections, the agonised shredding of societal fabric across the vast plains of northern India. “This too, shall pass”, I can imagine him consoling himself.

Instead, a few weeks later, the Superintendent of Police asked some of the Hindus remaining in Faisalabad to come to his office. 

“As the Chief of Police in this town, I consider it my duty to protect all residents. Unfortunately, due to the political climate, I can no longer guarantee the safety of your community.”  

My father was in his first job, in Chennai, his married sister lived in Bombay. His younger brother was in a Delhi college, and helped put together a rescue mission for 26 residents of Lyallpur. Through a friend in Tata Airlines, he met an English pilot of fortune, who plied a WWII airplane, a Dakota, and contracted to land his plane “for 5 minutes precisely” at the Lyallpur airstrip. “Only one attache case each” he insisted, consigning the accumulated possessions of decades to homes abandoned in haste. Mataji tightened the muslin cloths around her jars of pickling mango, milked the cow, and asked her neighbours to draw the milk till she returned.

My grandparents took a tonga out to the airstrip, and waited in the rain, in a tiny clump of Hindu families. The airplane never landed. Through that afternoon and evening, they clustered by a radio, the only electronic medium of messaging at the time. Late that night, a public service message came through, asking them to expect the flight exactly 24 hours later. Last year, my chacha, now a frail 97 years old, recalled his father’s whispered prayer when the pilot announced that they were flying over the border.

Other wisps of family history took decades to emerge from deepest private trauma. When my mother passed, in 2011, my father’s youngest cousin would visit every day, to hold her brother’s hand for a minute. By then, he had lost the desire to engage with the world, but Nargis would linger in his room, then retire to the enclosed verandah in the back, and reminisce. 

“I wake up four or five nights a week; every time I witness the same scene.”

Her father, my father’s uncle, was a station master in western Punjab. When he sensed that trouble was brewing, he sent the elder children to live with their uncle in Jalandhar. He was a grain merchant, and the family lived above the market, in an apartment overlooking the chowk. One evening, Nargis - then 4 years old - was in the verandah, when she saw a young woman run screaming into the chowk, her hair streaming behind her. Seconds later, two Sikh men caught up with her, and knifed her to death. 

“Sixty five years later, her screaming still wakes me up, almost every night”

I asked Nargis when her parents and other children crossed the border. 

“Papa couldn’t abandon the station till he had official orders, but when things started getting really bad, he decided that Mama and the younger children must move to Jalandhar.”

Exercising his privilege as station-master, my grand-uncle flagged down a mail train, and escorted his wife and infant children to a first-class carriage. There was an eerie silence from inside. When he opened the door, it was to a pile of corpses. My grand-aunt, the most timid Mathura Devi, a lady whose voice I always strained to hear, buried herself and her two infants under the recently slain, arriving in the partitioned India stained, and forever brutalised, by the plague of religious violence.

Seventy five years later, there are police stations across the nation where senior officers will never admit to the truth my grand-father heard, “Due to the political climate, I can no longer guarantee the safety of your community.”  

Seventy five years later, thousands of children are still witness to acts of violence that will still haunt them when they are old. 

Time, and the very nature of life, anoints all lives with sorrow and the grief of loss. These burdens of nature each of us must bear with grace; but as a collective, we must labour to negotiate difference before it leads to dispute, staunch dispute before it leads to violence. 

True leadership paves a path into the future with a quest for peace and understanding. The most profound tragedy of Independent India is that hatred has become a convenient tool of political mobilisation.

How Independent?

How independent are the 80% of our citizens who depend on the government for food grain?

How independent are we when we depend on China, an active aggressor at our borders, for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, for our mobile phones, and the flags fluttering in our streets?

How independent are we when depend on a rogue nation for the bulk of our ordinance goods?

New Delhi - August 15th, 2022