Overcoming the partition of the minds. Shri Radhe Shri Krishna

Three major partitions happened in the world in the second half of the 1940s. Germany was partitioned into the Eastern and Western blocs in 1945, followed by India into Hindustan and Pakistan in 1947. Finally, Israel was created by partitioning Palestine in 1948.

Germany’s partition was temporary. The Berlin Wall, constructed in the early 1960s to accord permanence to it, was dismantled by the Germans in less than three decades. The country was reunified in 1989..

But in India and Palestine, partition was a terrible affair, leading to a full-scale war in Israel and mass migration accompanied by mind-numbing violence in India..

More than a million were murdered, while many millions more had to endure a treacherous migration across the hastily created border, often on foot. Hundreds of thousands could not make it, as they were waylaid and butchered..

Those horrors are difficult to forget. Historian William Dalrymple, in an article in New Yorker, quotes from a book by Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies, about the brutality of the period: “Gangs of killers set whole villages aflame, hacking to death men and children and the aged while carrying off young women to be raped. Some British soldiers and journalists who witnessed the Nazi death camps claimed Partition’s brutalities were worse: pregnant women had their breasts cut off and babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found literally roasted on spits.”.

The Partition of India was a meaningless and reckless act. Mahatma Gandhi opposed it saying: “Vivisect me before vivisecting the nation”. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel vowed to fight till the end to reject it. Rajendra Prasad conclusively proved its irrationality in a thoroughly argued 1946-book, India Divided..

Across the border, for Saadat Hasan Manto, the famed author, it was all sheer madness. Those women raped, with bulged stomachs, distressed him. “Where should those bellies belong to — Hindustan or Pakistan?” Manto questioned in innocent grief. His dark satire on Partition-time madness, Toba Tek Singh, ends with his eponymous hero Tek Singh seen stranded on no-man’s land between the newly created India and Pakistan. “On one side, behind barbed wire, stood together the lunatics of India and on the other side, behind more barbed wire, stood the lunatics of Pakistan. In between, on a bit of earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh”, Manto provocatively demurs...

Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe Shri Radhe..

Partition was not inevitable even until the early 1940s. But then, the British were in a hurry to leave. Louis Mountbatten arrived in India in March 1947 with the mandate to free the country before June 1948. After meeting Mohammad Ali Jinnah, “a psychopathic case”, Mountbatten decided not to wait for that long. In June, he unilaterally declared that the British would partition India and leave in less than three months..