By Lee Sang-ki | South Korea

Throughout the long and often painful history of India-Pakistan relations, voices have been raised-many in anger, some in sorrow, but too few with the purpose of peace. As a journalist from Korea, a divided nation still living with the consequences of unresolved conflict, I speak not as a distant observer but as someone who deeply understands the price of hostility and the value of dialogue.

My message is clear: journalists must speak peace. This is not a slogan, but a professional and moral imperative that lies in the stories we choose to tell, the voices we highlight, and the tone we set for public discourse.

From Two Generations, One Common Message

Recently, I had the privilege of conversing with two exceptional journalists: Nasir, a seasoned journalist in his 70s from Pakistan, and Gunjeet, a thoughtful and active journalist in her 30s from India. Despite their generational differences and geopolitical contexts, both shared a profound desire to see journalism become a force for peace, not polarization.

Nasir, with over five decades of experience, has witnessed the cycles of tension, propaganda, and conflict between the two nations. “Every time we speak of war,” he said calmly, “we rob young people of their future.” To him, journalism should be a protective shield for the people, not a weapon of provocation. His reflections are not nostalgic-they are a call to responsibility.

Gunjeet, from a younger but well-established generation of journalists, sees an opportunity in transition. “We grew up with distrust,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we have to pass it on.” For her, the media must act as a bridge-between citizens, between perspectives, and across borders. Her words echo a generation seeking to reshape the narratives they inherited.

Their insights reminded me of Korea’s situation. We, too, have lived with division for more than seventy years-no peace treaty, only a fragile armistice. And yet, despite this, journalists from the North and South have found moments of contact, collaboration, and shared truth. It’s not just governments that negotiate peace; it is often the media that first imagines it.

The Power-and Peril-of the Press

The media can be a builder of peace or a barrier to it. Too often, it has chosen the latter. Sensational headlines dominate. Political talk shows inflame rather than enlighten. Reporters echo nationalist narratives without challenge.

This is not journalism-it is performance. And it endangers the very societies it claims to serve.

As the founding president of the Asia Journalists Association and former president of the Journalists Association of Korea, I have worked with journalists across Asia-including many from India and Pakistan. I have seen firsthand the professionalism, courage, and integrity that exist on both sides. What we now need is collective resolve to use these qualities to serve peace, not partisanship.

A Joint Media Declaration for Peace

I propose that Indian and Pakistani journalists come together-online or in person-to issue a Joint Media Declaration for Peace. This would include commitments to accurate reporting, rejection of inflammatory language, humanizing the “other,” and resisting political pressures that undermine editorial independence.

The Asia Journalists Association stands ready to support such an initiative, bringing in veteran and emerging voices not only from South Asia, but also from countries like Korea, Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka. These journalists can offer solidarity, share experiences, and help mediate with perspective.

Such a declaration would not be symbolic-it would be strategic. Because peace is built word by word, report by report.

Lessons from the Korean Peninsula

Some argue that India-Pakistan tensions are unique. That may be true. But so is the Korean Peninsula.

Despite the lack of a peace treaty, North and South Korea have made significant symbolic strides through media cooperation-joint coverage of events, shared broadcasts of summits, and even the exchange of editorial perspectives during moments of détente. These may seem modest, but they have changed perceptions.

Korean journalists have evolved from a history of censorship and state control to one of independence and accountability. We have learned-often painfully-that journalism must not serve the state or the market alone, but the people, especially in times of division.

From a Shared Past to a Shared Future

India and Pakistan may not agree on every detail of their past. But they can agree on one thing: their future must not be dictated by it.

It is time for journalism to move from echoing old animosities to amplifying new possibilities. When we report on cross-border tensions, we must also report on peace initiatives, cultural ties, and grassroots connections. When we cover disputes, we must also highlight empathy.

This is not “soft journalism.” It is journalism at its strongest-truthful, courageous, and constructive.

Let Journalism Lead

We live in an era dominated by digital misinformation, shrinking trust, and polarized politics. The responsibility on journalists has never been greater.

Let us not wait for politics to change. Let us be the change. Let journalists like Nasir and Gunjeet-bridging two generations and two nations—lead the way toward a media culture that refuses to reduce its audiences to anger and fear.

Imagine a future where reporters from New Delhi and Islamabad sit side-by-side at a peace conference, not a war front. Imagine collaborative documentaries on shared history. Imagine editorial exchanges, student journalist forums, and open newsroom dialogues across the border.

All of this is possible. But only if we begin-now.

Peace does not begin at the negotiation table. It begins in the newsroom. Let us make journalism a platform not for propaganda, but for understanding.

Let journalists speak peace-clearly, boldly, and together.

Read – War: When the Dust Settles

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Lee Sang-ki, a senior journalist of Republic of Korea, is Publisher of The AsiaN, Founding President, Asia Journalists Association (AJA) and Former President, Journalists Association of Korea (2002–2005)

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By Jyoti Bachani

A container of memories

Every time I make roti in California, I reach for flour in a container that is one of my prized possessions. It reminds me of my extended family, and my nani, maternal grandmother, who passed away when I was only ten.

Growing up in Delhi, every weekend was spent in her small two-room house. My grandfather who was a civil engineer, had built this small house along with the others in the neighborhood, for the Hindu Sindhi refugees who had relocated to Delhi in 1947 when the British divided the country into India and Pakistan.

The papad container

My mother was not yet ten. She grew up in that house, as one of ten siblings. During my childhood, my aunts and uncles, and cousins would gather there every weekend. Occasionally, an uncle or aunt would talk about the life of luxury they had in Sindh, and point to a few things in the house that had been carried as part of the relocation following the partition.

This old container was one of them. My nani used to store papad in this container.

I was visiting Delhi in 1991 when I found this container in my uncle’s home. The small two-room house had been demolished and a three-story building had been built for the three brothers who still remained in Delhi. The container was in a pile destined to be sold to a Kabadiwala – a junk collector – for recycling.

Rescuing the container

It brought back a flood of childhood memories for me, so I asked my uncle if I could have it.

He thought I was joking, and when he realized I wasn’t, he tried to dissuade me by explaining that this alloy tarnishes easily and cannot be used without kalai (tin coating).

I remembered the Kalaiwala as a door-to-door vendor who used to come and polish the inside of the utensils in everybody’s home.

My uncle wondered why I wanted to carry ‘junk’ halfway around the world, but when he realized that I was serious, he found a Kalaiwala to get the inside readied for use.

Since then, this container has traveled with me to several of my homes. Its contents nourish my body and its storied past and memories nourish my spirit.

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Dr. Jyoti Bachani is an Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is a former Fulbright Senior Research Scholar, with degrees from London Business School, UK, Stanford, USA, and St. Stephen’s College, India. She translates Hindi poems, and has edited a poetry anthology called “The Memory Book of the Poetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley.”

Courtesy: India Currents (Posted on June 7, 2023)

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By Tridivesh Singh Maini

The past few months have seen several instances of tearful reunions with members of divided families from either side of the Punjab in Pakistan and India meeting, after years of enforced separation.

These reunions involve families not only across Punjab, but also Kashmir, Rajasthan-Sindh, as well as UP/Bihar/Madhya Pradesh and other Indian states.

With the mainstream media usually too caught up in political happenings, it is often social media users who highlight such meetings, pushing big media houses to take note.

A YouTube initiative launched in 2013 known as Punjabi Lehar has done a stellar job in collecting stories of Partition survivors. Co-founded by two Pakistanis, Nasir Dhillon of Faisalabad (formerly Lyallpur) and Bhupinder Singh of Nankana Sahib, the channel has also helped re-unite members of hundreds of families and old friends separated by Partition.

The visa-free Kartarpur Corridor which re-opened in November 2021 after being closed for over a year and a half has helped catalyze several recent meetings.

On January 10, 2022, this avenue enabled the reunion of two brothers separated for 74 years. The story of Sika Khan in Bathinda district in Punjab, India, and his older brother Mohammad Siddique in Dhillon’s home town Faisalabad, has received a lot of media attention since their historic meeting. Videos of the reunion went viral on social media, evoking emotional responses around the globe.

Since 2018, Pakistani feminists have been organizing large public demonstrations for Women’s Day called Aurat – the Urdu word for women – March. Opposition to Aurat March has grown in proportion to its popularity and impact.

The Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi issued Sika Khan a visa the same month. However, he was only able to cross over in March 2022, due to special permissions required because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In another instance of close family members re-uniting, cousins from either side of the divide met at the Nankana Sahib gurdwara for the first time since 1947 — Baldev Singh, 75 of Rattoke village, district Sangrur, Punjab, India and his cousin Sajda Begum, around 80, from Faizabad, Punjab, Pakistan. Baldev Singh has no memories, since he was only a few months at the time of partition, but Sajda has faint memories of playing with him.

The meeting was enabled by a 10-day religious tourism visa, April 11-21, allowing Baldev Singh to participate in the Vaisakhi celebrations at several gurudwaras in Pakistan, including Panja Sahib, Nankana Sahib, Dera Sahib Lahore, and Darbar Sahib Kartarpur.

No matter how strained relations between both countries get, they must retain a humanitarian point of view which entails allowing a separate category of visas for individuals over a certain age who want to re-unite their families.

Before he crossed over to Pakistan in March 2022, Sika Khan, talking to reporters in Punjabi, said that he was glad to be finally going to Pakistan to be with his separated family. He noted that he had to wait for a long time even after getting the visa and expressed his pain “for those who even fail to get visas to meet their loved ones”.

He urged the governments to adopt “a flexible approach” in providing visas and allowing separated families to meet frequently.

In 2012, India and Pakistan signed an agreement allowing visa-on-arrival for senior citizens with roots in both countries. However, this has not been implemented due to bilateral tensions.

The Kartarpur Corridor was built to enable devotees from Punjab, India, to pay obeisance at Darbar Sahib, the resting place of the founder of the Sikh faith Guru Nanak Dev. On another level, it has helped reunite families, friends and even peace activists.

Since the re-opening, at least two groups of Rotarians from India and Pakistan aiming to build peace have had meetings at Kartarpur, enabled by the visa-free corridor.

When strategic analysts dismiss the utility of people-to-people contacts, they forget the role of such linkages in blunting the narrative of countering misconceptions and hate.

Today, in the 75th year of independence, both countries must honor their 2012 agreement and allow at least the elderly to meet relatives across the divide. They must do this before it’s too late.

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Tridivesh Singh Maini is a policy analyst and visiting faculty at the OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat (India). He is the author of South Asian Cooperation and the Role of the Punjabs. This is a Sapan News syndicated feature.

Courtesy: Sapan News Service

The post Let people meet – before it’s too late first appeared on Sindh Courier.

Sudheendra Kulkarni

One of the most intriguing political relationships in the history of India’s freedom struggle is that between Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mohammed Ali Jinnah. This association is iconoclastic on both sides. It punctures the leftist allegation that Tilak was a Hindu communalist. This depiction of Tilak can also be found in many accounts of the history of Pakistan by Pakistani scholars. This comradeship also busts the myth that Jinnah, who later became the architect of Pakistan, was a Muslim communalist.

Father of Indian Revolution

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, byname Lokamanya, (born July 23, 1856, Ratnagiri [now in Maharashtra state], India—died August 1, 1920, Bombay [now Mumbai]), scholar, mathematician, philosopher, and ardent nationalist who helped lay the foundation for India’s independence by building his own defiance of British rule into a national movement. He founded (1914) and served as president of the Indian Home Rule League. In 1916 he concluded the Lucknow Pact with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which provided for Hindu-Muslim unity in the nationalist struggle. (Click here to continue reading)

Remarkably, this association developed at a time when both the Indian National Congress, of which Tilak was a towering leader until his death on August 1, 1920, and the All India Muslim League, which later raised the demand for India’s Partition were themselves exploring a collaborative association to demand from the British self-rule for Indians.

Even more remarkably, it was a time when Jinnah, the most promising young lawyer and nationalist Muslim politician in Bombay in the first two decades of the last century, was a member, simultaneously, of both the Congress and the Muslim League. He had joined the Congress in 1896, when he returned from England to Bombay to start his law practice.

In 1906, he attended the Calcutta session as secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji, the “Grand Old Man” of India’s freedom struggle, who was then president of Congress. He would take membership of the Muslim League much later, in 1913. He viewed himself as a bridge between the two communities, Hindus and Muslims, and also between the two Indian parties, Congress and the Muslim League, pursuing the common goal of national independence.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, his mentor and a respected leader of the “moderate” faction of the Congress – Tilak was a leader of the “militant” wing – had described Jinnah as “an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. Jinnah himself had expressed the desire to become “the Muslim Gokhale”.

Bombay: The cradle of Hindu-Muslim unity

In his book Jinnah and Tilak: Comrades in the Freedom Struggle, AG Noorani, a prolific scholar, quotes Kanji Dwarkadas, a close friend of Jinnah in Bombay: “The two great political centers in Bombay at that time [c. 1916] were Sardar Griha, where Tilak lived and Jinnah’s chambers in the High Court. All political roads led to these two places for organization, consultation and decision.”

Noorani continues: “Theirs was not what is known as ‘drawing room politics’. They plunged deep into mass politics. Thousands of leaflets and pamphlets were published week after week. After dinner meetings were held at Kalbadevi and Mandvi and every fortnight big public meetings were held at Shantaram’s Chawl, Girgaum, addressed by, among others, Jinnah, Tilak, Khaparde, Khadilkar, NC Kelkar and BG Horniman, an Englishman who edited the nationalist daily Bombay Chronicle. Meetings were also held at places like Mulji Jetha Cloth Market and China Bagh.”

According to Dwarkadas, “The Shantaram Chawl meetings were a bugbear to Lord Willingdon [Governor of Bombay Presidency, which then comprised Sind as well]. For the first time in the history of political agitation, the masses were approached and were made politically conscious…Omar Sobani, Shankarlal Banker and I met Jinnah daily in his chambers to arrange our-day-to-day program of political propaganda.”

Here is an account of Jinnah’s speech at a public meeting in Shantaram Chawl in praise of Tilak, when the people of Bombay gave him a send-off at the beginning of his long visit to England in 1918. As president of the Indian Home Rule League, Tilak was going there to press the case of India’s Swaraj.

“A mass meeting of about 15,000 men was held under the presidency of Mr. Jinnah in the spacious compound of Shantaram Chawl on Tuesday evening to give a hearty send-off to Mr. Tilak and his party. The Hon. Jinnah, in the course of his remarks, said that no man was more fitted to voice the opinions of the democracy here to the English people than Mr. Tilak who had devoted his whole life to the cause of his country. Let it be quite clear, he said, that the demand for the immediate step towards the establishment of the Home Rule was the united demand of the people. It was the birth right of every man and that was the principle of self-determination.”

Addressing the same meeting, Tilak gave a rousing call for Indian unity. “Stand by us, now and ever like men, resolute men, against the temptation that would be offered by the [British] bureaucracy. Accept no compromise, no barter, no change in the matter. If you accept it, we all will be humiliated and laughed at. The bureaucracy might try to create a split amongst us. Be careful, attentive and resolute to stand by the Congress Scheme.”

There is another account of a public meeting at Shantaram Chawl, on May 31, 1919, at which Mahatma Gandhi gave tribute to Tilak. The meeting had been organized for the purpose of appreciating Tilak’s services to India and for calling upon the people to contribute to the expenses incurred by him in his case against Sir Valentine Chirol. The following is a full translation of Gandhiji’s speech in Gujarati.

“I am thankful to the organizers of the meeting for asking me to preside. The goal of every thinking Indian must be the same, though the methods for its attainment may be different and it is a matter known to all that my ways differ from Mr. Tilak’s. And yet I would wish to heartily associate myself with every occasion to pay a tribute to his great services to the country, his self-sacrifice, and his learning and with the present occasion in especial. The nation does not honor him any the less for his defeat in his case against Sir Valentine Chirol. It honors him, if that were possible, all the more, and this meeting is but a token of it. I have come to offer my hearty support to it.

“Truly speaking, I am in no love with fighting in law courts. Victory there does not depend on the truth of your case. Any experienced vakil will bear me out that it depends more on the judge, the counsel, and the venue of the court. In English there is a proverb that it is always the man with the longest purse that wins. And there is a good deal of truth in this, as there is exaggeration in it. The Lokamanya’s defeat therefore made me only wish he was a satyagrahi like me, so that he would have saved himself the bother of victory or defeat. And when I saw that far from losing heart at the result of his case, far from being disappointed, he faced the English public with cool resignation and expressed his views to them with equal fearlessness, I was proud of him. He has been in his life acting to the very letter up to what he has believed to be the essential teaching of the Gita. He devotes himself entirely to what he believes to be his karma, and leaves the result thereof to God. Who could withhold admiration from one so great?”

Even in defeat, a hero

Here we should digress a little and devote a few lines to the Chirol case and its significance in Tilak’s life. Sir Ignatius Valentine Chirol was a British journalist who passionately defended the British Empire. “It is impossible that we should ever concede to India the rights of self-government,” he wrote. To buttress this belief, he indulged in vilification of the leaders of India’s freedom struggle, especially Tilak, whom he called the “Father of Indian Unrest”. For example, he described the gymnastic societies started by Tilak as “juvenile bands of dacoits to swell the coffers of Swaraj”.

Chirol’s book in some ways was similar to Catherine Mayo’s Mother India, a vile and derogatory description of India and her freedom movement, which Gandhij dismissed as “a drain inspector’s report”.

Tilak filed a civil suit against Chirol in London for the deprecatory comments on him in Chirol’s book Indian Unrest. Tilak lost the case. The British Government had hoped that his defeat would dent his prestige and popularity in India. The contrary happened. The legal battle further boosted Tilak’s fame. Rabindranath Tagore, a great admirer of Tilak, observed: “You cannot purify the sacrificial fire or the sacred waters of the Ganga.”

The Bombay Chronicle, edited by the legendary journalist BG Horniman, wrote: “Who cares what the British jury and judge said about our beloved Lokamanya? Their pronouncements are powerless to dethrone him from the loving hearts of the people.”

The Chirol case, and Tilak’s long stay of over 18 months in England both to fight the case and also to propagate the cause of India’s freedom, left him under a very heavy burden of debt. This is what prompted Gandhiji and others to start a drive to collect donations from people to provide financial support to Tilak. Such was the response that on May 22, 1920, a purse of Rs.325,000 – a lot of money in those days – was presented to him in Poona.

He was seriously ill at the time, with just over two months of life left for him. He thanked the people and said, “By your generosity you have literally bought my body and soul.” Then, in a choked voice, he added, “Plainly you want me to go on working for you and, of course, I have no option now.”

To return to the narrative about the Tilak-Jinnah comradeship – which came to symbolize Hindu-Muslim solidarity for India’s freedom – at least two rare photographs of large mass meetings at Shantaram Chawl, which typified the middle-class and working-class habitat in Bombay a hundred years ago, have survived the ravages of time. One shows Tilak and Jinnah. The other shows Tilak and Jinnah, along with Mahatma Gandhi. Not far from Girgaum, and towards its North, was Girangaon, the hub of textile mills in and around Parel. Tilak would regularly address meetings of trade unions there. And between Girgaum and Girangaon were – and still are – Muslim-dominated areas such as Byculla, Bhendi Bazar and Nagpada, with absolutely no physical barrier between Hindu and Muslim localities.

Tilak’s Sardar Grih in Girgaum, a modest private guest house in which he rented a room whenever he came to Bombay, itself was in close vicinity of Anjuman-i-Islam, the oldest Muslim educational institution in India founded in 1874, a year before the establishment of the Alilgarh Muslim University, originally known as the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.

Its founder was Badruddin Tyabji, a great patriot who was president of the Indian National Congress at its third session in Madras in 1897. As a judge of the Bombay High Court, he was known for his courage and impartiality, as became clear in his granting bail to Tilak in a sedition case in 1897 after it had been rejected thrice by others. Tyabji, unlike Sir Syed, urged Muslims to join the Congress so that the interests of Muslims and Hindus could be advanced jointly. Incidentally, Jinnah, who too held the same view, regarded Tyabji as his mentor, and once told him that there was “nothing that I shall follow more readily than your advice.”

A ‘composite’ patriotism

All these things must have influenced Tilak’s mind, broadening his views on Indian nationalism. In an important speech on “Patriotism”, which he delivered in Bellary, Karnataka, in May 1905, he said, “Patriotism must be composite. The limits [of patriotism] must be widened.” Evidently, Tilak was saying that India was neither a Hindu Nation, as propounded by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, founded five years after his death, nor a Muslim nation, which later became the demand of the Muslim League, under the leadership of Jinnah, to be carved out in Muslim-majority parts of India. In the same speech, Tilak elaborated his concept of secular Indian nationalism, which is nothing but “composite nationalism”, as he called it.

“When you go to consider a question whether India can be a nation various considerations crop up in connection with it. One man says that unless the whole of India comes to profess one faith or unless they all become Christians, or Mohamedans or Hindus for the matter of that; there cannot arise one nation from the heterogeneous communities. Another man says that it is our social customs that keep us behind and down and that unless we cast them away there is no salvation. Our industrial friend says that unless the Indian industries are revived and unless the country accumulates more wealth – for wealth is power – there can be no salvation for India. Each man has his own view and pushes it forward. But when we consider the subject from all points of view it must be admitted that all these views are more or less one sided. When we consider the question of nationality and national progress we cannot afford to look at it only from one standpoint of view. We must look for progress all along the line and understand the mutual relations of the different parts so that in our enthusiasm for one we may not kill or come in conflict with the others.”

Anyone who reads these lines now will know how relevant they are for strengthening the unity of today’s multi-faith India and for promoting harmony in our multi-community society as it continues to grapple with Hindu-Muslim tensions on the one hand and, on the other, with the tension between economic progress in an era of globalization and an urge to preserve our culture and traditions.

Jinnah’s views on “composite” Indian nationalism in the first three decades of the last century echoed those of Tilak. At the 22nd session of the Indian National Congress in Calcutta in 1906, which was being held around the same time as the founding session of the Muslim League in Dhaka, Jinnah said, “Muhammadans can equally stand on this common platform and pray for our grievances being remedied through the program of the National Congress…The foundation upon which the Indian National Congress is based is that we are all equal.”

Jinnah strongly believed in the idea of a “union of the two great communities in India”. In a speech at Anjuman-i-Islam on January 20, 1913, he regarded it a necessity for the Hindus and Muslims “to combine in one harmonious union for the common good.” Presciently, he described this as the “problem of all problems that the statesman in India has to solve before any true advance or real purpose can be achieved”.

It is not out of place here to recall what Jinnah said while presiding over a meeting of the Gurjar Sabha in January 1915 to welcome the return to India of Mahatma Gandhi from South Africa. “He impressed upon Gandhi the importance of such unity. The South African question, in which Gandhi had been so actively involved, was to Jinnah the first issue “on which the two sister communities stood together in absolute union”.

And “it was that frame of mind, that state, that condition which they had to bring about between the two communities, when most of their problems…would be easily solved. That…was one problem of all the problems of India – namely how to bring about unanimity and cooperation between the two communities so that the demands of India may be made absolutely unanimously.” (Continues)

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Sudheendra Kulkarni was an aide to India’s former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in the Prime Minister’s Office between 1998 and 2004. As the founder of Forum for a New South Asia, he is actively engaged in efforts to strengthen communal harmony in India and also to promote India-Pakistan and India-China friendship.

Courtesy: Scroll

The post Tilak and Jinnah: A forgotten friendship and symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity in colonial India – Part-I first appeared on Sindh Courier.

By Guneeta Singh Bhalla

“I still don’t know what happened,” remarks Ranjit Kaur toward the end of our interview.

“Why did we have to move?” she softly asks, staring at me, then through me, as her voice trailed off. Her gaze turned down toward her folded hands and she paused. She is genuinely perplexed, I can tell.

More than 70 years have passed and she hasn’t been able to reconcile Partition in her mind. Her family was attacked by a mob in their ancestral village in Narowal district, West Punjab, when they fled. She looked up at me again and her gaze hit me like a bolt. A lump began to swell in my throat but I fought it back. So many thoughts streamed through my mind: How unfair was this history? How could she live her full life in exile still wondering, seven decades later?

But this isn’t Kaur’s story alone. As she reminds me, “The only consolation was that millions of us were in this together.”

When asked about her attackers, she says, “I don’t know who the killers were. We had never seen them before. We didn’t recognize them. They weren’t our Muslim brothers and sisters in the village.”

I’ve spoken to hundreds of individuals while the project I work on has preserved the life stories of more than 8,000 Partition witnesses since 2010. For us, a new picture of violence and what truly went wrong at the time of Partition is emerging. It is helping us put to rest many myths surrounding this history and misconstrued narratives that are often used to serve vested interests in the public sphere.

As newly kindled flames of communal violence today begin to flare across India and Pakistan, it is time we take another look at this history with access to a brand-new data set of oral histories and modern analytic tools. Much of the remembrance today about Partition is limited to artistic depictions, literature, and our emotional reactions. This was necessary and is wholly understandable as it helps us relate to what our ancestors have experienced. However, it is time now to intellectualize this history and look at it from an objective lens, learn to identify the triggers and spread this knowledge, lest we repeat the same mistakes.

What happened then and how is it increasingly more relevant today?

This month marks 73 years since India and Pakistan’s birth, and the subcontinent’s freedom from British imperial rule. In 1947 some 563 native kingdoms were merged with Britain’s South Asian territories, collectively known as “British India.” They were then reorganized into two new countries on the basis of religion: India and Pakistan. India took the name of the former British territories in the region and maintained much of British India’s original legal infrastructure.

The provinces of Punjab and Bengal were divided between India and Pakistan and the public polarized along religious lines. Mass communal violence broke out during the transition to democracy and the resulting power grab.

A common narrative many of us grew up hearing is that Hindus and Muslims began killing each other in a mad frenzy, leading to such a horrifying bloodbath that it is impossible to understand what truly took place. “Our people went mad,” I have heard often.

Yet, after gathering thousands of oral histories, we are finding today that most people did not participate in the violence and were largely innocent victims. In addition, a vast majority surprisingly do not harbor ill feelings toward the “other” religion. Importantly, in a significant finding, for the vast majority of the cases, like Kaur’s, victims did not recognize their attackers. And so, contrary to popular understanding, friends and neighbors didn’t kill each other indiscriminately. People didn’t turn on each other suddenly, in the name of religion, but rather offered protection to each other.

Perhaps less than 5 percent of the population participated in criminal activity at that time. Yet, between 1946 and 1948, some 15 million individuals were driven out of their homes and as many as 3 million killed in rioting that went out of control.

So how did this violence begin and how did it spread?

Up until the mid-1940s, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians, Parsis, Jews, and others had been coexisting peacefully for at least a couple centuries or more in regions across South Asia. “Before Partition, we didn’t identify each other by religion,” says Hidayatullah Khoso from Sindh province whose interview we recently archived, alluding to a more cosmopolitan make up of pre-Partition populations. Religion it seems was largely “practiced at home,” as many witnesses tell us, save for the big festivals like Diwali, Eid, and Christmas, which were more universally celebrated. For a vast majority of the people, religion was not a means for identifying one another.

But things began to change around 1945. As World War II wound down and the British departure from its Indian territories became apparent, different political groups of ideological nationhood — such as a Muslim-majority Pakistan, a Sikh Khalistan, a secular vs Hindu India, among other ideas — were gaining momentum. These ideas entered local politics. Isolated shootings, stabbings, and massacres based on religion began making the news, spreading fear, distrust, and anger. From the oral histories we hear, the culprits of those initial events were almost always fanatical individuals or groups aligned with right-wing religious ideologies.

With time, the lack of separation between religion and politics led to religious ideologues having representation in local political parties. We hear reports of local political leaders igniting violence through proxies like gangsters and dacoits for economic gain – the chance to grab land, businesses, homes, or family jewels (a sort of savings account in those days) belonging to religious minorities in their constituencies. As news of British departure and the formation of India and Pakistan spread, the violence had spread beyond fringe groups and gangsters to groups of young men across villages and towns. In West Punjab and Sindh alone, wealthy Hindu and Sikh landlords were driven out in a land grab by individuals looking to gain local economic and political power. Similarly, Nawabs and large estate Muslim landowners in what is now north and central India were also attacked. Young men committing the violence back then tell us today that they did so to gain loot or to kidnap women (and gain a wife). They were guided by local leaders and lured by tangible personal gains. And so, through our oral histories we find that most of the violence occurred due to top-down political rhetoric and material incentives.

The violence went out of control with tit-for-tat crimes largely because members of the armed forces had also become radicalized. Should a policeman from a Punjabi Muslim family protect the Punjabi Muslim gangster attacking a Punjabi Hindu family — or should he protect the Hindu family? At a time of mass anxiety, distrust, and public radicalization, these lines were blurred. The violence in northern India and Pakistan came to an end when ethnically unrelated militaries were brought in, such as the Gorkhas of Nepal and the Madras regiments from southern India.

An important implication of these findings is that the violence and separation of Muslims from non-Muslims was not an inevitable outcome. It is not that “Hindus and Muslims could not live with each other,” as I often hear younger generations lament, or as Winston Churchill famously proclaimed. It is that fringe elements were aroused by political rhetoric and their criminal acts victimized all of humanity in those regions. Disarray in the armed forces and a temporary lull in governance sparked the massacres which, it appears, could have been prevented.

To make sense of communal violence, behavioral economists have developed a number of models. A cursory look at analysis of communal violence in Rwanda and Sierra Leone reveals that certain universal conditions can lead to mass violence breaking out, such as 1) a recent return of armed forces fighting on behalf of colonial powers, 2) economic disparities between two groups defined by religion or ethnicity, and 3) disparities in political representations of the same two groups. With soldiers returning from World War II and the economically motivated nature of much of the Partition violence, at a surface level it appears Partition violence can be understood within existing models — and in fact, given the conditions of that time, seems quite inevitable in hindsight. Further research is required, and oral histories can help shine a light in that regard.

Today, with each new mob lynching in India, I see history starting to repeat itself. Each incident, like in 1947, breaks trust between groups, be they defined by religion or race. Each incident spreads anxiety and fear while inspiring other fringe groups to commit copycat crimes.

As they did during Partition, radical sentiments could easily infect the minds of those in the armed forces today. Will a radicalized Hindu police officer protect the Hindu criminal or the person belonging to a minority group being attacked?

Partition led to massive loss of life and livelihoods and was a big hit to education and economies in South Asia in ways that, our work shows, we are still impacted by today. Though many of these aspects have not been thoroughly studied yet, we cannot deny the impacts. Mass trauma from that period still lingers amongst millions in the modern generation as we are now learning from new findings on post-traumatic stress disorder science and epigenetic inheritance.

Despite the violent times they endured, we find that the vast majority of the 8,000 individuals we have interviewed do not hold grudges against those belonging to religious groups that were hostile toward them in 1947. However, the next generations seem to have stronger and more jingoistic feelings toward “the other side,” which they did not experience growing up with. We posit that this is due to Partition witnesses having pre-Partition memories of pleasant coexistence with “the other” while only memories of violence and regret associated with Partition, which are more pronounced, are selectively passed down to the next generation. Those memories, combined with the nationalistic rhetoric that was a part of India and Pakistan’s nation building exercise and one-sided knowledge of ongoing wars between India and Pakistan, created a greater degree of bias in the next few generations.

Having a deeper and clearer understanding on the origins of Partition violence will play a positive role in resolving many modern social issues rooted in one-sided histories of interfaith relationships from that time period.

It is time to learn from Partition-era communal violence and radicalization before it gets out of control once again and we descend into chaos. It has happened before. We must learn from that history. We can choose between teaching tolerance, acceptance, and understanding, or promoting intolerance and hate toward those different from ourselves. As the human population grows, our children and grandchildren will come into contact with more diversity. We can start teaching them how to respond in more productive ways now.

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Guneeta Singh Bhalla, Ph.D., is founder of The 1947 Partition Archive, which has documented more than 8,000 oral histories of Partition witnesses internationally. She is formerly a physicist.

Courtesy: The Diplomat (Published on August 28, 2019)

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