‘Lives torn asunder.’ The children of Indian Partition, 75 years on

Along the way she sees overturned bullock carts, burning villages and decapitated bodies floating down the canal.Elsewhere, a young boy is also about to embark on a journey — heading in the opposite direction, from India to newly formed Pakistan.Traveling by truck, he sees bloated vultures feeding on bodies by the roadside. His small hands hold a gun.Seventy-five years later — and now in their 80s — the partition of India remains seared into each of their memories. In August 1947, the Indian subcontinent won independence from the British empire. The bloody partition hastily divided the former colony along religious lines — sending Muslims to the newly formed nation of Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs to newly independent India. An estimated 15 million people were uprooted and between 500,000 and 2 million died in the exodus, according to scholars. Tensions between India and Pakistan today are “a result of the manner in which the two countries were born, the violent Partition,” said Guneeta Singh Bhalla, founder of the 1947 Partition Archive, a community-based archive which has documented over 10,000 oral histories, based in Delhi, India and Berkeley, California. “Without understanding Partition, resolving the past and healing our wounds, we cannot move forward,” she told CNN.On one occasion, I watched as my father rushed to help a man across the road who had fallen down. It turned out he was a Hindu who had been stabbed. He was already dead or died in my father’s arms. There was an application asking for police protection in his hand. It was a quirk of fate had he gone a few steps further he would have been safely inside the local police station!At the beginning of October, we moved to Sialkot City in Pakistan’s part of Punjab and lived in a house next to a locked building. One day I saw someone in one of its slightly open windows and told my mother. She told me not to tell anyone else. Then she prepared a vegetarian meal and asked me to leave it in the window for the occupant, an old Hindu who had been left behind as the family migrated to India. She continued this daily routine until arrangements were made to send him to India.In the end, the partition left up to an estimated 1 million dead and uprooted 9 million Muslims and 5 million Hindus and Sikhs. What we had witnessed and experienced affected all of us profoundly. It robbed us of the joy in our lives and replaced it with feelings of loss, sadness and hopelessness (PTSD) that lingered for a long time. It is often suggested that the madness in 1947 was rooted in religion. But Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully in India for 12 centuries and never engaged in an orgy of mass murder and expulsion on this scale.The unwisely hastened transfer of power had not given enough time to set up an effective administration, particularly in East Punjab. (In February 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced the British would transfer power by June 1948. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India, advanced that date to August 1947). The hasty British withdrawal left the field clear for anyone to loot, burn, rape and murder with impunity. The cowardly abandonment of responsibility by the British, aided and abetted by the Congress Party that insisted on their quick exit, was the main, if not only, cause for the disaster.