Why Punjab may not want to remember partition horrors day

Over the years, on my only visit to the Pakistan side of Punjab or interactions on the Indian side, I have found bitterness for the horrors of the partition has dissipated. One memorable meeting from my visit to Pakistan in October 2011 was with a frail old man in Lahore. His eyes lit up as I told him that I hailed from Shimla. "You see my broken tooth. I broke it near the tunnel at the Cemetery," he said. The Cemetery is a locality four km from The Mall, Shimla.

He gave me a tight embrace when I told him I, too, had lived in that area for the first seven years of my life. "Accha, you know there was one Patwariji?" he asked. The man went quiet and had tears in his eyes when I told him the Patwari died in 1978. "Patwarji's wife gave us food that lasted us five days till we reached Lahore a little before the partition was announced. He was like a father to me," he reminisced.

On the lookout for a story, the journalist in me started to quiz him if he had any bad memories from those days. He said, "No memories but a wish that I could live in Shimla forever. To relive those days, I still come to the Shimla Hills (another name for the Press Club in Lahore). But I don't want to recall any horrors. I am old, and I don't want to die of depression."

The Hindus and Sikhs who migrated from Pakistan have their third or fourth generations living in India. They have heard tales of horror from their grandparents or great-grandparents. Those stories had urgency and immediacy way back in the 1950s and 60s. But not anymore.

Jamna Devi, who came from across the border onto the Indian side in 1947, says, "There were tales of horror, courage, bravery but remembering them now is like rubbing salt on the wounds. The younger generations in my family don't relate to our stories. A child may listen to his grandparents' stories but not the stories related to great-grandparents. There is no connection. Even otherwise, why would one wish to remember tales of horror," she says.

For the Sikhs of Punjab and Haryana, who migrated from lehnda Punjab (Punjab of Pakistan) to charda Punjab (of India), Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to observe August 14 as the "partition remembrance horror day" has no appeal. Indeed, the partition of the subcontinent happened on religious lines - Muslims against Hindus and Sikhs and vice versa. But today, since both the communities are minorities in India, the Sikhs see a reflection of themselves in the lot of the Indian Muslims. So in the suffering of a Muslim, Sikhs see their suffering.

"We have to reflect on the state of affairs today rather than what happened 75 years ago. Why do they want to divide us," says Professor Jagmohan Singh, nephew of Shaheed Bhagat Singh. "Communal people on both sides were responsible for the horror of the partition," he says.

This brings me to the call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for observing the Partition Horror Remembrance Day. Most of those who witnessed partition have either died or are in the last stages of their lives. It could have made some sense had people started commemorating it a year after the partition. But 74 years later, it smacks of craftiness in purpose.

Another octogenarian, a family friend who passed away a couple of years back, would narrate umpteen tales from the days of the partition. But his stories were always about the pre-partition days and fond memories of the bungalow his father owned in Pakistan. He seldom narrated sad stories. Not that there were none, but they were too terrible to recount and unbearable to sit through. On the rare occasions that he would, his listeners would soon make themselves scarce unwilling to lend their ears to the expletives and violence in his words. While I would try to sit through it, it wasn't easy - a rape followed by a murder, kids having gone mission, found several years later as beggars.

Some years back, during the filming of his biopic, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, I met the legendary athlete Milkha Singh. I egged him to recall the day when he saw his family butchered to death, his subsequent barefoot run for his life and what went on in his mind then. He put a hand on my shoulder and requested in his somewhat baritone voice, "Son, I want to forget it. You should remember happy moments, not horror. From Pakistan, I only want to remember that I outraced Abdul Khaliq and got the sobriquet of The Flying Sikh."

After 74-years, we cannot undo the horrors of the partition. We cannot punish the perpetrators of those horrors as they are no longer in this world. We can, however, fold our hands to pay our homage to those moments of sorrow. We can also resolve to cleanse our hearts of the hatred that had led to those events. Better still, as that frail old man from Lahore told me when I had bid goodbye to him those many years back, "Had I known you from before, I would have asked you to bring some soil from Shimla."

(The writer is a Chandigarh-based journalist)