Monday in Delhi kicked off with India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar tweeting a photo from inside the Red Fort, where visitors awaited Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech. “Happy Independence Day,” Jaishankar wrote, and further: “Let’s also think about the massive trauma and strategic consequences of the split.” That was the main contradiction of the day.
August 15th is associated with freedom and suffering in India. This Monday marks the 76th anniversary of colonial power Britain which liberated India in 1947 and divided it into two major states. In Hindu-dominated India, Pakistan should give Muslims their own homeland. For some a reason to celebrate, for others a day of mourning.
More than 10,000 security forces were deployed to the Red Fort on Monday to deliver Narendra Modi’s speech to the nation without incident, which lasted 83 minutes. Modi began by honoring the forgotten heroes who played a role in the country’s independence, adding that India was grateful for the “countless revolutionaries who shook the foundations of British rule”. Among them Mahatma Gandhi.
He called on the nation to end the “disrespect for women”. He praised the contribution of Indian women fighting for freedom to independence. He addressed education policy and promised that in 25 years India would be a developed nation. After 75 years, India must “remove all traces of slavery”.
Anyone in this country who is wondering how long Germany has been going through its division should take a look at the current political and social problems in India. For example, the Kashmir conflict: the Himalayan region has been disputed since the end of colonial rule. India owns the populous Kashmir Valley and the Hindu-dominated region around the city of Jammu, while Pakistan controls a wedge-shaped area to the west of the region. China, as an ally of Pakistan, occupies a sparsely populated high mountain area in the predominantly Buddhist northern region of Ladakh – leading to ongoing conflicts with India.
The hard fight for division
The armed brotherhood between India and Russia is based, in turn, on the civil war in Pakistan in 1971, during which part of the country broke with military aid from India, again supported by the Soviet army, and formed what is now is Bangladesh. Anyone applying for a visa to India 75 years after independence must declare whether an ancestor is from Pakistan. If you wish to travel to Pakistan, you must not have an India visa stuck in your passport.
The last war between India and Pakistan, also known as the Third Kashmir War, took place in 1999. Last Thursday, three soldiers were killed in an attack on an Indian army post in Kashmir in the early hours of the morning. The two attackers were shot dead. So, after 75 years, the conflict is very much alive. After Indonesia and Pakistan, India, with its massive total population of 1.3 billion people, is the country with the third largest Muslim population – followed by Bangladesh. India’s estimated 180 million Muslims remain under pressure.
More than 76 years ago, after a tough fight, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah agreed to a split. gigantic country economically separated strong parts, in relation to the share of the population. But not in relation to living environments. He was a merchant, not an anthropologist.
open detailed viewIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks for 83 minutes.
(Photo: MONEY SHARMA/AFP)
What followed was an absurd separation of families, states, armies, a cruel migration of peoples, and a civil war that, depending on the way of counting, claimed the lives of around a million people in the year after the partition alone. And left many millions of lives destroyed. The New Indian Express reported on the anniversary of a reunion of two brothers who were not allowed to hug again until they were old.
Sika Khan from India met her Pakistani brother Sadiq last week for the first time in 75 years. A sister and father were killed in the massacres that broke out in many cities and towns. “My mother couldn’t stand the trauma,” said Sika Khan, who now lives in Bathinda, Punjab state, “she jumped into the river and killed herself.”
Suffering in Punjab
Punjab, inhabited mainly by Sikhs, was split in half, Muslims fled to the Pakistani part, Hindus and Sikhs to the Indian part, whoever stayed in the other would soon be in danger. “I was at the mercy of the villagers and some relatives who raised me,” recalls Sika Khan today.
The meeting was made possible by Pakistani Youtuber Nasir Dhillon, a former police officer who specializes in such state-of-the-art survivor meetings. The New Indian Express and some TV channels covered the brothers’ meeting, who met at the Kartarpur Corridor, a visa-free passageway opened in 2019 that allows Sikh Indian pilgrims to visit a temple in Pakistan. It’s one of the most comforting stories there is to tell about division.
During the flight to other parts of the country, atrocities occurred after 1947, which are kept alive as a narrative in both countries to this day, also to motivate voters. Tens of thousands of women were raped and trains traveling from one nation to another arrived full of dead bodies. And the cruelty survived.
Narendra Modi was chief minister in the state of Gujarat when more than 1,000 people died in brutal street battles in 2002, about a third of them Hindus and two thirds Muslims. The trigger was the fire on a train in which 58 Hindu pilgrims died on the return journey from Ayodhya. In Ayodhya, on the other hand, Muslims were able to visit the Babri Mosque until 1992. It stood on the site of what will soon be the largest and most modern Hindu temple. The mosque was violently destroyed by tens of thousands of Hindus with the help of the police.
Thus, violence is kept alive for generations, also by politicians and clerics. And Modi is prime minister today.