Partition of the mind

First, we constructed barbed wires. Now we are manufacturing bad faith, alienating the minorities, attacking the secular soul across the borders. It's time we heal wounds. Give peace and justice a chance
Hardnews Bureau Delhi

It is not easy to remove barbed wires. Over time, across man-made barriers and an infinity of bad faith, they take roots and create their own logic, politics, and also the political economy of absolutes. It is at once one-dimensional, with multiple borderlines, shadowlines, lines of control, actual, mapped or mythical. It stays like suffering, schizophrenic, simmering, a live wound which refuses to heal, stoked by the hate machines across the borders.

India's tragic partition in 1947, more gigantic, subaltern and intimate than it can ever be translated or registered in text, document, film or historical archives, with an oral tradition of unimaginable violence, brutality and silences, leaves both victims and survivors, and inheritors of nightmares, speechless. It has left a million plus dead, savaged and ravaged, like the dead, raped woman in Saadat Hasan Manto's dark narrative of cold classicism, Thanda Gosht (Cold Flesh).
 
It created a bitter communal legacy. It has shaped the worldview of the two countries and its politics. Its practitioners have spouted venomous speeches, polarisations, and engaged in terror acts in the name of 'cultural nationalism'.  

Sixty three years of tumultuous existence as separate nations has spawned constituencies that feed on hate and atavism. Since the Partition of India was based on religion and the killing fields of communal polarisations, it has become easy for the 'thekedars' (contractors) of faith to claim proprietorship over so-called 'nationalist politics'. In the last 20 odd years, the politics of hate has found new patrons, prophets and theoreticians. Civilisational fault lines have provided the raison de etre for the lunatic fringe to unsheathe their weapons and pounce on the 'other'. 

The demolition of Babri Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992 and the killings after that coincided with the rise of Mujahideen in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Religious radicalisation found expression on both sides of the divide. Bombay 1991-92, the pogrom against Muslims, the bomb blasts, Gujarat genocide, 2002, the many riots before it: the hyperbole of injustice remains embedded in memory, and it moves across the borders to and fro. Meanwhile, the 26/11 Mumbai carnage arrived as war on India. And the bomb blasts on sufi shrines and mosques within Pakistan.

The courageous investigation by slain Maharashtra Anti Terror Squad Chief Hemant Karkare exposed the Hindutva terror groups, with their umbilical links with overground, 'respectable' fundamentalist forces, engaged in bombing Muslim places of worship, killing scores of innocents, and vitiating the pluralist environment. Hundreds of law-abiding Muslim citizens, many young, were picked up, hounded, tortured, branded and brutalised as terrorists: many of them came out of jail with no evidence against them. They still carry the scars. (Indeed, the timidity and complicity of the 'secular' Congress/UPA and reluctance to take sides in favour of justice is also transparent.)

Karkare's evidence took the lid off a giant conspiracy that remained concealed for many years. As layers get peeled off, it becomes clear that elements of the Sangh Parivar had provided legitimacy to extremist Hindu outfits to unleash a reign of terror against the minority community. Their agenda was to communalise the social environment to such an extent that it allows these hate machines to control the Delhi Durbar. The design of the Hindutva terror groups was to replicate the Gujarat model nation-wide - the "successful experiment" as VHP rabble rouser Praveen Togadia put it so aptly.