Mani Shankar Aiyar – Partition: What does the prime minister want us to remember?

NB: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ – Big Brother, in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. DS

What is the purpose of remembrance? Revenge? Remorse? Restitution? Reconciliation? Rekindling the dying embers of mindless hate? Reapportioning blame? Remembering? Or, reminding oneself, “never again”? Before asking our prime minister to explain what he wants to be remembered, let me, as a displaced Midnight’s Child, briefly recount what I recall as a six-year-old at partition.

My father was in Lahore where he had sought refuge and a career 20 years earlier, in 1927, from anti-Brahminism in his home province. Do I recall the glistening blade of the dagger aimed at him as dawn broke on August 17, 1947, or the kindness of the Muslim grocer, who held the knife without plunging it in, after keeping my father well-supplied over the previous awful week?

And, what am I to do with the image that haunts me – of my father watching from his brother’s Panchkuian Road flat in New Delhi a Muslim boy begging and pleading, “I will say Ram, I will say Krishna, but please do not kill me”, followed by the mob brutally slitting the throat of this innocent thirteen-year-old, as if he were an Eid ka bakra?…

https://www.theweek.in/columns/Mani-Shankar-Aiyar/2021/09/02/partition-what-does-the-prime-minister-want-us-to-remember.html

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