A life-changing event for Yogi Bhajan

[Guest guest]

Most kundalini yogis know Yogi Bhajan experienced the horror of the

1947 India Partition. I invite comments by those who know Yogi Bhajan's direct

experience at that time, or more about the impact of this tragedy on the Sikhs.

Meanwhile, here's a review of a new book on this:

 

http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9507188

 

 

SIXTY years ago this August one of the greatest and most violent

upheavals of the 20th century took place on the Indian subcontinent.

It was an event whose consequences were entirely unexpected and whose

meaning was never fully spelled out or understood either by the

politicians who took the decision or the millions of Muslims, Hindus

and Sikhs who were to become its victims. In 1947, faced with

irreconcilable differences over the demand for a separate state for

India's Muslims, Britain decided, with the consent of a majority of

India's political leaders, to partition the country and give each bit

its independence. Tragedy followed.

 

The break-up of Britain's Indian empire involved the movement of some

12m people, uprooted, ordered out, or fleeing their homes and seeking

safety. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, thousands of

children disappeared, thousands of women were raped or abducted,

forced conversions were commonplace. The violence polarised

communities on the subcontinent as never before. The pogroms and

killings were organised by gangs, vigilantes and militias across

northern, western and eastern India. They were often backed by local

leaders, politicians from Congress and the Muslim League, maharajahs

and princes, and helped by willing or frightened civil servants.

 

Yasmin Khan, a British historian, has written a riveting book on this

terrible story. It is unusual for two reasons. It is composed with

flair, quite unlike the dense, academic plodding that modern Indian

history usually delivers. Second, it turns the spotlight away from the

self-posturing in the British viceroy's palace and the well-documented

political wrangling between Congress and the Muslim League leaders.

Instead, it focuses on a broader canvas that leads the reader through

the confusion, the uncertainties, the fear and eventually the horror

faced by those who were soon to become citizens of the two new states,

India and Pakistan.

 

Today the upheaval on both sides of the partition line would be

described as ethnic cleansing on a gigantic scale. It left two

traumatised, injured nations—suspicious and fearful of one another

even to this day—where once there had been one country of loosely

interwoven peoples. Pakistan's present military ruler, General Pervez

Musharraf, himself a child of partition, calls India " the arch-enemy " .

Such thinking has become instilled on both sides—an outcome

unthinkable to all those involved in the independence movement.

 

The decision to divide India on religious lines was taken with regret

but little foreboding and carried out with outrageous haste and

unconcern by the British government and its viceroy in India, Lord

Mountbatten. Asked by a journalist if he foresaw any mass transfer of

population, Mountbatten said, " Personally I don't see it...Some

measure of transfer will come about in a natural way...perhaps

governments will transfer populations. "

 

No preparation or consideration was given to the central issues of

citizenship, security and property rights in the division of the

country. On the other hand, India's civil servants, the babus of

empire, were busy itemising every fixture in their offices down to ink

pots and paperweights that were to be divided between Pakistan and the

new India. Lack of planning, hubris, confused thinking and a complete

void as to the consequences were the fatal flaws in the partition

plan, writes Ms Khan.

 

The announcement that India was to be partitioned and independence

would follow not less than a year later was made in the House of

Commons on June 3rd 1947. By August 15th the British were gone. They

accepted no responsibility for the carnage that was taking place and

they refused to allow the British troops still in India to keep order

or protect people.

 

The movement of people and the privations they suffered were

extraordinary. Muslims made their way west to Pakistan; Sikhs and

Hindus moved east to India in " foot convoys " that involved

30,000-40,000 people, wagons, carts and animals spread out over 45

miles (70km). In one month 849,000 refugees entered India by foot.

Trains that were impossibly overloaded, and dangerously targeted by

the killers, ran across Punjab from Rawalpindi and Lahore to Amritsar

and Delhi and back again as soon as they had refuelled and watered.

Many families left for reasons of safety, taking only a few belongings

because they expected to return. Not everyone imagined the journey

across the partition line would be final.

 

When Jawaharlal Nehru made his famous speech on August 15th declaring

that at the midnight hour, when the world slept, India would awake to

life and freedom, massacres were taking place almost daily on both

sides of the line. Nehru later wondered if his fellow countrymen knew

how close India had come to imploding. The violence was simply

uncontrollable.

 

Despite the pledges of equality for all communities in the new India

and Pakistan, the driving force behind the violence was to eliminate

or devour the other community, writes Ms Khan. It took the shock of

Mahatma Gandhi's assassination on January 30th 1948—by a Hindu

extremist opposed to Gandhi's conciliatory policy towards Muslims and

his peace overtures to Pakistan—to stem the violence and bring India,

especially, to its senses.

 

The illusions of partition are not overlooked by Ms Khan, including

the premise that a common religion is strong enough glue to hold

different and suppressed ethnic groups together in a nation state:

Bangladesh, once East Pakistan, is the prime example of how wrong that

premise can be. Above all, she nails the propaganda lie that the

transfer of power in India was an example of peaceful decolonisation

that the rest of the world could follow. The unruly end of empire in

South Asia was " a shock of epic proportions " , she writes. It was

ill-conceived, unplanned and only just escaped from spiralling into an

even more devastating civil war.

 

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan.

By Yasmin Khan.

 

Yale University Press; 288 pages; £19.99. To be published in America

by Yale in September