Remembering Partition: 70 years since India-Pakistan divide

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/remembering-partition-70-years-since-india-pakistan-divide-012000742.html
Remembering Partition: 70 years since India-Pakistan divide


Associated Press
The Associated Press
Associated PressAugust 10, 2017


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Survivors from both India and Pakistan, from left to right: Sohinder Nath Chopra in New Delhi; Mohammad Ishaq in Rawalpindi, Pakistan; Shamsul Nisa, in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir; Krishen Khanna, in New Delhi; Shamim Uddin, in Karachi, Pakistan; Hira Gulrajani in New Delhi; Akhtari Begum in Lahore, Pakistan. It's been 70 years since India and Pakistan were carved from the former British Empire as independent nations. Overnight, Hindu and Muslim neighbors became fearful of one another. Here, survivors from both India and Pakistan recall living through that uneasy time, and consider what it meant to the future of the two countries. (AP Photos)
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It's been 70 years since India and Pakistan were carved from the former British Empire as independent nations, a process that triggered one of the largest human migrations in history. Overnight, Hindu and Muslim neighbors became fearful of one another. Mob violence broke out, leaving hundreds of thousands dead. Some 12 million people fled their homes — including Hindus afraid they would not be welcome in the newly declared Islamic state of Pakistan, and Muslims worried they'd suffer at the hands of India's Hindu majority.


Here, survivors from both India and Pakistan recall living through that uneasy time, and consider what it meant to the future of the two countries.
ONE EVENING EVERYTHING CHANGED


On Aug. 14, 1947, the day of Pakistan's independence, groups of Muslims marched through villages wearing the country's newly created flags on their shoulders.


For some, it was a time of celebration. For Sohinder Nath Chopra and his Hindu family, it was time to flee.


A Muslim cleric urged the family to leave their ancient village in what is now western Pakistan. A Christian servant accompanied them as a guard.


"Our village had a family-type community," recalls 81-year-old Chopra, who was 12 at the time. "There was always something going on, and life in that village was very good."


Chopra's family moved through refugee camps on both sides of the border, eventually reaching the bustling Indian capital of New Delhi. Chopra and his three brothers immersed themselves in their schoolwork, with Chopra and his eldest brother earning scholarships for post-graduate studies in Canada.


When he returned to India in 1973, the country was struggling with social unrest and extreme poverty. In the decades of economic growth and reform that have followed, India became more economically and politically stable, while seeing its population more than double to 1.3 billion. Chopra believes the country's separation from Pakistan helped.


"It was a blessing in disguise. Although in the first 10 years or so, we felt very bitter about it," he said.


He still dreams of visiting his old family home, but lingering fears and turbulent India-Pakistan relations have kept him from making the journey. His wife tries to console him by saying that everything he remembers has probably changed.
NEIGHBORS LYNCHED, HOUSES SMOLDERING


Every hour there was rumor of another attack. One Sikh man lynched by rampaging mobs of Muslims, another hacked to death in his own home. Mohammad Ishaq's boyhood memories from Pakistan's first days are filled with these images of killing and destruction.


"That was the time of extreme fear. Then only the men stayed in their homes. The women and children were sent to safer places," he recalled.


In the early evenings, a silence would settle over his neighborhood in the old, congested city of Rawalpindi as no one dared to leave their homes. In the morning, they'd find other houses burnt, smoldering.


Ishaq remembers mobs attacking three large houses belonging to wealthy Sikh families, whom many in the Muslim majority neighborhood resented. They ravaged and robbed the homes. They stabbed and hacked one homeowner to death. His body lay in the street for days.


"When I first saw the body, I turned pale and I was so scared that I didn't dare come out of my home for many days," Ishaq said.


He said poor Muslims were in the majority in his neighborhood, and both feared and envied their wealthy Sikh and Hindu neighbors. The creation of Pakistan as its own Islamic republic offered opportunities they otherwise wouldn't have had, he said.


Today, he sees Pakistan's biggest handicap as its rapid population growth, from about 45 million in 1960 to about 200 million today.


"The population continues to increase, and resources decrease, and it is because of this that as a country we could not achieve great progress," he said.
A FAMILY MASSACRED


Shamsul Nisa was 10 when she watched her Muslim father, grandfather and six uncles killed by Hindu mobs in Udhampur, a southern town in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.


"Our homes and our lives were destroyed. We were suddenly turned into beggars," said Nisa, 80. She had escaped along with her mother and four brothers, and the family settled in Muslim-majority Srinagar, the main city on the Indian-controlled side of the still-divided territory.


India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars over control of Kashmir. Today, they each administer part of it, separated by a heavily militarized line of control. A third, smaller portion is controlled by China.


In the chaos of those first days, when ancient principalities were pledging to join one of the two nations, Kashmir's final status was by no means certain. The Muslim majority rose up repeatedly against the Hindu Maharaja and his plans to remain independent. Pakistani tribesmen raided in an effort to wrest control; India marched troops into the region with a promise to keep the peace and to hold a referendum. Tens of thousands of Muslims were slaughtered by Hindu mobs in the southern Jammu region, while hundreds of thousands more were driven from their homes to Pakistan or Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.


Until Partition, "Kashmir was not divided," Nisa said. "But whosoever could, grabbed and occupied parts of it."


Nisa eventually became a teacher, got married and had three daughters and a son. Since the recent death of her husband, she remains with her son. "I can't stay alone" since those violent days in 1947, she said. "My heart palpitates with pain."


She still believes Partition was the right move for South Asia — if only Kashmir could decide its own affiliation.


"I think it was a right decision, and we also say that Kashmir should be freed (from India)."

 

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http://www.npr.org/sections/paralle...ndependence-its-minorities-struggle-for-space
As Pakistan Marks 70 Years Of Independence, Its Minorities Struggle For Space
August 14, 20172:25 PM ET
Diaa Hadid
DIAA HADID
People pose in front of Pakistan Independence Day signs in Lahore. The country, created in 1947 as a homeland for South Asia's Muslims, celebrated 70 years of independence on Aug. 14.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
The children pile into the stadium in shiny clothes, clutching green-and-white Pakistani flags. Their parents light the area with cell phones to record the event as they scream, chant and cheer, watching soldiers close a gate that separates India from Pakistan.


In the evening ritual at the Wagah-Attari border, near Lahore and Amritsar, soldiers from both countries high-kick, shake their fists, then shake hands – and slam the gate shut.


It is deeply visceral for many Pakistanis: an acknowledgement of their border, of a plucky country they feel they have sacrificed so much to create.




Left: Youths sell paraphernalia in the colors of Pakistan's flag to celebrate its Independence Day on Aug. 14. Right: An anonymous mask in Pakistan's national colors of white and green lies on the grass of a park in Lahore.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
Pakistan was imagined more than 70 years ago by a stern, British-educated, whiskey-drinking Shiite lawyer. Muhammad Ali Jinnah hoped for a nation as cosmopolitan as he was. He led the fight to carve the country out of British-ruled India. In a new, independent India, Muslims were fearful that they would be dominated by a Hindu majority.


For India's Oldest Citizens, Independence Day Spurs Memories Of A Painful Partition
PARALLELS
For India's Oldest Citizens, Independence Day Spurs Memories Of A Painful Partition
But in the decades since, the sense of who is a citizen in the Muslim state hasn't been resolved. The question has come at a high price: Although Pakistan's constitution specifies the protection of minority rights, "the government limited freedom of religion," according to the State Department. The country's tiny minorities of Sikhs, Christians and Hindus are vulnerable to persecution. Certain laws, such as blasphemy laws, are often used to target them.




As a boy in 1947, Muhammad Hanif Qureshi — now 83 and shown here with his great-niece and great-nephew in their home in Lahore — fled Amritsar. The area encompassing Amritsar and Lahore saw some of the worst violence of Partition.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
Within the Muslim community as well, the definition of who exactly is a Muslim has narrowed.


The seeds of Pakistan's intolerance were sown within the country's very ideology as a Muslim state, says Taimur Rehman, a political scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.


That intolerance was "inherent in the very way in which Pakistan was created and the very purpose which it was supposed to serve of being a Muslim state," he says. "By its very definition, it has already singled out a community in opposition to another one," he says, referring to Muslims and Hindus. "And it's very easy for that community to be to be narrowed further."


Over the decades, he argues, the narrowing has been exacerbated by the military, Pakistan's most powerful institution, which cultivated hard-line Islamists to wage a jihad in the disputed region of Kashmir, among other things.




A member of Pakistan's tiny Sikh minority stops in Lahore's Gurudwara or Sikh temple. Sikhs have a centuries-long presence in Lahore, but most fled for India in 1947.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
This has given right-wing religious groups outsize influence. "Despite never having won an election," Rehman says, "they are nonetheless able to dictate the narrative in the country because of the support that they have from the military establishment."


Perhaps none have suffered more than members of a small Muslim sect, known as Ahmadis, whose beliefs clash with the dominant Sunni version of Islam. They played a key role in founding Pakistan. They are a community of over-achievers: An Ahmadi physicist, Abdus Salam, received one of only two Nobel prizes awarded to Pakistanis.


But the state declared Ahmadis as heretics via a constitutional amendment in the 1970s and restricted their rights further in the 1980s. They're not allowed to call themselves Muslims, and can't refer to their houses of worship as mosques. Over the years, militants have attacked their mosques and targeted them in killings.




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A Hindu shrine in Lahore was rebuilt after it was burned down more than a decade ago during a period of communal tensions. Now it's guarded by two state employees. A handful of worshipers come on Tuesdays.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
In a leafy suburb near Lahore, the Khans live in a two-story home behind a high gate that's firmly bolted. Mrs. Khan stands on the balcony every morning, waiting for her husband to return from prayers at their local mosque. She's terrified that somebody will kill him.


"We are frightened," she says. "For the life." (Her first name isn't being published out of concern for the family's safety.)


Most of her family already fled overseas.


So far, Mrs. Khan insists on staying. She runs a clinic that dispenses free medicine to her poorer neighbors. "If I go, the people will suffer," she says.


She doesn't want to "just sit and eat" in exile. "This is not the meaning of life."


She's also worried about her nephew. Twice, somebody threw a note into his house warning him to convert to Sunni Islam — or die. He hides out here when he's afraid.


He repeatedly tried to flee Pakistan – but he says the U.K., Sweden and Canada all rejected applications.

The roots of intolerance run deeper than just how Pakistan defines itself as a Muslim state, says Anam Zakariya, an oral historian in Islamabad.


She traces it back to Pakistan's birth story – at the time of Partition, in 1947, when millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled to India and Muslims to Pakistan. Mobs raped and butchered each other — around a million people died.


But Zakariya says those events are pushed aside. Pakistan focuses on celebrating its creation – and emphasizes how Muslims were victims.


"Now if it's your biggest victory to date," Zakariya says, "you have to make sure that the bloodshed is portrayed to the younger generations as perpetrated by Indians — Hindus and Sikhs."




Laborers work to prepare the new Pakistan history museum in Lahore's Greater Iqbal Park. The museum — a project of the provincial government and the private Citizens Archive of Pakistan — will be the first to look at Partition through the stories of those who witnessed it.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
It's to drive home the point: "And that's why there was a need to create Pakistan."


There are challenges emerging to that narrative. In a sprawling park in the heart of noisy, smoggy Lahore, a museum will soon open that will look at Partition through the stories of the people who witnessed it. It's a collaboration between the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, a nonprofit, and the government of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province.


"This is the first place in the entire country where you'll experience what the refugees in 1947 experienced," says Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker and head of the Citizens Archive.


Being exposed to stories from survivors of Partition will help create a more inclusive Pakistan, she believes, but it's a race against time – the people who lived through Partition are fading away.


And 70 years on, the very idea of what Pakistan is meant to be – an Islamic state, in opposition to Hindu-dominated India – feels hard to shake.




Aya (right), 19, partially covers her face as she poses alongside her sister Sania, 22, and their mother. They visited a shrine in Lahore with their family patriarch Abdul Aziz, who remembers tending fields alongside Hindus before British-ruled India was partitioned.
Diaa Hadid/NPR
Near the museum construction site, the Abdul Aziz family huddles under a shelter as a sudden summer rain drenches the park. Their patriarch, Yousef, isn't sure of his age, but says he used to work in fields alongside Hindus – and so he predates Partition. When the Hindus left Pakistan, he said, Muslims became free.


"We are now in a country where we can say, 'There is no God but God and Muhammed is his messenger,'" he says, reciting the Muslim declaration of faith.


In Pakistan, he says, "There is no idolatry" – a reference to polytheist Hinduism.


His granddaughters Sania, 22, and Aya, 19, nod in agreement. He says he's proud of Pakistan, which he describes as a "fort of Islam" where it's safe for his grandchildren to grow up.


Sania says she's not interested in a museum. She's already heard her grandfather's stories of Partition, and she'll tell them one day to her own children.


Besides, she says, "I know history — the Islamic history of Pakistan."