By Sarwar Kashani,IANS,
New Delhi : Indians’ preoccupation with partition may be getting over with youths saying that it is a closed chapter and that the sacking of Jaswant Singh from the BJP over his book on Pakistani founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah finds little resonance in their lives.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India’s main opposition and the second largest party in parliament, gets into unseemly squabbles over Jaswant Singh’s views on Jinnah, Sardar Patel and partition, the country’s youth seem unmoved and even scornful.
What matters are jobs, the economy and their futures, said several students and professionals IANS spoke to. They are no doubt interested in reading and learning about the subcontinent’s traumatic history, but then that’s where it should be left — in the past.
This view is shared by 31-year-old Guranchal Sethi, a Chandigarh-based businessman whose family migrated from Rawalpindi in 1947. The family still has property in the Pakistani garrison town, but Sethi and his family think it is high time that the ghosts of partition were exorcised.
Sethi says he doesn’t remember when his family last discussed the partition, which led to the creation of Pakistan – a Muslim-majority state. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the clashes surrounding the migration of millions.
“Who cares now? It is over. The chapter needs to be closed. It doesn’t affect us now. I am into the property business. I am more bothered about when property rates will stabilise, about infrastructure building, about my own financial security, my future,” Sethi told IANS over the phone.
“Everybody makes money and Jaswant Singh has perhaps also written the Jinnah biography… to make some. Why sack him? The BJP shouldn’t have overreacted and made a hullabaloo about it; this should be left for academics to debate over,” he said.
Jaswant Singh, who has held the portfolios of defence, external affairs and finance in BJP governments, was expelled from the party after the release of his book “Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence” in which he has placed the onus of partition not on Jinnah but on Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel.
Said Sneha Vashisht, who is searching for a job in Delhi after her MBA degree: “I don’t understand why we are making so much noise about all this. The partition story is history and I want to move beyond it. There are more relevant issues to rake up.”
“My job is my first worry. Yaar, who wants to go back 60 years? Partition happened, it caused mayhem, thousands died surrounding the creation of separate Hindu- and Muslim-majority states. But how is it relevant now who caused it all?” added Vashisht, who lives in Gurgaon on the outskirts of the national capital.
Shaziya Salaam, 24, an English research scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) blamed Indian politicians for being “obsessed with Pakistan”.
“They have little time for issues related to their own people. Unnecessarily raking up partition controversies smacks of political and intellectual bankruptcy,” Salaam said.
“Why should this more than 60-year-old controversy appropriate a national discourse when history, of course important, matters less than economic progress and welfare of the people.
“If the opposition party (the BJP) means business they have more relevant issues to take up with the government. We are facing drought and a disaster is apparently waiting to happen. And look what they are caught in?”
Fakhra Siddiqui, 28, who works with youth and conducts workshops on issues such as self and coexistence, felt a little differently.
“History is never irrelevant. Ripples of partition still haunt us. We need to revisit history, learn it and understand it. But rather than creating controversies and scratching the unhealed wounds incurred by one of the the biggest human disasters of the century, we should see how wounds can be cured to live in peace and coexistence,” Siddiqui said.