EVERY year in mid-August India and Pakistan celebrate their independence in much the same way. School kids sing anthems; politicians make speeches; soldiers rattle sabres. The two countries share a quieter, more introspective ritual too: memories are hauled out and dusted off and then, after a great deal of tut-tutting and head-shaking over the folly and sorrow of Partition, they are put away again, and the forgetting resumes.
Time has made both countries skilled at this. Not at forgetting their own injuries, to be sure, or at forgetting the bad things the other side has done. Seventy years after India and Pakistan won freedom from British rule, their mutual forgetfulness has more to do with ignoring, or perhaps simply not noticing, how much unfinished business remains from Partition, and how few of its lessons have really sunk in. The hardest one is the insidious nature of the very idea of dividing people along religious lines.
Such forgetting is not merely a matter of, for...Continue reading
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