By
Charanjeet S Minhas
Charanjeet Singh Minhas |
My father joined the Indian Army in 1948, a year after British India was sliced
in two. The earth around him shook, not from the impact of five rivers, but from
the numerous blood rivulets that flowed through the furrows of the Punjab’s
fields, bazaars, children’s playgrounds, and streets and gushed from the Punjabi
homes’ brick drains. It was alleged that it was the climax of the English
colonial chess stratagem: Divide and Rule.
“Why did the earth shake?” I
remember asking him some years after he had retired.
“Freedom fighters worshipped Mother
India and gave their blood and lives as an offering to her,” he said, “but
there were others who never took any pain in doing anything for the country — and
had enjoyed their time behind the cover of religion. When the British decided
to free India, these religionists forced a historic paradox: freedom fighters,
dead and alive, were defeated by their own countrymen, by these religionists
who were determined to operate on the mother and create another one out of her.”
“How did they do it?” I wanted to
know. He didn’t answer for some time.
“August was running as always but
this time, just when it reached the middle of its run when forefather Time
raised both hands and united them, the Mohammeds and the Mahatmas and the Pandits
of British India began the surgery to create two mothers from one. They started
to amputate the body parts of the existing mother. However, they took care of only
those parts they had a sense of belonging to. They only put those areas under the
knife that had already been donating blood for the country,” my father replied,
voice breaking.
“Why didn’t the Punjabis and
Bengalis take precautions?” I asked wisely.
“We are one people, one country, we
were told by them through powerful and seductive slogans that proved to be
empty rhetoric,” he responded. “We were asked to stay put in our homes in the
warmth and security of our ancestral places. Then, suddenly, the surgery began:
no anesthesia, no tranquilizers. The separation started, and with it came the rapes,
looting, and macabre killings, and we could see the remnants of hundreds of thousands
of our people lying strewn about by the time it was over.
“In a matter of hours and days, kaka, millions were made refugees, tens
of thousands were raped, and hundreds of thousands were killed. Grandfathers,
fathers, and brothers were so helpless that in some cases, in acts of mercy, they
themselves killed the women of the family. It was a pain those leaders never
felt and the world has been never told about.”
The successors they mentored corrected
the mistake by slicing it again to create the third mother in 1971-72. English
and the “Divide and Rule” doctrine had certainly survived, even though the
Englishmen had left.
If you thought that was enough, no;
they weren’t done yet.
One of India’s Prime Ministers,
their progeny again, almost succeeded in slicing the mother country yet again. Thirty-seven
years later, while justifying a state-sponsored Sikh genocide to avenge his
mother’s assassination, Rajiv Gandhi said, “When a big tree falls, the earth
shakes.” That the “Divide and Rule” was clearly on his mind, before and at the
time he said it, and on the minds of the coterie around him, was clear from the
election results. 1n the December 1984 polling, only six weeks after the Sikh
genocide, Gandhi’s Congress Party won a thumping majority of 404 out of 533
seats.
Whenever my father narrated the
partition tales, he would invariably say, “When the British freed India...” That
was different from blood-stirring tales of freedom and struggle I had read about
and heard in speeches on TV. Thinking about it later made me curious, and I decided
to do some research. It didn’t take me long to understand why he said what he
said.
The colonies in Asia and elsewhere
were the result of European imperialism. The two world wars in the last century
had weakened them economically. The wars also produced the arrival of two more
giants on the global scene: the United States and the USSR. The Second World
War also shattered the impregnability aura that had haloed the British Empire
earlier. The defeat of colonial powers by Nazi Germany at many places had fatally
undermined the myth. Japan took over colonies in Southeast Asia during the war.
In many colonies, as in the case of India, too, the rulers had made promises of
independence to nationalists in return for their help in the war.
India’s first Sainik School
(changed into a public school soon after) founded in Nabha was the result of
such economic inducement promised by the British to Punjab in exchange for
military recruitment. I know because I
went to that boarding school. The Punjab Public School (PPS), established in
1960, is widely known today for sending most commissioned officers — outside of
RMS, Dehradun — to the Indian armed forces.
On June 2, 2012, I hosted a very
well-attended reunion in Delaware of PPS alumni from across the United States,
Canada and India. At that time, PPS’s first alumnus became India’s army chief.
The newly minted Gen. Bikram Singh called in from New Delhi to thank the alumni
and add to our festive spirit.
Here, in this school, I lived,
played and studied with students from J&K, UP, Bihar, Bengal, Assam and
many other parts of India. The school sent me regularly on travels and treks to
many far-flung places in India — both remote and metropolitan. Providing us students
with opportunities to learn from adventure and acclimatization was the school’s
underlying mantra for a classy education.
The hymn made a home in my heart. No
surprise, then, that my Bharat darshan continued
after PPS. I enjoyed living in different parts of India for work, studies, and
business, and, in the last two decades, showing my US-born children one of the
oldest civilizations on the planet.
It is my love for this land even
with its open sewers beggars—that I still remain its citizen so many years
after I became a permanent resident of the US. The US is a great country and I
love it, but cannot abandon the mother in whose lap I was raised.
Earlier, when I was single, and after
I returned to India from the UK with a master’s degree in business to
complement my computer engineering studies, I worked in Bangalore and Hyderabad
before coming to the US in 1999. Tekstrom, the software testing company that I
founded on arrival presently has a campus in Bangalore.
My conclusions from long and wide-ranging
experience tell me that the English still rule our nation even though there are
no English in India’s government, parliament, and judiciary. If anything, the
inequity has become more rampant and flagrant. The mental slavery still
persists. An Indian is happily obsequious to a white while he finds it
back-bending to respect a colored. This is not only on display back in India
but is visible among migrated Indians here in the US as well.
A few months ago, the governments
of 40 African countries condemned the Indian government for the growing racial
and xenophobic attacks on Africans in India. Let me remind you that the
imperialism of the past which India is celebrating its 70th year of independence
from was similarly racist.
To put our independence, and its
track record since 1947, in perspective, remember that India was once solidly
against apartheid in South Africa: something for which India paid a heavy economic
price. Recall Mahatma Gandhi’s South African sojourn!
At 70, we are no longer an infant
democracy. However, we are still like that elephant, the one India has
historically been compared to, the elephant that moves slowly because it is carrying
too much potential. Since independence, its movement is becoming even slower,
perhaps because the untapped potential is becoming larger.
Except in cricket, the game the
Englishmen gave their colonies, including India, we have no commanding presence
in any sports discipline. During the Raj, we were undisputed world field hockey
champions. The two Noble prizes we won during the Raj were in Literature and Science;
and far less apart from each other are the two we won in the last 70 years —
both Peace Prizes. We are still ignorant of punctuality etiquette and that is
true of Indians regardless of where they live. We are never in a hurry to
fulfill our promises.
Justice is almost at a standstill
in India despite the fact that India supplies the largest pool of computer
software labor to advanced countries. During colonial rule a case used to be
decided in 10 years. Last year, chief justice of India, Justice Thakur, lamented that, “Now, cases and litigation have
increased. People’s expectations have also gone up. It is all becoming very
difficult for us and this is why I have repeatedly urged them (government) to
pay attention to these problems.”
To make the matters worse, law and order is almost absent in
India. Who knows better than the NRIs whose properties in India are always
greedily eyed by unscrupulous elements? In my case, someone occupied a vacant
plot my father had bought in Punjab decades before he passed away, and my continuing
ordeal to vacate the completely illegitimate occupation by total strangers is
beyond the scope of this piece.
The powerful can get away with threatening,
looting, raping, beating, and killing. Perpetrators of 1984 Sikh genocide still
haven’t been punished. They have been honored, given high positions, and
publicly feted. We are still not a
casteless society as was envisaged. It is still either a curse or an entitlement
depending on the last-name of the parents who gave you life.
Gender discrimination is practiced
at all levels almost openly. Some parents still advocate killing a female child
before or after birth. Many have experience doing it. The instances of rape and
rape threats are increasing at an alarming rate. Even when the daughter of an
army officer killed on the border dares to speak, she is openly threatened with
rape. It is alleged that the present ruling party has an exclusive troll army
to beleaguer and threaten those who dare to speak against them and their
policies. A husband or boyfriend may incur the ire of India’s “morality
brigades” if they even hold their partner’s hand in public. When watching a
movie those who don’t get up in cinemas when the national anthem is played may
be in for a “quick lesson” in patriotism.
Only law enforcement and
bureaucracy match the media’s probity in India.
With disappearing internal
security, the security at the borders too has become iffy. Pakistan-sponsored
jihadis easily sneak in and indulge in violent activities and inciting violence.
Their penetration and reach is growing deeper with time. Their attacks have
ranged from J&K to the parliament to hotels and bakeries. More recently
they have blatantly attacked military bases and city police stations.
Our ongoing historic feud with
Pakistan has cost us dearly in many ways. And if our ability to contain tiny
Pakistan is an indication, imagine our future with colossal China, which is seemingly
in a mood to throw its weight around because it doesn’t think much of India and
its current leadership.
If the Indian government can
suddenly demonetize the existing currency, and not worry even a bit about the
inconvenience and scores of deaths in its wake, why can it not control
population? This is India’s number one problem, and I can’t respect, or
consider honest, any Indian leader who is not in favor of promulgating
population control with equal vehemence.
The day Indians gain the ability to
shun and shoo politicians who use caste, language, religion, river waters,
gender, reservation, and other divisive vote bank tactics, is when India will
have indeed won independence. That day India will be the Kohinoor of the world.
It will be that precious golden sparrow it once was. Until then, my each heartbeat
will hum the legendary words of Gurudev:
“Where
the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where
knowledge is free
Where
the world has not been broken up into fragments…
Into
that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.”
First person experience, unbiased & well summarised.
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