Why remember everything?

We have an unhealthy obsession with the past, but not in ways that ever help us move forward

I like the idea of looking back. It can teach us a lot of things because historians like to constantly remind us that we have a tendency to repeat ourselves. The idea of looking back is that we look at what our ancestors did, and try to incorporate the good while avoiding the bad. Unfortunately, for us in India, this little trick has failed to work. We do look back often, but it sometimes feels as if we then deliberately repeat the things that have let us down as a nation. We revel in our ability to learn nothing.

This notion of the past was brought to my mind by the latest in a long line of suggestions from the Prime Minister’s Office. I often think of it as an advertising agency more than a place of governance, because of the regularity with which it suggests campaigns rather than anything tangible that can be measured as progress. The Idea Of The Month was called ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’, which made no sense when I first read it, and only confounded me further over the days that followed. Would ‘Partition Remembrance Day’ make more sense, I asked myself, with the assumption that those memories being dredged up would be horrifying either way? Why were the horrors in question referenced so clearly, and why exactly were we supposed to recall them?

It’s hard to imagine a significant number of people who remember the Partition with clarity. Adults with the capacity to remember are undoubtedly septuagenarians now, and may or may not like to recall those days of loss and inexplicable pain. What could they possibly get by recalling that event anyway? Is it meant to prompt comparisons between how Indians were lynched for their religious beliefs back then versus how they are lynched for their religious beliefs today? Are they to compare the sense of hopelessness they felt at the time with the hopelessness we all feel in today’s mismanaged and morally bankrupt India?

What about the rest of us citizens whose grandparents are no longer around to talk about the Partition? What are we to remember? What are we supposed to get by recalling an event outside our time? Do we exchange notes about the people murdered on both sides of the border? Do we change our Facebook updates to reflect our sadness at the lives lost? We are barely allowed to grieve for lives snatched weeks ago, so what exactly are we to do with these long-buried ghosts of Indians past? And what happens the day after ‘Partition Horrors Remembrance Day’? Do we put aside these remembered horrors until next year?

Governments obsessed with horror are often responsible for inflicting it upon their citizens. We could have been asked to remember the innocent men, women, and children who died giving birth to two nations that continue to hate each other many decades on. We could have been promised peace, by a government committed to 
making sure an atrocity like the Partition would never tear us apart again. Instead, we are being asked to reopen wounds that have never healed, with no clarity on how we must behave when that blood starts to flow again. We are not being offered band-aids; we are being denied closure instead.

India only pretends to care about the past. It’s why we pay lip service for a few minutes on August 15 to the patriots who gave us freedom, and why we carve our names into historic sites with impunity. For millions of us, the past is just a distraction, something to occupy us for a few seconds before the present impinges upon us. It’s why remembering the Partition will do more harm than good, unnecessarily reminding us that we were torn apart by religious beliefs all those years ago, and have yet to accept the idea that all citizens of India must be treated as equal. It should be an indictment of our ancestors, as well as ourselves, but will only end up as another empty campaign commemorated by full-page advertisements in newspapers that abstain from asking tough questions.

I refuse to think about the horrors of the Partition. I prefer thinking about the horrors of today instead, when activists are jailed for no reason, farmers are ignored for a year, and ministers focus on growing their beards instead of boosting our economy. The past was horrible, but the present is worse. And I have no intention of closing my eyes to that fact.

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira

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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper

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