Acid Jars and Tiger claws - Part 2

The two worst affected states by Partition were The Punjab and Bengal. Devastating levels of violence forced government attention to The Punjab were populations were exchanged on communal lines. Bengal remained neglected resulting in prolonged identity crisis and refugee influx from East Bengal, then under the reins of a newly born Pakistan. The government seemed incapable of handling the crises and many who lived through the trauma of Partition bore acrimony towards the government's indifference towards Bengal . 

The horrific experiences of women were kept hushed by families in a bid to hold onto the remaining threads of honour and tradition. The mass scale persecution annihilated the cultural and intellectual identity of the people, it changed the social fabric and destabilized the economy . All the garbage that was dished out with the truth hardly restored harmony; the prudence of the common man brought in some stability- the willingness to move on.

 The exodus of people from East Bengal does not even figure in the list of great refugee movements. Official figures are not available to this day. The truth is that The UN today recognises smaller refugee movements like those of Bosnia Herzegovina or Rwanda and Timor. The Partition of 1947 saw the largest migration in world history. The politics of Partition can be studied in state archives and documents but these do not reveal mass sentiment and grass root experience of those uprooted and humiliated. 

I leave you with the question of whether The Partition was avoidable. After all, it is in public knowledge that it was fuelled by the desire of a politically ambitious few. The millions displaced or massacred became mere pawns in the creation of a new geo political order that is still struggling to find solutions to its border disputes .