Partition Quotes

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”
― Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan

“We have undoubtedly achieved Pakistan, and that too without bloody war, practically peacefully, by moral and intellectual force, and with the power of the pen, which is no less mighty than that of the sword and so our righteous cause has triumphed. Are we now going to besmear and tarnish this greatest achievement for which there is no parallel in the history of the world? Pakistan is now a fait accompli and it can never be undone, besides, it was the only just, honourable, and practical solution of the most complex constitutional problem of this great subcontinent. Let us now plan to build and reconstruct and regenerate our great nation...”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.

2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times....

3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions.

4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred.

5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth.

It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“No settlement with the majority is possible as no Hindu leader speaking with any authority shows any concern or genuine desire for it.”
― Muhammad Ali Jinnah

“If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again...”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Everyone wants Kashmir but no one wants Kashmiris.
Aren't I a miracle? A seed that survived the slaughter & slaughters to come.
I think I believe in freedom I just don't know where it is.
I think I believe in home, I just don't know where to look.”
― Fatimah Asghar, If They Come for Us

“Memory dilutes, but the object remains unaltered.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.”
― Aanchal Malhotra

“The wounds will take decades to heal, centuries to overcome the trauma.”
― Gulzar, Two

“Migration is often accompanied by a feeling of unavoidable disorientation, and the circumstances of 1947 would have pronounced this feeling. In most cases, it would have created an involuntary distance between where one was born before the Partition and where one moved to after it, stretching out their identity sparsely over the expanse of this distance. As a result, somewhere in between the original city of their birth and the adopted city of residence, would lay their essence – strangely malleable.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“Partition memory is particularly pliable. Within it, the act of forgetting, either inevitably or purposefully, seems to play as much a part as remembering itself.”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“This arrogant, conceited history strides with her head in the clouds and never looks down. She does not realize how she crushes millions of people beneath her feet. The common people. She doesn't understand that one may cut a mountain in two, but people? It's a hard task, Bhai, to cute one people in two. They bleed."

A deep sigh coursed through the gathering. Master Fazal said, "History will keep on marching like this. The names of a few people will stick to her fabric. She will register those. there was Hitler, there was Mussolini, Churchill and Joseph Stalin, among others. this time the names maybe Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah, Subhash Bose! But the names of the lakhs and crores who have lost their lives will be nowhere. They will be mere numbers in which all of us will be included!".”
― Gulzar, Two

“Every time the train stopped at a station, we would all hold our breath, making sure not a single sound drifted out of the closed windows. We were hungry and our throats parched. From inside the train we heard voices travelling up and down the platform, saying, “Hindu paani,” and, from the other side, “Muslim paani.” Apart from land and population, even the water had now been divided”
― Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory

“it was too loud for hope
it was too silent for victory.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Synecdoche

“PARTITION'

are your drains clean of blood now?
do you recall the names, and faces
of your own people?

did your countrymen get to die
right like human beings?

butchered sisters and mothers
still wait by the windows,
with no lantern.

that was no proper farewell
past midnight.
minarets whisper your ghazals
to an empty sky,
Koklass’ know the borders too.

what have you done, sir?”
― Abhijit Sarmah, Dying With A Little Patience: Poems

“Partition tore India into three pieces. Disaster struck. There was East Pakistan, there was West Pakistan, and there was the rest of India. Millions of people were uprooted from their houses, tens of thousands massacred on both sides. It was one of the greatest mass migrations and killings in human history. People today do not realize the tremendous trauma of Partition, whose negative vibrations continue to haunt us even today.”
― Karan Singh, An Examined Life: Essays and Reflections by Karan Singh

“He could not help but admire his posters every time he saw them---the son of a rickshaw puller, now the chief of a prominent political party in this town, who was expected to win by an unprecedented margin of votes in the coming elections. There were many people in the party who begrudged his presence, his power, but they could do nothing. The people of Amrapur loved him and his speeches. Some people called them inflammatory, divisive, and harmful to the peace and harmony of the town. A smile spread across his face every time he heard that word. Has anything ever been achieved by harmony? What would the leaders do with harmony? Why would people come to listen to his speeches in droves if they wanted harmony? Elections can never be won by harmony.”
― Rohit Gore, A Darker Dawn

“1947, a found poem,
full of erasures in history
of India and Pakistan.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta, Synecdoche

“This arrogant, conceited history strides with her head in the clouds and never looks down. She does not realize how she crushes millions of people beneath her feet. The common people. She doesn't understand that one may cut a mountain in two, but people? It's a hard task, Bhai, to cute one people in two. They bleed.”
― Gulzar, Two

“A deep sigh coursed through the gathering. Master Fazal said, 'History will keep on marching like this. The names of a few people will stick to her fabric. She will register those. there was Hitler, there was Mussolini, Churchill and Joseph Stalin, among others. this time the names maybe Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah, Subhash Bose! But the names of the lakhs and crores who have lost their lives will be nowhere. They will be mere numbers in which all of us will be included!”
― Gulzar, Two

“For the mainly Urdu- speaking migrants from India who abandoned home and hearth to make their futures in a predominantly non- Urdu speaking country, Pakistan was the land of opportunity. Better educated than most of their coreligionists in western Pakistan, they expected to get the best jobs. Some of these muhajirs, as the refugees from India came to be known, had sensibly moved their money before partition in the hope of starting up new businesses in both wings of the country. The idea of material gain encapsulated in “Pakistan Zindabad” was a stretch removed from the other more loaded slogan, defining its meaning in vague Islamic terms. But for all their claims dressed up in religious terminology, the protagonists of an Islamic state too had their sights on power and pelf in the Muslim El Dorado.”
― Ayesha Jalal, The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics

“I would learn many years later that although Sindh and Punjab had been geographically and culturally close, their experience of Partition was vastly different with respect to violence.”
― Rita Kothari, Unbordered Memories : Sindhi Stories Of Partition

“The events leading up to the creation of Pakistan also made the path to statehood very difficult: more than a decade of civil unrest as Indians of all races and creeds sought independence from Great Britain was followed by a massive migration involving some fourteen million refugees who crossed what became the Pakistan-India border. Nearly one million persons—Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims—died during this bloody upheaval.”
― Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within

“The damage done by colonial powers to the heritage of conquered peoples is irreversible; yet racial memory is a collective storehouse that time and history cannot eradicate.”
― Ahmed Ali, Twilight in Delhi

“In my 12th / Intermediate Level in Ravenshaw College, I read the novel "Train to Pakistan" by the great writer Khushwant Singh. I read the struggles and sadness of the people from both sides of the border in the partition that happened in 1947.

I am poet and I only believe in love and peace. We the homo sapiens are capable of great things, but let us not get narrow minded and hate each other. Our world needs more loving hearts.”
― Avijeet Das

“In my 12th / Intermediate Level in Ravenshaw College, I read the novel "Train to Pakistan" by the great writer Khushwant Singh. I read the struggles and sadness of the people from both sides of the border in the partition that happened in 1947.

I am poet, and I only believe in love and peace. We the homo sapiens are capable of great things, but let us not get narrow minded and hate each other. Our world needs more loving hearts.”
― Avijeet Das

“When I was studying in 12th/ Intermediate Level in Ravenshaw College, I read the novel "Train to Pakistan" by the great writer Khushwant Singh. I read the struggles and sadness of the people from both sides of the border in the partition that happened in 1947.

I am poet, and I believe in love and peace. We the homo sapiens are capable of great things, but let us not get narrow minded and hate each other. Our world needs more loving hearts.”
― Avijeet Das

“The Arab and Palestinian rejection of partition in 1947, which would have occurred on far better terms than those that are suggested today, left the Palestinians dispossessed, dispersed, and broken.”
― Gershon Baskin, In Pursuit of Peace in Israel and Palestine