The pain of a generation explains why Manmohan Singh didn’t go to Pakistan

Behind Singh’s decision to not revisit his Gah, the village where he was born and studied till class 4, was perhaps the pain that most Partition survivors on both sides have endured for decades. Many of them are no longer alive to narrate that pain, and with Dr Singh, another such voice has been lost. For those of us who were born decades later, it would be a grave injustice to try to understand or feel something we did not go through. For us, 1947 was the year when India got its freedom, but for the likes of Manmohan Singh and his wife Gursharan Kaur, it was also the year when their country was divided, their Punjab bisected.

However, at certain points, emotion can resonate irrespective of age or generation. In not revisiting Gah, Dr Singh represented many of us. For Dr Singh, whose grandfather Sant Singh was brutally murdered in the partition riots at his own village where he once saw “people celebrating Gurpurab, Eid, Diwali together”, it was never easy to put aside that childhood trauma and make a revisit, notwithstanding his rise as the Prime Minister in India, his home.

Though he never revisited Gah, he did not abandon his village or close his doors to those villagers who remembered their “Mohna” after he became the PM. He initiated solar power projects in the village in coordination with then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, would warmly welcome his childhood friends from across the border, write emotional letters in Urdu recollecting his school days and expressing gratitude for the gifts they would send him, and more.

What young Manmohan went through during Partition is also not widely known, except that he lost his grandfather in the riots. His daughter Daman Singh in her book Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan has delved into the subject.

From their house in the village being set afire by rioters to his late mother’s trunk full of handcrafted phulkari (the intricate, traditional embroidery that Punjab women used to weave) treasures never returned by some neighbours — Manmohan Singh’s pleasant childhood memories were overshadowed by horrifying incidents during Partition.

In March 1947, as the violence spread across undivided Punjab, his grandfather was killed by the rioters, along with other men in the village. His grandmother Jamna Devi survived after she took refuge at a neighbour’s home. By 1947, Manmohan had shifted to Peshawar with his father Gurmukh Singh and they got news via telegram that his grandfather had been killed. Another woman in their family died of immolation to evade abduction. The same year, Manmohan, as a class 10 student, would reach his exam centre walking through the “streets littered with corpses” but the results of those exams were never declared. Nevertheless, he excelled in re-exams held in 1948 after migrating to India, and even secured a scholarship, despite not having textbooks to prepare.

Daman Singh writes that when she asked her father how “he made sense” of the gruesome chapter called Partition, he replied: “I didn’t. I didn’t make sense of it.” He added that he never saw any communal tension until 1947 happened.

Dr Singh was not alone.

In 2019, while interviewing elderly Partition survivors in both countries, I realised that time had failed to fade their childhood memories or lessen their pain of separation from the place where they belonged.

Justice (retd) JC Verma, 79, who had migrated from Mianwali to Ferozepur, was just seven then. “I still ask about Mohalla Gaushala, my home, my heart”, he said.

Sajjad Kishwar, 86, who migrated from Ludhiana to Rawalpindi, said: “I still miss Ludhiana. I lock myself in a room and cry.”

This dilemma, between the love for old memories and the pain of bloodshed, is what Dr Singh also went through, for decades. Asked by his daughter if he would like to revisit Gah, he said: “No, not really, that’s where my grandfather was killed.”

But somewhere that belongingness did exist, despite bitter memories. “I would very much like to visit Pakistan. I was born there. I thought of it many times but ultimately I felt that circumstances were not appropriate for my visit,” said Dr Singh, during the end of his tenure as PM. “I owe everything to this country (India), the great land of ours, where I, an underprivileged child of partition, was empowered,” he had said, proudly acknowledging his roots.

It is high time for people in both India and Pakistan to understand that Partition survivors love their country which they call home after migration, where they rebuild their lives — but they can’t be expected or forced to hate their roots. Partition was a mistake, and now only a few are left to recall those times when “Saanjha Punjab” was murdered. It’s time to listen, learn and empathise with them, not judge them.

In Manmohan Singh’s own words: “Kuchch aise bhi manzar hain tareekh ki nazron mein; lamhon ne khata ki, sadiyon ne saza paayi (There are such episodes in the gaze of history; moments commit a crime and centuries bear the punishment).”

d.goyal@expressindia.com