I hate gandhi for a lot of reasons, but if he indeed was responsible for partition, then I would not be so critical of him from now on.
Anyway, the one thing we got wrong is that the partition was incomplete. Had it been complete, then we wold have had fewer mess to clean up. Atleast, India would have been saved from Islamisation for a few more decades
I don't hate Gandhi.
It is just that, unlike many who hero worship him and raise him to the pedestal of a Demi God, I look at him like any other human being with sterling qualities and yet with human failings.
He rose to the occasion in consonance with the popular sentiments prevailing amongst the natives then against the Raj and moulded it wonderfully well to achieve the aim.
However, was all his action perfect? Not really. He also brought misery to many like allowing the Partition where many died, were made homeless, penniless and left to fend for themselves.
Or for that matter, the call during the Civil Disobedience Movement for School boycotts and withdrawal from government educational institutions. Many out of sheer patriotism responded. It only deprived many Indians the avenues for literacy. I fail to see how what is benefiting the Indians without debilitating the essence of the Independence Movement should be boycotted and the same very Indians being deprived of knowledge that they could use when Independence came.
I think Gandhi at times got carried away by his own charisma.
But now that the Partition has happened, we must accept it with all grace. And now think of ourselves as Indians and quit dividing ourself further into compartments of community, caste, creed and religion and instead remember and live up to Rabindranath's famous words -
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls and instead let
words come out from the depth of truth.
The Partition gruesome as it were is being used by politicians to grind their own axe and lead us astray with myths and back to the days of strife and squalor.
It is time to ensure that
the clear stream of reason does not lose its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit and instead
the mind is led forward Into ever-widening thought and action so that Into that heaven of freedom, our country awakens.