VIEWPOINT, Pakistan: Special Issue on August 17, Anniversary of the Radcliffe Award

By Dilip -
Exactly 65 years ago, today, on 17 August 1947, one of the most critical decisions on pre-partition Punjab, the Radcliffe Award, was made public. It also became one of the most controversial episodes in the drama of India’s and Punjab’s partitions.

 A special number of VIEWPOINT, the left wing weekly launched by the late Mazhar Ali Khan in 1975. It was shut down due to intense state oppression in 1992. It was restarted in 2010.

We didn’t know. Or didn’t we? It seems as if everyone is a victim of the partition violence. No one asks the question, if that is so, then who are the perpetrators? There is a complete silence about it: Ajay Bhardwaj http://www.viewpointonline.net/we-didnt-know-or-didnt-we.html



Radcliffe Award & Punjab: 500,000 to 800,000 Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed. More Muslims lost their lives than Hindus and Sikhs combined. It was the first grand-scale successful experiment after World War II in religious cleansing - by Ishtiaq Ahmed
http://www.viewpointonline.net/radcliffe-award-a-punjab.html

Holocaust we wrote: Manto keeps haunting the reader when one is uneasily reading the macabre details of either Sheikhupura massacre when 15000 Hindus/Sikhs were gunned down Jalianwala-style or the public gang-rape of Muslims girls at Amritsar’s Hall Bazar - by Farooq Sulehria
http://www.viewpointonline.net/holocaust-we-wrote.html

Partition of Punjab: One would do well not to ignore another unique experience that Punjab underwent between 1890s and 1940s: the construction of a huge canal network. The hard task of preparing the land, and occupying it by forcing the original inhabitants – the Jangli tribes – was given to middle castes among Muslims and Sikhs- by Ajmal Kamal
http://www.viewpointonline.net/the-partition-of-punjab.html

Maulana Azad & the future of Pakistan: Congress president Maulana Abul Kalam Azad gave the following interview to journalist Shorish Kashmiri for a Lahore based Urdu magazine, Chattan, in April 1946.. when the Cabinet Mission was holding its proceedings in Delhi and Simla. Azad made some startling predictions during the course of the interview, saying that religious conflict would tear apart Pakistan and its eastern half would carve out its own future. He even said that Pakistan’s incompetent rulers might pave the way for military rule:
http://www.viewpointonline.net/azad-a-future-of-pakistan.html

Jinnah "the Quaid": Excessively snobbish and completely cut off from grass roots politics, while immensely westernized and totally inaccessible to the man in the street were some of the characteristics of the great leader - by Waseem Altaf
http://www.viewpointonline.net/jinnah-qthe-quaidq.html
Rebuttal to the above by Yasser Latif Hamdani

Partition: A British revenge on Pakhtuns: Pashtuns, in the process of partition were in a strange situation. They were Muslims but anti-imperialism and thus they cannot be supported by the Muslim League - by Arbab Daud
http://www.viewpointonline.net/partition-a-british-revenge-on-pakhtuns.html

Also see:
Sris Chandra Chattopadhya's speech on the Objectives Resolution, Constituent Assembly of Pakistan March 12, 1949

Pakistan's First Law Minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal's Resignation Letter, October 1950

 Garaj Baras: Rahat Fateh Ali Khan & Ali Azmat (and other gifts from Pakistan and India)

A personal meditation on Radcliffe's work: A White Line and a Mosque

 An essay on Gandhi's last fast & the Delhi Declaration of January 1948

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