 As you well know, the SOAS director's lecture series focuses on the planetary questions of our time and how to enable a collective human response to them. In this historical moment, all of our big challenges, pandemics, climate change, inequality, social and political polarization all are transnational in character and require a cohering of the human community. We reflect on these challenges and try to bring insights to them from what we describe as the majoritarian world. Today, we're going to of course discuss partition. Last year, as you well know, was the 75th anniversary of the partition of India. India's writer and author Salil Tripati reflected in foreign policy when Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the nation in August 1947 with his trist of destiny speech. It was truly remarkable for its awareness of the tasks that lay ahead of this nation. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of a secular India. He spoke of a southern solidarity. He spoke of cohering the human community into a much more powerful collective cohesive entity. Yet, today, India is a very, very different place and more these leadership. And what we want to ask is how different is present day India from what the founders had envisaged some 75 years ago. It's worth saying that the past partition was, in many ways, a tragic moment. Millions of people died in the subcontinent. Tens of millions of people were uprooted. And it ushered in, in its wake, three separate nations ultimately. What is today known as India, what is of course Pakistan, and what is known as Bangladesh. And today, what we want to understand is what does partition, what was the partition about, what were its origins. And more importantly, how is the partition understood in contemporary India, in contemporary Pakistan, in contemporary Bangladesh. And what does that imagination of what partition represented and what these societies have begun become. What does that mean for the world that we live in? What does it mean for the world that we need to build? And what does it mean for the cosmopolitan vision of the world that we require if we are going to survive as a human species in the next century or two. Today, we have two colleagues to speak to us about this. Of course, we have Salil Tripati, who is the author of The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, The Bangladesh War, and Its Unquiet Legacy, which was long listed for the Nonfiction Award at the Tata Literature Light Festival in Mumbai in 2016. He has also written a collection of travel writing detours, songs of the open road, and a book on threats to freedom of expression from Hindu nationalism, offence, the Hindu case. His next book is about Gujaratis. He has also co-edited, in your tongue, I cannot fit with the artist Shalpa Gupta about imprisoned poets through the centuries. His journalism has won awards in Asia and the United States, and he has, of course, been published widely in the UK, US, and India, and elsewhere. He has written academic papers on business and human rights, and he was born in Mumbai, lived in Singapore, Hong Kong, and London, and is of course now based in New York. So our second speaker is Dr. Aditi Kumar, an art historian and cultural practitioner, who was of course born in Jammu, Kashmir. Her scholarship interrogates the role of art and culture in the formation of post-colonial nation states, and national as well as regional identities in the Global South. In particular, she has worked to redefine the intellectual scope of art history as a discipline, with reference to the Caribbean, South Asia, and diaspora communities in Europe, specifically in the UK. Particularly, she has worked on Jammu and Kashmiri diaspora living in the UK. Dr. Kumar has shown how scholarship may interact more creatively with global histories, museum and exhibition curation, cultural policy, and the public understanding of art. Through public and academic engagement as an academic fellow at the Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development, she is in the process of materializing her research into a manuscript. Dr. Kumar is also a lecturer in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Rohantan in London. Friends, colleagues, I am going to recommend the following. We're going to allow Salil to of course have a conversation with us to speak for about 10, 12 minutes on how he sees things playing out in India. What he sees as what partition represented, more importantly, how India and Bangladesh in many ways are different from how it was originally imagined by their founders. And then of course we'll go to a DT Kumar for another 10 to 12 minutes of introduction, where she will speak to many of these issues but also not only focus on India and Bangladesh but also Pakistan. And then hopefully we will take a conversation from there with each one of them. I will of course allow questions to be raised through the chat line, and we will have a conversation up until just before 7pm. So, thank you once again for joining us. It's a real pleasure to have you at the first director lecture series for the calendar year 2023. And may I ask you Salil to lead us in your first introductory statement. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for that kind introduction and almost intimidating because I'm with two senior academics and I don't have a PhD. I don't have a background in law, but I'm an observer and writer, so I will speak more as a room server and writer and draw from books that have written both on Hindu nationalism and on Bangladesh as we go along. I'll speak a little bit about Bangladesh and about India in the reverse order first start with India and then with Bangladesh and really look forward to questions and a very stimulating session. And so as which is, you know, as one of my great friends, a young woman called Shehla Rashid at JNU calls it the JNU in London and I think all of you will agree that that's a great compliment to us when someone called it the JNU in London. And I leave it at that. You refer to my my piece in foreign policy on Christopher Destiny. And I think what Nehru said at that time was very critical about the narrative of separating and distinguishing India from what it was, and what it could have been the secular versus the religious. Now this secularism that Nehru spoke about was of course Indian secularism, which was inspired by Gandhi, and which meant equal respect for all religions, and not what the French would call, which is, you know, the lazy day and you know, keeping religion out of the In fact, the school I went to, I went to a medium school in Bombay, when I was a young student. And all religion for respected and all religions prayers was spoken, I mean, I mean, I'm an agnostic bearing towards atheism so I don't have much time for that, but I can understand the rationale for it. That was fine. But the one thing every Indian knows about and doesn't talk about is a mass violence at a company the partition. That's the first narrative we have to remember that the nation was we decided it was divided into two. Two halves on each side, East Pakistan, which was largely Bengali and I'll come to that when I speak about Bangladesh shortly and West Pakistan which was Punjabi and Urdu. Two halves, which was supposed to be home for Muslims, because the argument within was that India, the centerpiece was a home for Hindus. Gandhi didn't agree with that. Maulana Azad didn't agree with that. Nehru didn't agree with that. Sardar Patel didn't agree with that. They all said that India was a home for everybody, but many Muslims felt unsafe and they left and in some ways they were right. The way India's turned out today. But I'll come to that also towards the end of my presentation. So for a long time the national narrative in India remained that secularism was better. I have many liberal Pakistani friends who look with awe at India, because they felt that India had done something right, which they hadn't because progressively Pakistan on the West and in Bangladesh on the East turned more and more Islamic in ways, which ended up undermining human lives. But India didn't have an easy right. If you look at the history of India since independence, it has been unpleasant. The emergency of 1975 was the first major shock to the system, because it showed that the institutions could collapse very easily. I'm not a huge fan of V.S. Nipal, but in his book India, a wounded civilization. He has this phrase and I'm speaking from memory so I'm not quoting it accurately. The press, the parliament and judiciary were borrowed institutions. The press, when it was asked to bend, it crawled as LK Advani, one of the ministers later said. The parliament became a robust and the judiciary approved everything the famous Jabalpur case I mean who can forget that right when the attorney general of India says that the government is right to deny the right to life. And the judiciary went along with it. So you have that on one hand, then you moved to 1980s, and you see three major things happening. One, the disappearance of the idea of non alignment, something that Nehru believes in Nehru has sworn by it he's part of the bandung process. He genuinely believes in the fact that you know you could be neither US, I mean, John Foster Dallas may have called it an immoral choice but that's exactly where he was. But the non alignment ended. Because there was no longer a Soviet Union to fight. There are two cases in India, one is a shabbana case where there is a genuine concern about the rights of Muslim women to seek alimony and the ban on satanic verses. And the third is the end of socialism, as we knew it. What did the Congress Party of Nehru and Gandhi have to offer. It was a chasm. It was a gap. And it was in that gap that the Babri Masjid was destroyed in 1992. There were major shocks to the system. On one hand, we saw that a lot of people actually liked what happened. Those who lived in Delhi, those who lived in the big cities felt that this was terrible and it couldn't be countenance and could not be supported. But a lot of people said, fine, we've taught them a lesson and the them were the Muslims. Right. And then we move forward by another 10 years and we have the massacres in Gujarat in 2002 under Narendra Modi who was the chief minister. And I don't really want to go into the details of the BBC documentary I do hope people in London have seen it and people elsewhere have seen it through some other means. But the film very clearly and demonstrably shows the problems that occurred, the fact that the state was either incompetent or complicit in what happened. But the crucial factor we have to remember is that that the same party continues to get elected it is popular. And that alternative narrative includes several things that have happened in the last few years and I'll go very briefly into explaining why one is projecting the non narrow, non Gandhi Universe as heroes. Project Bhagat Singh as a hero, even though he was a communist, projecting Ambedkar as a hero, even though he would fringe at the thought of being adopted by Hindu nationalists. Projecting Sardar Patel as a hero and building the world's tallest statue in Gujarat. About a man who had banned the rastri swamsevaksam, the founder head of PJP's ideology and project its Vashandra Bose as a hero. You know the man who founded the Indian National Army, not founded. He was the second inheritor Mohan Singh actually founded it in 1943. Bose came later, but what Bose did. And if you see his politics, it was progressive leftist integrationist and something that was closer to the Gandhian ideal of of integration, then what the BJP in the RS is one. But these are the people that are being projected today as a hero for two aims, one to show that Nehru was a playboy and undermine his reputation continuously and Gandhi was India's janitor. He believed in cleaning India, clean India. So if you listen to Modi, whenever he speaks about Gandhi talks about Swachhata as in cleanliness as a thing that Gandhi wanted completely ignoring all the other things that Gandhi has fought for such as equal respect for religion, human rights and so on. And currently what he will not say it himself, but people around him will say are projecting to other heroes, one is Savarkar, who was a right wing Hindu nationalist who coined the phrase Hindutva, and was in the Andaman Jails for a long time and wrote many mercy petitions to get free. That's what I'm good say the man who shot Gandhi, and killed him. It's almost like America were to worship John Wilkes Booth over Lincoln. Or if America were to worship someone like Lee Harvey Oswald, or John Kennedy. But that's where we have come a bridge was to be named after good say plays are being written about him praising him. And this is happening. And this is where the statistic comes in and this is where I want to end up by talking about India is that more than half the population today in India is under 25 and more than 65% is under 35. In 2021, about 26% of India's population was between the zero to 14 years category, and about 68% was between 15 and 64 years category. People who remember the past are fading. And people who don't remember the past or who don't care about the past are around. They are getting information about quote unquote Muslim tyranny, quote unquote Hindi superiority, and I'm a best friend of and speaking of Hindu nation nationhood to WhatsApp message. And it's almost like you're talking about two parallel universes. And the interesting part is that you know that Gandhi is 150th anniversary was in 2019 and Narendra Modi wrote an article, obviously someone else wrote it for him because it couldn't have been Modi's writing in the New York Times about it. And the interesting part is exactly that that the BJP leaders are speaking about Gandhi and Nehru when they're abroad. At home, they praise good sense of worker, because they know very well that if they were to project good sense of worker abroad, they will be laughed out, because nobody knows them, and they know that what they represent was evil. But we are on 21st of February and now I'm switching from India to Bangladesh here. And I want to recall a poem by Tarpia Faizullah, who's an American Bangladesh poet. And here's a poem. Each week, I pull hard the water from the well, bathe in my sari, ring it out, beat it against the flattest rocks. Are you Muslim or Bengali? They asked me again and again. Both, I said, both. I live in Bangladesh and it's struggle for freedom and I'm born a Gujarati and I can speak Bengali. I chose to learn the language. And one of the things I learned was, you know, the stronghold that the language has on the people's nationalism. So one has to look at the narrative of 1947 in Bangladesh, because Bangladesh's history doesn't only begin in 1947 goes back to 1935 it goes back to 1905 when Curzan divided the land. The borders between East Pakistan and India were opened in 1964. I mean, when I wrote my book on Bangladesh, I met. And then women who said they used to come to Calcutta to see the new Satyajit Ray films by saris and shawndesh and go back. This is what used to be. But then you have the language movement. And that goes back to 21st of February, which is a co shared boy Mela today. The world mother language Ray and it is recognized as such, because of Bangladesh and Bangladesh national level language that language movement was extremely important. Six people were certainly killed maybe more killed. We don't have the full figures and that followed with the six point program. From 65 to 71 was a brief period where the antagonism between West and East Pakistan, magnified, leading to the massacre of 1971, whether 150,000 people died or 3 million people died is for statistician. I really don't care. But a lot of people that it was certainly a crime against humanity, probably a genocide, and it's something for which there was a lack of justice. If you go to the martyrs Memorial at Rayir Bazaar in Dhaka, which I have and every time I go to Dhaka, I've not been back since 2015, which was some time ago. I see an n grade poem written there in Bangladesh, which says. I'm not a Bangladesh. It's not for me to prescribe solutions for that. But it's a question that I want to answer. Bangladesh needs to ask themselves if the digital security app, the jailing of journalists, the killing of bloggers, and the abuses of human rights that are going on. Is it consistent with the kind of country that Mujibur Rahman wanted to create. I'm not a Bangladesh. It's not for me to prescribe solutions for that. But it's a question that Bangladesh does need to reckon with. But the question that ultimately led and I'll end with this is to recall what family that he has said a Pakistani poet, and she said this when Babri Masjid was destroyed in India. We were fooled into believing something else. But you turned out to be just like us. Where were you hiding till now? And this is a question that India has to reckon because the way India is moving now is on a trajectory that confirms every fear, every suspicion that a Muslim in the subcontinent had of a Hindu dominated India and what it would do to them. And Gandhi and Nehru convinced everybody that it's not like that, that we are different. We are liberal, we are Democrats. But the people in charge of India today think otherwise. They are building a new narrative, which is dangerous. And the world ignores it at its parent. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's, it's a powerful words and will of course come there are many questions there. I want to immediately shift to a DT. Yeah. And a DT I want to give you, obviously, 12, 15 minutes to make your comments, introductory comments and then I will start off the conversation and then we'll come to look at what others, others say, but a DT the flow is yours. Thank you, Adam for your wonderful introduction. And, of course, I'll try to do justice to what my predecessor has spoken about and, and thank you for the wonderful audience who is listening to us now. And before I start my, I would rather say it's not a research, you know, piece that I'm going to present but rather a conversation that I would like to engage everybody into. And before I make that I start with the conversation I would like to make one thing clear that I'm not looking at politics per se of Kashmir Valley, but rather of a contested belt that is known as, you know, Azad Kashmir in Pakistan and P okay occupied Kashmir. So I'd rather call it contested regions and off Jammu in Kashmir. And that's the area I've been working in collecting material culture for the past 10 years. And my PhD is also based on cultural artifacts items of memorabilia and photographs which I very painstakingly collected over 780 years from the diaspora families, specifically those who were based in Jammu and Delhi and other northern parts of India. So, I also find myself very privileged and fortunate to have access to diaspora and displaced families that are based in India, and the families that migrated to the UK. And I'll also give you a very brief historical, you know background of the diaspora community I specifically looked into. And these people belonged to Meerpur region and adjoining area so that it is small belt, which India till date, you know, politically is part of you know that the crown which we see on the map of the India is actually not there, because that portion is administratively and politically, it is part of Pakistan. So that diaspora migrated after partition, specifically the Muslim communities to the United Kingdom, and it was also the time when, you know, United Kingdom was undergoing nation building. There's a lot of people from South Asia, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, they migrated to this to United Nations. And having said that so there was a duality in terms of this migration like in my work I say like Palestine, these people could never return back to their homes, because the development plan in Pakistan of a dam was built. So that the whole belt went under the Mangla dam waters. So the people could never go back or revisit their homes because they are lost. But every year, once the monuments, they are resurrected, you know, because when the dam water goes out down in the month of March, I believe, so a mosque comes out and a Hindu temple comes out. So it's very interesting how these commemorative sites become active spaces of cultural unification. So it's dating back, I was, you know, recording in, you know, narrative from four generation partition survivor. He happened to visit that part of, you know, POK back in 2004, when, you know, there was this bus service which was started called by the Indian government for the Hindu families to visit those areas. So he got the picture of the Hindu temple, which was brought back with him along with the sand of the land. And that image became a commodity or religious, you know, photograph which is circulated among the community members. And as you know, a lot of Hindus have domestic shrines or they have their in-house shrines. So I was amazed to find that image in the domestic shrines of these families. So how culture is kind of reimagined and how sacred geographies are reinstated in new spaces. That's really interesting to see. So again, I will take the, as I'm an art historian, I will really emphasize on, you know, factors which what Adam raised that how we are going to imagine this new world, a cosmopolitan world. So is it through the divisive politics that, you know, the hegemonic partition narrative has been going on? Or who owns the narrative? It's actually the narrative of the people, by the people and for the people. So it's only now in this scholarship, which actually focuses on social and cultural aspects of partition came about maybe three days, three decades ago. If, you know, Urvashi Batalya, who popularly wrote the other side of silence, Ritu Menin, and other scholars who really, you know, who really brought human stories of partition. And of course, nobody can deny the genocide that happened on both sides of the border. And we are still, you know, embroiled in that violent conflict. We say, our power, it's ongoing, it has not stopped even after 75 years. But it's important to take into factor the stories which talk about human solidarity and friendships and, you know, different stories. This, I know the time is tied. So I will really want to showcase a story which really touched my heart and I've been fortunate to be a part of their lives now. So when I was in India, when I was doing my PhD from JNU, so because of, you know, certain factors I could not travel to the UK under Charles Wallet scheme to really document those families who had come from, you know, Pakistan administrator Jamun Kashmir. So I was just on telephone and I took the interviews on the phone. So I got to know about a person called Zulfika Rally who is, who has his family based in Birmingham right now. And his mother was basically a Hindu girl who was left behind, like many other stories like we see in, you know, Kiran Keh's movie Kalapani and other so many movies have been injured. So she was left behind and she married a Muslim man. And then she came to the UK. And that's how and as, as you know that women had no agency. So the state decided what the fate of these women would be. So they went multiple types of violence, you know, one of, you know, a Hindu or a Muslim vice versa, they were married into different religions. And then they were extracted from their homes. After many years and mind you, many of these women have already born children with new marriages, you know, so they were not asked if they want to really go back. But under the state scheme which was, you know, Repatriation Act as we know it, these women were exchanged between both the countries. So the story of Wade Kumari aka Fatima B is one of those women who didn't want to, you know, go back. So I'll just show you, I think I can share the image. So this is the image of Fatima B in the UK when she was settled here this is her son who's doing very well and now he himself is 75 years old. And she's no more though. So this is when they relocated and they were well established here. And so I really wanted to talk about her identity as you know, a Hindu slash Muslim woman, and she was not allowed to go back to meet her parents back in Jammu. It was only 40 years of, you know, rejected visas, rejections and finally due to, you know, the persistent efforts of a son Zulfikar Ali whom you see in the left side of the photograph that she was finally able to reunite with her family back in Jammu. And this is her. And this is what's very interesting that when she went back to India and Jammu particularly she wears a bindi which is a signal of a married Hindu woman. And the kind of duality of identities which people navigated through is really fascinating. And another story that touched my heart was her brother didn't marry till the sister came back revisited. So when the sister got back for what after 40 years she got her brother married, and she was able to attend that. So these amazing and rare, you know, family albums really help you to see the other part of partition, which otherwise is silenced. So, you know, I'd really find this, you know, material so fascinating and so rare that hardly people don't have this material, like this old woman who said he in Punjabi I'll see it and I'll translate. The mother had to throw the children, you know, in the river because the breast had no more milk to feed the children so it was so gruesome. And to ask them if you have a photograph or if you have an image is kind of, you know, it's something which really puts you in a very tight spot as a researcher. Now the story is of a sick person whom I met who is no more unfortunately. And he said, and I met him couple of times in Jammu, and he didn't open up with the stories, you know, personal stories. And as I went and you know I won his trust. So one fine day I was like, okay, about you and many on like, I'm now stop, I'll stop visiting you have to go back to Delhi. And that day he very slowly he went inside his room, and there was, you know, the old lockers the brass lockers which you move slowly, you know, which had a jewelry and etc. He opens it up, and he brings something very guardingly towards me, and it's wrapped into multiple polythene bags. And I was like something precious he's going to show me. And he comes out from the, you know, he takes out this ubiquitous brass glass. I was quite astounded why is he showing me this, you know, because a brass glass was a thing which you found in many partitioned families because they wanted to drink water etc etc. And this is the only thing which remains of partition with me. And because I was a soldier and I was escaping the marauders and the killers of the from the opposite side. And I only had this glass, and I survived on alcohol or water and whatever I get it in this class. So this is the souvenir of partition this is my family. So what's a memory is attached to this one glass. So objects really unfold the other stories of partition, which often got, you know, hidden and not spoken about. So I would just like to end here. And I hope this gives us some food for our thought and opens up who really, you know, owns this narrative of partition, even after 75 years. Thank you. Well, thank you, I think you both of you, and Salil have, have given us very fruitful understandings of the challenge of partition. If you could take out that. But what I wanted to pose is a question you know it seems to me. What is important, I mean, partition is important for the people that were, were involved in it, and for the experiences of how we defined the three nations. But it seems to me that it's also speaks to our contemporary world in many ways. Because at the heart of partition is two visions of the human community. Is humans are defined by their identity in very, very rigid terms, whether that is a racial identity, or whether it is a religious identity. And there's a second vision in the battle of partition that human beings can be see themselves beyond the human, their rigid identities. They can live together. They can be part of a collective human community. And in a sense, the one perspective ironically, in partition that emerges emerges in Pakistan, very early on, as an Islamic state, but India represented this, the alternative, the possibility of a more cosmopolitan nation. And it seems to me that that was the two perspectives that we're, we're defining partition. If you forward 75 years later, that battle is still playing out, but this time it's playing out in Western Europe, where particularistic identities emerging in places like the United States were very particularistic identities emerging. And yet that same battle is, is playing out. And ironically, in India, as Salil says, there seems to be a return or a retreat into more particularistic identities. And I wanted to ask both of you. If you could think for us, how partition speaks to the contemporary world, what partition means for the contemporary world. And while you think it is something that we should be constantly thinking about and not forgetting. And I want to come back to you Salil and of course I'll come back to you. Tell me why you think we should be writing about it thinking about it can reflecting about it in the ways that we do Salil. So I think that's a great question, and it keep us busy for the next few hours, if you were to really dig deep into it. But I do think that the idea of what constitutes a nation and you know I go back, you know I'm not an academic but I go back to what Ben Anderson wrote about an imagine communities and and and you know about Indonesia about a common understanding to forge an identity through words and two ideas through print right which is what Ben Anderson talks about in imagine communities. And if you look at the rise of nationalism in India it was pretty much like that rise of nationalism in many countries was through the elite who are thinking about a specific identity to get rid of the colonial power. And, and there was a liberal imperative behind it you know the whole idea of building it around a notion that everybody was equal. It sounds almost laughable for someone with an Indian heritage like me talking about that today given what has become of India. But the fact remains that we believed it I mean you know I mean my parents believe in it and my grandparents believe in it. And you know to part in the Gandhian struggles and it was a flawed struggle I mean it wasn't a perfect struggle I mean you know Gandhi had his own flaws, but the way he looked at the way he looked at blacks and all that I'm not trying to whitewash him at all here. There's something noble about his endeavor about bringing people together and and to see this whole, you know from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Kabul Kabul is too far but let's say at least certainly from from Baluchistan to let's say Bangladesh as one entity of a common civilization. I mean you know I mean I've been out of India for 30 years and you know whenever I speak about Bollywood music or cricket, you know, all the bonds break apart and we all become friends again, you know and everybody forgets about when we are talking about India and so on. But but that's not the point point here is that there is a commonality of a culture, commonality of civilization, which I think Gandhi, Nehru and others understood. I think Gina also understood that, but Gina understood also the Hindu nationalist feelings and he was afraid of that. And that's why he built the barriers. I mean, those of us who believed in a secular liberal ideal of India now have to question, were we wrong because we were taken in by the Gandhian rhetoric, not realizing that the undercurrent was so poisonous. Diti, you want to come in. Yes, I would just add on to what Salil is already saying. And I would, of course, there are very now strong, what's the positions that people put, because society is not without politics, even if I'm saying I'm apolitical that's really diplomatic I am political, whether the food I'm eating, you know, the culture or the identity I'm performing it's also the performance of identity. And, you know, going back to what you were saying, you know, Adam, these kind of the identities that we are navigating. And now more so have become, you know, more prominent because we are getting conscious of our multiple identities. You know, within India, if you say, one part is wants to be identified at this and the, the addition of new states or with Rakhand or you know, so we are very conscious of what our identities are. And I think if we, you know, if we give into these very strong for instance I'll give you a very recent case of what happened at Leicester, like couple of months ago, there was a cricket match between India and Pakistan. So, you know, it became volatile, it took on a communal color, you know, there were, you know, youths, the Muslim youth and the right wing Hindu youth. You know, the Hindu youth from, you know, what say ABB or the BJP, they started chanting Ram, you know, Ram Ki Jai Ho. You know, it's a very religiously driven chant. And that kind of instigated the other community. And there was, you know, a flag was pulled down from a Hindu temple and they were circling, you know, I don't know if it's doctored because I didn't in person see it. There were black burning videos, which kind of became very volatile and there was police all over Midlands and it kind of, it was a trigger point for rest of the Midlands. So the riot spread. So if you see the, the political position which India is taking right now, and the very strong stringent right or left, you know, positions have deeper impact on the diaspora itself. So I feel we have to, as society, you know, we have to be very careful to not get influenced by the political realities of the home land. So I will come back to both of you. You see both Salil and you make the argument that where we wrong Salil puts it very provocatively where we wrong did Nehru and Gandhi and the Congress leadership mislead us. But isn't there another explanation. And that is, to be fair, India survived for many decades as a secular state in some form or the other. And maybe we need the answer to look at how did Congress fail. It could not, it's failure of delivery to poor people. It's economic crisis, the corruption in the place. You know, we say that young people by the very character I hear this debate all the time about young people going to be revolutionary. The question that is emerging is, what you're saying to me, 65% of India is less than 35, they're young people, but they're not necessarily revolutionary, that they actually maybe people have lost hope, and is more these project. Not a product of the failure of the liberal establishment to deliver social justice to poor people that this is what was not that we were that the cosmopolitan leadership was wrong. It is they did not take social justice seriously, that it was all about liberal rights as opposed to delivering on this, the real needs of people. And is that not an explanation that allows the right to emerge as opposed to, and I want to pose that as an alternative explanation to you Salil and to you and ET. I'll be with you Adam on on many, many, many respects I think I've touched upon it a little bit by pointing out the three things that happened in the 80s preceded by the emergency because the emergency broke the contract. The contract between the Indian people and the Indian government, because Indian government till the emergency 1975 was always Congress and what was the Congress Gandhi Nehru Patel Azad, blah, blah, blah, and then Indira Gandhi. But then Indira Gandhi comes along and her attorney general says that the right to life is not a right in the Jabalpur case. The media is asked to bend and the media chooses to crawl. The bureaucracy is rubber stamping everything that the government wants sterilization takes place and you have a period when you have a country, which is moving away from its democratic powers. And so that's the first shock. The second shock is of course the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984. And then in 1992 the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And all of this basically happens at a time when the world is changing right India has aligned it's it's not aligned but it's still largely seen as an ally of the Soviet Union. And so socialism doesn't matter. Secularism has been questioned because of what you see with with Shah Bhanu case and the Salman Rushdie ban case. And in every which which way you look at India at that time, it looks as though the existing order needs to change and it's in that vacuum that the BJP makes its mark, because it was waiting. As a communist BJP is a fundamentalist party and being a fundamentalist party, it plays a long game. It was formed in 1925 with the, you know, BJP was officially formed in 1980, but the roots go back to the RSS in 1925. And we think long term that someday we will have a generation, which will not have the memory of the partition, which will not know this, these these these instances, and we will be able to create a new narrative and that's what seems to be succeeding So I completely agree with you that yes that Congress failed Congress had the rhetoric. It talked about you know economic social and cultural right the whole rationale of the emergency was that poverty will be removed bonded labor will be eliminated, and we'll make all the changes, but it failed to deliver. Because it failed to deliver on removing poverty, because it failed to make India prosperous. And because India had the so called Hindu rate of root of 3% a year. There was, you know, an open goal and somebody has to just kick and that's what BJP is doing right now. Before you come in a detail I'm going to pose a question to you that is coming from colleagues, people on the, who are the audience some colleagues are saying, explain to us how you, you know, why is it that India which has such a large youth population can sustain the politics of the BJP. You know, what would imagine young people, I buy the very nature inclined to a more radical cosmopolitan agenda. Why is it that if in essence here, they becoming more prone to a particularistic agenda and I'd like to get your thoughts on that. It's a great question I mean I would love to know the answer myself. The only thing I can guess and this is only an assumption and a guest so it is not a theory, or well founded opinion at all is the fact that there is so little awareness and understanding of the history of what constituted what brought India to where it is. The very fact that you are challenging history today through WhatsApp forwards through TikTok posts, through claims made on Twitter to photograph shown on you know of Gandhi dancing with a white woman which is of course an Australian actor doing it. And you're trying to portray that Gandhi was a womanizer, and I'm not here to defend Gandhi here just now, or show a picture of Jawaharlal Nehru kissing his niece, and so showing that that some somehow something to be terrible, and so on. So you have a narrative that you know these you hear about when I grew up in India was born in 1961, and I you heard all these stories, but you knew they were not true, but today because of the way the internet works. It has gained the currency of being true. And you have people who are genuinely young and who do not have access to the history and who are told that the historians like Romila Thapar and others are leftist historians who should not be taken seriously, and because they're communists and so on, this embrace of this new alternative history, and the only way to fight that mean you know I'm a free speech fundamentalist in other life as working with with pen on this board and all that. I just feel that we have to fight falsehood with truth. Okay, I did I want to come back to a question somebody asked a very interesting question from the audience and what they say is when we talk about partition, particularly the context of Pakistan. Why isn't there enough reflection on sin. And how there was displacement there. Of course. But why is that not sufficiently highlighted why is that that sufficient why was there. No conclusion into a partition, how would you explain that. Would you have any thoughts on that. I would. Yeah, I would like to add a little because of course in this not my research area but like I, because one of the Mike partition itself it just not very you know, black and white. It itself has multiple narratives so you have a bigger India Pakistan, then you know a sub narrative Bengal in Punjab, and then you have micro narratives. Like what I am talking about the G and K or the, you know, Pakistan administers Jammu and Kashmir. It is one of the micron narratives that kind of got overshadowed with the politics of the valley. So likewise this sinned diaspora were very much there like I did have because I also studied in Gujarat Baroda. I had Cindy friends who talk about this migration between Africa and, you know, since then I had a Pakistani friend, very interesting. So she, she studied in Baroda when I was studying and she had Cindy connections. And, you know, went back to trace a roots to sinned in Gujarat Muslim woman, and who had Hindu, you know, extended family members. Of course, there, there is still scholarship that is evolving. And there are micro narratives that are really, you know, fighting to be there in in in the bigger narratives. And I would just also go back to what Salil was saying and what you had posed earlier. And I agree to your questions about partition and just clocking it back to the earlier, you know, question about partition itself that unlike other governments globally who have acknowledged genocides that have happened in the past, whether that's the original killings in Australia, whether that's New Zealand and, and the, you know, and the leaders acknowledging at world forums and apologizing for the genocide it has not happened in the case of India and Pakistan. Neither the leaders are nor, you know, policymakers have actually political heads have actually acknowledged the wrongs. So I think there is always, and there is, you know, if you don't reconcile with the wrongs of your past, it will keep on repeating whether that was 1971 1984 the Sikh riots 1992. And now the kind of polarity which we are seeing and Salil was very right that the youth which we really the India boast about and becoming the one of the most dominant world economies right now is because a percentage of youth is much more than, you know, other countries of the world. But having said that the youth has partial or rather dangerous, you know, knowledge of history itself, which is this, you know, wikipedia or WhatsApp University, which kind of, you know, circulates wrong historical factors, and, and itself the historical textbooks are being edited now. So which is very dangerous for a country where completely, for instance, Nehru's history is being omitted. And there are many, you know, important facets in national building. In 1947 what happened where India reached, you know, so I think we really need to take factor in those things which and be very careful what a source of history is for knowledges. So I mean I'm interested but I want to come back to a thing that you picked up on and I'll come back to it in a minute. Nehru, you touched on something about who tells the stories and whose stories are being articulated when you say there isn't an acknowledgement by political leaders of their, of their state's complexity in genocide of one kind or the other. What stories, who owns the stories that are playing out on partition, who is telling the stories, because it seems to me, whether it's the Pakistan State to the Bangladesh State to the Indian State. The real question is, is, are we allowing too much of these stories to be told by political entrepreneurs and politicians. And does, and does, does give a particular narrative and is it more important to tell the kinds of stories you say to Agiti, the really individual stories of how somebody is both Hindu and Muslim, how they transcend these divides, how in the periods of actually the partition, as people were being forced to remove themselves from one area to the other, there's all of these countless of stories of young people helping each other across the religious divides, keeping people away from the religious mobs of all sides. Those reflect the, the beautiful part of what it means to be human. And how do we surface those stories, how do we tell those stories, and how do we make that the dominant narrative. I wanted to get your thoughts on that. Can I start with you, Agiti? Yes. What you said is already been in underplay and for the past I think 30 years, you know, huge, there is huge repositories and archives that are working towards collecting for instance the partition archive in India and the Pakistan archive. They have amassed so many oral narratives, which actually talk about these stories, just not of the violent traumatic memories, but about reconciliation about friendships across borders about letters, for instance in the UK. I have this amazing, you know, tape letters that's called. So I got my hands on these cassettes, when people from Pakistan who relocated to the UK, they used to send recording messages on cassettes, back to their homelands, either India or Pakistan, and the repositories are here. For instance, this person from India who traveled in 2004 to the contested parts of, you know, Pakistan. So he got a letter from a Muslim daughter whose mother was taken away after the repatriation and the brothers married the mother again to a Hindu man. And she had not met her mother ever. And the brothers when he went with the letter said, we can't let you destroy her family. So they've been also these very powerful and emotional stories when people are trying very hard to make people have been separated for years. So that's where the power lies with the people. As I said, so the whole socio cultural, you know, what's the research and, you know, academics or cultural practitioners really want to work around these stories. And what you saw last, I think every since 2020, the South Asian Heritage Month, which actually celebrates South Asian identities in the UK. And in India also we of course we every year we have those. So it's basically they celebrate those stories, just not of trauma and separation, but of friendships and reconciliation. I think we need to know more of those stories. I mean, I'm writing a book about Gujarat and Gujaratis. And, you know, it's a very divided state and puzzlingly slow because if you look at 1947, Gujarat didn't suffer from the partition violence. Punjab did and Bengal did Gujarat did not and yet Gujarat has had more communal riots than almost any other state in India. And Gujarat is a mystery. And I mean I don't have the answer why. But one of the things I found is the ordinary acts of kindness across the communities are amazing. And I mean, this, I mean, is a reflection of the liberal way I look at the world, but I'm ending the book that I'm writing by pointing out those stories that there is still hope because this land may have been built and all these these lunatics who went about killing and raping people, but it also did produce Gandhi. And so, you know, there was something intrinsic about this place which is something worth looking at and reflecting and understanding. And it's not just Gandhi it's Chakrabapa it's Ravi Shankar Maharaj and there are lots of people like that. And I think the stories upon stories like that because the country of 1.4 billion people you will always have exceptions and exceptions can change the narrative and I think the challenge because our whole topic today is to look at who owned the narrative is to reclaim that narrative. And you know remind people that it is, I mean, you know, I used to go to South Africa as a as a young reporter. A few years ago when Kodesa was taking place and all that and at that time you still had with the lazy and there were there was violent between Zulu's on one side and the in Qatar freedom party and so on. And at that time you still had people who talked about the compassion and forgiveness that Mandela spoke about. You know, there was Helen Susan, other people exactly beer and other politicians who are talking about it from a point. So I think it's possible to reinforce those ideas, even if those are discredited and challenged by those who feel that it is time to have a more divisive solution. Because otherwise, you know we may as well close shop and feel in utter despair. I pose an interesting question. So a lot of people say that why do we worry about India and what's playing out in India. Isn't this true of similar trends that are playing out in other parts of the world. So think about Pakistan. Think about Israel. Think about Saudi Arabia and much of the Islamic countries in the Middle East. If you look at my own country think about some of the racial chauvinism that I'm urging in South Africa is think about some of the particular racial chauvinisms that are emerging in in Western Europe, where people defy Europe as being Christian as part of its historical legacy and not allowing others. So the point that people are raising is, is India not part of the trend that the world is moving towards particularistic identities. What we need to start thinking of is political entities that are largely governed around ethnic identities of one kind or the other, whether they're religious, or whether they, they, they racial or whatever, how would you respond to that. Let's start with you Salih. Yeah, I look at it as this, you know, in introducing me you're very kindly referred to my essay in foreign policy where I begin by quoting Nehru, and his twist with destiny speech. So if we look at Nehru and Gandhi as a standard bearers of a particular kind of liberal internationalism of the time. It was a wonderful idea that you know you could be your religion didn't matter your gender didn't matter your sexual orientation didn't matter. Your caste didn't matter, but you were united in a common identity, which goes back to what Tagore writes about in his essays on nationalism in 1911, which he writes about when you know he goes to China and you know he's got the whole idea of Chinese national deeply offensive. So if you take it from that perspective. Then I think there was a lot to be learned from that a lot to be appreciated. And India represented that ideal that here was a multi everything country multi linguistic multi religious multi caste multi ethnic and all that, and yet it was experimenting with after the second world war to create a nation that everybody could be to any of the first country probably the world and I'm not a Wikipedia or encyclopedia expert here so I won't go into that, but probably one of the first countries to give universal franchise to everyone at start. It's not that it gave votes to men first and then women or votes to whites first and then blacks or votes first to uppercase and then lower cast everybody was equal from day one it was a brilliant ideal. To see that ideal destroyed is a great civilization misfortune. So I mean I'd love to come back to that and then I'll come to you in a minute, but I'm really interested in what you said because you're not only born in Mumbai and write about India and Bangladesh but you live in New York. And New York is in one sense, the city that represents the cosmopolitan identity of human existence. But if you look at the battles that are playing out in the UK in the US, you seeing very particularistic identities emerge amongst young people in the way they battle in the way they articulate their struggles. And some of it is racial, some of it is a religious, even in places like New York, you seeing that. Where do you think that that comes from do you think people take for granted. The very notion of what it is to live in a place like New York or even London I would argue, which is such a cosmopolitan city, but I am as a South African quite struck by the manifestation of what I call particularistic identities of religious or ethnic sense. Because that strike you as somebody who's so steeped in the pan, the pan south solidarity of the Nehru's and in Krumas. Now, do you think that that identity and that heritage is remembered in places like New York and London. I sort of remembered but I live 20 years in London also so and and eight years in Singapore which is also a very cosmopolitan place right I mean you know Chinese Indians and Malays and others. So, I'm used to being in a melange. I mean so, and I like it that way I mean which is why I prefer big cities to small towns and you know, David Goodheart had this book about people from everywhere and nowhere some years ago in London. And I think there's something to that that people who are in urban settings are different from people who are from non urban setting. Now I'm not saying one is, they're different. I'm not saying one is better than the other I mean I have my views about what's better and what's not. But that's that's besides the point here. But yes you're absolutely right I mean you know I mean just there's this completely mad American politician called Loren Robert who said yesterday that we need divorce national divorce between the red states and blue states and you know revisit the civil war in a way and sometimes you think that's right I mean you know I, I was in London when Brexit happened and you know and you had London your Scotland your Oxford Cambridge and the big cities voting in one way, and which has never seen a person of color except maybe in the corner grocery store or at the pharmacy, voting to, you know, leave from Europe. So there is indeed that that division and and the only way forward, only civilized and peaceful way forward is through dialogue and conversations. And easy. It's not easy we have but we have to try, because the alternative is a bloodbath and and that's not in anybody's interest. I want to come back to that right to the end but I want to come back to you and you, you raised an interesting thing earlier on about diasporic communities. Yes, and I want to pose a kind of contradictory phenomenon that I find playing out in diasporic communities and perhaps the best example of this is the BBC documentary that's a little spoke about on Modi. And Rishi Sunak was confronted by this in Parliament the other day. And of course he said he doesn't identify with all of the criticisms that are contained in the, in, in the, in the biography or the reflection in the documentary about Rishi Sunak. And it struck me and it showed me the contradiction. Rishi Sunak lives in London, in what is the most cosmopolitan city in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world. He manages a country that is seen to reflect in one way or the other for all of its failures, a cosmopolitan nation in its complexity. But he doesn't identify or see problems with the particularistic identities articulated by Modi. There seems to be a historical country. There's a contradiction in that. But is that a problem simply of Rishi Sunak. Or is it a problem of too many people. So when you use the example. Why is it that people have grown up in the UK. Are suddenly fighting amongst themselves about a cricket match between India and Pakistan. For God's sake, you grew up in the UK. Why are you caught up in identities around a cricket match of a nation you've looked and try to understand that historical contradiction give me your thoughts. I'll quickly come in because recently I was interviewing a third generation diaspora who traces her roots back to Malawi and Gujarat. So it's very interesting to see diaspora because I am based in Leicester. There is a lot of diaspora has come from Africa. After, as we know, the army, you know, send a lot of South Asians back. So there is a huge African slash Indian diaspora slash Pakistani diaspora here. So I, unfortunately, I have not seen I've not yet got my hands on the BBC documentary. I'm yet to watch it. But what I really understood by these conversations and oral narratives of the diaspora, there is somehow whether those are Hindus or whether those are Sikhs or whether those are Muslims. Even the second third generation people, it's almost like a time machine. And that's also a lot of cultural, you know, writers and scholars have rightly pointed out whether it's cultural practices or language. So then after migration diaspora who come from the homeland, they preserve their culture and language as it is. So even if you go back to, you know, the people I'm working with, the language is pure. Even after, you know, 75, 80 years of documenting these stories, the dialect is pure. So it is as it is, and so is the case of their values. So for instance, I was talking to this Muslim young artist, and she is working with a lot of other diaspora women artists. And she was like, I'm surprised when I go back to Pakistan. You know, the women are so empowered and you know, they are doing everything, but here women are still into marriage and they're so I think behind, because culturally, they have still, you know, they hold very tight to the older values and anything which happens in the homeland has an direct implication on, you know, their whatever political stance in the diaspora. Are you not saying that the image of the homeland is an old image, not the current. Exactly. Exactly. And the current politics though, especially the right wing or the extreme I would not say left or right but let's rather put it extreme politics have a very, very, what say, strong impression on their minds, without knowing the historical connect, you know, context, they are easily they pick up on those, you know, narratives which are in circulation. I mean, I left India in 1991. So the ethos I represent is the time when there was still a Babri Masjid. Right. So you could call me a person from the yesterday I keep going back to India that's a different story, but there is that part of it. There is you know when you were talking about you know, Indians in Pakistan is fighting over a cricket match in Leicester. Remind me about Norman debit and his test in Britain, right, that you know you are supposed to cheer England. NASA was the captain of the English cricket team used to say that why can't you cheer me. I'm cheering Imran Khan or Mama Chami for that matter you know in in India for that matter. So I think those are very legitimate and genuine question that that have to be taken taken into account, in terms of you know dealing with with with how you. I mean the story there probably is how willing is Britain to accept and absorb those who look different or pray to different gods or eat different foods. Can I come back to I'll give you one cricket story which I think is an interesting one. When I was in the early, I mean when I was in South Africa in the early 1990s, just before the transition happened. There was still a match in Durban between Pakistan and what was then the cricket South African cricket team then just entered into global competitions. Sitting in that cricket ground and a large number of black South Africans in South Africa's definition of black as a kind of inclusive of persons of a of African and Asian and mixed ancestry. And what is what's striking about that is there is a lot of people in those early days before the transition where supporting both India and Pakistan against the South African team. Who would want in 10 years later, there's not a young person of Asian or mixed ancestry of African ancestry that will be seen as supporting Pakistan in it, they'll all be supporting the South African national team. Because of Hashim Amla, because of Hashim Amla. Yeah, because of the how identities have transformed. Absolutely. And I think it's not only because of Hashim Amla, I think there is a shift of identities that play out. But here's the final question I want to pose for you. And it's really on an issue that both of you touched on. You spoke about Gina, and you said that Gina feared that Muslims would not be accepted. And therefore, he demanded partition. And in the process Gina established what is effectively an Islamic State, what has become an Islamic State. I mean, that out of this fear of not being accepted. He became what he feared most in many ways Pakistan became what he feared both by becoming a nation of a particularistic identity. It seems to me that that's also a reflection of what played out in other contexts. Think about Israel in the post genocide phase of World War Two establishes a nation that effectively is seen to oppress the rights of Palestinians. Think about Africa, and which comes out of the angle of war and in a desire to make sure that they never pressed again. They move on to press the African majority in South Africa and create one of the most horrendous political systems in history. In every one of these cases. The fear that we don't do what happened to us in the past, you land up creating the political system that becomes the very notion of your nemesis. And, and the question that I want to pose to you is what does that mean today, because there's a whole series of social justice struggles playing out. But I worry that in the fear of not in this polarized world we live in in the unequal world we live in this desire to heal from the divides of our past. We don't behave in a way that becomes the very antithesis of what we want. Because nobody starts off to wanting to be evil. We all start off wanting to protect ourselves, but in the process create an evil, because we only protect ourselves and not protect others. I want to pose that question to what does that partition lesson bring to the world of New York and London, and the UK and Western Europe, because that's what it seems to me. What we want to learn is the lessons of the south for the universal community itself. And I'd like to get your thoughts about that kind of argument. Fascinating, absolutely. I, I wish I had an answer. I do think that what unites people ultimately is more important than what divides people and the case for unity need to be made more forcefully. We are not there yet. And I think, because of the way the Trump presidency, the way Brexit argument played out in the UK, the way Orban behaves in Hungary, the way Netanyahu behaves in Israel, the way Erdogan behaves in Turkey, Duterte behaves in Philippines and of course Modi behaves in India, makes you feel that the strongman, the strong guy is a victorious one. But I know this sounds sallow almost to quote Gandhi in this kind of context. I did say right, I mean that you know the way of proof and non violence do win in the end that you know in the end you have to look at the fact that you are able to whoever is a is a tyrant, ultimately falls and this this is how I remember was gone the end with banking his words. And I know it's no so less to anybody I mean it's it's doesn't. It's just nice birds to make us feel better. But that's the only way to go forward, otherwise we live in a time and enormous despair. I don't want to say whether the glass is half full or half empty and all that kind of nonsense. But I do want to believe you know I work on free speech and you know I mean I work on journalists and writers are in jail, trying to get get up out of jail from places like North Korea and China and Iran and you know through my work at Penn International, and the work I do on business and human rights and you know people I revere and respect in India are today in jail for this be my colleague on case. So, it is very very depressing but you have to continue to believe that we shall overcome. I'll, yeah, I'll quickly add to it I'll, I rightly echo what Sillil is saying that you know unity wins over divide, and it reminds me of this title which became very common in India, when this old woman Vina Varma visited her ancestral home in 70, after 75 years, and it said human humanity over rivalry. So it is actually these, you know, stories of unity and celebration which talks about this ongoing process of reconciliation. Yes, we are not there, but we are on the path. This is a political narrative which is very, you know, dominated of us, othering, you know, one state one religion, but we have to see that we cannot look from the same prism, and whether those are theoretical frameworks whether those are political narratives, whether we talk about other genocides that happened across the world and if you're looking at Marianne, Marianne Hirsch's famous work on post memory, etc, etc. But we have to have our own framework, which takes into consideration, you know, class religion caste, the internal divides, and we really have to look at personal stories and narratives, which look beyond these social divides, you know, really into stories which unite us. But we've got we don't have many much time so I'm going to ask you to push you a little so both Sillil and Aditi, it's important what you say, but you know, unity can only survive. It seems to me if the case of unity is made on the basis of social justice. So, when you speak about Gandhi and it's important all of the issues that can be speaks about non violence, etc. What is also true is India post 49 food 47 was not the socially just place that it is poor people start people died on inequality levels existed. And when you don't take social justice seriously as part of the unification project as part of the cosmopolitan project. You compromise the cosmopolitan is itself, you compromise unity itself, because you don't take social justice. And isn't that the lesson of India of Pakistan, of even South Africa today that Madiba, who represents that same tradition of Nehru and if you like that the solidarity of the South in Krumah, NASA, etc. That is under threat, because we didn't take social justice very seriously inequality increase. Is that not the lesson Aditi and Sillil that we should be thinking about. Let me come to Aditi first. So, the whole Ambedkar politics and the new conversations on caste. It, of course Gandhi itself there, there were troops in, you know, Gandhi in theory itself I'm not saying of course there is, we say Gandhi is the father of the country and you're very correct. I do agree with what you're saying that social injustice cast itself is it's it's like a termite even now in India. I'm gone. Even after 75 years of independence, we still hear cast stories or, you know, couples born down or, you know, separated or killed based on gas it's very much there. And I would say there are multiple things that need to be part in social justice is definitely a part reconciliation and acknowledgement, whether that's by the state of the people or the people of the wrongs of our historical past. So basic acknowledgement should be there in space for the others to speak. Salil you've got a minute and a half to. Okay. So that's not a lot of time but but no but I essentially yeah I agree that it's a, it's a huge challenge. It's a it's a formidable task to deal with. Yes, we are in a situation where we have a context and a picture which is extremely bleak and and and grim. The only way forward is not by embracing Gandhi or Patel or Nehru or anybody in a kind of a naive manner, but to try to see what is it that they're trying to say you mentioned Madiba for example you know what is it that he was trying to do and what is it that's relevant in in in today's context and time. And I think if we were to move in that direction, if we were to move in that kind of a context, then I think there is, there is some scope and hope for for future, because otherwise, I mean, we are in a situation of despair. So I think that that's an important point to end. Thank you Salil. I do want to say friends colleagues that the real issue that we have to be mindful of is that this is not an partition is not simply what was the tragic death of millions and the force in the world of tens of millions. It is as the, the forces that underlay partition is as important today for our world, and for the, for the political conflicts of our world. It worries me that it's a wonderful show a theater into a couple of months ago. I went to see something called the father and the assassin, and it's a play about God see and his ideology and his thoughts. In the play itself. There's a moment where the actor turns to the audience and says, What do you think is this only an Indian problem. Do you think this is a foreign problem elsewhere. Explain Brexit itself and identities that played out and the conflicts that made Brexit. It's the same forces it's the same identities. It's the same conflicts that played out in the debates around Brexit. They played out in the fights around partition that played out in the struggles against Israel Palestine that played out in South Africa that play out in the middle of Germany, or the conflicts that are taking place in Paris today. So that the issues of partition speak not simply to the subcontinent of India and Pakistan and Bangladesh. They remain relevant to our world, and they remain relevant to the struggles of the contemporary order. And if we truly are desirous of a human community that lives in peace, then we have to learn the lessons of that past, and we have to learn the lessons and tragedies of both the work, the experiences of Africa Asian but also the experiences of Europe and North America, so that we can collectively live as a human community. I want to end there and say thank you to all of you to Salil and Aditi for the fantastic reflections you've had, and to all of you for participating for the wonderful because it's only when we speak like this, when we engage, when we think that we can heal the world and the fractured past that all of us come from. Thank you very much. Thank you. May you all have a wonderful evening. You too. Thank you. Thank you so much.