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‘Lives torn asunder.’ The children of Indian Partition, 75 years on

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‘Lives torn asunder.’ The children of Indian Partition, 75 years on

Alongside the best way she sees overturned bullock carts, burning villages and decapitated our bodies floating down the canal.

Elsewhere, a younger boy can also be about to embark on a journey — heading in the wrong way, from India to newly fashioned Pakistan.

Touring by truck, he sees bloated vultures feeding on our bodies by the roadside. His small arms maintain a gun.

In August 1947, the Indian subcontinent received independence from the British empire. The bloody partition swiftly divided the previous colony alongside non secular strains — sending Muslims to the newly fashioned nation of Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs to newly impartial India.

An estimated 15 million individuals have been uprooted and between 500,000 and a pair of million died within the exodus, in keeping with students.
Tensions between India and Pakistan at the moment are “a results of the way wherein the 2 international locations have been born, the violent Partition,” mentioned Guneeta Singh Bhalla, founding father of the 1947 Partition Archive, a community-based archive which has documented over 10,000 oral histories, primarily based in Delhi, India and Berkeley, California.

“With out understanding Partition, resolving the previous and therapeutic our wounds, we can’t transfer ahead,” she informed CNN.

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Partition additionally holds essential classes past India and Pakistan. “We’re seeing an increase of political polarization — left v. proper, non secular v. non-religious, or one faith v. one other — in lots of locations around the globe,” mentioned Bhalla. “Loads of the rhetoric we’re listening to now’s just like the type of rhetoric within the public realm that preceded the 1947 Partition-era violence,” she added.

“Partition is an instance of the actual human value of this form of polarization in society,” Bhalla mentioned.

Right here, Baljit Dhillon VikramSingh and Hussan Zia, two individuals who lived by way of this pivotal second in South Asia’s historical past, share their reminiscences — and partition’s legacy at the moment.

The woman who traveled from Pakistan to India

“We’re the fortunate ones… don’t weep for my arms”

Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh.

Opinion by Baljit Dhillon VikramSingh

Baljit Dhillon VikramSingh was 5 years previous in the course of the partition of India. She moved from close to Lahore, in what’s now Pakistan, to town of Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan, India. VikramSingh lives in Los Altos Hills, California. The opinions expressed on this commentary are her personal.

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My childhood was idyllic. I used to be born into the Dhillon clan, lions of the Punjab, landlords of many villages. Our village was Nayanki, exterior Lahore in what’s now Pakistan.

We had all of the comforts — horse buggies to journey, imported puppies to play with, messenger pigeons to fly. Love was showered by all of the elders on this lucky prolonged household.

We knew no distinction of who was Muslim, Sikh or Hindu.

Then one fateful evening I used to be woke up with my two youthful brothers and put in a jeep with my father, mom, uncle and aunt in a hurried method. The journey is as clear as crystal in my thoughts, even at the moment on the age of 80.

The Dhillon family -- including baby Baljit -- pictured in their ancestral home near Lahore, early 1940s.

The horror I witnessed as an virtually 6-year-old: useless, dismembered and decapitated our bodies floating down the canal. Overturned lorries, vehicles, bullock carts and extra savagely bloodied individuals.

The armed males — troopers on the Pakistan facet in white uniforms — pointing rifles at us and my mom’s braveness as she jumped from the jeep and laid her dupatta (conventional scarf) on the captain’s toes, begging for mercy for her young children.

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There was no marker, no crossing. Nobody even knew the place the border was drawn.

I bear in mind a village alongside the best way in flames — the white uniformed males who stopped us had been given orders to burn it — as as soon as extra we fled by way of the again roads attempting to succeed in security at my maternal grandparents’ house in Tarn Taran Sahib, close to town of Amritsar.

After a brief stick with my Nankas (maternal grandparents), we moved on to our new house Sri Ganganagar, within the state of Rajasthan. (A distance of some 200 to 300 kilometers from our place to begin). No less than we had a spot to go.

My mom mentioned now we’re actually refugees. We got here to at least one room, a tin roof kitchen, no servants, no lush mango groves, no buggies. The sandstorms and dirt ravaged every thing. We drank from the identical diggi (pond) because the animals, rode camels, discovered Bagardi (Rajasthani dialect), learn by the sunshine of kerosene lanterns, wore homespun grey clothes just like the villagers.

Life was harsh; scorching and dusty summers, freezing desert chilly within the winter. The elders by no means complained. They carried the bricks and combined the cement to construct the home. They leveled the fields to plow and plant.

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My arms writing these phrases brings again the reminiscence of my grandfather crying over the arms of my mom, as she gave him a glass of water she had purified and strained by way of three layers of muslin.

He wept that her arms have been so work-worn and brown and now not the arms of a daughter of a noble household. We’re the fortunate ones my mom answered. We’re collectively. Don’t weep for my arms.

My heroes are my grandfather, mom and father. How did they turn out to be so stoic and handle life and nonetheless bathe us with love? They sacrificed to ship us to varied faculties and army academies.

My marriage was organized in 1959 to a Stanford graduate, an engineer. We moved to the US in 1967. He went first and I adopted a 12 months later with our 4 daughters.

I babysat for 50 cents an hour so I might be house to boost the ladies. Exhausting work, tenacity and persistence discovered from the legacy of partition and my elders’ instance of affection and care made it potential to construct a life in a brand new nation removed from house and family members.

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I’ve been rewarded with materials consolation, however I reside a easy life.

The phrase “partition” offers no sense of the tearing asunder of lives just because a line was drawn by the powers that be. Mates and neighbors who had lived collectively in peace for generations now enemies.

Each my brothers, officers within the Indian military, fought in opposition to Pakistan in a number of pointless wars. My courageous mom at all times just a little afraid we would wish to flee once more since we lived so near the border.

I noticed my sturdy father weep a few years later as he stood on the border gesturing in the direction of Pakistan saying “Bawa, the prepare from Lahore used to return right here.” Grieving for his house, the reminiscences and all that was misplaced. He would say we have been brothers, we shared the identical meals, why would we kill one another?

That perception is why we didn’t go away instantly however then needed to flee because the insanity got here.

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The injuries of partition will at all times be uncooked, even 75 years later. The impression on me is that I’ll at all times be empathetic to humanity. I’m antiwar. I’ll at all times raise individuals up if I can, by no means put them down.

These are classes discovered from my elders. And classes taught to my descendants.

The boy who traveled from India to Pakistan

“We kissed the bottom… it felt gritty and tasted brackish”

Hussan Zia.

Opinion by Hussan Zia

Hussan Zia was 13 years previous in the course of the partition of India. He moved from Jalandhar, in India, to Sialkot, in what’s now Pakistan. He later served within the Pakistan Navy and is the writer of a number of books on partition, together with “Pakistan: Roots, Perspective and Genesis,” “Muslims and the West: A Muslim Perspective” and “Muslims and the Partition of India.” He lives in Canada. The opinions expressed on this commentary are his personal.

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“In the event that they kill me first, do not end all of the cartridges; hold one every on your mom and sisters,” my father informed me as we stood watch on the roof, weapons in our arms. “Be sure you kill them first earlier than you die.”

The horrible thought troubles me to today.

On the time of partition, I used to be just a few months shy of 14 and residing in Basti Danishmandan, a suburb of Jalandhar Metropolis, within the Muslim-majority Jalandhar district that now types a part of India’s Punjab state.

Basti Danishmandan had been overwhelmed by hundreds of Muslim refugees, a lot of them wounded and sick with no meals or medical facility. At evening, when the nightmarish cries of one among them raised alarm, my father and I might rush to the roof with weapons in hand. This was to protect in opposition to “jathas” (armed teams of Sikhs) that routinely attacked Muslim settlements at evening.

I belong to a neighborhood of Pathans that had lived in settlements on the outskirts of Jalandhar Metropolis for greater than 330 years. My father, a choose, had opted to serve in Pakistan after the partition.

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A street sweeper at work after communal riots in Amritsar, Punjab, during the Partition of  India, 1947. The streets are otherwise deserted under a curfew imposed by the British Army.

On August 27, the Pakistan authorities despatched two vehicles to Basti Danishmandan to evacuate authorities officers and their households. The street to Lahore was principally abandoned because the large-scale migration had not but began. However proof of the breakdown of administration, violence and brutality was obvious. We noticed scattered belongings, many our bodies, bloated vultures and canines that consumed them by the roadside.

Each the vehicles have been stopped at Amritsar — a Sikh stronghold about 15 miles in need of the Pakistan border. There have been some anxious moments as Sikhs armed with spears, swords and daggers started to collect across the vehicles. Thankfully, as soon as once more the sight of our weapons stored them at bay.

Shortly after leaving Amritsar, somebody shouted, “We’re in Pakistan!” There was no test publish. Everybody received out and spontaneously kissed the bottom. I bear in mind it felt gritty and tasted brackish.

In Lahore (roughly 130 kilometers from our place to begin), we have been housed in a naked room with none furnishings in a home owned by a Hindu household that had moved to India. My father was briefly assigned to assist in an enormous refugee camp on the airfield in horrifying situations.

The usually busy metropolis had a abandoned look with the places of work, companies, retailers, colleges, hospitals and different establishments closed. (These have been principally owned by Hindus and Sikhs who had migrated to India a lot earlier).

The burned-out Hall Bazaar shopping hub in Amritsar, Punjab, during the Partition of India, 1947. Fighting took place between the city's Muslim, and Sikh and Hindu residents.

On one event, I watched as my father rushed to assist a person throughout the street who had fallen down. It turned out he was a Hindu who had been stabbed. He was already useless or died in my father’s arms. There was an software asking for police safety in his hand. It was a quirk of destiny had he gone just a few steps additional he would have been safely contained in the native police station!

Initially of October, we moved to Sialkot Metropolis in Pakistan’s a part of Punjab and lived in a home subsequent to a locked constructing. Someday I noticed somebody in one among its barely open home windows and informed my mom. She informed me to not inform anybody else. Then she ready a vegetarian meal and requested me to depart it within the window for the occupant, an previous Hindu who had been left behind because the household migrated to India. She continued this each day routine till preparations have been made to ship him to India.

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Ultimately, the partition left as much as an estimated 1 million useless and uprooted 9 million Muslims and 5 million Hindus and Sikhs. What we had witnessed and skilled affected all of us profoundly. It robbed us of the enjoyment in our lives and changed it with emotions of loss, unhappiness and hopelessness (PTSD) that lingered for a very long time.

It’s usually advised that the insanity in 1947 was rooted in faith. However Hindus and Muslims had lived peacefully in India for 12 centuries and by no means engaged in an orgy of mass homicide and expulsion on this scale.

The unwisely hastened switch of energy had not given sufficient time to arrange an efficient administration, notably in East Punjab. (In February 1947, Prime Minister Clement Attlee introduced the British would switch energy by June 1948. Lord Louis Mountbatten, the final viceroy of British India, superior that date to August 1947).

The hasty British withdrawal left the sector clear for anybody to loot, burn, rape and homicide with impunity. The cowardly abandonment of duty by the British, aided and abetted by the Congress Get together that insisted on their fast exit, was the principle, if not solely, trigger for the catastrophe.

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As Harvard Battles Trump, Its President Will Take a 25% Pay Cut

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As Harvard Battles Trump, Its President Will Take a 25% Pay Cut

Harvard University, which is clashing with the Trump administration over its academic independence and the withdrawal of billions of dollars in research funding, said on Wednesday that its president had chosen to cut his own pay by 25 percent starting later this year.

The university has not disclosed specifics about its compensation package for the president, Alan M. Garber, who became Harvard’s permanent leader last year. His recent predecessors were paid around $1 million a year.

Whatever it amounts to in dollar terms, though, the pay reduction is a symbolic gesture compared with the scale of the university’s fight with the federal government, which has already moved to block more than $2.6 billion in funding for Harvard.

A university spokesman, Jonathan L. Swain, said Dr. Garber’s salary would be reduced starting July 1, when Harvard’s next fiscal year begins. The university, which has already halted new hiring and suspended merit raises for many employees, said that other Harvard leaders were planning contributions to the school.

The university acknowledged Dr. Garber’s decision the day after it expanded its lawsuit against the Trump administration.

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The government made a range of intrusive demands of Harvard last month, asserting that the university had, among other things, not done enough to combat antisemitism. The university has sharply contested those accusations. Then last week, Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said that Harvard would not be eligible for any more federal grants.

Legal experts have cast doubt on the viability of Ms. McMahon’s decree, and many of them believe that Harvard has a strong legal case to reverse the cuts the Trump administration has already made. Even so, Harvard, which has routinely received hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal research funding, is preparing for turmoil as long as President Trump remains in office.

In the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, Harvard has already had to scale back or eliminate some research programs, including efforts to study tuberculosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease and radiation sickness, because of federal funding cuts. The university’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, faced with some of the most significant funding losses, is eliminating desktop phones, limiting catering, reducing security and cutting back on purchases of new computers. The school has also cut back on leased office space, slots for doctoral students and a shuttle that ferries employees between offices.

The Crimson, the Harvard campus newspaper, first reported Dr. Garber’s pay decision.

A sense of campus solidarity in the funding fight extends beyond Harvard’s top ranks. Ninety tenured professors have pledged to take 10 percent pay cuts in order to help Harvard, the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, weather the Trump administration’s onslaught. Ryan D. Enos, a professor of government and a leader of the group, said the university had expressed its gratitude.

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The group came together, Dr. Enos said, in recognition that some Harvard employees could be harder hit than others by the federal cuts.

In a statement, the professors, some of whom have not been named publicly, said their offer to work for less pay signaled “our commitment as faculty members to use means at our disposal to protect the university and, especially, staff and students who do not have the same protections.”

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Qatar orders up to 210 Boeing jets during Trump visit

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Qatar orders up to 210 Boeing jets during Trump visit

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Qatar has agreed to buy up to 210 aircraft from Boeing in what US President Donald Trump hailed as the largest order of jets in the history of the American aerospace company as he visited the Gulf state. 

The White House announced economic deals worth more than $243bn as Qatar became the latest oil-rich country to earn plaudits from the president for buying into his “America first” investment policy as he toured the Gulf in pursuit of headline-grabbing business deals.

Qatar Airways, the state-owned national carrier, had agreed to a $96bn deal to acquire up to 210 American-made Boeing 787 Dreamliner and 777X aircraft, the White House said, adding that it was Boeing’s “largest-ever wide-body order”.

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“Congratulations to Boeing. Get those planes out there,” Trump said at a signing ceremony with Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Qatar’s emir. “I just want to thank you. We’ve been friends for a long time.” 

Boeing shares were up 2.3 per cent on Wednesday. Airlines often receive a discount off the list price of the aeroplanes they buy.

Other multibillion dollar deals have also been reached in defence, energy and technology, the White House said.

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A federal appeals panel has made enforcing the Voting Rights Act harder in 7 states

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A federal appeals panel has made enforcing the Voting Rights Act harder in 7 states

A demonstrator carrying a sign that says “VOTING RIGHTS NOW” walks across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge in 2022 in Washington, D.C.

Samuel Corum/Getty Images


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A panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down one of the key remaining ways of enforcing the federal Voting Rights Act in seven mainly Midwestern states.

For decades, private individuals and groups have brought the majority of lawsuits for enforcing the landmark law’s Section 2 protections against racial discrimination in the election process.

But in a 2-1 ruling released Wednesday, the three-judge panel found that Section 2 cannot be enforced by lawsuits from private parties under a separate federal statute known as Section 1983.

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That statute gives individuals the right to sue state and local government officials for violating their civil rights. Section 1983 stems from the Ku Klux Klan Act that Congress passed after the Civil War to protect Black people in the South from white supremacist violence, and voting rights advocates have considered it an antidote to a controversial 2023 decision by a different federal appeals panel that made it harder to enforce Section 2 in the 8th Circuit.

That earlier panel found that Section 2 is not privately enforceable because the Voting Rights Act does not explicitly name private individuals and groups. Only the head of the Justice Department can bring these types of lawsuits, that panel concluded.

The majority of the panel that released Wednesday’s opinion came to the same conclusion.

“Because [the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2] does not unambiguously confer an individual right, the plaintiffs do not have a cause of action under [Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code] to enforce [Section 2] of the Act,” wrote Circuit Judge Raymond Gruender, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush and joined in the opinion by Circuit Judge Jonathan Kobes, a nominee of President Trump.

In a dissenting opinion, however, Chief Circuit Judge Steven Colloton, also a Bush nominee, pointed out the long history of private individuals and groups suing to enforce Section 2’s legal protections against any inequalities in the opportunities voters of colors have to elect preferred candidates in districts where voting is racially polarized.

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“Since 1982, private plaintiffs have brought more than 400 actions based on [Section 2] that have resulted in judicial decisions. The majority concludes that all of those cases should have been dismissed because [Section 2] of the Voting Rights Act does not confer a voting right,” Colloton wrote.

Under the current Trump administration, the Justice Department has stepped away from Section 2 cases that had begun during the Biden administration.

The 8th Circuit includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. The latest ruling comes out of a North Dakota redistricting lawsuit by the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe. Citing Section 1983 as a basis for bringing the case as private groups, the tribal nations challenged a map of state legislative voting districts, which was approved by North Dakota’s Republican-controlled legislature after the 2020 census.

In a part of the state where voting is racially polarized, the tribal nations argued, the redistricting lines drawn by the state lawmakers reduce the opportunity for Native American voters to elect candidates of their choice.

“For the first time in over 30 years, there are zero Native Americans serving in the North Dakota state Senate today because of the way the 2020 redistricting lines were configured,” Mark Gaber, an attorney with the Campaign Legal Center, which is representing the tribal nations, said during a court hearing in October 2024.

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A lower court struck down the redistricting plan for violating Section 2 by diluting the collective power of Native American voters in northeastern North Dakota.

But the state’s Republican secretary of state, Michael Howe, appealed the lower court’s ruling to the 8th Circuit, arguing that, contrary to decades of precedent, Section 1983 does not allow private individuals and groups to bring this kind of lawsuit.

Since 2021, Republican officials in Arkansas and Louisiana have made similar novel arguments in redistricting lawsuits after Justice Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court appointee, issued a single-paragraph opinion that said lower courts have considered whether private individuals can sue an “open question.” For this North Dakota lawsuit, 14 GOP state attorneys general signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief arguing that private parties don’t have a right to sue with Section 2 claims.

In a separate Arkansas-based case before the 8th Circuit, GOP state officials have also questioned whether there is a private right of action under another part of the Voting Rights Acts — Section 208, which states that voters who need assistance to vote because of a disability or inability to read or write can generally receive help from a person of their choice.

Many legal experts consider this questioning of a private right of action as the prelude to the next potential showdown over the Voting Rights Act at the Supreme Court, where multiple rulings by the court’s conservative majority have eroded the law’s protections over the past decade.

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Edited by Benjamin Swasey

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