L K Advani feels that more Hindu-majority districts in the Sindh region would have remained with India at the time of partition had there been an `assertive leadership’ in India.

In the prologue to his autobiography, `My Country, My Life’, Advani says that had this happened, India’s western boundary could have stretched right upto the sacred Sindhu river.

Excerpts:

“For Hindus living in those parts of undivided India, which later became Pakistan, Partition was a terrible calamity. Apart from the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan, the other main provinces affected were Punjab, Bengal and Sindh. But while Bengal and Punjab were divided and so provided a natural home to the uprooted Hindus from these two provinces, Sindh became a part of Pakistan in its entirety. There were districts in Sindh contiguous to Rajasthan, like Tharparkar, which had a Hindu majority. A more assertive leadership could perhaps have succeeded in bringing these districts to India, in which case India’s western boundary could have stretched right upto the sacred Sindhu river. Sadly, that did not happen.

“For the Hindus in Sindh, Partition has meant not only being uprooted from their hearths and homes, but also a tragic distancing from their culture and language. It may surprise many to know that at the time of Partition, Hindus constituted more than half of Karachi’s population of four lakhs. Out of Sindh’s population of about forty lakhs, Hindus numbered thirteen lakhs. Of these, approximately eleven lakhs migrated to the Indian side. The migration from Karachi was almost total. Although a majority of the Sindhi refugees, constituting mainly the trading community, went to Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, they settled down in almost all parts of the country.

“Political analysts have often wondered why the Hindus and Sikhs who came from Sindh and Punjab so were quickly and easily integrated into free India and why, on the other hand, the Muslims who went from this part of India to West and East Pakistan were treated as unwelcome muhajirs for many decades. The only answer that comes to my mind is the age-old sense of cultural unity that binds Indians of diverse castes, communities and regions into a natural national entity. In the decade of the 1980s and ’90s, I developed this theme as ‘cultural nationalism’ and made it the subject of a countrywide debate on what defines Indian nationhood. Explication of this theme is an important aspect of the raison d’etre of this book.

Source: India Syndicate

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