Partitioned Freedom by Ram Madhav.
The book offers us a new and different perspective on the most troubled and traumatized times of modern Indian history, from the beginning of the 1900s to India’s political freedom, in 1947. It focuses on the events, incidents and chronicles that led to the fractured, amputated and divided India, which was up in communal flares across the country raging with famines and extreme levels of poverty.
India’s partition was not a smooth and peaceful affair. It happened over the dead bodies of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Historians wrote poignantly that the Sindhu river flowed not with water but with the blood of tens of thousands of Hindus and Muslims. “It was the world’s largest and rarest exodus”, wrote Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in ‘Freedom at Midnight’.
The author also brings about an interesting and rather puzzling fact in the book when he mentions how Gandhi, in the early 1940s realizes that his Hindu-Muslim unity was backfiring, and he went on to the extent of offering to Jinnah that “You(Jinnah) take over the leadership of the whole country, but please keep the country united.”Jinnah out-rightly declined this offer given by Gandhi. Later, he told one of his biographers that “ you see I knew Gandhi well, He would have first thrown the British out, promising me the whole country, but later he would have thrown me out also”, “so I did not believe in that man” Such was the distrust that Jinnah had towards Gandhi.
The author stresses the fact that “one thing that we must keep in the mind is, we must not compromise with the separatist forces like the Muslim League, as we clearly encounter those statements even to this day. The Integrity and the unity of the country is something for which one should be ready to sacrifice the utmost”. Quoting how Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose upheld the unity and integrity of a United India.The author gives the impression that, if Gandhi had not forced his Hindu-Muslim unity strategy, which was successful in South Africa against the imperialist struggle; by understanding the communal realities of the subcontinent, India wouldn’t have got partitioned freedom.