August 15th: The Festival of Collective Forgetting
August 15th is not a day for celebration. It's a day for paying attention. We turn 1947 into a morality play—bad people did bad things, good people tried their best, everyone learned important lessons about tolerance. Case closed, problem solved.
Except we are ignoring the instruction manual buried in the wreckage, assuming that the threat died with the event.
Start with the numbers everyone skips past: 1.5 million dead. Tens of thousands of Hindu & Sikh women raped. Twelve million forced from their homes. Human beings whose only crime was living on the wrong side of a line someone drew on a map.
Was this collateral damage from some unfortunate misunderstanding? No. This was the predictable outcome of a specific strategy, executed by people who wrote down exactly what they were planning to do.
The Muslim League didn't hide their intentions. Their pre-Partition posters explicitly portrayed Hindus & Sikhs as enemies to be eliminated. Their National Guards stockpiled petrol for arson attacks. In Sindh and Punjab, they spent years manufacturing grievances to justify what came next.
I'm going to state this more bluntly than most people are comfortable hearing: Partition wasn't a tragedy. It was a successful military operation disguised as political necessity.
Savarkar understood one thing that Gandhi didn't: appeasement doesn't prevent conflict. It guarantees it.
Which is why while Congress leadership was busy making concessions to "avoid Partition" Savarkar was asking a different question: what happens to Hindus when negotiating from weakness becomes a habit?
His answer, written decades before 1947, was: "Never stop your struggle for United India, or there would be many more Pakistans in future."
The 'inevitability' of Partition was manufactured through a precise sequence of escalating demands. Each step built deliberately on the last:
- First, they demand separate electorates—just for fair representation, of course.
- Then they need special privileges to protect that representation.
- Then those privileges prove that coexistence is impossible.
- Then selective violence drives out the minorities who might disagree.
- Then they project the majority's inevitable self-defense as proof of their communal nature.
- Each step follows logically from the last, creating inevitable momentum toward an 'unavoidable' conclusion.
Then they repeat it in Kashmir. Then Bengal. Then Kerala. Then wherever demographics and ideology align for the next land grab. Every time Hindu identity weakens in a region, demands for geographical separation follow.
Forgetting has already cost us much. Within weeks of independence, 90% of Muslim soldiers moved to Pakistan and the new state immediately launched the Kashmir invasion.
Shatrubodh isn't paranoia. It's pattern recognition. It's the ability to recognize ideological hostility early, assess methods accurately and organize proportionate defense before emergency becomes crisis.
Shivaji Maharaj understood this when he retaliated against cow slaughter. Guru Gobind Singh built it into the Khalsa ideal. Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1909 that "some day the Hindus may have to fight the Muslims and must prepare for it."
They were not advocating aggression for aggression's sake. They were studying outcomes. The moment Hindu society lost that instinct, appeasement got rebranded as "national unity." The Lucknow Pact of 1916 opened the doors for Muslim appeasement that led directly to Partition. Gandhi's offer to hand the entire government to the Muslim League to "avoid Partition" virtually guaranteed it would happen.
Partition isn't a closed chapter. It's a mirror India must look into every day. Hindu society's choice remains stark: cultivate shatrubodh as disciplined, ethical alertness, or keep discovering piecemeal how many more ways a civilization can be vivisected.
Savarkar's counsel becomes the only rational closing line: "Let us hope for the best—but let us be on guard." The alternative is discovering that some lessons are too expensive to learn twice.
