Saturday, September 5, 2015

Editorial, "DAY TO CELEBRATE OR MOURN?" in LAW ANIMATED WORLD, 15 August 2015 issue, Vol. 11, Part 2, No. 15.

DAY TO CELEBRATE OR MOURN?

In the columns of this journal, dismay was often expressed at selecting and celebrating 15 August as the Indian Independence Day whereas the real celebrations should be to mark 26 January which was, ever since 1930, the fighting day for freedom of India from the British clutches. Also attention of the readers was drawn to the enormous genocides and destruction of ‘stuff and soul’ perpetrated on and subsequent to that day in the Indian subcontinent due to the criminal negligence of the British imperialists coupled with the crafty and selfish greed of the Indian (including Pakistani) political leaders at the helm in those days. The villain of the piece was of course Lord Mountbatten, actively assisted by Nehru and Patel whose hankering for power was incredible. Having ‘deputed’ the ‘one-man army of Mahatma Gandhi’ to look after the law and order situation in the Eastern part, which fortunately remained relatively quite calm, the cruel imperialists and their Indian vassals did not even arrange for adequate military protection to the people of the West who were divided into conflicting communities that were already seething with rage and revenge mentality against each other. Interestingly, while the then British Premier Clement Atlee had in his historic declaration to ‘Quit India’ gave time till June 1948, it was the last Viceroy and first Governor-General of India who advanced the date very arbitrarily, instinctively at a press conference, as he later confessed to the authors of ‘Freedom at Midnight’, just because it was the D-Day of Japanese surrender in World War II that followed the biggest genocidal acts in history by the American imperialists dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki quite wantonly and inhumanly. Incidentally, it was to be the first independence day for both India and Pakistan as per the Indian Independence Act 1947 and in fact the first two independence days were celebrated on 15 August only in Pakistan too. Hindu astrologers denounced it as an inauspicious day and so it seems the time was advanced to the midnight of 14 August, but all the same their ‘prognoses came true’! Well, anyway, this editor treats 15 August tantamount to a Mourning Day, which may at the best be marked as a Day for communal harmony. §§§

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