Partition Horrors Day to CAA: BJP has tried to weaponise 1947 for electoral politics – By Shoaib Daniyal
On India’s 75th independence day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that August 14 would now be marked as “Partition Horrors Remembrance Day” in memory of the victims of Partition “who were subjected to inhuman circumstances, suffered torturous treatment” and “could not even receive a dignified cremation”.
…. rather than a commemoration meant to act as a balm to these wounds, the BJP seems more interested in using the event as a way to push communal politics in the present day. Following Modi’s announcement, the party and its impressive social media apparatus selectivity presented Partition as an event with only Muslim aggressors and Hindu victims.
The idea was clear: to get Partition to feed into the BJP’s current-day Hindutva messaging, a large part of which is based on the idea of Hindu victimhood, which argues that the past millennia has seen India’s Hindu majority community victimised by its Muslim minority. This isn’t the first time the Modi government has mined Partition for political use….
