POSTED BY Sundeep ON Aug 29, 2009 AT 01:58 IST ,  Edited At: Aug 29, 2009 03:09 IST

Ashis Nandy in the Times of India:

Jinnah demanded a looser, federal polity built around powerful provinces as a way out of partitioning the country. The Indian National Congress first accepted the idea and then ditched it. Paradoxically, the power that Jinnah demanded for the provinces was in many ways less than the power the chief ministers of some Indian states have exercised in recent years.

This background explains why, 60 years after the event, partition and the roles in it of individual leaders haunt our political culture. We are still debating in our hearts our birth trauma. We cannot accept that our midwives, too, were children of their times and spoke from within the colonial world in which they lived. We use them as archetypes to battle our fears, anxieties and self-doubts. We are what we are, we suspect, because of their choices, not ours. 

Read the full piece where he says he  looks "at the future with apprehension and fear that we may have already lost a part of our selfhood" at the Times of India

POSTED BY Sundeep ON Aug 29, 2009 AT 01:58 IST ,  Edited At: Aug 29, 2009 03:09 IST
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