Partition was disastrous: Filmmaker

Nearly seven decades after the partition of India and Pakistan, Yavar Abbas, the veteran British-Asian filmmaker, writer, broadcaster and journalist, said the division of pre-independent India has proved disastrous for the sub-continent.

Ninety-three-year-old Abbas who worked for the BBC's Urdu service for over 70 years, came to the dusty-powerloom town of Malegaon on Saturday night to watch veteran actor Tom Alter's famous play, Maulana Azad, being staged at the fair-All India Urdu Book Fair organised by the National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL).

After watching the play on one of India's prominent freedom fighters who went on to become the first education minister, Abbas said: “The concerns raised by this great mind on partition…have all proved right and nobody neither the Muslim League nor the Congress paid any heed to Maulana Azad’s premonitions and those who accepted the partition were at fault.”

Earlier, Tom Alter also spoke at the book fair, emphasizing that the Urdu language didn’t belong to any particular community or religion. He proved his point by quoting verses from the Bible in Urdu.