JOIN USHow much of the past should a society remember and how much should it forget?
Indian politics is obsessed with history – from movements to renaming towns, to fighting over medieval emperors, and holding undying grudges from centuries ago. The fallouts from the British colonial era and Partition are a timeless favourite: During West Bengal’s acrimonious election campaign, Home Minister Amit Shah claimed that infiltrators from Bangladesh were “eating” the rice that was meant to go to the natives. He had earlier called the alleged infiltrators “termites”, and the entire citizenship registry exercise was merely meant to avenge Bengal’s difficult history of partitions and cross-border migration.
Meanwhile, Hindu nationalist warriors across the country have been seeking to avenge Partition ever since it happened, holding that Muslims have no right to be equal citizens in India because they “already have Pakistan.” And crimes against liberty that took place during the Emergency are often cited as justification for any authoritarian action in the present day.
In the midst of such fiery politics, here’s a radical idea: Shall we as Indians simply agree to bury the past and forget about it?
As crazy as this may sound, it’s not unheard of elsewhere in the world. In the early 1990s, in Rwanda, the majority Hutu community mercilessly slaughtered the less numerous but more prosperous Tutsi minority. In the aftermath of the genocide, Rwandans have tried to forget that recent history.
Researchers found that while many people remembered the genocide (because of how it upended their daily lives), they were actively trying to forget the ethnic tensions that led to the slaughter. Some Tutsis even objected to monuments commemorating the victims because it brought back painful memories. The post-genocide Rwandan government – run by a Tutsi leader, Paul Kagame – actively tried to teach its citizens that ethnic differences were not innate to Rwandan society, having been created by Belgian colonialists in order to ‘divide and rule’.
Why was such an effort to forget the past accepted by people who had lost their loved ones in a genocide? Researchers found that many Rwandans, across ethnic lines, believed that it was simply wiser to forget the ghosts of the past, so as to be able to live with one’s neighbours without being haunted by their possible role in the violence.
This isn’t just the story of Rwanda; similar efforts to bury difficult episodes of history have also taken place in Poland, Ireland and even South Africa, where Nelson Mandela famously emerged from prison after 27 years, willing and ready to forgive those who put him there. (Mandela went so far as to defy his own vote bank, to declare that there shall only be a non-racial South Africa, rather than one dominated by his black voters. That kind of ‘unwise’ politics would make most people scratch their heads in India today!)
The case for forgetting difficult episodes from history is only stronger in a country as vast and complex as India. Much of Indian identity politics is driven by historical communal tensions. But this is only made worse by the fact that Indian history is extraordinarily complex, full of contradictions and heavily contested. Parts of Indian history are often craftily twisted by politicians – to build a sense of victimhood among any and every community.
None of this is to say that a country should not learn from its history, if only not to repeat it. But the line between learning from history, and avenging it, is extremely thin. At the end of the day, the pride of the dead should matter far less than the fate of those still alive.