Yet another rash of programmes has erupted marking the anniversary of yet another of Britain’s disastrous foreign policy decisions. At midnight on 14 August it will be 60 years since Nehru, as the prime minister of newly independent India, pronounced those fateful words, ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’
Yet another rash of programmes has erupted marking the anniversary of yet another of Britain’s disastrous foreign policy decisions. At midnight on 14 August it will be 60 years since Nehru, as the prime minister of newly independent India, pronounced those fateful words, ‘A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.’
The trouble in the subcontinent was that there was no single ‘nation’, no united community, no historical tradition of a unified country. Independence brought with it Partition, declared on the following day, as the only way to reach agreement between Nehru’s largely Hindu Congress Party and Jinnah’s Muslim League. Its architect, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, was an English barrister who was flown in specially from London to do the job and given only four weeks to draw up the lines that would create Hindu India and Muslim east and west Pakistan. Changes were being made to where the dividing line fell until just moments before Nehru delivered his speech.
In Crossing the Border (Radio Four, Monday) Hardeep Singh Kohli, the strangely attired kilt-and-turban-wearing Sikh who grew up in Glasgow, returned to Ferozepur in the Punjab, home to his family until 1947, when his grandfather and father fled to safety in Britain.
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