The 19th hole of Delhi Golf Club was no different. A usual I was nursing my wounded pride after the very first round at that prestigious course. My playing partner who was paired with me, an elderly gentleman in his mid-seventies, was a long time member. And he appeared visibly pleased to see that his home curse was too much to take for a visiting outsider.

After a sadistic post-mortem of the worst among my shots of that day, conversations shifted to other topics such as my work in Japan, politics & education. While talking about my exposure to the practice of education in Japan I passionately quoted Gandhiji’s famous thoughts on the subject and how Japan is a showcase of implementing that class model of education, which we have abandoned. The gentleman, whose name has escaped me, nodded his head in reverence and said that Gandhiji was truly a great man; a great philosopher and an educationist to the core. I reciprocated too with genuine respect that I held Gandhiji in for his seminal work in the field of education. But it was also a customary lip service that we Indians pay in hush hush tones whenever the redoubtable Mahatma is mentioned. When the two Chinese meet for the first time, probably they do not discuss the darker side of Mao, all the while nursing and hiding the fact that they lost at least one member of their family on the mother’s side or the father’s to Mao’s Cultural Revolution genocide. That is the case with all National Mascots made larger than life by the state propaganda whether it is Stalin or Mao or a Gandhi. So as the two Indians meeting for the very first time we found it rather politically incorrect to start sharing side-splitting and horny Gandhi jokes, which all of us have heard in the good old days at school.And then I asked the gentleman if he remembered the day when Gandhi was killed. “How can you forget something like that? I remember it as if it was yesterday”, he continued. “When I heard the news that Gandhiji was shot and died, suddenly tears started rolling down from my eyes”. And then came an unexpected bolt of lightning from nowhere as he said, “Do you know the reason why I cried? I cried because I wanted to be the one to shoot and kill him and now that someone else had done it already, I would never get my chance”. The shock evaporated the copious amounts of alcohol I had ingested up to that point and it took me a few seconds to grasp the full force of that statement.

Obviously this discussion had stirred some hidden passions that I did not know about nor could relate to as the second generation born after the fateful event that was so far away from the memory. I could not understand someone feeling so strongly and radically about it after a passage of sixty years. This gentleman was a successful businessman and apparently affluent now. And what would have been his age at that time, barely fifteen? Can a boy so young be capable of harboring such sentiments and dreaming of pulling a political assassination of the century? I was completely clueless and curiously asked him to elaborate on what he had just said. He continued, “I grew up in the pre-Partition India in Lahore, now in Pakistan. It was a Muslim majority region that saw the worst massacres of Indians by Islamists demanding Pakistan with the Direct Action in which regular people came out on the streets to kill their non-Muslim neighbors. I was in 9th grade and as I walked to school each morning there would be a new pile of dead bodies in the streets of the people killed during the night. To escape that crazy mayhem, people in large numbers had already started their exodus to Punjab & Delhi. We decided to stay back until the final exams would be over in March so that I could continue my education in Delhi where I had many relatives. However the mass killings did not stop and it became very difficult to attend school too. The teachers and students decided to participate in a non-violent protest rally at the local police station to appeal for providing protection to non-Muslims preparing to give up everything behind and leave. However our protest rally was met with bullets from the local police that consisted of Muslims and they were obviously supporting the carnage. I ducked in the gulley by the roadside as the bullets were flying, my school friend who was by my side was hit by one and died on the spot. We did not wait for the exams to get over and fled to Delhi. In Delhi I was given the responsibility of going to the railway station everyday and receiving any relatives who might arrive on one of the trains from Pakistan. Everyday, to my horror, I saw trains full of blood and gore of the people killed on their way to Delhi. The Islamists would stop the train by the Ravi River by, and the hapless kafirs would be looted and hacked to death without getting the chance of making it across the border. My cousin traveled with our servant, who was an Afghan, acting as his bodyguard. But at the Delhi station this Afghan was all alone and in tears apologizing that he too could not save my cousin from being dragged away to be killed. The Afghan was spared for being a believer of Islam. After Partition I once went to Patna where I had a chance to listen to a public address of Gandhiji. I was hoping to hear some words of hope from our great leader but I was shocked to listen to his speech and could not believe my ears. Gandhiji was insisting that of the locomotives inherited from British Railways there were still 200 that belonged rightfully to Pakistan and that Indian Government should part with those. Then he went to stage one his famous fast-unto-death theatrics for his demand. Gandhiji had already forced the handing over of Rs. 55 crores to Pakistan from India. It had already occurred to me at that time that the killings of over 2 million Indians before and after Partition was a contract killing that the Indian taxpayers must pay off. And now the old man was insisting on handing over additional locomotives to Pakistan. And for what purpose? May be so that they could efficiently ship the bodies of Indians being slaughtered in Pakistan. I thought that the guy was thinking and acting completely out of place and time, and there and then I decided that I must kill him before he made another of his costly mistakes. And I was not alone who felt that way; anyone who suffered the holocaust of Partition wished that that man was better dead than alive. Gandhiji was squarely responsible for lending legitimacy to that Islamist bloodletting and sovereignty to a new enemy state that became free to graduate from fighting Indians with sticks and knives to the weapons of its choice including the nuclear ones. Gandhiji was punished in his lifetime for indirectly endorsing the killings of millions of Indians and counting”, he concluded.

I was numb from listening to this startling narrative from a man who had been there, had seen it all and I really had no words to respond. I tried to offer a lame suggestion that if Gandhiji were alive today probably he would be fasting for sharing India’s nuclear arsenal with Pakistan. We laughed heartily to that and cheered to the fact that we could put a comic twist to this harrowing story, and did so with a brand new Gandhi joke. Can anyone imagine Gandhiji endorsing violence? But political figures are no saints and are schizophrenic bundles of contradictions and of controversial blunders. Gandhiji allegedly beat up his wife Kasturba on more than one occasion and refused to sleep with her after he began his quest for Mahatma-hood. So the God of Non-Violence and of Domestic Cruelty walked hand in hand. Jaswant Singh is presently being flogged for exposing the dubious role of Nehru and Patel during the Partition, which was probably played in all eagerness to ascend to the inviting throne of Free India as quickly as possible. However in an objective scrutiny of this history it is very tough to play favorites with anyone who was at the helm of India’s destiny at that time. No one shines as a hero except for the unheralded army men, brave Samaritans and the doctors who tried to save as many lives as they could and the heroic survivors who lived to tell the true story to the next generations. All leading political figures of the time including Jinnah appear more like villains responsible for that tragedy unsurpassed in the long history of India. But it is not a true account of history that decides the title of national heroes and villains. That is decided by the political craft of trivialization, glorification & vilification known as the State Propaganda.

In the present controversy, by focusing on Jinnah and Jaswant, the real culprits are getting away scot-free again. Those are of course the Islamists and the subsequent governments pandering o them in the legacy of Gandhi and Nehru. The Islamists are relentless in their demands and are used to being served on a platter every time. First it was demand for a separate state but that did not create the elusive friendship with India and Indians. Then there were demands for a special status for the Muslim majority in Kashmir, which also did not lead to its integration with India even after pouring disproportionate amounts of money for the welfare of Kashmiris. On the other hand the Kashmiri Muslims looted, killed and raped the Indians in Kashmir to scare them away from the valley and to lead the life of refugees in Jammu or elsewhere. Then there is a long list of demands as a minority (?) including not accepting a Common Civil Code and insisting on the continuation of a separate Muslim Personal Law. It means that the shariah, jihad and obscurantist fatwas issued by mullahs supersede the constitution of India. The pampering of Islamists continues unabated, in exchange of Muslim votes, in the form subsidies for Hajis, a separate Haj Terminal at Delhi airport and other economic sops funded by the Indian taxpayers. Within 60 years of the Partition, Islamists have succeeded in creating a ‘State within a state’, a communalist Islamic State within the secular Indian State, thereby setting a stage for another Partition within a couple of decades. This a communalist frenzy and killings must stop and there has to be a humanitarian solution to this problem. But the onus for curbing the Islamists and to begin a process of trust building lies squarely with the Muslims in India and the politicians.

Indians need to make a choice between national integration through the Indianization of Islam or meekly submitting to the Islamization of India. The Nehruvian government has conveniently opted in favor of the latter. And as a result our children stand to face unthinkable horrors in the foreseeable future or even worse, a nuclear war.