Dear Express reader, Last week began with India’s celebration of August 15 and kicking off of its commemoration of 75 years of Independence amid stormy winds whirling in the neighbourhood. The Taliban swept into Kabul to turn the clock back and complete its return to power in Afghanistan even as, under President Joe Biden’s leadership, the US beat an ungraceful retreat. At home, too, it is not as if a tidy space or time was cleared for the celebration and commemoration. There is the continuing pandemic, the third wave a looming spectre still to be confronted and slayed. The abrupt adjournment of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, ahead of schedule, reverberates uncomfortably, reminding us of the unfulfilled promises and possibilities of deliberative democracy. The Pegasus snooping controversy could not enter the House, nor could the people’s representatives talk at any length about other pressing issues that had queued up at its doors, from the management of the public health emergency to the widespread economic distress and the renewed political calls for a caste census. August 15 is an annual milestone and ritual and there is nothing controversial about a nation marking its 75-year anniversary. The same cannot be said, however, about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s announcement made on August 14, that it would henceforth be observed as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day. That announcement seemed to underline that India must choose how to remember — and that this choice is a consequential one. Because, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote on our pages: “The logic of Partition and the logic of freedom are fundamentally incompatible. One traps us in compulsory identities, the other lets us define ourselves. One sees fellow citizens as a potential threat, the other as a resource to build something special. One wallows in the past, the other is oriented to the future. One concentrates on the true foundation of national greatness, the other creates an impostor-like substitute. One is premised on fear, the other on hope. One on violence, the other solidarity”. Former foreign secretary Shyam Saran wrote: “If the intent is to cast India-Pakistan hostility in stone… it can only spawn negative domestic political consequences while seriously limiting India’s foreign policy options”. When we remember the Partition, “can we remember the thousands of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who risked their lives to save their neighbours from the hate…?” asked human rights activist Harsh Mander. As the week drew to a close, came news of another kind of remembering, another sort of memorialisation. On August 20, Friday, PM Modi laid the foundation stone, virtually, of the Parvati temple and inaugurated several projects in and around the Somnath Temple complex. It gave him the opportunity to dwell on a theme he evidently favours, which links the present with the past: Of destruction and creation, of building New India on old debris, as an act of grand remaking and reconstruction, and therefore, a showcase for great strokes of power, not incrementalism. “… we have built modern pride on the ruins of the past, and have given shape to inspirations drawn from the past”, the PM said. The project in Somnath, headed by the Shree Somnath Trust, of which the PM is the chairman, runs alongside different and yet similar projects elsewhere. Of these, the Ram temple at Ayodhya, which has played such a seminal role in the BJP’s political rise and rise, is the most high-profile. But more quietly, the large-scale Kashi Vishwanath Dham corridor project in Varanasi, which is also the PM’s constituency, is racing ahead of it, to completion by November end. In UP, again, on August 1, Home Minister Amit Shah laid the foundation stone of the 150 crore Vindhyachal Corridor Project in Mirzapur, which is also an expansion and redevelopment project with a temple at its centre. Politics is often more about forgetting, but all remembering is political. As India turns 75, what it remembers and how it commemorates, is one of the most crucial choices before its leaders and its people. Till next week, Vandita | 
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