The Human Race

I heard this yesterday on Radio 4 while driving to an immigration prison in Oxford, how appropriate:

I've just got back from holiday to a pile of mail that includes an invitation to a dinner on Friday organised by the Indo-Pakistan Friendship Society. It's to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the partition of the sub-continent to form the new states of India and Pakistan.
To me, it's a bit like a couple separated in a bitter and acrimonious divorce getting together to celebrate an anniversary of their parting. In this case the parting cost more than a million lives with millions more, including members of my own family, fleeing homes in which they had lived for generations. Previously friendly neighbours turned on each other in fear and politically induced hate. Overnight, Sikhs found that many of their holiest places of worship, including the birthplace of their founder Guru Nanak, were now in what seemed, an alien and hostile land.
On what might be termed the plus side, Britain found a convenient exit strategy to leave a difficult to govern sub continent, and ageing Congress and Muslim League politicians got the power they had long craved. As India's first Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru wrote in his memoirs, 'if we hadn't taken power at that time, we might not have had another opportunity in our lifetime'.
To me the partition of the sub continent was one of the most shameful peacetime acts of the 20th century whose reverberations are still being felt today, as are the fall outs from the arbitrary division of other lands in the cause of political expediency.
Even worse is the argument used to justify partitioning countries: that people of different religions cannot live peacefully together. The actual thrust of religious teachings is in the very opposite direction of showing respect to others. In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus reminded Jews of the goodness that can be found in neighbouring communities. The Sikh holy scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib includes uplifting writings of Hindu and Muslim saints to illustrate the same truth, and Guru Gobind Singh taught that we should look beyond labels like Hindu or Muslim or Shia and Sunni to an understanding of the oneness of our human race.
The tragic lesson of history is that people of different faiths all too easily allow themselves to be manipulated by the power hungry or in the cause of political expediency. It's a lesson well worth remembering in looking at today's turmoil in Iraq and other parts of our suffering world.

Indarjit Singh from Radio 4 - Thought of the Day