This year, India and Pakistan will be marking sixty years since India and Pakistan's Partition. Whether or not the Partition should have taken place will remain an open and unresolvable question on all sides. But that the Partition resulted in mass-scale violence and displacement, with personal and family tragedies still touching the lives of millions, is beyond dispute. Likewise, that these memories influence the contemporary relations of Muslims, Hindus and other identity groups, is beyond dispute. How is the Partition remembered, how are those memories connected to communalism today, and how might those memories themselves be used to build and bolster peace?

The 60th Anniversary in 2007 will be one of the last when survivors will be around and active in recounting their stories. The Center is working with Indian partners to go beyond its initial success -- the August 2005 Revisiting Partition Seminar-Consultation in Delhi (see www.revisitingpartition.org) -- and take advantage of this unique opportunity. The Partition of India and Pakistan and the subsequent Partition establishing Bangladesh were followed by increasing levels of communal riots and violence, culminating in 1969, 1992 and 2002. The Partition is still a source of tensions that occasionally erupt into Hindu - Muslim and other communalist-oriented clashes. These riots not only threaten the world's largest democracy; they threaten the stability of the entire region. Notwithstanding the enormous reserves of human talent and hardworking people that could make India a supreme success story of economic development, the communal violence has a most negative effect on the risk analysis assigned to India. The riots cost Indian entrepreneurs billions of dollars in the capital markets, thereby lowering profits and thwarting Indian competitiveness in global international trade. These avoidable riots undermine Indian development in many other ways.

Our August 2005 Delhi Consultation attracted over 200 activists, public figures, journalists and scholars who evaluated the issue of historic memory in present day relations between the countries on the subcontinent, as well as between Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Christians, Muslim and Christians, different castes and others. It aimed to identify pathways to reduce these tensions, highlighting countervailing forces to communal violence and tensions. The Consultation confirmed that we can use sensitive historic markers such as the Partition as a positive contribution towards peaceful cohabitation and economic and human development.

The many discussion panels included scholars, government officials, business leaders and activists who generated expert discussion on the topics of Partition, remembrance, and cooperation between countries in the region around the time of the sixtieth anniversary. The project had the backing and support of the Indian Government and will involve cooperation of a number of other universities and institutions that are involved in peace movements in India and Pakistan. Follow-up events along interdisciplinary lines are already underway, building on the connections made at our event in August. Organizations with whom the Center has established ongoing connection in this project include the Seagull Foundation for the Arts in Kolkata, and the Henry Martyn Institute in Hyderabad.