New Delhi, Aug 25 - Indians' preoccupation with partition may be getting over with youths saying that it is a closed chapter and that the sacking of Jaswant Singh from the BJP over his book on Pakistani founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah finds little resonance in their lives.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), India's main opposition and the second largest party in parliament, gets into unseemly squabbles over Jaswant Singh's views on Jinnah, Sardar Patel and partition, the country's youth seem unmoved and even scornful.
What matters are jobs, the economy and their futures, said several students and professionals IANS spoke to. They are no doubt interested in reading and learning about the subcontinent's traumatic history, but then that's where it should be left -- in the past.
This view is shared by 31-year-old Guranchal Sethi, a Chandigarh-based businessman whose family migrated from Rawalpindi in 1947. The family still has property in the Pakistani garrison town, but Sethi and his family think it is high time that the ghosts of partition were exorcised.
Sethi says he doesn't remember when his family last discussed the partition, which led to the creation of Pakistan - a Muslim-majority state. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the clashes surrounding the migration of millions.
'Who cares now? It is over. The chapter needs to be closed. It doesn't affect us now. I am into the property business. I am more bothered about when property rates will stabilise, about infrastructure building, about my own financial security, my future,' Sethi told IANS over the phone.
'Everybody makes money and Jaswant Singh has perhaps also written the Jinnah biography... to make some. Why sack him? The BJP shouldn't have overreacted and made a hullabaloo about it; this should be left for academics to debate over,' he said.
Jaswant Singh, who has held the portfolios of defence, external affairs and finance in BJP governments, was expelled from the party after the release of his book 'Jinnah: India - Partition - Independence' in which he has placed the onus of partition not on Jinnah but on Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel.