Nationhood can't be built on charity alone

The suspicious timing of Justice S Muralidhar’s transfer revives the old question of whether Partition solved anything. Putting it differently, can Hindu and Muslim live in harmony as equals in the new India that we fondly believe was born on August 15, 1947? It’s a personally pertinent conundrum because of childhood memories of Delhi and communalism, family traditions in East Bengal that I didn’t experience but whose constant retelling shaped my consciousness, as well as of experience in Calcutta.

In the late 1940s, my father was attached to Pandit Hridya Nath Kunzru’s railway inquiry committee and began a peripatetic existence

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