‘Now It Can Be Told’ is the story of deception and glory which some political leaders in India surrounded themselves with to cover their erroneous policy decisions and acts of omission and commission, which were responsible for plunging Bengal and Punjab into troubled waters.
After Partition, Hindus of Punjab in general and Sikhs in particular have complained about their problems remaining unaddressed; they blame the leaders for throwing them to the wolves in their quest for grabbing power.
The Sikhs have suffered the most grievously. From being rulers of Punjab that spanned from Delhi to Khyber Pass, a little more than a century ago; they have for the past two years become wanderers. Unable to call a single district of Punjab as their home.
Can there be a single instance cited, where a strong and large religious community like the Sikhs lost the Holiest of its places to others?
This book is a faithful account of day-to-day occurrences in Lahore and other parts of Punjab during the critical period of 1947 when the fate of India was being decided by its leaders and at a time when Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus underwent untold miseries and hardship.
This book should be treated more as a souvenir of Partition than as a treatise on history.
This book is being reproduced without any editing or changes.
It is an important document for understanding the circumstances and facts during Partition.
Only the lot of the refugees is unenviable. The glow of freedom is certainly not found on their faces. They have lost their everything; their homes and hearths, their kith and kin, their properties, moveable and immovable, their religious shrines and sacred places hallowed by the blood of their martyrs and their accustomed ways of life and living. With their scanty resources dwindling fast, with the snail-like pace of rehabilitation and with the blasted career of their children staring them in the face, they are living in the daily dread of worse and worse things to come.
The objective of writing this book is to rouse the conscience of the country, giving it a glimpse of the hell which the prosperous and proud people of North-West Pakistan had to suffer in those critical days and to appeal to the leaders to learn from their past mistakes and take determined and suitable measures in hand to undo the evil effects of the greatest ‘wrong’ of history.