121 POSTS
Rama Lakshmi is Editor, Opinion and Ground Reports, at ThePrint.
She did her graduate program in museum studies and African American civil rights movement from University of Missouri, St Louis.
She was the India correspondent for The Washington Post for 27 years, and won the American Society of News Editors Award in 2005 for her coverage of the tsunami disaster.
She can be reached at Rama.Lakshmi@theprint.in
Imtiaz Ali showing Hindu and Sikh retaliatory violence without adequately establishing the provocation, the trigger, the sequence of events is a form of false equivalence. It’s the classic whataboutery move dressed as balance.
Genuine historical honesty would require showing what came first — Direct Action Day, the League’s deliberate instigation, the systematic targeting.
The sequence matters because reaction without showing the provocation that caused it is manipulation not balance.
Proportionality matters too — who organized it, who had political backing, who had state support.
Showing Hindu and Sikh violence without that context creates a false picture. It implies spontaneous communal savagery rather than communities defending themselves under extreme provocation after suffering enormous losses.
Real honesty about Partition requires showing the full sequence. Instead Ali made a selective morality tale dressed as history.
And the question worth asking Imtiaz Ali directly is simple:
Why does your courage always seem to flow in one direction?
A memory studies scholar who doesn’t interrogate the historical accuracy of what’s being remembered has left the most important question unasked. By her own framework…memory is shaped by what gets included and excluded …the real question is what Imtiaz Ali deliberately excluded.
She’s admired the architecture without checking the foundation