August is a month that brings both joy and grief to the 1.3 billion people of the Indian subcontinent. Joy, as we celebrate the end of nearly 200 years of British colonial rule in 1947, and sorrow as we remember the one million who were slaughtered unnecessarily in a genocidal frenzy of religious hatred. Punjab, my ancestral homeland, was sliced in two by the departing British to create the new state of Pakistan. In a few short months, the entire population of Punjab’s indigenous Sikhs and Hindus in Pakistan was either slaughtered or driven out by raging mobs of Muslim fanatics. On the other side of the border, there was more bloodshed.
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