At 75, spectre of Partition haunts India

The Idea of India is under erasure as democratic institutions and secular values continue to dwindle under tremendous pressure from communalist absolutism.

In the novel Midnight's Children , as his body slowly disintegrates into dust while being trampled by millions of Indians, Saleem Sinai, the tragic hero of Salman Rushdie’s fictionalised account of post-Independence India, prophesies that his death marks not his end but the perpetuation of the destiny of India where generations of midnight's children like him will live and die like him. Because, he says, "It is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace."