DEHRADUN: Witnessing the harrowing scenes of the 1947 Indo-Pak partition genocide still haunts those who lived through it, and for 84-year-old Shanti Devi, it’s a haunting memory. As an eyewitness to the massacre, she now faces a bitter moment as the Dehradun district administration has ordered the evacuation of 17 families, including Shanti Devi’s, from Kabul House.
This property of Shanti Devi is situated in an upscale area of Dehradun for the past 75 years and it has been declared as the ‘enemy property’, a term which is mainly used to describe assets belonging to individuals or organizations considered enemies of the state. It was somewhat two weeks ago when the Dehradun District Magistrate Court had issued orders to vacate Kabul House within 15 days, as reported by its occupants. And after a 40-year legal battle between district officials and residents, a decision was therefore finalized this week which prompted the authorities to enforce the evacuation and seal the homes.
Despite this, those 17 families are not made homeless as they have been shifted to a make-shift by the Nainital High Court, which has also allowed the locals to vacate their villages and the looming winter presents them with an uncertain and challenging future. Among the displaced families, the story of Shanti Devi, a survivor of the partition violence, stands out. Born on May 31, 1939, Shanti Devi vividly recalls the horrors she endured as an eight-year-old, witnessing her family being brutally attacked by rioters during the Indo-Pak partition riots.
“There was a large residential area in Peshawar’s Nowshera Cantt in Pakistan where we lived. As soon as the riots started, armed Muslims reached there in large numbers and said, ‘You all come out of the houses; you will not be harmed,’ but when we came out, they started stabbing everyone. I was eight years old, and I was holding my mother’s hand when rioters stabbed my mother to death in front of me,” recounts a distraught Shanti Devi.
