In 1947, India was partitioned. My family was among the millions who crossed over from Pakistan, uprooted and empty-handed. I have heard stories of horror and hope directly from those who made that journey.It is from them I learnt that 56 male members of our immediate family were killed in the partition riots. Sons, fathers, brothers and husbands, all gone in a few blood-soaked weeks! Only the women, the children and a handful of surviving men reached the truncated soil of the new India. The women had to work to survive, but their spirits stayed indefatigable. Their courage took over their grief and within a generation, they bounced back.Migrant Sikhs didn’t just settle in Punjab. They went to Dehradun, Gorakhpur, Shillong, Mumbai, Kanpur, Indore and Nagpur and made those places home. Wherever they landed, they assimilated, built and prospered. They asked none for pity. They toiled and progressed, contributing to the nation far beyond their numbers.For decades after independence, there was no major discrimination against Sikhs that one can recall. Rather, their success was celebrated. From Milkha Singh to field marshal Arjan Singh, from Pratap Singh Kairon to Khushwant Singh, from Bishan Singh Bedi to Amrita Pritam, the stories were plenty.And then, an evil eye was cast on Punjab. For nearly two decades, it burnt. The community suffered. Lives were lost, trust disappeared, fear prevailed and the collective psyche was assaulted.The wound reopenedThis is the memory that Honey Trehan’s Satluj drags back into the spotlight. It revisits an era when militancy invited brutal repression and repression manufactured even more militancy. Between the two grindstones, ordinary people were reduced to nothing. Innocents were killed, branded terrorists only after they were dead and dumped into canals as “collateral damage.” A chief minister was assassinated. Police and security personnel were slaughtered.Also read: The Question After ‘Satluj’: Why Didn’t Habeas Corpus Work in Punjab During the Insurgency?The crisis had begun a decade earlier, with terror attacks in the early 1980s that led to Operation Blue Star, which cost the nation its prime minister. The horrors of the 1984 riots followed and every Sikh felt the wound, even those on whom it was not inflicted personally. An entire community was made to feel like a suspect in the very country it had laboured and bled to build.Just a generation earlier they had endured the pain of the partition and overcome it. And yet, this dark chapter threw their collective being into turmoil once again.There can be endless arguments over who is to blame. Yes, the militancy was real and murderous. Yes, the response to it was murderous too and thousands of innocent lives were lost under the cover of fighting it. Yes, all political leaders of the time must share the blame. History is not clean and honesty demands we say so plainly.But the arguments, however true, do not point towards revenge. They point towards the one road out of the fire: reconciliation. It was the reconciliation of the last three decades that led Punjab back to normalcy and healed the psyche of the Sikh community. The watershedHere is the truth that changed everything. Sonia Gandhi’s decision to make Manmohan Singh prime minister was the watershed: the mainstreaming of Sikhs after the militancy was complete. Sikhs were back as army chiefs. The director of the Intelligence Bureau was Sikh. The Chief Election Commissioner was Sikh. Secretaries to the Government of India were Sikh. The community was again entrusted with the guardianship of the republic itself. The worst was healed.This did not happen automatically. It was built, patiently, over decades, by people who chose healing over the easy harvest of resentment and hate.When Sonia Gandhi became the Congress president, she never tried to explain away the dark chapter of Punjab. A woman who had known the violence of politics through her own tragedies, she abhorred it in every fibre. That her children, Rahul and Priyanka, could forgive the assassins of their father speaks of her innate belief in forgiveness over hate.When she came to power, she simply went to the Golden Temple and bowed her head in silence at the supreme seat of Sikh spiritual tradition. No speeches. No cameras arranged for effect. Just a bowed head, an expression of regret and a community watching and understanding.When she chose Singh, the move needed no explanation. Here was a Sikh at the head of the Indian state, his faith not a disqualification but a non-issue. The people of India embraced him, praised him and loved him, precisely as their leader. That embrace was itself a statement: the Sikh community is integral to India’s ethos and the dark period is over.In 2005, on the floor of parliament, Singh apologised for the 1984 violence. He told the house he was ashamed that it happened, that it was a negation of the very idea of nationhood enshrined in the constitution. For a community that had waited two decades for the state to admit its mistake, it was catharsis. It was closure.Then, recently, came a gesture which was once unthinkable. Rahul Gandhi, grandson of the very prime minister whose assassination led to the anti-Sikh riots, went to Harmandir Sahib and performed seva (service) there for three days. Even though he has visited the holy site earlier, this time he stayed in the Golden Temple campus, irreverent to grave security threats. He said nothing and did not have to. The Sikh community understood the grammar of that silence, conveyed through conduct and conviction. It was not courage as a performance; it was courage as a belief, a belief in reconciliation and in love without exception, against hate and the politics of division.Though it was the Gandhis who walked the path, the import of reconciliation was understood earlier too. Atal Bihari Vajpayee understood it. So did other prime ministers like V.P. Singh, Deve Gowda and Chandra Shekhar. Across the political divide, a generation of leaders grasped one hard truth: the embers under the ashes must never be reignited. The duty of the state is to heal and to walk forward.What the world learntIndia is not alone in this discovery. After the 1994 genocide, Rwanda chose neither amnesia nor endless vengeance. It built the gacaca courts, where perpetrators confessed before victims’ families and communities decided how to take them back. After apartheid, South Africa chose a truth and reconciliation commission over the gallows, wagering that a nation heals faster when it hears the truth spoken aloud than when it watches the guilty hang. Neither model was flawless; both left victims feeling dissatisfied. Yet both grasped the deepest lesson: a society that only avenges its wounds guarantees that the next generation will have wounds of its own to avenge.Reconciliation in Punjab was built on truth-telling – on a prime minister’s willingness to admit shamefulness aloud in a parliament, on inquiries that named what happened. You cannot heal a wound you are forbidden to describe. The unbroken promiseMillions of Sikh families who suffered due to the partition assimilated into the Indian mainstream, endured the mistrust of the militancy years and came home again through resolution and goodwill. They wanted peace. They loved this country and worked and sacrificed for it. They have earned, a hundred times over, the right to never again be dragged through another cycle of insecurity, alienation and suspicion.Sikhs are an emotional community, boisterous and hard-working. Over the centuries, the salient values of Sikhism have drilled into them the capacity to endure pain and yet fight for justice, not only for themselves, but also for sarbat da bhala (the good of all). In the 1950s and 1980s, successive generations went through unimaginable massacre and strife and yet each time, within a decade, the community bounced back, serving the nation without malice. It was possible because Sikh values teach that all humans are one, ‘Maanas ki jaat sabhai ekai pehchaanbo’. The daily ardas (prayer) asks God to bestow discernment, endurance and faith, ‘Vivek Daan, Visaah Daan, Vishwas Daan’. That is why the community can forbear, forgive and forget.Also read: Satluj Was Taken Down From OTT, But Punjabis Have Brought It to Their Villages And BeyondThe Satluj is one of Punjab’s five rivers, the water that gives the land its very name. Rivers carry memory downstream. A film named after that river reminds us that the past cannot be censored out of existence; it can only be postponed. The only real question is what we do with the memory once it rises to the surface.Document the darkest chapters. Preserve them, so the generations to come may learn from them. That is the duty of an honest nation. But there is a line, and it is absolute: do not weaponise them to reopen the wounds. Whatever our politics, every political force in this country shares one non-negotiable obligation, which is to ensure that conciliation and healing never take turn back. That is why, Rahul Gandhi, on the last day of his Bharat Jodo Yatra in Srinagar, vulnerable to the forces of violence, physically and metaphorically, and challenging the politics of hate, said: “I want to say that I understand violence. I have suffered violence, seen it. One who has not suffered violence, has not seen violence, they will not understand it. So I say, those who incite violence, they can’t understand it, they can’t understand the pain. We can understand…[That’s why] our effort is to stand against the ideology that is trying to break the foundations of this country, we must stand against that ideology, stand unitedly, not with hate, because that is not our way, stand with love…remind the nation that India is a land of love, land of respect, land of brotherhood.”His words were not mere rhetoric. Dark chapters will remain permanently etched in India’s history. They will trouble the generations to come. However, the coming generations must flourish in peace and joy. The way forward is to confront hate and ensure a better future. The fifth guru of Sikhs, Guru Arjun Dev, who sacrificed his life, gave this message to humanity: “बिसरि गई सभ ताति पराई, जब ते साधसंगति मोहि पाईना को बैरी नही बिगाना, सगल संगि हम कउ बनि आई”(I have forgotten all envy of others since I found the company of the holy.No one is my enemy, no one is a stranger; I get along with everyone.)For those who are not aware of Sikh history, the fifth guru attained martyrdom when he was executed on the Mughal emperor Jahangir’s orders. Yet for next 100 years, the five gurus who followed him, never spoke of hate and never talked about setting the history right. They only spoke of humanity, of equality and of facilitating a just order, where everyone’s wellbeing is sought in words and in deeds.That is the true spirit of Punjab. Let that spirit prevail. The embers are banked. Let the wise leave them so.Gurdeep Singh Sappal is Permanent Invitee, Congress Working Committee.