Loosely speaking, riots are riots and all human suffering is a terrible tragedy. The broad similarities end there. History must go beyond broad similarities and take account of the specific features of each riot if it is to be a true record of events and a guide to future action. But individuals and communities have the much tougher task of finding ways of remembering the past and simultaneously putting pastbitterness behind them. How it is done is important. To some, the Akali politician who would like to hire the architect of the Holocaust memorial in Israel to build a memorial for Sikhs in India has the right idea. Others Sikhs don't think so. And so it goes on, the world over, the past disputing the present, the present the past. Envy the truly ahistorical individual who can walk towards the future without any troublesome baggage. Many in India for whom the Partition riots were sui generis will resent comparisons with other riots no matter how horrendous they were. Many will object to the intellectual laziness of politicians and others who claim many twentieth century genocidal killings, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda etc, are holocausts. To the individuals and communities involved organised racist killing has no other name. To the keepers of the Holocaust memorial in Israel, the word has a specific meaning for their people and for no others.

Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland and their political leaders have had to learn the hard way that memories and folk history mean the continuation of trauma. In that instance both sides have to surrender the past in order to live. Not so with the victors of the world wars or the Cold War. In their case, they have the power to write history and the rest have to cope as best as they can with their own memories and the demands of the modern world. All the countries occupied by the Japanese during the last world war have sooner or later demanded and received an apology for Japanese atrocities. British war veterans want apologies too. But the Japanese in turn have yet to hear the word drop from American lips. Instead, on the last anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what they got through most experts was a justification of President Truman's decision. It is somewhat different in Vietnam, where the Americans, pragmatically, have had to forget their bloody nose and get on with thebusiness of business. So in the end, history and memory remain with us. It is up to people, not politicians or historians, to decide what best to do with them.