The television presenter Anita Rani will lead a delegation heading for the House of Commons this week to make the case for an annual day to commemorate the partition of India.

Dr Binita Kane, whose father’s harrowing story was among those highlighted in a documentary presented by Rani last year, My Family, Partition and Me, has called for the day to both “remember the cataclysmic events of partition and celebrate the contribution south Asians have made to British society”.

Kane, supported by Rani and Virendra Sharma, the Labour MP for Ealing Southall and chair of the Indo-British all-party parliamentary group, will make her case at the Westminster event on Wednesday.

“Before I took part in the documentary I was a fairly typical second-generation British Asian in that I hadn’t taken much notice of my roots,” Kane says. “I knew my father’s story but I hadn’t considered the human cost or how enormous the consequences of partition were.”

Kane’s father, Bim, and his family were the only Hindus in a predominantly Muslim village in what would later become Bangladesh. Forced into hiding, they were saved by a Muslim boy who risked his life to smuggle them to safety.

“My hope is that a day of commemoration will stimulate a much-needed conversation,” says Kane.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Dr Binita Kane: ‘I knew my father’s story, but I hadn’t considered how enormous the consequences were.’ Photograph: BBC/Wall to Wall Media

Partition has been described by the Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal as “the central historical event in 20th-century south Asia”, and Rani, who won a 2018 Royal Television Society Award for My Family, Partition and Me, agrees that there is a desperate need to remember an event that saw more than 15 million people uprooted in one of the largest migrations in history, and which led to the deaths of between one and two million, most of them killed in shocking acts of sectarian violence between the country’s Hindu, Sikh and Muslim communities.

“One of the reasons I made the original film was because I was really shocked how few people knew about this period of history,” Rani says. “After partition, India was too busy celebrating independence, Pakistan was celebrating the birth of nation, Britain was relieved to have been able to cut and run, so no one talked about how they’d got there and what had happened.

“It’s become this dark stain, but an event such as this could change that. It’s a way of involving not just the south Asian community but everyone in Britain in a reflection on the past and a conversation about what happened and where we are now.”

And there is evidence of a growing desire throughout the country for such a debate.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Muslim refugees sit on the roof of an overcrowded train near Delhi as they try to flee India in September 1947. Photograph: AP

“Since I first suggested the idea of a partition commemoration day I’ve been contacted by people from all kinds of backgrounds, young and old, Sikh, Punjabi, Pakistani, Hindu and white,” says Kane.

India after partition: then and now – in pictures Read more

“People have said ‘How can we move this forward?’ and offered their services and asked ‘Can I get involved?’ It’s really struck me how many people have a personal connection to the events of partition and want to discuss both what happened and what this means to those of us living in Britain now.”

For Kane’s father, who describes the events of 71 years ago as “like a raw wound covered with paper”, an annual event would help people to not only come to terms with the past but also understand how easily the bloody events following partition could occur.

“We lived in harmony and yet when the spark was lit the whole thing blew up and the hatred and division continues in bits and pieces to this day,” he says. “This project will allow people to remember the horrible things that happened and to learn from that. It will remind people so that it doesn’t happen again.”