Sixty-four years after they parted ways, their toxic past and violent split still continues to haunt India and Pakistan and hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the divide
By Asma Anjum Khan
Everything about India and its opposite is true, Mark Twain had said long ago. This may be why we have Formula One cars zipping around while our politicians are still not ready to get down from their raths. We all know rather too well that the last rath yatra of Lal Krishna Advani, who is said to have read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kempf in jail during the Emergency, was nothing but typically fascist shortcut to power and glory. This trend to couch fascist agenda in the garb of a democratic exercise has grown stronger with time.
The prophets of doom continue playing such games. Last “rath yatra” did not just leave behind a bloody trail but also wrote a new chapter in the history of communalism in India. Numerous Commissions of inquiry have acknowledged that in all those Hindu-Muslim riots after Independence, over 75 per cent of casualties in terms of life and property have been Muslim.
Let me state here at the outset my strong belief that the person who suffers in such grave situations is the Indian who may just happen to be a Hindu or a Muslim. This conflict between these two religious groups has been exploited by leaders of both communities. It has a history that had once changed our geography and the acidic chemistry between the two fosters serious conflict among our people, even today.
My attempt here is to glean references from various sources about the tragedy of Partition of India and to locate them within history, as it is linked to the larger question of peace in the region. The responsibility for this catastrophe in the subcontinent’s history has often been credited entirely to one single individual named Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Jinnah’s name immediately conjures up all the horror and devastation that marked the division of subcontinent to create the Land of the Pure.
Pakistan has never been the same since the 9/11 attacks on the United States that were quickly blamed on Afghanistan-based Al Qaeda militants. Islamabad had little choice but join America’s terror war. In any case, Pakistan never runs out of its usefulness for western powers. Now it seems, they can neither swallow it nor throw it up in disgust.
Eminent historian and cricket writer Ramchandra Guha in his book, India After Gandhi, [2007] argues that since 1947 Britain saw Pakistan as a potential ally in the Cold war and a strong bastion against communism whereas India was perceived to be soft on the Communist Soviet Union. Sir Winston Churchill, he adds, had endorsed this idea of Pakistan as a strong ally on Russia’s eastern flank as Turkey was on the western.
Such line of thinking should give us an idea about the real agenda and motives of the West. Guha cites former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s view that, “The defence of Afghanistan [from the Soviets] depends on the strength of Pakistan.” Any guess why the Af-Pak region is so important for the West today?
Jinnah: the gambler who lost by winning the bet [Photo: Wikipedia]
We in India have always had a love-hate relationship with the Western neighbour of ours. ‘Pakistan was created to blackmail India’ was the line that made me dig deeper into this conundrum called Partition and which never fails to titillate our imaginations to this day . Given our uneasy equation with it, Pakistan has always perplexed me, the generation born after the event. especially when some terrorists with affiliations to our neighbor strike. Right from my childhood, when I used to have agitated moments to witness my uncles get all excited over Pakistan’s victory in cricket matches to the present times when this very name spells disaster or it is made to appear so, it has never ceased to confound me.
Indeed, we Indian Muslims have a very complex relationship with Pakistan. Most of us would account for the fact that, at one or the other stage of our lives we have been made to feel guilty for the debacle of Partition. In India painting us all as Pakistani sympathizers, or worse, traitors comes easy for some. It seems we simply cannot escape it. As a youngster it was impossible for me to comprehend the logic behind it but as times went by, the medley of assorted pictures began taking shape in the mind.
Eventually the mind began wondering, how a nation as grand as India could be cowed down into being carved up into two halves? How illogical, it seems to me even today! While thinking this aloud and overheard by a friend, her tongue in cheek comment was, “That world famous lunatic Toba Tek Singh too might have felt the same way!” So be it.( Anyways, I can always find consolation in George Bernard Shaw‘s (1856-1950) cryptic remark about the United States that “An asylum for the sane would be empty in America!
Toba Tek Singh, they said, was mad. The Partition too was a lunacy that was perhaps never seen before in history. Millions of lives were lost and more were displaced. This humongous tragedy has cast its shadow on the Indian Muslim psyche in a way that cannot be even imagined by the rest of the world. We have paid a heavy price as our loyalty to the country permanently remains under a cloud of suspicion.
Here is an attempt to understand this whole business of Partition, which still haunts many of us and for which we Muslims are squarely blamed and made to feel guilty every now and then by the religious and political bigots this side of the border. Indeed, this has become the proverbial albatross around the neck of the country’s largest minority. M N Roy, a 20th century philosopher, freedom fighter and founder of humanist movement in India in his essay on Muhammad Ali Jinnah in Independent India, September 19, 1948, maintains that Jinnah was not the only one responsible for the Partition, “But he was not the devil of the drama, as he was made out to be.”
Roy further details about the man who is considered to be architect of this catastrophe by majority of the middle class India, saying that, “The fact, however, is that, if distrust and hatred of the British were the hall mark of patriotism, Jinnah was always as staunch a patriot as any other Indian. The more that fact was willfully ignored by his opponents and he was maligned and misrepresented deliberately, the more was Jinnah naturally embittered and spitefulness became the motive of his politics .But even then his ambition was not to gain political power but to avenge the wrong which he believed had been done to him.”
Roy then offers an incisive analysis of the effects of Partition on those Muslims, who were left behind and who in their right mind, never did fancy going to an alien country. My grandfather was one of them. He was personally invited by Jinnah to join Pakistan but refused outright.
But the tragic irony of the situation is such that the epithet ghaddar [traitor] has stuck with us. As Khader Mohiuddin, a poet from Hyderabad, puts it like this,
Long before I was born
My name was listed
Among the traitors,
Where circumstances “make me a refugee
in the very country of my birth.”
Commenting on the absurdity of questioning Indian Muslims’ loyalty, which has forever remained under doubt, M N Roy wrote: “The establishment of the largest Muslim state meant, leaving many millions of Muslims in the lurch. Having been fighters for Pakistan, the millions of Muslims left in the Indian union are in the most difficult position. Most of them feel betrayed. Jinnah was fully conscious of that tragedy, which must have haunted his last days. Indeed the homeland for the Indian Muslims was a Utopia; any territorial division was bound to leave many millions of them out in a very delicate position of being regarded as aliens, suspected of disloyalty to the land they must live in.”
This whole business of their loyalty being under suspicion is something that simply bewilders Indian Muslims. We are forever in the dock. Khader Mohiuddin captures the predicament rather well:
My religion is a conspiracy
My prayer meetings are a conspiracy
My lying quiet is a conspiracy
My desire to have friends is a conspiracy
My ignorance, my backwardness, a conspiracy
On the other hand, says Khader
It’s no conspiracy
to make me a refugee
In the very country of my birth
It’s no conspiracy to poison the air I breathe
And the space I live in
It’s certainly no conspiracy
To cut me to pieces
And then imagine an uncut Bharat!
The part I liked most with reference to the relationship between cricket and India-Pakistan equation comes here:
Cricket matches weigh and measure my patriotism
Never mind my love for my motherland
What is important is how much I hate the other land!
Thus the Indian Muslim has been carrying this cross of partition around his neck since it transpired. An interesting fact lesser known perhaps is that, out of the 522 Indian soldiers who died in the Kargil war, 38 were Muslims, which makes them 10 per cent of the total Indian Muslim population, which implies that more Muslims died in that manufactured war of Kargil. Now let’s see what Jinnah thought about the ‘left over’ Muslims’ plight, as Roy explains, “An intelligent man like Jinnah must have foreseen this tragic consequence of what he demanded.”
Roy therefore categorically declares Jinnah to be ‘innocent’ of this historic blunder. He adds, “Therefore, I for one do not believe that he really wanted partition of the country. Like a gambler, over confident of his wits, he staked high, believing that the other party would compromise on his terms. That he would have been for the best of all concerned. But the latter having taken up the attitude of all or nothing, Jinnah was driven to the bitter end – of gaining a victory he himself dreaded and which he did not survive.” [1981:34]
Roy was a legendary figure of our independence movement and his words carry a lot of significance. He has essentially captured the dilemma of Jinnah and the Muslims. Another stinging reality is that Hindu and Sikh refugees who were forced to leave their lands and belongings in Pakistan and came to India, were willingly assimilated here without much ado. However the same cannot be said about those who left their country of birth for the ‘Promised Land’. The common perception is that they were never made to feel welcome there and are still referred to as Mohajirs. There it is the Punjab and Punjabiyat which dominates everything and everywhere. This refusal to integrate the migrants into their land is something that negates the very basis for which Pakistan was created. So unfortunate for a country which was created in the name of Islam whose first teaching is about universal brotherhood as all men [and women] come from that one man named Adam.
Prof. Sunil Khilnani, Director, King’s India Institute, London, admits in his book, Idea of India, that the trend to dump the responsibility for the division of the country on the Muslims by Hindu nationalists is quite old. And the modern research has, in his words, only “complicated” the picture.
Prof. Khilnani probes the reasons behind this sense of alienation in the minority community in decades and years before the Partition. He observes that the Muslim demand for a separate state deepened as a reaction to the practical experience of the Congress rule in key Indian provinces following the 1937 elections which fostered a sense of alienation among the Muslims. The Congress governments were heavily influenced by Hindu nationalists consequently losing the trust of the Muslims. This convinced them that in the post British India, they would be under the thumb of the majority community.
VD Savarkar: Architect of the two-nation theory [Photo: Wikipedia]
Besides, Jinnah, once a veteran Congress leader and a passionate champion of the Hindu-Muslim unity, had come to the conclusion that peaceful co-existence for the two communities had become impossible. It was the same theory that was propounded by Guru Golwalkar and Veer Savarkar, the ideological parents of the extremist Hindu nationalist movement. Savarkar was even linked to Mahtama Gandhi’s murder but let off for lack of evidence. While Muslims have squarely been blamed for far too long for the cardinal sin, many in turn blame the likes of Golwalkar and Savarkar and their mindset. With Savarkar becoming the president of Hindu Mahasabha in 1936, the organization began to aggressively propagate its theory of the Hindu nation. Savarkar writes in his book, Hindutva [1923] that a Hindu is one who acknowledges Hindustan as his Pitru Bhumi [fatherland] as well as his Punya Bhoomi [Holy Land]. Effectively it means that there can not be a Hindu nation with foreigners like the Muslims, Christians and the Parsis, who had their religious holy places outside India. He was also the first to propound the two-nation theory, referring to the Hindus and Muslims as two separate nations. Ironically though, it’s Jinnah, not the Hindutva’s proponents, who has ended up as the villain and architect of the two-nation theory.
Indeed, like the Nazis, Golwalkar et al believed in racial purity and Aryan supremacy and approved and admired Hitler’s methods to ‘purge’ Germany and achieve racial purity. Golwalkar had also objected to the honouring of Abdul Hamid and the Keelor brothers for their bravery during the India-Pakistan war since they were not Hindus.
To comprehend the complexity of the whole issue, we must first understand the genesis of hatred and mistrust that had come to develop between the two lead players, Hindus and Muslims. Nirad C. Chaudhury, the late Indian author who made Britain his home, is the zeitgeist who has captured the pre-Partition ethos superbly, in his widely acclaimed work, The Autobiography of An Unknown Indian [1951]
He for one rubbishes the theory that it was the British who fanned the flames of enmity between the two communities. He claims the seeds of hatred were sown much before the British arrived in India. He debunks the much popularized theory of Hindu tolerance terming it clearly to be only a myth. According to Chaudhury, the first description of Hindu nationalism that he found in was in Abu Raihan Alberuni’s Kitabul Tarikh al Hind. Alberuni had earned the sobriquet of being the world’s first anthropologist and founder of Indology, for his amazing description of 11th Century India. He had accompanied Mehmud of Ghazni on his Indian conquest and finished writing his Kitabul Hind, around 1030 CE.
Al-Beruni is considered founder of Indology. [Photo: Wikipedia]
Alberuni observes that the high pride the Hindus had over their “better than the best religion, land and philosophy is palpable in their behavior.” The Hindus, he writes, “fight with words, but they will never stake their soul, or body, or their property on religious convictions. Their fanaticism is directed against all foreigners. They call them malechchha, i.e. impure, and forbid having any connection with them.” (380)
This concept of the pure and impure is ingrained in the Hindu psyche at a very deep level and it’s one of the chief reasons for its discrimination against its own kind–this distinction of high and low among the people on the basis of their birth. Alberuni further observes that the hatred of the Hindus against Muslims intensified with the Muslims making inroads in their land.
Commenting on Alberuni’s observations about the much celebrated Hindu tolerance, Nirad Chaudhury confesses, “I was shocked when I read Alberuni’s account of Hindu xenophobia for the first time, for I had been nurtured in the myth of Hindu tolerance and catholicity. But subsequent reading and inquiry has convinced me that Alberuni was substantially right. “[380-381]
Chaudhury also refers to a Sanskrit poem written around twelfth century which is full of, in his own words, “a lamentation over Muslim depredations….and punctuated by a liberal abuse of the Muslims.”[381] The Hindus, he says, seemed to struggle against this rising tide of Muslim conquests but with little success. “The Hindus”, Nirad Chaudhury analyses, “were never hopeful but perpetually haunted by a premonition of defeat and had more fear of the invincibility of the Muslims than confidence in their own powers.” [382]
Chaudhury further notes how a Hindu king when he succeeded in defeating an Arab army was awarded the title, Resister of the Irresistible. He makes another valid point when he attributes the birth of Hindu nationalism in the course of this ever losing battle of the Hindus against the Muslim tide to a growing ‘sense of defeat’ among its adherents. He describes this nationalism as a weapon of the defeated and a product of frustration on the part of the Hindus. The Hindu, Chaudhury argues, always clung to his ‘disloyalty’ as he considered it as an expiation for his services to the foreign ruler, which he took to be against his convictions.
On the other hand, the Hindu, he points out, “was also confident that one day his day will come without risking life, worldly possessions and ease, so he didn’t invest in a premature revolt, he waited. His time came, when the Muslim political power weakened in India at the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth, and Hindu nationalism rose in a flood to the political plane. The Hindu (then) exultantly stamped on the head of the exhausted enemy.”[385].
Chaudhury, however, points out that the Hindu was ready to accept the Muslim if he gave up all his Islamic values and traditions and sent invites, many times over saying:
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?
The modern Hindu, according to Chaudhury, felt aggrieved when the Muslim was not fast enough to accept his invitations. He adds the ‘clear-sighted’ Muslim responded thus :
Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.
Would not, could not, would not, could not, and would not join the dance.
Mani Shankar Aiyer, well known Congress politician and former diplomat, who has extensively written on the issue agrees; suggesting that the Hindutva mind is not ready to accept the Muslim unless he sheds his Musalmaniyat. In his Confessions of A Secular Fundamentalist [2004], Aiyer argues that in accordance with its ideology and Golwalkar’s legacy, the Sangh Parivar wants all the minorities of India to call themselves as Hindu Muslim or Hindu Christian, and expects them to feel proud of being so.
This nomenclature and approach to existence, the Sangh Parivar reasons, would “purge” the thought process and way of life of the minorities–purged of all that the Sangh Parivar regards as ‘impure, retrograde, perverse’ or even sinful! The Muslim, however, has refused to ‘merge’ himself with ‘them.’ Some feeble attempts on their part have met with cold response from the Fundoos, the name given by Khushwant Singh, the grand Old Daddy of Indian journalism to the Hindutva fanatics. He also calls them “Professional Community Haters,” pointing out time and again that what the Hindu right is doing is absolutely against the spirit and ethos of India.
The fact of the matter is that when diverse people of varied races, faiths, languages and traditions come to live together, some tension and friction and even violence is unavoidable.
Nirad C Chaudhury‘s insight into the Hindu-Muslim equation is fascinating and helps us understand the roots of this conflict and the social and ideological factors that dictate our communal behavior even today. This social, psychological and ideological Hindu-Muslim rift eventually formed the basis and genesis of the tragedy of Partition. When the split eventually took place, its far reaching ramifications and consequences proved too overwhelming even for its chief architects.
I have always wondered and still do, how any one in their right mind and spirit would agree to cut his/her country into two bitter halves? Maulana Abul Kalam Azad‘s anger after Nehru and Gandhi agreed to it is well documented in his special
It is said that Jinnah’s isolation in the Congress and the growing dominance of conservative Hindu leaders including Gandhi in the party also played a role in paving the way for the Muslim alienation. Jinnah, it is said, had once protested that the idea of Pakistan was ‘foisted’ upon him by what he called the Hindu public opinion. So this blame game for fracturing a country is almost as old as the Partition itself. Nirad Chaudhury has blamed Gandhi’s Swadeshi movement as responsible to some extent for furthering the divide along the religious lines.
Khushwant Singh in his treatise, End of India [2003] endorses it by claiming that, “The Indian Freedom Movement was biased against the British as it was against Muslims.”(47) He also categorically affirms that “Muslims have as much right to this country as anyone else. If they are foreigners, we all are. The only people who are indigenous are the adivasis, whom we have all but made extinct.”[131]
Singh declares that the Muslims cannot perpetually be made to pay for the sins of some of their rulers, who were more concerned about their empire than the common people.
One of the most intriguing and mysterious factors about the Partition is also that the job of dividing the country was entrusted to a lawyer from England, Cyril Radcliffe, who had neither travelled much outside of his country nor knew much about India and its traditions and history. There are huge misgivings then and even today about the lines drawn on the map. But then any other arrangement would have seemed just as awful.
Cyril Radcliffe had an unenviable task to be completed within a deadline. The trio Nehru, Sardar Patel and Jinnah reportedly insisted on a timeline for the work of dividing the nation. The man tasked with the unprecedented project, who literally divided and carved out India in two parts was as befuddled as some of us might be about the complexities and intricacies of nuclear physics. W.H. Auden, the eminent Anglo-American poet (1907-1973) describes the devastation and mystery of the great drama of Partition, at the hands of a diffident Radcliffe in a most haunting way,
Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot. (200)
The predicament of Radcliffe is understandable. What makes little sense is the haste and desperation of India’s nationalist leadership to go along with the dissection of the motherland. Radcliffe was asked to draw the stripes on the basis of ‘contiguous majority areas.’ Other ‘unnamed factors’ were also under consideration. However, it is well established documented now that none of these factors were addressed. Not surprisingly, prodded by a guilty conscience, Radcliffe wrote to his stepson a day before the so-called tryst with destiny, as Nehru famously described in his midnight speech, to tell him why he was planning to scamper away soon:
“Nobody in India will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and travelled and sweated-and I have sweated the whole time.”
–The Idea of India (P..201)
However, the 80 million people whom Radcliffe imagined to be thirsting for his blood were rejoicing in Delhi, the capital from where the Muslim sultans and emperors had ruled for nearly a thousand years and where the first Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru was having his “tryst with destiny.”
What I find intriguing is why those celebrating multitudes failed to see the Great Game being played out in plain sight.
In conclusion, it could be argued that the Hindu-Muslim split was a historical fact. What the Partition did was to bring it to the fore like never before.
As Khilnani argues, “the pornography of borders, an imagery that at once excites, actually existing and aspiring nationalisms [separatisms] with the fantasy of fulfillment, and must always leave them with permanent disillusion, the melancholia of endless corridors of no man’s land.” [P..165]
Remarkably, this disillusion, this melancholic concoction of hybrid emotions exists on both sides of the divide, even today. This catastrophe of Partition still has enough ammunition to perpetuate the historical enmity between the two nations. Bonded by their bitter past and present, they are locked in a perpetually antagonistic relationship.
Even today Bollywood’s reigning superstar Shahrukh Khan gets the unwanted compliment of carrying self–proclaimed Nishan-e-Imtiaz ‘[the highest civilian honour of Pakistan] by Bal Thackeray, the fire-spitting rabble-rouser of Shiv Sena. In the past, Thackeray ran a similar hate campaign against another reigning Khan, the greatest of them all who preferred to be called Dilip Kumar in the post Partition times, tormenting him to return his Nishaan-e-Imtiaz, in a most humiliating way.
Throwing the slur of Partition at an Indian Muslim and linking him to Pakistan in some way or the other is still the worst insult that can be heaped upon him. Sixty-four years after Independence, little has changed.
I am reminded of Emperor Babur’s verse, the man who laid the foundation of the Mughal empire in Hindostan:
Is there one cruel turn of Fortune’s wheel, unseen by me?
Is there a pang, a grief my wounded heart has missed?
–Like A King on Chessboard
What hurts me the most is the fact that this tragedy and all the bloodshed and all the suffering that went with it could have been avoided, had there been a will, on the part of the leaders on both sides. When my friends from across the border express their huge admiration and awe for everything Indian and say they are dying to see the country, this sense of loss is accentuated.
If only the Partition had been averted and had the ABC plan by the Cabinet Mission sent by British Prime Minister Clement Atlee been accepted, the subcontinent would have been a better place today. The Cabinet Mission proposed a loose federation of three provinces, each of which was given the option of opting out of the federation when they pleased. The Congress rejected it after first accepting it, which made the Muslim League to renounce constitutional methods and declare Direct Action Day, on August 6, 1946. This set in motion an unstoppable cycle of events leading to the split. The killings that began with the Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta continued for the next 13 months.
Another mystery is Lord Mountbatten‘s declaring independence for India and Pakistan, a year or so before the scheduled time. The British under their Viceroy Lord Mountbatten perhaps were avenging the Muslims for their role in the first war of independence of 1857 that almost would have deracinated the British forever from East of Suez. They settled scores with the Muslims once and for all by cutting them to size and not just cutting their country into pieces, thus dealing a deadly blow to their economic, social, cultural and most importantly religious positions.
The effect is felt even today, after a lot of proverbial water has gone under the bridge. Jinnah was offered a state with empty coffers and Gandhi‘s insistence to give Pakistan its dues, proved fatal for him. “Both India and Pakistan are my countries,” he is said to have insisted. “I am not going to take out a passport for going to Pakistan!”
Those words sound so anachronistic, even absurd today.
The toxic legacy of the past continues to bedevil the two countries. It continues to hold us, especially the Indian Muslims, to ransom. Our best bet is to go an extra mile to win our Hindu brethren’s hearts, making them realize that the well being of the largest minority of our country is to the advantage of our nation.
This should be a mutual effort which will help build a strong, prosperous and peaceful India, for us all–we the Indians. The wounds of the past can’t be allowed to fester forever. There must be an end to this madness, this lunacy of communalism.
As for Pakistan, its creation might have been a tragedy for many in India and it may have its hands full of woes and warts of its own making but we cannot wish it away. A strong and stable Pakistan is in the interest of a strong and stable India and peace and stability in the subcontinent. Let us strive in our own small ways for this. Let peace prevail in our lands. Alternative to peaceful coexistence is mutual destruction.
—
Asma Anjum Khan is Assistant Professor of English in Maharashtra
Bibliography:
1 . The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, Nirad.C. Chadhury,Viking with JAICO Publishing House,1997 (first published:1951]
2. The Idea of India, Sunil Khilnani, 1998 [Penguin]
3. India After Gandhi, Ramchandra Guha, 2007, [Macmillan]
4. The Men I Met, M N Roy, 1968, [Janta Publications]
5. The End of India, Khushwant Singh, 2003, Penguin Books India.