Partition of India: Counterview
I have maintained in the teeth of casual or contemptuous dismissal of critics that the Partition of India was part of the grand design of an Empire in retreat.
Criously, this Independence Day, an event that frankly arouses little enthusiasm these days, a major section of vernacular newspapers celebrated the occasion with stories of Partition and of the mighty Vallabhbhai Patel manfully heaving as big a chunk of territory into our country as possible.
While the coincidence appears a chance event it is not unlikely that the RSS influence had some hand in turning things this way. For, they remain still absorbed in such memories. And, determined that others will be made to share this obsession.
Whether we like it or not the existence of three separate countries in the same sub-continent today is an indisputable reality. Any attempt to grab and pull their territory into ours will incur incalculable if not cataclysmic costs.
But living in the past in the present might compensate for today’s misery. Like dreams of Hindu spacecraft armed with Vedic hydrogen bombs. But it also casts a pall of mist on problems that call for immediate solution.
It is also a time for that section of people to revile the memory of those who are alleged to have connived at or colluded in the Partition. Gandhi or Nehru, or for that matter the entire pseudo-secular lot. Incidentally, it is on record that Sardar Patel had been the most powerful voice in Congress leadership in favour of Partition.
But fuelling this dream and the corresponding belief that the existence of such countries at our doorstep is transient and provisional have dangerous impact on policy that raise hackles across borders to our own loss. The arrogance and intolerance in the outlook are barely concealed by good manners and result in diplomatic errors as well as far-reaching economic and political damage.
These people ought to realize how fortunate it is that by sticking doughtily to a secular and syncretist idea of India our leaders have so far been steering a course unhindered by frequent interruptions like civil unrest, breakdown of law and order and military rule. India has been perceived by the world as a functioning democracy.
Also Read: Pakistan, politically incorrect solution of a communal problem
If that more or less safe passage is now under a threat it is only because some people are unhappy that the country has not embraced a religious-communal notion of statehood, and opinion still remains uncensored. In the two close neighbours thanks to the basic uncertainty that dogs the state the economy as well the politics there have an unpredictable character.It is also obvious that with the ascendancy of a particular ideology and its fanatics India has also started undergoing spells of turbulence. Hence it is pertinent to settle accounts with these intrusive guests who follow a different purpose.
Sane people have been doing just that for the last two decades in earnest, though the debate itself has been going on since independence. Like a machine they are set on course by an injection of ancient and modern myths, and are immune to rational argument.
And one modern myth is that some Congress leaders had brought about the partition knowingly. And they are obsessed with the idea of revenge against this betrayal. Had that been the case they would have been a prey to reflex action and turned India into a Hindu state. But they did not. Even Patel said firmly during debates on the Constitution that India is not a country of Hindus or Muslims, but of both.
So, it remains a matter of serious import to find out who had brought the partition about. The secular group commonly says that it was the fiercely communal Muslim League aided and abetted by RSS that engineered the calamity. But they had been purblind agents not the original perpetrators. And it is vital to nail the true plotters.
I have maintained in the teeth of casual or contemptuous dismissal of critics that it was part of the grand design of an empire in retreat. A scorched earth policy that incinerated lives of millions and caused untold harm and misery to more for decades. The intention behind it had been clearly spelt out by Maulana Azad in his INDIA WINS FREEDOM.
Also Read: Nehru, Jinah and Partition
The British had tried desperately to keep a toe-hold in the empire where they still had high economic and military stakes. Having failed in that attempt they used shady and dirty methods to put in place crooked leverage to serve the same purpose. Partition was that leverage though neither Hindus nor Muslims saw through it. I remember how puzzled I was in late sixties of the last century that among the British people, across all sections of opinion, Pakistan was favoured much more than India. Indeed that had almost become common sense.
Not that Atlee and the Labour government had much to do with it, or even that they had any idea about it. It was the old boys’ network, the old India hands, ensconced in higher levels of the bureaucracy and the police helped out by imperialist scholars who pulled the wires and moved the pawns for the dirty game. Certain Tory sections were of course in the loop. It is they who had carefully bred and nurtured Muslim separatism. Of course it helped that the continuity of feudal forces through land revenue exploitation kept intact the Muslim gentry as a separate group, used to privilege greased with polite manners and culture, accustomed to thinking of themselves as born to rule. The British conquest had left them suddenly defrauded of that right and 1857 saw an imperious upsurge to seize it back.
As the upsurge was still noticeable as ripples and unquiet eddies in mosques and Islamic seminaries, threatening to spill over into larger society,
Sir William Hunter in that seminal imperialist classic, THE INDIAN MUSALMANS, (1861), dedicated to one of the early masters of the masonry of the empire. Hunter pointed out the persistent danger from that quarter and proposed initiating a policy of accommodation and appeasement to corral substantial Muslim elite sections into defence of the empire. One early step was associating the enlightened Muslim gentlemen scholar Sayyad Ahmed Khan (later Sir Syed) in the design to win over the Muslims for the cause of the empire. Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) got shaped initially as an institution to groom young scions of the Muslim elite for high administrative posts and sustain orthodox Islamic studies, though its base later broadened to include middle and lower middle class elements.
For him it was only a matter of switching loyalties from a decadent Mughal Badshahate to the British crown and he played along, perhaps sincerely believing that the British will be tied to gentlemen’s rules. But the initial intention of using a co-opted Muslim elite as a prop of the empire gave place later to the grand strategy of keeping at bay the dangerous rise of nationalist claims to self-government. The latter was a predominantly Hindu and Parsee phenomenon. The Muslim feudal gentry were perhaps also disturbed that their erstwhile subjects aspired to a position of power above them.
As the freedom movement widened in scope and mass participation, especially after the advent of Gandhi, British rulers faced a much more serious challenge to their rule than before, it had become a really national movement with farmers and workers joining in large numbers. By late twenties of last centuries, the colonial rulers took advantage of the disarray in the Non-Cooperation Movement following the outbreak of violence among ranks of volunteers at Chauri Chaura to introduce a communal electorate on a considerably extended franchise. This was clearly designed to be manipulated by the rulers to divide Indians to the advantage of the empire.
The limited powers of the Govt. of India Act 1935 granted to natives were bitterly fought over by leaders of Congress and Muslim League with increasing rancour. Muslim separatism was no longer a mere possibility. It had become a full-blown reality. The Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS set up camp to complement and oppose the Muslim League. The War had drained the energy and resources of the empire forcing its votaries to depend more on intrigues and dark practices.
The Great Calcutta Killing of 1946 took place because - either on his own or on cue, Jinnah had asked his followers to win Pakistan by ‘Direct Action’. But, he did not explain how. In stead of ‘Direct Action’ against the empire, it turned out to be a series of bloody assaults on Hindus, provoking reprisals by the latter that killed many more Muslims than the Hindu victims of Direct Action!
By then there was no question of a united secular country emerging out of these disputes. On that fateful day, neither the Governor nor the Chief Secretary of Bengal, was available to call out the army to quell the riots. Partition became accepted in order to avoid more such violence, but in effect it resulted in even more savage and dreadful massacres.
As Hindus marched en masse from Western Punjab, North Western Frontier Province and Sind abandoning ancestral homes for an uncertain future in the new India, and Muslims did likewise from their homes in Indian provinces, to trek to Pakistan. But both the streams of migrants were waylaid and visited with barbarous violence and cruelty apparently by earlier victims of violence.
Hundreds of thousands perished and more suffered grievous injuries. Women were raped and then battered to death. Children were not spared. The Indian Army headed by a British Commander-in-chief stood by and were not deployed to stop the riots for several weeks as the horrific riots peaked and only then brought in. In Bengal, the calamity came in a series of convulsions, reducing the proportions of Hindus in the population of East Pakisran/Bangladesh 41% to 7%. In retrospect, it no longer looks like a messy disorderly transition but a directed disaster.
Jaliwanwala Bagh had underlined the unpleasant fact, not yet palatable to most British people, that the cause of the empire overrode all other concerns, including humanitarian ones, to the imperialists of the deepest dye. By design the scale and barbarity of this violence was bruited to the whole world as the price of their dream of freedom that the unruly and thoughtless Indians called upon their own heads. And the real culprits remained behind the curtains sipping port and puffing away at their pipes and cigars.
The Muslim League had played the game under British guidance. After all Jinnah had been called back from the bar in London to be the star player in the communal tournament the British had arranged under the Government of India Act of 1935. Ditching his former secular convictions he befriended feudal elements like the Talukdars of United Provinces and die-hard Mullahs steeped in orthodoxy to wrest as much territory and power as he could from the Congress which refused to align itself to a communal cause. This incidentally still provides the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha a handle to accuse it of Muslim appeasement.
But the British did not leave him a clue on how to keep these heterogenous forces together in a modern state. As he died shortly after fulfilling his dream of a Muslim country within the territory of the Indian empire, he was spared the trouble of building it up as a modern state.
Available evidence suggests that not being religiously inclined, but having used religion as a political tool, Jinnah would perhaps have been surprised by the power of the imp he had let out of the sealed bottle. His right-hand man Liaquat Ali Khan, who succeeded him as President of Pakistan was shot dead shortly after at a public meeting by unknown assailants, probably religious fanatics. But Islamic orthodoxy has been battling unceasingly with the tendencies of a modern state, leaving the army the sole power to hold the balance and maintain order.
By refusing to heed that lesson the RSS, and the Hindutva-vadis in general, always decry Nehru for not creating a mirror image of Pakistan in India. Nehru and his team strenuously steered India out of that fatal route. By doing so they have to a great extent avoided the imperialist trap. Hindutva-vadis have happily jumped into it. They may still have to pay for it by enveloping themselves and the country in the flames of violence and disorder. Imperialists of both yester-years and today are happiest when they can embroil a restive or unruly colony in disorder and violent chaos, as is now being revealed in Bangladesh. Unless the RSS introspect they will bring India to the brink of similar bloody chaos.
[The writer, Hiren Gohain, is a Political Commentator. The featured image used here for representation purpose is generated by AI.]
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