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Partition was a historical necessity
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Friday, 13 August, 2010, 12 : 36 PM [IST]
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P N V NAIR
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There were no winners and losers, no heroes and villains. Partition of India was a historical necessity. Be honest, does anyone want Pakistan to be part of India? Sixty-three years after Independence (or partition), we are still pointing accusing fingers at our honourable leaders who had fought for our freedom. At least half-a-dozen books are written every year on India’s freedom struggle, most of the Indian authors blaming Mohammed Ali Jinnah for the partition. If anyone has a kind word for Jinnah, his book becomes controversial and the author is sure to face the wrath of the countrymen. A senior leader like Jaswant Sigh was kicked out of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for his rational assessment of the role of Jinnah while partly blaming Nehru and Patel for the partition. Lal Krishna Advani lost the BJP’s leadership for paying obeisance to Jinnah at his grave during a visit to Pakistan a couple of years ago. Two recent books on Jinnah —“Road to Pakistan, The Life and Times of Mohammed Ali Jinnah” by B R Nanda and “Jinnah and Tilak, Comrades in The Freedom Struggle” by A G Noorani – retell a familiar story with riveting details about the twists and turns in the politics that led to partition. While Nanda sees Gandhi’s triumph as the triumph of a charismatic leader’s mass politics, Noorani presents Gandhi as a ruthless politician who could not tolerate rivals. He thinks that Jinnah did not get his due for his sterling qualities. He is highly critical of Gandhi’s cunning ways of dealing with opponents, and Nehru’s sheer dislike, impatience, and even hatred of Jinnah.
Jinnah was more English than Muslim. He was identified as a man who did not believe in religion, one who lived the life of a westernised gentleman. He did not accept the view that Muslims needed reservation or any other special treatment. But later he became a victim of circumstances. He could not stand Gandhi, the toothless man in loincloth, who he thought was working towards the Congress retaining an upper hand, and Jinnah would not have it. Nehru was dismissive of both Jinnah and the Muslim League because he was too convinced of his confused socialist blinkers. It was only from 1937 that he had championed the cause of Muslims as a separate nation. He had made it clear that Muslims would not co-exist with Hindus. And in 10 years’ time he had created Pakistan.
Britain won World War II with the Allies, but lost its colonies one by one. Britain was so broke after the war that it decided to grant freedom to the colonies. Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, came to India with a clear mission – to hand over power to the locals as early as possible. Within hours of setting foot in India, he was privy to the bitter divisions within a once-united freedom struggle. The Viceroy found the idea of dividing British India frightening and potentially disastrous. Daniel Lak, author of India Express, gives a vivid description of what the Viceroy had to confront with. “Mountbatten was awed by Gandhi, by his ability to appeal to the religious nature of Indians and his commitment to non-violence. But the Viceroy soon learned that the frail old campaigner in his loincloth was the toughest and least predictable of Indian leaders. As of Jinnah, the British aristocrat and the Muslim lawyer did not get on well at all. Mountbatten found the future founder of Pakistan ‘cold, very cold’ and ‘impossible to argue with… a psychopathic case.’ He was drawn more to what he saw as the reasonable attitude of Nehru. Patrician, moderate and eloquent, Nehru had more than a little of the British upper crust about him.”
Eventually, in early June 1947, one of Mountbatten’s advisors came up with a plan to divide the sub-continent – over Gandhi’s objections – into two states, India and Pakistan, that would remain within the British Commonwealth as independent dominions. “Jinnah was ecstatic, Nehru reluctant but resigned to such a solution, Gandhi withdrew from the talks in sorrow, giving the process his grudging consent,” writes Lak.
Mountbatten acted quickly and set August 15, 1947, just two months ahead, as the day British rule would end on the Indian sub-continent. It was a wholly arbitrary decision. Mountbatten later wrote that he decided on this rigid and impossible short timetable in the hope that it would focus minds and minimise bloodshed.
Both the bloodshed and political wrangling that accompanied partition should have been anticipated. Millions were killed, dislocations were immense as millions left ancestral lands and travelled through hostile territory to reach an unfamiliar and uncertain haven. It was a two-way genocide — Muslims expelled and ravaged their Sikh and Hindu neighbours in what would be Pakistan, and Muslims were killed, maimed, raped and beaten in India. Trains carrying fearful refugees were stopped by armed gangs, and later carriages bearing only corpses would pull up at the main stations in Lahore or Amritsar, on either side of the sundered land.
Partition was painful and Gandhiji paid with his life in less than six months after the country became free. He was assassinated by Hindu fanatics amid accusations that he had compromised on partition and was soft on Muslims. After independence the Mahatma’s role became irrelevant. Had the Mahatma survived long, he would have become a liability for the country and an embarrassment for Nehru who was busy laying the foundation of a modern India. Likewise, apart from paying a ritualistic homage to the man who created Pakistan, most Pakistanis have not been too interested in Mohammed Ali Jinnah the Quaid-I-Azam. He died of TB in September 1948. While India became a Secular Democratic Republic, Pakistan became an Islamic state much to the dissatisfaction of Jinnah. He had believed that Muslims would not co-exist with the Hindus in an undivided India. But look at Pakistan where Muslims are killing Muslims. The majority Sunnis are killing Shias (and vice versa) and Mujahirs, Muslims from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who had migrated to the promised land in the wake of partition. A nation founded on hate and intolerance cannot prosper and Pakistan is the best example of this popular dictum. The Army and feudal landlords continue to run the country even as it degenerates into a lawless, fratricidal state where Muslim extremist groups like Taliban, Lashkar-i-Toiba have made the civilian government powerless and irrelevant. To the outside world, Pakistan is a failed state, a rogue state. As well-known columnist M J Akbar had written in one of his columns, “Indian Muslims should thank Allah that they are in India and not in Pakistan.” On the contrary, despite decades of poverty, corruption, occasional political instability, war (Pakistan waged four wars with India) and man-made and natural disasters, India is alive and is emerging as an economic superpower.
Well, this writer considers partition as the best thing that could have happened. Even after partition, India had the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia. According to latest population studies, the global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that one in four people in the world practises Islam. Of these, 202 million are in Indonesia, 180 million in India, 164 million in Pakistan and 145 million in Bangladesh. That means if India was not partitioned, the country would have got about 489 million Muslims, the combined Muslim population of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. This is a very huge number and would have been difficult to manage. It is my fear that instead of one Pakistan now, there would have been half-a-dozen Pakistan’s within India, each demanding separation from the Union of India
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