Daily Times

The partition of British India still touches the deepest of nerves in India and Pakistan. Unfortunately, the debate focuses too much on personalities and events that were a sideshow to the true reasons for the division of the subcontinent. The true root causes of the partition are often left unsaid and the cost-benefit analysis thus stays incomplete or ideologically biased. Partition would not have resulted without imperial machinations that used the existing communal differences and manufactured adversarial relations to prolong imperial rule. However, divide et impera (divide and rule) was secondary to the imperial need for survival during World War II. It was WW II that created the circumstances for partition.

While conflicts between communities in South Asia always existed, to argue that the differences between Hindus or Muslims were so deep that a partition was inevitable is an expression of ignorance of pre-colonial history. The empire continued to use communal differences for its perpetuation. The first blatant step in dividing Indian communities came after the 1857 rebellion of the British Indian army. As the Peel Commission report after the rebellion shows, the colonial decision makers deliberately created a structure of recruitment and composition of regiments using ethnicity and religion to counterbalance different groups. The aim was to prevent future rebellions.

The second step was the beginning of the imperial census in 1881, which consolidated a diverse and complex population of the vast subcontinent into orientalist rigid blocks of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, et al. There is no evidence that a unified and monolithic Muslim community ever existed in India — just like no such Hindu animal existed. Linguistic, ethnic, cultural, geographical and historical differences divided the Hindus and the Muslims. The Muslims of the Frontier had no more connections to the Muslims of the Deccan or Bengal, as did the Hindus of the central provinces with Hindus of the South. The imaginary communities in India were helped in their imagination by the British Empire.

The manufacturing of group identities and promotion of political competition between them was a major contribution of the British Empire to India. The death knell to the unity and cooperation between communities was rung with the institution of separate electorates in 1909. With Muslims voting for Muslims and Hindus for Hindus, any need for political compromise and accommodation was removed by the ‘wise’ British. Extension of the deeply divisive separate electorates into the so-called Communal Award of 1932 to other communities, including the Sikhs, Parsis, Christians and “lower classes”, further ensured the divide between the communities.

The British colonial masters never allowed the true protection of minority rights by negotiated political settlement constitutionally. The sole method of alleged minority protection was to divide multiple communities of the subcontinent into fenced islands and ensure that different communities, instead of cooperating politically, remained at loggerheads! Furthermore, even if reservations of electoral seats was necessary for Muslims, Sikhs and other minorities (and I support the idea that groups should be proportionately represented in a democracy, instead of the winner-take-all approach that currently exists in South Asia and deprives smaller groups a voice in the system), the fact that only Muslims could vote for Muslims and Hindus for Hindus was a blatantly divisive strategy. A candidate by necessity had to become communal to fight elections!

Another point that has received little focus in the debate is the most critical reason, without which the partition of India would not have occurred: the need for Indian resources during WW II. The British mobilisation for the “Great War” greatly depended on India. During the war, more than two million Indians fought on both the eastern and western fronts. This excluded a large number of ancillary resources. For example, more than 200,000 Naga tribals were deployed as porters and carriers on the eastern front alone. Resources, including precious food (while a devastating famine was killing three million people in Bengal), were siphoned from India during the war. Princely states additionally poured in help in the form of war funding as well as state labour corps. India provided goods and services worth two billion pounds to the UK during WW II, becoming the largest contributor to the imperial war effort. Despite a shortage of wheat in India, the imperial masters had ordered India to supply 50,000 tonnes of wheat per month for British and Indian troops stationed in the Middle East and Iran. There was no way that the empire was going to let anyone interfere in India’s indispensable (and forced) contribution to the war effort.

It must be remembered that in the last decade of the 1930s, prior to the beginning of WW II, Jinnah and the Muslim League were marginalised and greatly diminished (the Indian Muslim League lay dormant for a majority of its existence after its creation in 1906; it rose to prominence only after 1939). The Muslim League had miserably failed in the Indian provincial elections in 1937. Its devastation was further compounded because, although it claimed to represent India’s Muslims, it received only 4.8 percent of the Muslim votes in the Muslim-only electorate. A political organisation with such miserable support could hardly be expected to win a state in less than a decade!

After the British failed to provide a guarantee that participation in the war would result in freedom for India after the war was over, Congress ministries resigned and launched agitation against imperial rule, including the Quit India Movement.

(To be continued)

The writer is a PhD holder and works for the Los Angeles Police Department. The views presented here are his own and do not represent the LAPD. He is also a professor of Homeland Security at the Colorado Tech University