The ruling regimes of India and Pakistan are whipping up nationalist fervour with massive celebrations on 14th and 15th August to mark the seventieth anniversary of ‘their Independence’. There’s an on-going campaign by the corporate media to instil a contrived pride and gratification for this independence. The euphoria imposed from the top will wane in days as the harsh realities of life come back to haunt the vast majority of the deprived peoples of the subcontinent.
One of the subcontinent’s most celebrated historian Romilla Thapar wrote some years ago that, “the later history is written the more authentic it becomes.” Todays advanced research techniques to discover the truths about partition has proved her point. The political, state, social and intellectual elites in India and Pakistan make a selective use of history and often engage in re-writing history in order to justify their projected notions and impose a narrow narrative of the events that serve vested interests of the ruling classes.
It’s also the seventieth anniversary ofthe ignominious withdrawal of British imperialism after centuries of rule over the entire Indian subcontinent, first through the East India Company and then by direct military occupation. This event was the culmination of a century of revolutionary struggles in the form of strikes, hartals and uprisings, uniting crores of workers, peasants and intellectuals behind a common banner.
What is concealed and omitted in the syllabi and history textbooks of these states are the revolutionary upheavals of 1946 where the sailors of the Royal Indian Navy revolted in Bombay, Karachi and other major naval installations. This uprising triggered revolts in the British Indian air force and the army. But more importantly it sparked the general strike of the workers and peasants across the subcontinent that paralysed the British imperialist rule and brought united India to the verge of a revolution. Such was the strength of this revolutionary insurrection that the British imperialists had to flee the subcontinent much before their planned schedule. And yet victory was horribly tainted; the retreating imperialist colonisers had left behind a poisonous legacy of communal mayhem, manifested in a brutal partition of the Indian subcontinent, leaving behind it the bleeding fragments of a hitherto united movement. This was the darkest episode in modern history for the peoples of the world’s oldest civilisation, especially for the peoples of Punjab and Bengal, which were torn asunder in the process. The trauma of the hot, humid and atrocious August of 1947 has lingered on. Seventy years on, the agony and pain and the horrors of partition still torment more than one and a half billion oppressed peoples of the region. The living body of a society that had survived numerous invasions, wars, natural disasters and calamities and co-existed in relative harmony for much of the past millennia was ripped apart. The gory stories of mass rape, harrowing slaughters and spilling of innocent blood have become deeply entrenched in the social psychology of these societies.
India with its self-proclaimed secular pretensions is in clutches of rabid Hindutva bestiality
The British had engineered partition, but it was the Hindu and Muslim elitist politicians grafted by the colonisers that connived in this act of uprooting whole peoples from their ancestral lands, and creating artificially contrived and unviable nations with combustible materials built into their foundations that were doomed to explode in future secessionist wars. Religious reaction was imposed in the wake of a revolution that could have gone beyond the stage of national liberation into a socialist transformation. This was the period when a revolutionary storm was sweeping across Asia and beyond, from China to the Middle East. With red China establishing itself across the Himalayas, if capitalism and landlordism had been overthrown in India too, then the imperialist stranglehold in Asia could have been shattered forever.
On the eve of independence Nehru in his ‘tryst with destiny’ speech had pledged: “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”After seventy years his pledge has rotted. India with its self-proclaimed secular pretensions is in clutches of rabid Hindutva bestiality. Partition in reality transformed what was left of India into Bharat.
Pakistan is in the throes of Islamic terror and crisis of the state, society and culture. It’s bourgeoisie’s key representative Nawaz Sharif in fact confessed the failure of the state to create a stable Pakistan in the last seventy years after he was deposed prematurely for the third term as the prime minister. But it’s the socio-economic system that Sharif represents that is pulverising the masses and has brought Pakistan at the verge of a failed state. The ruling elites with their political, bureaucratic and military protégés in India and Pakistan have wreaked havoc with the inhabitants of these dismembered lands.
The toiling masses have suffered for generations in the post partition South Asia. According to a UNICEF report, socioeconomic conditions of the masses are worse today than they were at the time of the 1857 Indian War of Independence. This region has twenty two percent of the world’s population, yet it hosts more than 40 percent of the planet’s poverty. These are two nuclear-armed states, yet 44 percent of children suffer from stunted growth. They are among the top ten buyers of weaponry and are amongst the lowest spenders on health and education.
Reminiscences of the horrors of partition are manipulated by the elites to perpetuate their tyrannous rule, incessantly inciting renewed religious and communal hatreds. The socio-economic crisis is burgeoning, with no hope of any progress or prosperity under this decaying system. Once they arise and enter the arena of history to transform their destiny, no force can hinder the movement for a revolutionary change. It will obliterate reactionary rule of these rotten elites, brutal partitions and the system breeding wars, coercion, terrorism and bigotry. The acrimonious legacy of imperialist divide and rule will be wiped off from social mind-set. Such a revolutionary victory in any country of the subcontinent shall spread across the region. It is the only way forward for the emancipation, prosperity and unity of the toiling masses of the region through the creation of a voluntary socialist federation of South Asia.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail. com
Published in Daily Times, August 15th 2017.