“The Great Partition”, as Oxford’s Yasmin Khan calls it, was designed to end communal warfare between Muslims and Hindus that had engulfed India during the closing years of the British Raj. Instead, it reinforced “the estrangement of the two nation states.” What followed was a far cry from the “hopes and dreams of Swaraj and Pakistan which people [had] rallied to in the 1940s.”
Within two months, Pakistani tribesmen invaded Kashmir to liberate it from the clutches of ‘Hindu-dominated’ India. A carefully crafted myth was set forth that “an external enemy” was “waiting on the borders to subsume Pakistan.” This appeared to create “a useful bond” to hold the diverse peoples of Pakistan together. The psychosis of fear would lead to decades of military dominance in Pakistan.
Ruefully, Khan says that in the ten years that have elapsed since the book was first published, “relations have not improved between India and Pakistan; indeed, many would argue that relations have deteriorated, and prospects for reconciliation seem ever more remote. Pakistan is deeply afflicted by Islamist militancy and sectarian violence; whilst India’s government under Narendra Modi has continued to hitch neoliberal development to a vision of a Hindutva future.”
She writes that Partition cannot simply be regarded as a historical event. Both national capitals have produced one-dimensional versions of the past and invested in perpetuating false memories. In Pakistan, the event is shown as consisting entirely of martyrdom, courage and victimhood. In India, the creation of Pakistan is regarded as the triumph of religious intolerance.
There is no memorial to commemorate the sacrifices of those who died or who were uprooted and traumatized. Partition, imposed from above, “has never escaped the stain of illegitimacy that marred it.” In the rush to unmake British India, there was a “complete abnegation of duty towards the rights of minorities” and a “failure to elucidate the questions of citizenship.”
Five distortions of memory were carried out. First was the claim that Pakistan had Mughal lineage. As Partition approached, a prominent leader of the League, Begum Ikramullah, recalled walking past the tomb of Emperor Humayan with her husband and looking wistfully at it. He said it would be impossible to imagine Pakistan without Delhi.
At some point, Pakistan progressed from being “an imaginary, nationalistic dream” into “a cold territorial reality” without Delhi and without a third of the Muslim population. Indian Muslims, now an even smaller minority, were forgotten. Jinnah had sacrificed them knowingly. Instead, the focus turned to highlighting the presence of Emperor Jahangir’s tomb in Lahore and Emperor Shah Jehan’s Shalimar Gardens to revitalize the Mughal connection.
Second, the 1940 Resolution had called for the creation of independent states (in the plural). Therefore, East Pakistan’s secession in 1971 did not shatter the Two Nation Theory on which Pakistan was founded. This was much too glib and convenient of an assertion.
Jinnah and the League were familiar with the 1940 Resolution and had put forward a single-state solution. Jinnah had imposed Urdu on Pakistan, knowing fully well that Bengali and not Urdu was spoken in East Pakistan. When he visited Dacca in 1948, he was received with mass protests against the imposition of Urdu. He derided the protestors as being the enemies of Pakistan.
Today, if the 1940 resolution were to be taken at face value, then the four states of Pakistan would be allowed to become independent states, in the spirit of the resolution. But such a separation would never be countenanced by the state of Pakistan
Today, if the 1940 resolution were to taken at face value, then the four states of Pakistan should be allowed to become independent states, in the spirit of the resolution. But such a separation would never be countenanced by the state of Pakistan. In 1971, it had gone to war to prevent the secession of the East, the resolution notwithstanding.
Third, Pakistan was intended to be a secular state. But during the mid-1940’s, speaker after speakerhad become increasingly strident in invoking Islam, liberally sprinkling their speeches with citations from the scripture. Muslims were told that unless they voted for the League, they would be destined for hell. Even Jinnah began using “Inshallah” in his speeches.
While this was rousing stuff, “the fine details – and the meanings of Pakistan for the Muslims of South Asia – had been deliberately and conveniently evaded and ignored.” Pakistan had become a “talismanic word” which would be used to great effect to rally the Muslims of India, “yet few knew what it meant or what it would cost to build.”
Religion became a dominant part of the pro-Pakistan rhetoric at Aligarh University, which Jinnah had called the “arsenal” of Pakistan: “In Aligarh, in the atmosphere of violent rhetoric, rumours of trouble and the visible drilling of students, suspicion between communities increased.”
Sadly, by the end of World War II, many people were revelling “in new and simplistic expressions of religion.” The politicisation of religion “became the order of the day” and “Flagrant propaganda was used to weld Muslims together by the League and to frighten them into supporting the Pakistani cause”.
Jinnah had included the white stripe in the green-and-white national flag to show that minorities would be given their due rights in Pakistan. However, there was a yawning gap between theory and practice. Disillusioned by Jinnah’s promises about the rights of minorities, J.N. Mandal, the leader of the local Dalits who had been sworn in as a member of the Constituent Assembly in Pakistan, migrated to India in 1950. In the early 1950s, riots developed against the minority Ahmadi sect. In 1974, they were declared non-Muslims by the national assembly. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of the Shia minority sect were targeted and killed.
Fourth, India successfully broke up Pakistan in 1971. The disenchantment in the East had begun with the imposition of Urdu. The problem was exacerbated by two decades of economic exploitation. It was so blatant that the Government of Pakistan’s Planning Commission acknowledged it in the Fourth Five Year Plan. In his posthumously-published diaries, President Ayub had noted that it was just a question of time before the East broke away.
Fifth, cardboard heroes and villains were created. In India, Jinnah became a villain who broke up the country. In Pakistan, he became a hero who saved the Muslims. Thus, when conservative Indian leader L. K. Advani laid a wreath on Jinnah’s grave and called him a great man in 2005, he was reviled in India and forced to step down from the presidency of the BJP. In 2009, when Jaswant Singh wrote his biography of Jinnah, he was met with equally strong ridicule and expelled from the BJP.
Khan concludes that the terrible legacy of Partition is that the poison of hatred that Gandhi had warned about seeped “deep into the arteries of the nationalist firebrands.” Thus, like images in “a distorted fairground mirror, India and Pakistan became warped, frightening, oppositional images of each other”.
That is a frightening conclusion. Are India and Pakistan two siblings locked in permanent enmity, fated to indulge in a dangerous and unending arms race, while hundreds of millions of their citizens go to bed hungry, illiterate, and ill?
New Delhi and Islamabad must re-think their diplomatic approach towards one another. Otherwise the slide toward Armageddon will continue.
The writer can be reached at [email protected].
Published in Daily Times, April 28th 2018.