Daily Times

“In the nineteenth century, the Germans painted their dream, and it always turned into a vegetable. The French needed only to paint a vegetable, and it was already a dream” (Adorno). The people of the sub-continent painted their dream with blood – it was a nightmare! The partition bled the humanity white, the color of the imperialist master who transferred the power to a class of its tried and tested allies, assuring the allegiance to King George VI. The tryst with destiny faltered, the world slept, and partitioned India could not wake up to the economic dimension of freedom.

While the Muslim League and its leaders used the religious card frequently, Jinnah – by replacing the word ‘swear’ with ‘affirm’ and deleting any reference to God from his oath as the first governor-general of Pakistan – immediately shed the religious halo. However, he could not have helped the conditions that led to the slicing of India and turning either state into belligerent religious monsters.

Was it possible to save Indian partition on religious lines? The question seems hackneyed and redundant, but a sustained economic malaise has rekindled what was eclipsed from the collective consciousness. The answer can only be found by transcending and looking beyond, rather than through the events. A superficial critique of religion, leaders, or the followers will be pointing fingers of accusation or appreciation to the individuals, leaving the relations of production – instrumental in creating specific thoughts and individuals – untouched.

A human being is an ensemble of social relations, and his thoughts are part of those relations which assuming the form of religion disappear in religious ideas to reappear as its followers. The same happens to economic objectivity, another human-to-human relation that disappears and reappears in the form of mysterious economic forces, and in the money form as almighty power, a relation between things, the ‘fetish’ of Marx. In economics and religion, people forget the original human relation and the creators of those relations by locking themselves into a gigantic apparatus which they themselves create, making the laws of value and laws of religion infinitely superior and sacred than their own selves.

The sub-continental society modelled on phallocentric principles represses emotions; buried alive, they reappear finding a sadomasochist expression

India had a melange of several religions existing side by side, but under precapitalistic relations of production, they were not commodified to create an intensive struggle for survival until the market relations were developed. Under the ‘divide and rule’ policy, the British pitted Hindus against Muslims but in a backward agrarian society, the religious card remained mostly ineffective. However, with the introduction of technology and improved means of communications, the jobs in employment sector grew, a new market for the skilled labor appeared and the uncertainty made the objective of division successful.

Muslims were latecomers in the market where the Hindu majority had already developed subterranean roots. The struggle of self-preservation was individual, but it could only be highlighted through ideology and community. With Soviet victory against fascism, its control over Berlin and a decisive strike against Japan forced the imperialist power to think differently. Socialism was becoming a real threat. A united India embracing socialism could have wiped capitalism off from the biggest and most populous continent of the world; India had to be cleaved on religious lines.

The Second World War immensely indebted Britain and France. The US demand to open their markets for the American capital spurred the liberation of colonies. In India, the sailor movement of 1946 hit the last nail in the British coffin, albeit the Indian bourgeoisie nailed the movement and its leader to a cross. The power was transferred, and two agnostics/atheists, Nehru and Jinnah, became the heroes but Savarkar and ideology of Pathankot were the real winners.

India having an infrastructure for industrialization joined the Soviet orbit. The backward agrarian states comprising Pakistan struggled to become a frontline state of the US. Under the duress of economic constraints, implementation of the Objective Resolution became the first step towards Islamization, a diversion from the chaos demonstrating the incapability and minimum resolve of the ruling class to improve the dismal socio-economic conditions. Once the indebted feudal class found respite from Hindu mercantile capital, the civilian-military bureaucracy snugged in power made them dance to its tune.

The largely Punjab centric first and last anti-Ahmadiyya movements were state-sponsored urban petty-bourgeois, lumpen, and traders’ phenomenon. For Pakistan, the Dacca debacle was reminiscent of the Indian loss to the British. Despite aid from Middle Eastern Arabian states, an informal technical bankruptcy of the financial institutions became a reality. With minimal capitalist relations, the populist premier turned to a distorted form of national socialism. The anti-Qadiani law was not only a distraction but a powerful assertion of feudal relations. Integration or liquidation was the choice.

The identical relations brought the separation of the eastern wing, devoid of feudal relations Bengal was prepared for capitalism and refused to be pulled back by the primitive system dominated by the Junkers’ army. Bereft of a material base, and with a powerful army, defeated but not devasted the political leadership of remaining Pakistan was not in a position to take the country to a bourgeois welfare or a democratic socialist state. Pakistan was sliced and in the absence of a revolutionary upsurge, the rulers found it convenient to follow the old, failed primrose path.

Religion itself a politics used exceedingly to conceal class domination in production, to regain an external colony in the shape of Afghanistan and to coerce and expropriate the native population. Afghan jihad, Kashmir saga, and the process of Islamization were part Lebensraum and part primitive accumulation. In the process, a generation was created hungry for domination while simultaneously struggling against it. In its false consciousness it fights against its freedom. Such rebellion against domination helps perpetuate domination. The law of blasphemy is an unveiled barbaric law of capitalism/value, a cathartic behavior “unleashed in situations in which blinded people, deprived of subjectivity, are let loose as subjects” (Adorno), proving that “the movement of society is not only antagonistic from the outset. It maintains itself through antagonism alone”.

Once the society is brutalized, “social reality models itself after a paranoid system”. Paranoid thinking for Adorno “is the eminently rational response” but what is paranoia if not an adjustment to a society gone mad, where “one denies death by refusing to live” (Laing). Capitalism produces a monogamous, patriarchal, phallocentric society, “the body”, Hocquenghem says, “is centered around the phallus like the society is around its chief”, capital… “As the signifying despot, it organizes the global situations of people. As the complete detached object, it plays, in the sexuality of society, the role money plays in the capitalist economy; the fetish, the veritable universal reference of activity, economic in one case, desiring in the other”.

The sub-continental society modelled on phallocentric principles represses emotions; buried alive, they reappear finding a sadomasochist expression. “Rational persuasion”, Horkheimer says, “can never be as effective, because it is not congenial to the repressed primitive urges of superficially civilized people”. The repressed people, living in a paranoid system with “inverted ideology” find salvation in “distorted conception”, in the reality “standing on its head”, in the “independent kingdom in the clouds” (Marx). The query that bewilders is not that they kill in cold blood for death has been glorified by both the capitalist state and religion, but why death has not become a celebrated festival?

The writer, an Australian Pakistani has authored books on socialism and history