Sorrow behind India’s independence day
Despite seven decades of development, the country is still coming to terms with its freedom from empire, says Samanth Subramanian
Celebrations of India’s independence are always laced with sorrow, but especially so this year. India won its freedom from the British on August 15, 1947, through non-violence – the central pillar of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy.
Yet when freedom arrived, it was awash with blood.
More than a million people died in Hindu-Muslim violence as the subcontinent was split into the states of India and Pakistan.
This year, the 70th anniversary of India’s independence, there has been a revival of the religious rupture at that Partition, a reminder that the fault lines have never closed and, worryingly, they are perhaps being forced further open.
The question of whether Partition was ever avoidable is still debated hotly. Over centuries of British rule, some scholars contend, Indians had been divided and ruled, forced to define themselves by their religious identities.
When political power was placed in their hands, they were bound to wield it with these identities in mind. This is how empires work, the historian Yasmin Khan wrote in her book, The Great Partition. It “distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different, and unknowable, paths”.
But others argue that India was driven towards Partition by the frictions among its own leaders: Gandhi; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, leader of the All-India Muslim League; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the Congress arty.
Gandhi and Nehru wanted a free India to remain whole, but they were unable to convince Jinnah that Muslims would be an integral part of this new nation, and that they would not be sidelined or powerless within a predominantly Hindu population. By 1940, Jinnah was calling for creation of a separate Pakistan.
In the uncertain years that followed, religious riots broke out across the country. Nisid Hajari opens his book, Midnight’s Furies with an account of the violence that shook Calcutta (now Kolkata) in August 1946, a full year before independence.
A mass rally called by the Muslim League slid into bloodshed, and about 4,000 Hindus and Muslims died as mobs attacked and counter-attacked. A photograph shows corpses in a narrow alley, and a flock of vultures perched expectantly on a nearby wall.
In October that year at least 5,000 people died in similar riots in Bihar. Gandhi threatened to fast to death if the rioting did not stop. The following
One million people died in Hindu-Muslim violence as the subcontinent was split into the states of India and Pakistan
month he visited Noakhali, a scene of much violence in what is now Bangladesh.
“‘What to do?’ was the mantra he uttered daily as he walked barefoot through the bloodsoaked mud,” wrote Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s biographer.
Organisational chaos compounded the general uncertainty. In February 1947, Britain announced that it would transfer rule to India “not later than June, 1948”. Four months later, the date was suddenly brought forward, to August 15, 1947.
Cyril Radcliffe, the British judge who thought he had at least a year to draw the borders of divided India, found his time reduced first to six months and then to just six weeks, condensing a sensitive duty into a swift cartographic exercise.
Radcliffe did not announce his borders until August 17, two days after independence, plunging millions of Hindus and Muslims into sudden fear that they were now living in the wrong country.
A great and tragic mass migration began, the largest in human history. About 10 million people were on the move, with Hindus fleeing to India and Muslims to Pakistan. India’s borders – with West Pakistan on one side, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) on the other – unimaginable scenes of murder, rape, abduction and arson.
Trains running from one country to the other were stopped midway so that their passengers could be killed or maimed. Villages in the Punjab went up in flames.
If the migrants made it to their destination they arrived as refugees, bereft of their belongings or wealth, torn away from their loved ones, strangers in the places they were now forced to call home.
The animosity that the Partition stirred up between India and Pakistan has never been quelled. But more pressingly for India – a country conceived as a secular project, which is an antithesis to Pakistan – its own internal religious pressures, born in many ways out of the strains of Partition, are now seething and sparking in dangerous ways.
The ascent to power of prime minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014 has emboldened the Hindu right. Groups such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) believe fervently that India is a Hindu land and no chunk of India should ever have been torn off and handed to Muslims.
Any Muslims who don’t like how they are treated in India should seek their home in Pakistan, RSS supporters frequently say. Mr Modi and other BJP leaders cut their political teeth with the RSS.
The BJP chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state – home to 200 million people, including 40 million Muslims – is also the head priest of a Hindu temple in Gorakhpur.
The Indian state and majority religion have never been more closely intertwined.
The headlines constantly tell of crimes by Hindu right-wing groups. The election campaigns of BJP leaders routinely include veiled attacks on the Muslim community in a crude appeal to the party’s nationalist base. On social media and news, jingoism flirts dangerously with incitement to violence.
One study by the data analysis site IndiaSpend concluded that 68 incidents of violence related to cattle protection have occurred since Mr Modi assumed power. (Cattle, revered by Hindus but central to the leather and meat industries that employ many Muslims, is a frequent flashpoint and the BJP’s 2014 manifesto vowed to ban cattle slaughter altogether)
Last year, in about 700 outbreaks of religious violence, 86 people died and 2,321 people were injured. Muslims are threatened and killed by vigilantes.
Amnesty International India deplores the “seeming impunity” with which crimes are
committed against Muslims, many of them in states where the BJP is in power, and the lack of condemnation expressed by the prime minister and various chief ministers.
In its 70 years of independence, India has several achievements to its credit. It has built a modern economy, remained a democracy and lifted millions out of poverty.
But the state is failing in its essential duty of uniting its citizens and even appears at times to deliberately turn one section of society against another.
The renewal of Hindu nationalism is one reason, but another is surely the wounds that never healed and the fury that never calmed after the Partition in 1947.
The long arm of history never fails to reach into the present.