75 years later, the quest to understand Partition
To think out of the box on the India–Pakistan dynamic, we must first understand how we boxed ourselves in
The 75th year of South Asia’s decolonisation has seen the revival of an old unease with India’s Partition. It was recently suggested that the pain of Partition can only be addressed when the division of 1947 is undone. The sentiment calls to mind the announcement made earlier this year that August 14, the day Pakistan celebrates its independence, would henceforth be observed in India as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.
Partition was unimaginably painful for people and disastrous for the entire region. There are strong reasons for revisiting it, publicly debating it, trying to make sense of it. But such an exercise will likely bring gains if we approach Partition to see what it can tell us about the difficult political and moral choices that confronted India in the 1940s.
In a new book, The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan, I have attempted to examine what Partition represented, why it came about, and how it has impacted the lives of India and Pakistan as both States and societies. It is essential to revisit Partition to map the trap in which they find themselves.
Partition emerged on the horizon of South Asia’s politics in the final decade of colonial rule. It was held by its proponents, principally the Muslim League led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as the solution to the likelihood of Muslims finding themselves at the mercy of a central Indian government dominated by Hindus once the British left. Jinnah appeared to believe that creating one or more Muslim homelands in the regions where Muslims formed a majority would address the problem substantially, if not completely. To make his case unassailable, Jinnah adopted the ‘two-nation’ thesis, which had crystallised in the 1920s, and claimed that the subcontinent’s Muslims constituted a separate nation who had the right to establish their own homelands.
The Congress-led Indian nationalists expectedly and vehemently disagreed with the ‘two-nation’ thesis. However, some of them—notably C Rajagopalachari and Mahatma Gandhi—were willing to address the concerns that had led Jinnah to demand separate Muslim states. Based on a formula by Rajaji, the Mahatma in 1944 agreed to the possibility of a limited Partition on the basis of territorial rather than national self-determination, provided the people of the regions in contention had the final say on the separation.
It is commonly held that once Jinnah became a partisan to the two-nation thesis, at the League’s general session held in Lahore in 1940, Partition became inevitable. But Partition was not inevitable. It became unavoidable only in early 1947. The principal parties to the high political negotiations—the Congress, the League and the British—reluctantly agreed to it in the face of expanding civil strife that could plunge the largest part of South Asia into civil war. Partition was neither a logical outcome of the “two-nation” thesis nor could it fully address the legitimate fear of majority domination felt by Indian Muslims. Rather than a lasting solution to a political conflict, Partition was a practical measure undertaken to arrest regional anarchy.
It is not surprising, therefore, that we find none of the frontline leaders of the Indian nationalist movement were prepared for it. Illustratively, as late as 1946, in his book India Divided, Rajendra Prasad was arguing for creating an “unnational” or a “multinational” state in India. And his public rhetoric notwithstanding, Jinnah too hoped for a loose subcontinental federation rather than Partition. So unexpected was it that many South Asian leaders considered Partition unnatural and unsustainable, believing that a voluntary reunion of the separated parts would happen once the British left and communal tempers cooled down. Many who thought Partition was here to stay nevertheless believed that the two new states would evolve common policies on trade, security, transport, and communication.
Partition was deeply unsatisfactory for all the parties concerned. Worse, it bequeathed to India and Pakistan three new problems: Territorial contestation, minorities vulnerable to enraged or predatory majorities, and discord over national identity. It is misleading to suggest sameness between India and Pakistan, but no honest and concerned citizen in either country can miss the parallels between the trajectories of each of the problems.
Minorities have been rendered politically disempowered, their loyalty suspected, their everyday life exposed to violence. There may be a difference in degrees, but their ordeals in the two countries conform to a type. The territorial contestation over Kashmir has deepened and today a negotiated settlement acceptable to all parties seems a near impossibility. And finally, ideas of national identity in both countries have come to be marked by homogenisation and mediated by ungenerous interpretations of religion and culture.
The careers of each of these problems tell the story of the region’s appalling disfigurement. The countries, as States and societies, continue unsuccessfully to resolve them. Each has tried to treat these as “domestic” issues, although the problems also keep the countries entangled. The entanglement has perpetuated conflict, deepened alienation and encouraged majoritarianism. It has also ensured that no South Asian regionalism— neither top-down nor bottom-up—will stand a serious chance.
As Partition loomed, leaders such as Prasad and Jawaharlal Nehru repeatedly warned all concerned about its consequences: If two nation-States that combined religious nationalism and overly strong central governments were established, they would struggle to attain security, prosperity and stability both at home and in mutual relations.
Any dispassionate audit of our histories would reveal the remarkable prescience of these leaders. For 75 years, India and Pakistan have struggled to evolve a relationship that is minimally stable and decent. “New India” and “Naya Pakistan” have fared no better. Through 2020 and early 2021, they worked the back channel and agreed once again to a ceasefire. But as 2021 aged, it was clear that the old pattern had been repeated.
The idea that Partition must go is older than Partition itself. Since 1947, some have wanted it to end peacefully, others by force. In contemporary India, the key questions around it have become invisible; Partition itself has been reduced to a ghatna (event) of the past that is useful for ideological mobilisation and political gains.
The trap that India and Pakistan find themselves in — in their relations with each other, in some (but not all) of their domestic political fault lines — and the trap that South Asia finds itself in can only be escaped from by carefully revisiting Partition. The questions that led to it are still with us. But the temptation to turn Partition into an event — of the past and for the present — must be avoided.
There is no alternative to thinking out of the box, but we must first understand how we boxed ourselves in.