The most lasting effect of the partition and subsequent creation of Pakistan was the devastation of the Indian people – Hindu, Muslim and Sikh - who were mere pawns in a cynical game of power politics. Division, the physical, psychological and spiritual breakup of the nascent Indian nation, meant the destruction of families, the ruin of businesses and an end to a way of life that the subcontinent’s countless villages had followed for centuries. The political alternative was decades of social upheaval and a politically unacceptable instability in South
Asia. The establishment of Pakistan may have been a desirable outcome from a purely political standpoint. However, the human toll, the cost in lives lost and displaced, in fortunes lost and a society cast adrift was the true price of partition.
The road to partition
In 1929, the Indian National Congress (INC) declared at Lahore that the only acceptable political goal would be complete independence from Great Britain. To this point, the most
notable split in the INC, the driving force behind Indian autonomy, had been between activist and moderate. Yet as the independence movement gained momentum, other ideological cracks began to appear. The influence of leading Muslims such as Syed Ahmed Khan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Jim Smith sought equity with the Hindu majority, spurring debate over whether Hindu or Muslim would hold political primacy in the INC and over the nascent Indian state. World War II aggravated the situation. As the British prepared for war, they looked to their Indian subjects as a major source of manpower for the struggle with the Axis powers, a completely unacceptable scenario for Gandhi, Nehru and other Hindu leaders who led the drive within the INC to ban Indian involvement in the war. With independence as their goal, the last thing that the country’s leaders wanted was to sacrifice Indian lives to a European conflagration.
In 1942, Sir Stafford Cripps led a mission to foster cooperation between Hindu and Muslim in order to bolster the British war effort. The British considered that differences “between the two major representative parties of the country” limited the British military, which historically relied heavily on its colonial possessions and dominions in times of conflict (The Story of Pakistan, 2003). Though British promises of dominion status were rejected by the INC and Muslim League, thus quashing Cripps’ entreaties of cooperation, the
Muslims, saw their relationship with the British differently than did the Muslims. Since the late 19th-century, prominent Muslims, such as Syed Ahmed Khan, had counseled their people to cooperate with the Raj. The primary interest of the Muslim leadership was the enfranchisement and protection of their people, and they considered that a continued relationship with the British was the best way to achieve those objectives.
Now, the Muslim League saw the call to arms as an opportunity to leverage British influence and force the Hindu political power bloc to enfranchise the Muslims. Muslim intellectuals at Aligarh Muslim University, which Khan had founded, thus embraced and
supported the involvement of Muslim military units in the British Army. Aligarh, which Jinnah often referred to as the spiritual and intellectual “arsenal” of the Pakistan movement, had exhibited “enthusiastic support for both the (Muslim) League and the Pakistan demanddating back to the earliest years of the Second World War” (Khan, 40, year). The situation exacerbated tensions between the Muslim League and Hindu power brokers, who were suspicious of a Muslim power play.
The issue of cooperation with the British Raj was always a significant obstacle to the possibility of Muslim-Hindu accommodation. The 1916 Lucknow Pact represented an apparent accord between the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress Party. However, Jinnah resigned from the INC four years later over the Congress’ official policy of non-cooperation with the Raj, which led to a conflict between Jinnah and Gandhi that crystallized the two men as the chief representatives of divergent political interests within the independence movement (Lyon, 91). The Muslim League criticized Gandhi of cynically employing divide-and-conquer politics
in seeking the support of the pro-Khilafat Muslims (Jalal, 8). Jinnah “denounced Gandhi for causing schism and split ‘not only amongst Hindus and Muslims but between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even between fathers and sons’” (Ibid). As such, the political tumult following the INC’s non-cooperation stance vis-a-vis the British must be seen as a milestone in Hindu-Muslim relations, albeit a damaging one. But as the rift continued to grow, the people of India were unaware that they were caught in the middle of a conflict that would claim the lives of millions.
Perhaps frustrated by failures at the negotiating table in India, Gandhi attended the Round Table Conference in London in 1929, ostensibly as the official spokesperson for the INC. Many observers have seen this gesture as Gandhi’s attempt to play the “British card,” to curry
favor with London and so to force the Muslim League to adopt a more conciliatory line. Not surprisingly, the Muslim faction took a dim view, by now thoroughly convinced that the Hindu ascendancy in the INC intended to subordinate Muslim Indians to their rule, one way or another. A fiery comment made by a prominent Muslim during this period summed up the growing frustration and anger over perceived Hindu intransigency, and offered a chilling indication of the violence to come: “If the Hindus don’t meet our demands this time, we’re going to make war on them. We ruled the Hindus once. We at least don’t intend to be ruled by them now” (India’s History, 2008). Events had reached a point where every action by one side was seen as provocative by the other. Independence was not to come for almost another 20 years but, in a sense, the lines of partition were already being drawn.
in Bengal, the province that was home to roughly half the Muslims in all India (Jalal, 108). At stake was the future of Pakistan. Jinnah appears to have used well the lessons of Bengal and other provinces, where Muslim League representatives were poorly prepared, to establish a sort of grass roots level political machinery. Aligarh University played its part as well, establishing a kind of election “training camp” to help lay the groundwork for the kind of success the Muslims would need in the Punjab and the Sind in order to ensure backing for Pakistan. Consequently, the League was able to mobilize on a front broad enough to reach all levels of Muslim society, not just the class to which Jinnah and his colleagues, many of them British-trained lawyers, belonged (India’s Constitutional Question, 2006).
After the elections, Gandhi and the other Hindu leaders sought to leverage their vast majority and the power with which the multitudes of Hindus endowed them. Gandhi’s correspondences with Sir Stafford Cripps in May 1946 reflect the Hindu leader’s evident belief that by framing the situation in straightforward constitutional terms the British would be compelled to support the Hindu majority. For Gandhi, the issue of representation was a fairly simple one. In a letter to Cripps, Gandhi reminded his British counterpart that in terms of population size, the Hindus were clearly dominant, a fact that the Muslim League was bound to respect. “The Muslim majority Provinces represent over nine crores of the population against over nineteen crores of the Hindu majority population” (India’s Constitutional Question, 2006). This was “people power,” and Gandhi’s intention was to wield it against his Muslim foes.
As a lawyer trained in the complexities of British law, Gandhi argued that this could mean only one thing. “What is suggested in place is that the Central Legislature should be framed on the population basis and so too the Executive” (India’s Constitutional Question,
2006). If any should consider this state of affairs unfair, he went on, then it would fall to a specially appointed Indian tribunal to act as impartial judges to resolve the situation (Ibid). As previously mentioned, the Muslim League basically consented to the plan put forth by the Cabinet Mission because the League’s members believed that it brought them closer to Pakistan. This situation was alluded to in the 1946 resolution passed by the Muslim League, which was willing and prepared to play along “inasmuch as the basis and the foundation of Pakistan are inherent in the Mission’s plan by virtue of the compulsory grouping of the six Muslim provinces” (Ibid).
The collapse of the Mission Plan was a microcosm of a much deeper problem endemic to the political situation. It has been argued that even the failure of 1946, which likely was the last, best chance for unity, needn’t have led inevitably to partition. Nevertheless, the Muslims and Hindus stood on opposite sides of a gap that was too large to bridge. “From a constitutional perspective, the collapse of the Cabinet Mission plan demonstrates the fragility and limited potential of constitutional procedures in the context of a deeply divided society” (Lerner, 125). Another problem was that the “fixes” proposed could not have been implemented without the involvement of British colonial authority, which the INC was so determined to remove from the Indian political scene. As such, the constitutional procedures put forth “were not adopted by mutual agreement, but rather were imposed by a colonial ruler” (Ibid).
It is interesting that, despite the fervent desire for freedom from Great Britain shared by all Indians, the fate of the Muslim League and the Hindu majority should have remained so dependent on British actions and policies in the years leading up to dissolution of the Raj. For both sides, the British were the political means to a desired end, namely, independence on their
own terms, the Hindus insisting on an India dominated by them through the auspices of a strong federal government; the Muslim insistence on partition growing stronger with each failed attempt to achieve a mutually acceptable solution. When Britain finally brought an end to its rule in the subcontinent, the inevitable political vacuum facilitated the final push toward partition and the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The product of a turbulent political landscape, Pakistan has maintained an adversarial relationship with India. Partition and the resultant decades of confrontation between the two countries have had an equally turbulent effect on the citizens of both countries.
A human tragedy
The most evident and immediate impact of partition was the village-by-village violence that erupted throughout India. Minorities in these communities were particularly vulnerable. On August 14, 1946, Jinnah declared a day of “Direct Action” to foster a showing of widespread support for Pakistan. However, the event decayed into violence. In East Bengal, the Hindu population was targeted by Muslims in West Pakistan, where administrators did little to protect the Hindus, who were forced to leave the province en masse (India’s History, 2008). Muslim violence was matched by Hindu reprisals in Calcutta and other parts of India. In all, as many as one million people lost their lives and 12 million people were displaced in the violence arising from partition (Butalia, 2000).
The months following partition witnessed a truly epochal shifting of population bases throughout India. In the three months following the Act of Partition, just under three million people were forced to become refugees shunted about on hundreds of trains (one million gallons of gasoline were required to evacuate people from East Punjabi) (Butalia, 2000). The shock waves of partition and its aftermath were felt for decades - and are still much in evidence. In
1954, the Indian government adopted a policy that designated Muslim-owned and Muslim-inhabited properties first as “‘evacuee property’ and then as ‘national property’” (Daiya, 143). Countless Muslim families and businesses were ruined by what is widely considered, even by Hindus, as a vindictive course of action. When this policy was eventually dropped, it came “as small consolationafter the institutionalized forced, internal displacement of Muslim families,” and the “ethnicization of property” remained a threat for Hindu and Muslim families and businesses (Ibid).
This oppressive atmosphere played out in villages throughout India and Pakistan, communities that had a long tradition of multi-ethnic cooperation. The destruction of this syncretic harmony was one of the most devastating effects of partition in Pakistan and India. As is often the case in civil conflicts, ethnic hatreds and seething individual vendettas took advantage of unrest and the breakdown of law and order, with men, women and children all victimized. This happened in the subcontinent on a scale difficult to imagine, in numbers that defy belief. Emigration became the sole option for many of those capable of marshaling the financial resources necessary to leave and begin new lives elsewhere. Perhaps in reaction to the injustice of its 1954 evacuee property policy, the Indian government eventually provided some form of relief for Muslim families, with up to 500 rupees offered for business loans for families that returned to India after the violence, and up to 200 rupees for Muslim families that had been displaced (Daiya, 128).
Indeed, displacement was the worst tragedy to befall families on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. Many families were physically separated, with some caught in one country while other family members escaped to safer regions across the border. Partisan violence
escalated during the latter part of 1947 as soldiers defected to join militias in order to take revenge for “villages wiped out or sisters abducted” (Khan, 116). This human catastrophe became a permanent and official part of the partition legacy when the border between the two countries was solidified, with the Wagah border crossing being the only land passage between India and Pakistan, which it remains to the current day (Ibid). Wagah is a village through which was drawn the Radcliffe Line, the official line of demarcation between India and Pakistan.
Conclusion
The partition of India was the inevitable result of a deep and ancient gulf between what amounted to two societies, both with long traditions of oppressing the other at various periods in history. The imposition of British rule only delayed what was surely an inexorable process. When the Raj came to an end, the British withdrawal from India took place too quickly and left a power vacuum that virtually assured partition and a descent into chaos. In light of the historic evidence, partition was a desirable outcome and the best accommodation that could be attained at the time. The alternative was further bloodshed and a humanitarian disaster on an unimaginable genocidal scale. Had the British adopted a more careful and phased approach to disengagement, much violence and misery may have been averted. And while it is true that the Hindus enjoyed a significant majority, the Muslims comprised a vitally important part of the Indian population and, as such, should have been dealt with more equitably, rather than as junior partners expected
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