India and Pakistan are now 60 years old, as is the bloody partition that created them. My father’s family was caught up in what became arguably the largest mass migration in history: 14.5 million people were moved, roughly the same number in each direction, and somewhere between 500,000 and one million of them died in the process. 
Because independence was declared prior to the actual Partition, it was up to the new governments of India and Pakistan to keep public order. No large population movements were contemplated; the plan called for safeguards for minorities on both sides of the new state line. It was an impossible task, at which both states failed. There was a complete breakdown of law and order [Link]
The management of partition was badly botched; if you think Brownie did a heck of a job, Mounty makes him look like a paragon of engagement and sensitivity. Mountbatten insisted that the partition line be drawn in only six weeks! Think of how slowly the US government moves today, and that will give you a sense of how ridiculous and uncaring that deadline was. The line was drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe; this is what his private secretary, Christopher Beaumont, had to say about the process:
“The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame – though not the sole blame – for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished,” he writes. “The handover of power was done too quickly…”… it was “irresponsible” of Lord Mountbatten to insist that Beaumont complete the boundary within a six-week deadline – despite his protests. [Link]
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p>Mountbatten was a pretty boy from a royal family whose track record during WWII led him to be “known in the British Admiralty as the Master of Disaster.” [Link] His track record in India seems similar – he was charming and glib, but unconcerned about the feasibility of plans or the lives which would be lost.
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p>As Viceroy of India, he advanced the date of independence by nine months (no reason was ever given), making the problems associated with partition worse. Critics argue that he foresaw bloodshed and didn’t want it to happen on British watch; he was willing to make things worse as a form of CYA rather than take responsibility for the situation.
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p>So how did the Last Viceroy spend the evening of August 14th, having put calamity into motion? Was he apprehensive? Concerned about the lives he had condemned? Not at all:
… on the evening of August 14, 1947, a few hours before Britain’s Indian Empire was formally divided into the nation-states of India and Pakistan, Lord Louis Mountbatten and his wife, Edwina, sat down in the viceregal mansion in New Delhi to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, “My Favorite Brunette…” [Link]
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p>In the end he was killed by the IRA rather than O’Dwyered by one of his victims from India. Mountbatten had a very difficult job to perform, but from what little I have read, he did not do it well.
Related links: Exit Wounds, the New Yorker book review of Indian Summer by Pankaj Mishra
244 Ponniyin Selvan
If people have any doubts that “partition” was not good after the imperialists left, please take a look at Lebanon and Nigeria now where the “imperialists” left without any kind of partition between rival religious groups and the pathetic “civil wars” that followed and killed many people (which continues in one form or another to this date).
–> I would think that would have to do with lack of leadership to provide a secular political model, free of religion, as an alternative. To argue for goodness of “partition” based on current scenarios, as you have done, requires a leap of faith across decades that cannot be justified given the different paths the aforementioned countries have taken in the time in between.
Indians should thank Jinnah for the partition.. and stoutly oppose any form of sugarcoating indulged by those who try to rewrite history.
–> I would just reword it as ‘Indians should blame Jinnah for the partition’. The second part, I agree.
This is not so “unnatural.” In the long arc of British history, Scotland has only been an integrated part of the “United Kingdom” for just under 1000 years.
Well, I don’t know what you think. But I think it is the best thing to have happened to India and hence I thank Jinnah. 🙂
“This is not so “unnatural.” In the long arc of British history, Scotland has only been an integrated part of the “United Kingdom” for just under 1000 years.”
oh i know. i must shamefully admit to a twinge of delight on Aug. 15 when, after reading comments by many Britons using partition/violence of partition as a stick with which to beat south asians (and maybe justifiably so to some degree) and thump their chests about the magnanimity of the Raj ), i also read heated comments between scots and english about how both sides would be better off without the other. a small-minded reaction on my part, i know:)
Well, I don’t know what you think. But I think it is the best thing to have happened to India and hence I thank Jinnah. 🙂
Calling any event which directly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the misery of millions is not a ‘good thing to have happened’. We dont know what would have happened if there was no partition. Increased civil strife is likely but we dont know. What we do know and are sure about is that hundreds of thousands of innocent people were slaughtered, women raped, children left without parents and families torn apart.
Your constant praising of the event is obscene and vile. Maybe this is some attempt at comedy, but its not funny.
Additionaly: If you add in the casualties of the partition, lets say half a million in 47, another million in 71 in Bangladesh, ethnic cleansing and killings in Kashmir etc. are all a direct result of the partition. We are looking at 1-2 million dead people. Would 2 million have died in sectarian violence since 47? How many people died in sectarian violence between 1900 and 1945? Its a little foolish to presume that 2 million people would have died in ethnic strife if there was no partition.
I second that. As a Southerner, whose ethnicity and previous generations were far removed from the tragedy, I register my objection to another Southerner minimizing this historic tragedy as trivial.
In general, I have never understood why Ponniyin Selvan, smiles so much in several of his serious, political, (liberal-bashing?) posts. Maybe he thinks he comes across as easy-going , flippant or casual while the rest of us are serious. But I am left with a suspicion that he is semi-trolling/semi-baiting, especially when he writes comments such as #207. He comes across as the Cheshire cat that licked the cream; the giggler; the one sitting with a mischievous, evil grin on his face at his computer. So I find it hard to respect and pay attention to any of his viewpoints.
He should make a political point with confidence and stand by his words with dignity if he wants me to listen to him.
If you look at my first comment, I started with
I avoided the words within brackets later for brevity purposes..
When I say partition is the best thing to have happened, it means the “political split” that happened between India and Pakistan, and not the violence that is associated with it. Even Nehru and Patel have said the same things to Gandhi when they decided partition is the best thing at that point of time. And I think the violence would have been far greater and it would have been unmitigated disaster (atleast for Indians) if people had gone through with the Cabinet Mission Plan.
If some commenters feel otherwise it is their prerogative to think so. I’m just posting because I feel like it. I’d use whatever style I think.
Thank you. It’s your right to pay attention to whatever you want.
Seriously, I re-read my #207. It is exactly what I feel like. And I don’t find anything objectionable in it. The only thing I’m concerned is about the truth value of my statements. If anyone finds wrong facts / lies etc.. in my comments please let me know. I’d take back those comments.
Afterall “Satyameva jayate / Truth alone triumphs” is India’s motto.
If you add in the casualties of the partition, lets say half a million in 47, another million in 71 in Bangladesh, ethnic cleansing and killings in Kashmir etc. are all a direct result of the partition. We are looking at 1-2 million dead people. Would 2 million have died in sectarian violence since 47?
Now let’s look at the comparable situation of Nigeria where there was no partition after the imperialists left. Their current population is 131 million.
link
doing simple math, 3 million people died in civil war out of 131 million. Even 2 percent of 1 billion amounts to 20 million people in deaths alone. To be exact, the partition deaths are only around half a million ( I should add that God/religion/Gods are not reasons worthy enough to lose even a single ant’s life). Whatever the “martial races” did to the Bengalis is Pakistan’s problem. I ‘d not add that to this discussion.
If you (and other commenters) want to add “shock value” and portray me as something of a “heartless creature” gloating at the loss of human lives feel free to do it. That would not change anything.. I was just talking about the facts and truths.
Again to re-emphasize, the “secular hero” Jinnah said this.
He meant exactly what he said. The Cabinet Mission Plan is just a stop gap arrangement for 10 years at the end of which states can decide their own future. If there was no partition in 1947, I can confidently say there would have been a partition with the difference being that of a “moth eaten Hindustan” instead of a “moth eaten Pakistan”.
By the end of these things there’s always way too much to respond to….
@Ponniyin Selvan and Puliogre in da USA: The overwhelming majority of Muslims stayed where they were. Only in border regions and isolated pockets across North India were there actually mass migrations. And those were almost entirely under duress. Today the Muslim populations of India and Pakistan are roughly equal (around 170 million each, Bangladesh has about 50 million fewer Muslims.) More than 1 in 20 Tamils is a Muslim. If not partitioning the country would have meant a brutal civil war, shouldn’t the fact that more than 1/3 of Muslims remained have led to a far more continuous and intense history of bloodshed? Much of the instability in Pakistan, and communal discord that exists in India is a product of the history and existence of post-’47 Pakistan.
By the way, saying that Lebanon suffered from not being partitioned misses the point that Lebanon itself is as pure a product of partitioning by the Western powers as Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Also: “Is Turkey the most stable secular democracy with a muslim majority? why was Turkey able to pull this off and not Pakistan?”
Turkey is stable and secular largely because it has experienced even less sustained democracy than Pakistan. (Even stability is a relative term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey-PKK_conflict – 37,000 killed. Pakistan has had nothing to compare to that.)
Re: Naming issues – The Punjab is perfectly appropriate for referring to the region, and to the division of British India which was partitioned – just as you might refer to the Doab, the Gangetic plain, or the Deccan. Adding the definite article to place names is in no way diminutive – otherwise you wouldn’t have the Midlands, the Lake District, etc.
Kush, A couple of points : * Re: #229 : Here is an extract from “Indian Summer”. I think Pankaj Mishra is correct on this. His facts, imho, are usually correct.
Emerging into the streets of Delhi, Nehru was greeted by the ringing of temple bells, the bangs and squeals of fireworks and the happy shouting of crowds. Guns were fired, in celebration rather than in anger; an effigy of British imperialism was burned, in both.5 Soon afterward, Nehru arrived at the Viceroy’s House, a gated citadel at the end of Kingsway, New Delhi’s two-mile processional avenue. He and Rajendra Prasad, the leader of the Constituent Assembly, were to see the last of the viceroys, Earl Mountbatten of Burma.6
At forty-seven, Mountbatten was young for a viceroy but no less assured for it. Tall, broad-shouldered and handsome, he had a brilliant Hollywood smile, easy wit and immediate charm; it might never have been guessed that he had been born a prince were it not for his ability to switch to a regal demeanor. The new earl and his countess, Edwina, had kept an appropriate distance from the festivities. While freedom was declared, the couple had spent the night at home, pottering around their palace and helping the servants tidy away anything marked with an imperial emblem. They had taken a brief break to watch the latest Bob Hope movie, My Favorite Brunette. It was a pastiche of the fashionable noir genre: the story of a wayward but irresistible baroness, played by the sultry Dorothy Lamour, whose feminine wiles drag a number of men into a dangerous conspiracy. No more than a handful of those in the Viceroy’s House that evening could have realized what a very apposite choice of film it was.
I think Pankaj Mishra is in the process of coming into his own as a perceptive commenter.
ag:
India does not have any major trouble (so far, I can’t say about the next few decades when the demographics change) because of “partition”.
Why would you think the “bleeding heart liberal” Nehru agreed for partition. After the experience of working with Muslim league ministers in the Interim cabinet where they were harassed by the Muslim league members on every single step, Nehru and Patel came to the conclusion that it is better.. these are patel’s words
And I can’t imagine that anyone would see this photo and think its purpose was to make Nehru look subservient. I completely agree with chachaji: “Come on, Amrita, it is a historical picture, reflecting a real event, capturing people in a candid, unposed composition that was rare at the time, especially for near-royalty like the Mountbattens. Besides which, it also brilliantly captures Mountbatten’s indifference – in his faraway, I-don’t-give-a-damn look, which applies both to the Edwina-Jawaharlal relationship as well as to the process of Partition;”
(Except that Mountbatten wasn’t near-royalty, he was royalty.)
Day to day, hour by hour breakup of Mountbatten activity during August recounted by Pamela Mountbatten.
Kush @ 223 : Jinnah replied on August 16: “Thank you for your letter dated the 30th of July and for all the trouble that you have taken, and to Jawaharlal for giving careful considerations to this case. I am quite willing, as suggested by him, to let this house on the terms mentioned in your letter to a foreign consulate, not because of any racial feeling but (because) the house is built entirely in European style and for the use of a small European family.
“As regards the rent, I was offered some time ago Rs.3,000 per month, but it does not lie in my mouth to fix the rent. As it is requisitioned by [the] government, I leave it to the government to make fullest inquiries and fix such rent as they may think reasonable.
“I would prefer the American Consulate to occupy it because they would be really in a position to keep the amenities, and the very large and pretty garden which is very essential, in good condition. Thanking you for all that you have done, and looking forward to meeting you when I return to Karachi.”
It seems like Jinnah himself was quite appreciative. I have this impression of the desi babu as the bureaucrat with a heart. If you meet one of these guys, you can assume that he or she is trying to get the job done while reading up on World History on one side, and trying to write the Great Indian Novel on the other 🙂
Shankar,
I think the writer of Indian Summer has misplaced the facts – either movie watching happened on August 12th (since Mountbatten left for Karachi on August 13th, or August, 16th/17th evening). Exact date is important for intent or what Pankaj Mishra insinuated. Or it is plain baloney.
Can we please have Pamela Mountbatten’s diary (and book later) as the final arbitrer. She was there.
Please do not get me started on Pankaj Mishra. Pankaj Mishra should know his Indian history.
I didn’t say the problems were because of partition, but because Pakistan has been such a disaster, the effects of which have spilled over in a thousand ways to India.
Historical what-ifs are complete nonsense, but at least we can say that a united India as the world’s most populous country and the world’s largest Muslim country would have made for a very different last 60 years.
Kush @ 267 : In regards to the movie watching, I think you will find that the two versions are not inconsistent with each other.
Kush @ 267 : In regards to the movie watching, I think you will find that the two versions are not inconsistent with each other.
Maybe, but it was not certainly due total indifference as Pankaj Mishra ji implies.
There is a 2 hour time window, when Moutbatten’s waited for the formal invitation to Constituent Assembly.
But even in those two hours, he did few things as the Viceroy of India – making wife of Nawab of Palampur as the Begum.
As a historian writing on the Partition in India and Pakistan, Pankaj Mishra can obviously not be held responsible for any impressions he may leave about Mountbatten.
That’s reductionist and not very accurate either. His anglophilia is complex and he is definitely more of a writer/scholar/commentator than a bureaucrat.
On possibilities of civil war, he echoes ACfd — “I have now to deal with the prospect of an aggravation of the Hindu-Muslim conflict. I have always been told that there would have been a civil war in India if the partition had not been agreed to. I have replied by asking two questions: first, has any country in the world been able to establish a revolutionary regime without a civil war? Next, has any civil war known in history resulted in the death of nearly a million persons and the ruin of many millions?
… But the worst thing was that the partition with all its immediate evils did not produce the only result which could justify it, that is, an end to the Hindu-Muslim animosity. It is continuing till today and has even taken an international form and a domestic form, both equally insensate. The creation of Pakistan, which was the major political result of the British withdrawal from India, was also seen to be a terrible blunder in its original form. By it, two ethnic groups were united in one state which except in religion were divided from each other by every natural feature which can divide man from man: geographical distance, physical and mental characteristics, social habits, language, and culture. This unnatural union created as great a hatred between Muslim and Muslim as hd existed previously between the Muslims and the Hindus”
There is a personal side to this, too. Two of his sisters did not move to India in time and died in great distress.
I just wanted to join the bandwagon and say that you cannot compare Nigeria and Lebanon to India. The only similarity is that a) they were former colonies, and b) they have diverse populations. As was mentioned, we don’t know if there would have been sectarian violence without a Partition. There are other examples of unsuccessful and long-standing partitions that have led to huge losses of life, the most notable being the post-independence partitioning of Palestine.
Two points :
Nirad Chaudhuri says that “It is the defeat at the hands of Jinnah which has made both the British and Indian writers vent their spleen on him.” How exactly does he say this? Is he psychic? I find many of Jinnah’s actions problematic, such as the call to Direct Action. Also, importantly, it is not clear what his vision for the Pakistani state was going forward – was it a militaristic dicatatorship, a theocratic republic, what? Can you blame people if they prefer the intellectual approach of, say, Ambedkar over that of Jinnah?
In my opinion, it was the Muslim league that was primarily responsible for the Partition, which led to the loss of millions of lives. Nirad Chaudhuri also seems to fall in with this opinion. But he also find Jinnah the noble one. I think it is these contradictions that make his opinions suspect.
Well. I think both his questions are stupid. 1) He thinks civil war is good as if it’s going to produce a stable society. Afghanistan should have been a stable society by now. 2) I just quoted the numbers from the “Nigerian civil war” and it is not completely done there yet.
I also quoted Jinnah gloating over “Mussalmans shedding of blood” and he did prove what he meant by the “Direct Action Day” actions. I’d take Patel and Nehru’s partition plan over any other scheme. Anyways, all this is over and done with.
I was pulled into the discussion because of the claim that “Jinnah is a secular hero” and somehow it is Nehru who spoiled the whole thing.. which is completely wrong and false on the basis of the facts we know…
Make that “hundreds of thousands of lives”. Again, I think #274 may sound a bit provocative. I just never got Nirad Chaudhuri.
Sunil Khilnani has a very interesting article from two years ago – Outlook India, Aug 22, 2005.
I tried excerpting, but that might do it injustice, in addition to presenting some formatting problems. People who can access the original from the link above should do so, because it also has some unusual and rare photographs.
It previews OK, hope it goes through all the way, and the mods are indulgent. Below this line is all Sunil Khilnani.
The Ides Of August
It’s been almost 60 years since Partition. Now is a good time to get a clearer understanding of the events that took place and to take responsibility for it.
SUNIL KHILNANI
Partition divides the inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent, but it also poses for every one of them enduring puzzles. Why exactly did it happen, and who was responsible for itâ€â€given that just a few years earlier, no one could even imagine it? Who were the real winners and losers? Or, was it for all a confusing mixture of bothâ€â€a pledge redeemed, as Nehru put it at midnight on August 15, 1947, “but not wholly or in full measure”? The winning of freedom as a nation-state was accompanied, it seemed, by the loss of a civilisation: a loss lived out in the post-partition histories of the great cities of the subcontinent, in Bombay and Karachi, Lahore and Delhi, Dacca and Calcuttaâ€â€cities that had once epitomised a distinctive civilisational achievement.
In the great Amar Chitra Katha of the national imagination, Partition is an archetypal tale of tragic heroes and scheming villains, men who make sacrifices and others who betray. In this story, Partition was a cataclysm visited upon the course of India’s destined historyâ€â€those who brought it about were always others, conspiring leaders and impassioned mobs, who together diverted us from our path to freedom. The responsibility for Partition did not lie with us, but with them.
Perhaps, our infant republic needed such tales to fortify itself. But now, almost 60 years on, we need a clearer-headed understanding; and, above all, we need to take responsibility for our past, wherever called for. Not least, because if we want to change our future relations with our neighbours, we need to start by changing some of the stories we tell about our past.
The recent stirring of public debate around the events of Partition is, therefore, potentially a good thingâ€â€but only if it gets us to re-examine rather than re-entrench our received ideas. We can, in our public debate, also take help from recent history-writing about Partition, which has opened up a larger range of interpretative perspectives, which draw on a wider array of sources, than previously. From the constitutional documents of high politics to oral testimony and memoirs, historians have given us reason to reject the view of Partition as simply a conflict between the forces of secular nationalism and religious communalism. Nor is it convincing to think that it was something decided entirely in the political parlours of Delhi or London.
Historians have insisted on a wider range of actorsâ€â€and, therefore, of responsibilityâ€â€for what came about: on the role of the provinces and provincial politics, and on the contiguity and sometimes interpenetration of secular and religious ideas and personnel. Some have argued to good effect that the pressures for Partition were built not by religious disaffection but as the result of a political contest over the distribution of powers between the central and provincial governmentsâ€â€and that the creation of Pakistan as an independent state for India’s Muslims was an unintended outcome of the argument of the Muslim League leadership. Others have demonstrated the role, in West Bengal, of the Hindu bhadralok and of the Congress there in pushing for Partition.
The larger point coming out of all of this work is that it is mistaken to presume the existence of the objects which, in the usual tale, are assumed to be the actors who clash. “Communalism”, or even such monolithic categories as “Muslim”, “Hindu” and “Sikh” were not pre-existent.Each of these were internally divided and differentiated; and much of the violence that made Partition was not so much directly caused by these entities, but was a necessary means to define and bring them into existenceâ€â€needed in order to freeze these identities hard.
Partition was the outcome of immediate politics, not immemorial religious passionsâ€â€it was a political event, which, no doubt, drew upon forms of religious self-identification, but also changed their character. As we set aside the simple vision, perhaps, we need to reframe the context, too.
We tend to think of Partition as a domestic event, caused by domestic conflicts. In fact, it was an international event, with international consequences; and to assess and understand it, we need to locate it in a much wider frame. The decade of the 1940s defines our modern era, not just in South Asia, but across the globe: the decade of total war, genocide, the atomic bomb, the division between East and West and the beginning of the Cold War. It also saw the beginning of the end of the era of European empire: it opened a phase of redrawing the global map, and initiated the long shift of global dynamism from Europe towards Asia. We have always viewed the Partition of India in relation to the history of Britain and its empire and, of course, this makes appropriate sense. But we also need to see it and its consequences in the context of a long-running contest for power and control within Asia.
During the 1940s, the people of the subcontinent were asked to see themselves in a variety of ways. In this contest, the Congress tried to make people think of themselves as Indians, the Muslim League appealed to the Muslim identity, the British worked to keep them fighting for king and country, while the Japanese wanted them to believe they were Asians first and foremost, fighting a European enemy: and each of these appeals found followers in India.
The theatre of the great war of the 20th century was perhaps notâ€â€as we usually think of itâ€â€in Europe, but in Asia. For over two decades, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 to the end of the Korean War in 1953, Asia was plunged in swirling conflicts and almost continuous war. Alone among Indian political leaders, Nehru had some sense of the stakes of these conflicts and of the need for an independent India to position itself advantageously in relation to them. But neither he, nor Jinnah nor Patel fully saw the strategic consequences a divided subcontinent would hold for their peoples. Partition has undoubtedly been a bonanza for international arms dealersâ€â€but overall, it created two weakened successor states to the departing Raj, much diminished as Asian powersâ€â€and it left all residents of the region more vulnerable, and open to outside influence. To see the effects of Partition thus is to recognise the need to develop political means to mitigate, for all the states of South Asia, some of the negative effects of the boundary-drawing of the 1940s.
We also need much more nuanced stories about the leading political actors in the events of Partition, and about what they did. It is, perhaps, an obvious but all-too-often forgotten point that these were men acting in conditions of extraordinary complexity, in a highly compressed chronology (Nehru described his era as one of “concentrated history”), and without any precedents to guide them. By the 1930s and ’40s India was a society which had achieved a partial or “imperfect mobilisation” as historians have called: one which brought into politics new groups such as the peasantry and lower castesâ€â€but which also left in place the old elite and their old language.Congress leaders negotiated with the British in hallowed cadences; the aroma of the street did not waft up the viceregal steps. The results were volatile: a politically much more charged world, with more power available to leaders who could now draw upon the energies of these newly-mobilised groups. But, there were also deep internal tensions and conflicts across these mobilised blocs, and between them and their leaders. Even as these political elitesâ€â€within Congress and outsideâ€â€launched powerful claims to represent the newly mobilised, challenges to such claims multiplied. Who could, in fact, legitimately represent, who spoke for whose interests, who stood to gain or lose? Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Ambedkar, Master Tara Singh: all were in the race to be the spokesman of the people, “their” people. And all had to combine, often too unthinkingly, a liberal and universal language of rights and representation with a more populist and exclusive vocabulary of sentiment and belonging.
Ambiguity and obscurity, not sharp ideological vision or clear-cut demands, surrounded the negotiations through the spring and summer of 1947. Certainties seemed to teeter and topple. And yet, as often happens in politics in the face of prolonged ambiguity, the desire for some conclusion pushed and cornered people into absolutist positions: with consequences that were bound to be unsatisfying, delivering to different people a full version of what they had only half-wanted.
It is striking how none of these leaders, all of them men of intelligence and some of vision, could fully foresee the consequences of what they were doing: how staggeringly unprepared the leaders themselves were for the effects of Partition. Jinnah kept his house on Malabar Hill, thinking he could weekend there, while running his country from Karachi on weekdays. Passports were not required for many months. Nehru, along with many other Indian leaders, believed Partition to be a temporary inconvenience. Badshah Khan wanted his frontier province to become ‘West India’, mirroring East Pakistan. Well into the August of 1947, both Jinnah and Nehru believed there would be no major and permanent movements of population. Mountbatten busied himself with the ceremonial minutiae of the transfer of power. All failed to imagine the violence.
Yet, if we can recognise the political character of these men’s actionsâ€â€having, through force of circumstance, to come to strategic judgements about one another in conditions of partial knowledgeâ€â€we can also begin to acknowledge what an error-prone process this was, rather than trusting in the omniscience of our preferred leadersâ€â€and blaming the violence on some external deus ex machina. And perhaps, we can also begin to examine our own family lore about Partition so that we can come to see it less blamelessly. For, if we can accept that mistakes were made, perhaps we can also have the beginnings of a conversation, amongst ourselves and across borders, about how now, six decades on, we can begin to mitigate some of these.
L.K. Advani no doubt had his own political reasons for choosing exactly when and where to make his remarks on Jinnahâ€â€his own ghosts to exorcise with his partymen and their Jhandewalan handlers. But his comments have performed a real service for us, if they can serve to open a debate on the creation of Pakistan and on the historical role of the man who was instrumental in this and who exists only in caricature in the Indian imagination.That the RSS should throw a tantrum at Advani’s remarks on Jinnah was to be expected. Yet, the Congress, too, took offence, refusing to entertain the thought that Jinnah’s disagreement with Congress was not about the place of religion in the state, but about the rights of minorities and how these could best be constitutionally protected. At a moment when the Congress should be re-examining its political instincts and scrutinising its intellectual inheritance, it chose instead merely to unthinkingly repeat nursery school wisdom.
Jinnah’s August 11, 1947, speech to the Constituent Assembly at Karachi, to which Advani drew attention, is indeed an important oneâ€â€important enough for subsequent governments in Pakistan to deny he ever made it, and to write out of the record the bits they did not like. In this speech, Jinnah, reflected on how “this mighty subcontinent with all kinds of inhabitants has been brought under a plan which is titanic, unknown, unparalleled.” He told his compatriots: “in the course of time, all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim communityâ€â€because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis, and so on and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vaishnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so onâ€â€will vanish”. From this, Jinnah went on, “we must learn one lesson…You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creedâ€â€that has nothing to do with the business of the State… We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.”
It would be foolish for Indians to, in turn, deny the significance of these words. We have to thank Advani for drawing attention to them. In Pakistan itself, a new image of Jinnah is being propagated, apparently in order to make him more attractive to the young. As the Pakistani scholar Akbar Zaidi has pointed out, billboards have appeared in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad, sponsored by an internet company, which show the Qaid-e-Azam before he became Qaidâ€â€the young, dashingly handsome man about town, in wing-collar and sporting a diamond tie-stud. This is not the skeletal, sherwani-clad Jinnah most Pakistanis have seen in some form or other virtually every day of their lives. The captions that attend these pictures are no doubt somewhat unhistorically drawn from the period when he had become Qaid, and they stand in tension to the images. But, they may serve to stimulate the young in Pakistan to look anew at their founder, to ask different questions of him.
Are we in India to remain stuck with our dusty understanding? Our historians have produced industrious and sometimes sophisticated accounts of Partition and the period leading up to it. Yet, our understanding of the central figure in this story, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, is absurdly inadequate. For all but one short year of his life, Jinnah was entirely a part of India’s history, an actor on the Indian political stage. But we seem unable to find an analytic or interpretative idiom that can locate and integrate him into our history, rather than seeing him as a perpetual interloper. It would be useful, for a start, to study the changing image and portrayals of Jinnah in the Indian imagination: to examine our psychic nationalist epic.
But to properly understand a figure like Jinnah, we need, among other things, to locate him within the as yet unwritten story of Indian liberalismâ€â€after all, this was a man who once said he wished to be the “Muslim Gokhale”.This Indian liberal tradition, distinct from its western counterparts, recognised minority rights and had a strong sense of injustice; but it also took community belonging seriously (which Indian politician could ever afford not to?). The disputes turned on how to find ways of representing such identities within a constitutional order: what could be an acceptable calculation that could transpose some difference into a world that now rested on numerical power and the idea of territorial sovereignty? This was where Jinnah, a man once described as “armed to the teeth with dialectics”, clashed with Congress, Nehru and the others. The force of disagreement was precisely because they shared many premises, yet, arrived at such different conclusions. Partition was a political event: and politics, which is nothing more or less than the compressed legacy of past and present human beliefs and actions, can, perhaps, also provide a resource to deal with some of its own negative effects. Politics is a stumbling, error-prone activityâ€â€sometimes catastrophically so. But, it is also the best method humans have yet devised in order to correct and revise past collective errors. It can be its own anti-dote.
The politics that resulted in Partition not only broke families and cultural connections. It disrupted the economic and trading rhythms of the subcontinent. That is something that human ingenuity has shown a capacity to fix. The creation on the subcontinent of an institutional framework which can allow the open exchange of goods, services and people, would be a first and important step in trying, in our own lifetimes, to improve on those negative consequences of Partition which are part of our inheritance. If Europe, after centuries of war and animosity, and after the greatest bloodletting in human history, could, in just 60 years, devise a complex, pragmatic unityâ€â€one which respects the basic sovereignty and integrity of its member statesâ€â€this can serve us as a lesson. In a region that contains the largest potential market in the world, it is a lesson in the capacity of political skills to redress damage, and perhaps even to remake the world. But to do this, we have to be willing to rewrite the cartoon books of our history.
Partition allowed for the great reformations in the Hindu law, which would not have occured if the country consisted of in effect two majorities, both extremely defensive regarding any abrogation of their personal laws. The state was able to draft laws in favor of women, including an equal share in property and the right to divorce; made inter-caste marriage legitimate from the Hindu standpoint; allowed for the adoption of children from any caste; and sanctioned redressive compensation owed to marginalized communities – the Untouchables and Tribes. In short, it paved the way for India to become a modern state.
Nigeria will have a Muslim-Christian civil war in the coming decades; in fact there is a low-level one going on right now.
I found an amazing article – from NYT archives.
It expounds on Pamela Mountbatten’s mention of “Midnight Mysteries”, and astrologer’s recommendation was the reason for the celebrations to start at 11:00 PM, on August, 14th. She mentions both. There was lot of formal ceremony, in which India laid down its transfer of power.
PS: On August, 15, 1947, the death toll reported was 153. So half a million would rise in the coming days.
chachahji at 234
No worries chachaji, I’m only saying, pictures are whatever they are; publishing images anew carries the burden of current intent. It’s not that he’s short, it’s that he’s making a fool of himself.
Manju, blacks and whites didn’t engage in sex as equals, by and large, in the antebellum or for that matter in the postbellum South. Pamela Hicks assures us they never slept together, whatever that means. That’s a really optimistic interpretation of the writer’s and publisher’s intention, because I don’t see the lady’s response as eager. She laughs, but is seeking the Louis’ participation. Louis is not at all emasculated in the picture; rather, he appears to have more serious things to focus on.
ag, the photo didn’t twist the facts, it captured a moment when Nehru’s posture betrayed a tendency to an obsequious stance. It may have been a brief moment, but now that moment has been magnified by publication and preserved for posterity, although that picture might never have seen the light of day otherwise. Britons love to replay and play upon their domination of Desis– the more subliminally the better.
The 60 Days to August 15, 1947</b>
This might answer some of ACM, Amitabh etc. questions.
From Mr.Khilnani’s article,
…..we need to start by changing some of the stories we tell about our past.
–> Yes, we will change the stories so changing our future relations with our neighbours is not such a rocky business. Revisionism zindabad!!!
From the constitutional documents of high politics to oral testimony and memoirs, historians have given us reason to reject the view of Partition as simply a conflict between the forces of secular nationalism and religious communalism.
–> Such vagueness ? Does anyone know what are the sources he is referring to ? I am curious to see if this is true.
….the creation of Pakistan as an independent state for India’s Muslims was an unintended outcome of the argument of the Muslim League leadership.
Krishnan you insufferable careless writer, that was a magazine article, not a scholarly piece. I don’t know if he reads this blog, though I would hope he does. I linked his website into the post. It has his email address. If you are genuinely curious, why not contact him directly.
Looks like the following Jinnah’s words can be found in page 305 of Stanley Wolpert’s book ‘ Jinnah of Pakistan’. According to Notes at the end of the book, these remarks are attributed to , Reuter’s “Report of Jinnah’s Meeting in Cairo”, in Atique Z. Sheikh and M.R.Malik, eds. ‘ Quaid-e-Azam and the Muslm World: Selected Documents’ ( Karachi : Royal Book Co. 1978)p. 166
….the creation of Pakistan as an independent state for India’s Muslims was an unintended outcome of the argument of the Muslim League leadership.
–> How disingenuous can one get ? To my recollection, Muslim League was explicit in its demand for an independent state for India’s muslims. If they werent intending for an independent state for India’s muslims, what prevented them from working within a constitutional framework and addressing the needs for muslims ? There were people who went that route (Azad, for one). Especially when the direction of Congress leaders at the time was towards inclusiveness(with exceptions of course) at that time.
There seems to be a restriction on the length of the comment text so I am splitting my responses.
Who could, in fact, legitimately represent, who spoke for whose interests, who stood to gain or lose? Gandhi, Jinnah, Nehru, Ambedkar, Master Tara Singh: all were in the race to be the spokesman of the people, “their” people. –> Great example of muddle headed equivalence if ever there was one. It is a travesty that the arguments of Nehru towards a secular society that treats “all ” people the same irrespective of their religion is in the same level as the (poisonous) arguments of Jinnah or Dara Singh or Mahasabha crowd.
At a moment when the Congress should be re-examining its political instincts and scrutinising its intellectual inheritance, it chose instead merely to unthinkingly repeat nursery school wisdom.
–> Pre-empt by casting the other side as unthinking before they call you (deservedly) unthinking. Nice strategy, though.
It would be foolish for Indians to, in turn, deny the significance of these words.
–> So, Jinnah, whose driving aim was the creation of Independent state for muslims after discarding the option of accomodation within a secular framework, was speaking with a forked tongue when he described the new nation as accomodating all religions ? I can understand why Indians shouldnt deny the significance of these words. It shows that politicians, secular or religious fundie, switch their positions all the time. Only here, he chose to play with religion and a huge number of people paid with their lives for his politics.
The force of disagreement was precisely because they shared many premises, yet, arrived at such different conclusions.…..
–> They shared many premises ? What about the important premise that it is possible to accomodate all religions within a secular state ? Pakistan’s creation is, in my understanding, the triumph of religious exclusivity over secular ideal.
But to do this, we have to be willing to rewrite the cartoon books of our history.
–> I just wish this guy doesnt get to rewrite history. We will then have a true cartoon book.
Cammille i will strongly disagree with you, as always you make the same mistake by taking only sikh punjabi’s in your perspective. You completely forget there is a huge Hindu punjabi population ( people like me) we completely supported operation Bluestar, these operations are needed when people start using religion to justify violence. i think sikh majority of indo-punjab committed grave crime against hindu punjabi minority in the 80’s.
aight anu 1st of all if operation blustar happened 2 hindus u wudnt say shit if yer most sacred asthan got destroyed u wud care on topa tha avg person sikh or hindu was terrified. my mom tells me about how sikh boys esp inncoent were abducted n killed. n many hindues outside of blustar outside of punjab esp delhi massacerd sikhs how u explain tha dey wer no better den da militants.
da militants cause was right way of gettin der wuz wrong thas wat every1 says. n itz true from wat i hear i wasn’t around o i can’t fully judge. I can say tha it fuckin pisses me off 2 no da army disgraced it lyk tha w/ ppl walkn in der shoes drinkin n smokin inside it. I tell u rite no doubt i give my life for ma ppl. I am Punjabi n Sikh 1st Indian n Canadian Citizen second.
cuz da government can turn on u but yer ppl wont. cuz if dey did ud alrdy b dead.
on top many sikhs regind cuz of it n many measures were takn cuz majority of army wuz sikh n punjabi. (30 % sikh more punjabi if u include all religion) now dey made it % cuz dey found out hard way not smart 2 mess w/ punjabiz wen we’re majority in army. Also ppl lyk KPS Gill turned on der own ppl thas y dey got killed. u never i mean NEVER turn on yer own ppl no mata wat. EVER.
basically it wuz a tragedy on more den 1 side n avg person wuz inncent n caught up in it all religons. ppl on 1 side had militants come 2 house @ night askin 4 roti or dey wud kill u cuz u cant fight on empty stomach. If u gav dem it. Popo come n arrest sayn ur a militant.
n how can u encourage an army destroyin n killin lyk tha? me seein da shit i seen n doin wat i have done wudnt say tha. no1 wud. Also yo mayb 4 once da hindu minority got treated lyk da minorites every wer else in india get treated lyk. Shit. thas da way it is.
Nehru was indeed a pathetic little man. It would be a travesty to depict him as noble.
1.) why do you think he was pathetic? 2.) why does his size matter?
Prema & Rexdale should combine their annoying forces to form one super-annoying entity. It would be unstoppable.
Here’s a taste:
wteverz InDia sux eggs cuz its lyk sooo stpd n the kds r sooo homelss n stff n nehr cn go fuk hmslf.
it will be like that except 750 words.