The Ides Of August

Historians have insisted on a wider range of actors—and, therefore, of responsibility—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 governments—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 whoclash. "Communalism", or even such monolithic categories as "Muslim", "Hindu" and "Sikh" were notpre-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 existence—needed in order to freeze these identities hard.

Partition was the outcome of immediate politics, not immemorial religious passions—it was a political event, which, no doubt, drew upon forms of religious self-identification, but also changed theircharacter. 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 not—as we usually think of it—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 dealers—but overall, it created two weakened successor states to the departing Raj, much diminished as Asian powers—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.

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 actions—having, through force of circumstance, to come to strategic judgements about one another in conditions of partial knowledge—we can also begin to acknowledge what an error-prone process this was, rather than trusting in the omniscience of our preferred leaders—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 onJinnah—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 Indianimagination. That theRSS 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 constitutionallyprotected. 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 one—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 community—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 on—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 creed—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.

>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 activity—sometimes catastrophicallyso. But, it is also the best method humans have yet devised in order to correct and revise past collectiveerrors. 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 unity—one which respects the basic sovereignty and integrity of its member states—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.