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.
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 guidethem. 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 castes—but which also left in place the old elite and their oldlanguage. Congress leaders negotiated with the British in hallowed cadences; the aroma of the street did not waft up the viceregalsteps. 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-mobilisedgroups. But, there were also deep internal tensions and conflicts across these mobilised blocs, and between them and theirleaders. Even as these political elites—within Congress and outside—launched powerful claims to represent the newly mobilised, challenges to such claimsmultiplied. 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 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.
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 Qaid—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 liberalism—after all, this was a man who once said he wished to be the "MuslimGokhale". 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 notto?). 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 theothers. 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 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.
