The Great Partition (40 page)

This book has taken a rather different angle. It has shown how, for several years, South Asia was in a deeply ambiguous, transitional position between empire and nationhood that threatened the very existence of the new states themselves. There was no straightforward exchange of the baton of government. The protracted, unruly end of empire in South Asia was a shock of epic proportions that destabilised life for millions of its inhabitants. In 1946, people felt entirely uncertain about what the future would deliver. It is not implausible that South Asia could have spiralled into an even more devastating civil war, or that Pakistan could have failed to come into existence. It is not improbable that the new states could have been created along entirely different lines or that some of the princely states could have succeeded in their bids for autonomy. There was nothing inevitable or pre-planned about the way that Partition unfolded. Well accustomed as we are nowadays to the contours of these states on the world map, and given the terrific speed with which they acted to establish themselves, it is very challenging to visualise the moment at which they could have been forged in different ways, and what that future might have looked like.

On 15 August 1947 the first part of the British empire was unhooked from the imperial metropolis. This history of Partition has suggested that modern nation states had to be crafted out of a chaotic, diffused situation in which myriad voices made their claims and counter-claims. As the first Asian countries to win their freedom from empire, India and Pakistan pioneered decolonisation. Few aspects of this were preconceived or well mapped out.

The flip-side of the story of liberation from colonial rule was the chaos and violence that engulfed and almost overwhelmed the new states. Nationalism exacted its own blood price. The violence of 1946–8, so regularly and conveniently portrayed by contemporaries and by later historians as the unstoppable thuggery of madmen and hooligans, in an uncanny parody of the colonial language of governance, was, instead, often planned, strategic and linked to middle-class party politics. The black and white imagery of ragged refugees and bloodthirsty peasants should be replaced with a technicolour picture of modern weaponry, strategic planning and political rhetoric, which was used to encourage and legitimise the killers and their actions. Fuelled by appeals to an ideal society and determined to bring about their own interpretations of
swaraj
and Pakistan, some of the murderers no doubt operated with the mistaken idea that they were doing what was best for their nation. Others, living under the shadow of curfew, daily stabbings and bombings, and exposed to misinformation and rumour, turned from a position of strategic self-defence to overt aggression. It is beyond doubt that nationalist politicians and enthusiasts from leading political parties colluded with, and became tangled up in, the massacres.

Individuals and communities felt the full brunt of Partition, far beyond the gravest and most deadly sites of violence in Punjab. Centripetally, its effects radiated out from the nerve centres in the north in a broader arc than is usually presumed. It ripped apart the operation of everyday life in cities across North India and often made ordinary life altogether impossible. The lives of factory workers, teachers, government clerks and shopkeepers were massively, albeit temporarily, disrupted because of the closure of offices and factories, ruptured train lines, the heightened and abnormally anxious circulation of news and rumour. Unfamiliar and desperate batches of refugees speaking strange tongues started to turn up unannounced at local railway stations. Relationships with communities of local people – who were suddenly branded as ‘minorities’ or ‘not one of us’ – were cast in a new light, especially when these groups began to cluster together and move to another place for their own safety.

New opportunities to make extra profit or to secure promotion opened up for some. For others, there were major and agonising decisions to make about whether to leave for India or Pakistan. For the refugees, life would never be the same again. In the worst affected places, in an almost carnivalesque manner, relationships between men and women and between families became upended and distorted as every taboo was broken and people clutched at older caste or regional identities while trying to recreate in strange new conditions and alien cities something of their former existence. There were small glimmers of opportunity which enabled, for instance, women to work outside the home, or to seize the political initiative in their new refugee camp or housing colony. But it is difficult to see these attempts at an autonomous, dignified life as anything other than small triumphs in the face of unending adversity.

After Partition, there was a sea change. The new national governments in India and Pakistan worked spectacularly hard at supplanting the endemic confusion with order and at recasting the disorder as the handiwork of thugs and hooligans. Newly emerging nations, economically and politically precarious in 1947, quickly turned from defensive weakness to literal and metaphorical fortification. From the earliest days of Independence, middle-class contemporaries regarded state-building and nation-making as part of their inescapable duty. As this book has argued, new types of nationalism were consolidated in the aftermath of Partition, not only in its prelude. Whether people had previously supported the League or the Congress had become a secondary consideration by 1947. Crucially, Partition had its own intrinsic revolutionary repercussions. It was not just the product of the decades of electrifying change which preceded it.

Pakistan and India are now established facts, distinctive nations, which have followed trajectories that were scarcely dreamed of by their founders and supporters in the 1940s. The Partition plan was, in some ways, a genuine compromise that allowed for a sharing of land and a division of people and materials. It acknowledged the right to self-determination of a large group of Muslims who, albeit in a contradictory and confused manner, had expressed their strong desire to extricate themselves from the Congress's control. For these reasons, the more optimistic onlookers in June 1947 welcomed the settlement as a solution to the problematic tensions that had been plaguing South Asian politics. The blueprint, which was loftily imposed from above in 1947, though, has never escaped the stain of illegitimacy that marred it. It was a plan that went catastrophically wrong: partly because it was sabotaged by militant groups who did not subscribe to it and partly because it did not make detailed allowances for many different grassroots realities that were shaping local politics in the provinces. Even those inside the limited loop of political information in 1947 were shocked by the speed with which Partition was imposed, the lack of clarity and reassurance provided to those living along the borderlines, the paucity of military protection written into the plan, the complete abnegation of duty towards the rights of minorities and failure to elucidate the questions of citizenship. One apparently contradictory aspect of Partition's nature is this tension between speed and sluggishness, decisiveness and prevarication. Far more power had already been devolved by 15 August 1947 than is usually acknowledged. The states that were coming into existence were works in progress. If not entirely responsible for the contending nationalisms that emerged in South Asia (which it certainly contributed to), the British government's most grievous failure was the shoddy way in which the plan was implemented.

In a close approximation of each other, India and Pakistan swiftly moved to consolidate their nations and to define themselves as autonomous states using all the national apparel they could muster – flags, anthems and national histories – and by implementing more concrete measures: the policing of boundaries, the closure of lacunae in the definitions of citizenship and writing constitutions. None of this is too surprising, but the ‘other’ state necessarily became an object of comparison, a counterpoint, and was, to a greater or lesser extent, vilified in the process. A cornerstone of nation-making was securing control of a separate and powerful army. The Kashmir imbroglio and the subsequent wars since 1947 have, of course, sustained the tensions between India and Pakistan and further entrenched the conflict in new and difficult ways. New grievances and conflicts have arisen because of the growth of militancy, Pakistan's backing for violent atrocities carried out in Kashmir and beyond, Indian human rights abuses in the Kashmir valley, not to forget the complications caused by the creation of Bangladesh after the war of 1971, the acquisition of nuclear weaponry, and the complex interplay of national and regional identities in all three countries.

Not all of South Asia's current problems can be laid at the feet of Partition. Events have moved on from 1947 and difficulties created by the Radcliffe line – such as the maintenance of illogical and tricky boundaries – instead of being salved with the balm of diplomacy have become running sores. Yet, the way in which Kashmir is usually cited as the cause of these problems overlooks the way in which Partition itself was the site for, and the origin of, so many of the ongoing conflicts in South Asia, not least because it was the source of the suspicions and national myths that are deeply rooted in the definition of one state against the other.

Today a peace process is under way in earnest and there are reasons for optimism as the confidence-building measures agreed between the two governments are gradually implemented. New bus, rail and air services link up the two nations. The prospects for commerce are excellent and the surge in bilateral trade, which crossed the 500 million dollar mark in 2004–5, has outstripped earlier levels of economic interaction. Chambers of Commerce send eager delegations across the border. Film, entertainment and tourism all have wide attraction for Indians and Pakistanis who have a shared taste in humour, music and film. Pilgrims want to visit temples and sacred sites, artists would welcome the chance to perform to the transnational audience, businessmen know full well the market for their goods and services across the border which is confirmed by the thriving black market in everything from textiles to food products and electronics. There are recent signs that the ban on showing Indian films in Pakistani cinemas, which has boosted a pirate industry, may be lifted and Pakistani cinemas have been able to screen selected Bollywood movies for the first time in forty years.

Nevertheless, Indians and Pakistanis are still, despite the ongoing and encouraging liberalisation of the visa regime in 2006, kept apart. For sixty years Indians and Pakistanis have been largely segregated in a manner unthinkable to the protagonists who agreed to the plan at the fateful meeting on 3 June 1947. The way in which Pakistan and India have evolved as nation states and the literal, pedantic, policing of nationality in the interim seems in retrospect a product of the anxieties and insecurities of Partition. The failure at the time to define Indian and Pakistani citizenship fully, the contradictions of imagined nationalisms and the territorial realities of state-making left a difficult and acrimonious legacy. Today, queues outside visa offices remain long and depressing as families camp out from early in the morning trying to acquire the necessary paperwork to cross the border, while the visa regime explicitly favours the wealthy and cosmopolitan. Visas, when issued, still restrict visitors to specific cities, only allow trips of a short duration and involve complicated and dispiriting registration with the local police on arrival. It has become ever harder to recover a sense of what it was like to be a pre-Indian or a pre-Pakistani.

Partition deserves renewed consideration and closer attention for abundant reasons. It was one of the twentieth century's darkest moments. The millions of people killed and forced to leave their homes merit greater recognition and a place closer to the heart of history writing for their own sake. The Partition of 1947 is also a loud reminder, should we care to listen, of the dangers of colonial interventions and the profound difficulties that dog regime change. It stands testament to the follies of empire, which ruptures community evolution, distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different – and unknowable – paths. Partition is a lasting lesson of both the dangers of imperial hubris and the reactions of extreme nationalism. For better or worse, two nations continue to live alongside each other in South Asia and continue to live with these legacies.

1.

USSA 845.00/6–647 Box 6070. Gordon Minnigerode to US Secretary of State, 6 June 1947.

2.

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, ‘Who Killed India’, in Mushirul Hasan, ed.,

(Delhi: Lotus Collection, 1995), vol. 2, p. 232.

3.

IOR L/PJ/5/140, Akbar Hydari to Mountbatten, 5 June 1947.

4.

Alan Campbell-Johnson,

(London: Robert Hale, 1951), p. 106.

5.

N. Mansergh, ed.,

, vol. 11, pp. 86–101.

6.

Ibid.

7.

Ibid., p. 96.

8.

Ibid., pp. 97–8.

9.

As the historian Gyanendra Pandey has stressed, Independence and Partition marked out the problematic beginning of a process, ‘the normalization of particular communities and particular histories …’ See Gyanendra Pandey,

(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 52.

10.

, 4 June 1947.

11.

, 1st ser., vol. 15, p. 506; Pakistan Assembly debate, 11 August 1947 reproduced in M. Rafique Afzal, ed.,