Partition essay - Grade: 1:1 PDF

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To what extent did the partition of British India solve the problems it was meant to address?...

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To what extent did the partition of British India solve the problems it was meant to address? The Partition of British India, announced in August 1947, did not solve the problems that it was meant to address and plunged the subcontinent in to decades of further division and strife. Much of the historiography regarding partition has failed to look at the enduring long term consequences of partition which still effect India, Pakistan and Bangladesh today. Historiography of partition has also seen a shift away from ‘high politics’, such as the work of Ayesha Jalal regarding Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demands for Pakistan, to a focus on the subaltern human dimension which has proved more valuable in assessing the problems of partition in terms of the scars it left on ordinary people, families and whole social groups. This essay will argue that partition never solved the problems of the religious divide between Hindu’s and Muslims, the debate surrounding central power and provincial power and the problem of communitarianism and minority groups. It is necessary to understand modern-day problems in South Asia in regards to these issues in light of the failures of partition. This shall be done by identifying the immediate problems of the partition plan in addressing each of these issues, looking at its short term implications and finally analysing whether that issue endures in the subcontinent today. Perhaps the most important problem that the partition of British India was meant to address was the divide between Hindu’s and Muslims, or more specifically, the divide between the ‘secular’ Congress and the Muslim League. Although there was no political party to represent Muslim opinion in India in the early 1930s, the separate electorates established for Muslims in the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms signalled that Muslims would be a perpetual minority, dominated by Congress. It was World War Two that allowed the Muslim League to claim to speak for all Muslims with the 1940 Lahore Resolution formally stating that Muslims were a ‘nation’ and deserved equal power with Congress. When the Muslim League won all Muslim seats to the central assembly in the 1945-46 elections, it was clear that Muslim demands needed to be taken seriously. 1 Lord Mountbatten’s 3rd June Partition Plan sought to solve this religious constitutional deadlock and stipulated that India would be divided between Muslim majority and Hindu majority provinces with the provinces of Bengal and Punjab also divided internally between Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority districts. Partition based on religious demarcation was far from successful in solving the religious problem, showing that the causes of partition reveal very little about its potential consequences. Fixing ‘Pakistani’ and ‘Indian’ citizenship based on religion proved a difficult task since not all Muslims wanted to or could become Pakistani and not all Hindus wanted to become Indian. For many Muslims and Indians, migration to Pakistan and India was not in the cause of solidarity among religious compatriots but a matter of immediate security and the hope that they would one day return to their homeland. 2 In Punjab alone, 4.5 million Hindu’s and Sikhs were uprooted from their homes in West Punjab and migrated to the East

1 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. New York: Routledge. (2nd Ed. 2004) Pg 148 2 Zamindar, Vazira Fazali-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia : Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press (2010) Pg 70

with 5.5 million Muslims moving in the opposite direction.3 Partition overall left 40million Muslims in India, showing that this religious demarcation simply did not work.4 Neither states undertook the rehabilitation of refugees as a religious duty, with the Pakistani government eventually drafting limits to migration, blaming the strain on Pakistan’s economy. Vazira Fazali-Yacoobali Zamindar explored the status of those left with no citizenship rights from an ethnographic sub-alternatist perspective. She draws on the life of Muslim Indian army officer, Ghulam Ali, who was placed in a Hindu camp in Lahore and then declared by a Pakistani judge to be an Indian citizen even though the government of India refused to give him citizenship. Ali’s story represents the many dispossessed Muslim and Hindu people across the subcontinent.5 The partition plan also meant that Muslims remained disadvantaged compared to Hindu’s economically and politically, showing that the League’s aims of equality with Congress had failed. Revisionist historians, Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose argue that Pakistan was never a creation of the two-nation theory, as orthodox historiography has argued – Congress had never accepted Muslim nationhood and the Muslim-majority provinces were deemed to have seceded from the existing Union of India.6 As a result, it was India that inherited the political machinery of the Raj which allowed it to quickly establish a democratic culture while Pakistan soon came under military rule. Additionally, a partition based on religion alone, encompassing all other social dividers was dangerous. David Gilmartin argues that the argument made by secular-minded historians regarding the teleology of India’s religious differences which made eventual division fait accompli, essentialises these communities in to homogenous blocs and ignores the various classes, castes, languages and cultural heritages that exist within them.7 This can be exemplified by the Indian Muslim refugees who settled in Sindh, known as the ‘Muhajirs’. Extreme violence erupted between the indigenous Sindhi’s and Muhajir’s in the 1980s. This gulf was created by partition due to differences like language, the Sindhi dialect compared to Muhajir Urdu, and Muhajir’s being typically better educated compared to Sindhi’s, creating hostility between the two communities in the job market. ‘Secular’ India and ‘Monotheistic’ Pakistan is also a very essentialist paradigm that exists in Partition literature. This can be refuted by the rise of the Hindu right in India with Narendra Modi’s silence regarding the 2002 pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat and in the BJP seeking to make Hinduism the defining basis of the Indian nation.8 Therefore, partition did very little to heal religious divisions between Hindu’s and Muslims in both India and Pakistan and served to increase divisions within them. A major debate leading up to partition among the Muslim League and Congress concerned the distribution of power between the administrative centre and the provinces. While Congress sought a unitary India with a powerful centre, Jinnah was amenable to the 3 Tan, Tai Yong & Kudaisya, Gyanesh. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge (2000). Pg 93 4 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. Pg 158 5 Zamindar, Vazira Fazali-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. Pg 16. 6 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. Pg 155 7 Gilmartin, David. ‘The Historiography of India's Partition: Between Civilization and Modernity’. The Journal of Asian Studies. 74:01 (February 2015). Pg 29 8 Ibid.

federal structure presented in the June 1946 Cabinet Mission as it provided for a weak centre and the League’s control of Muslim-majority provinces.9 Both of these aims contradicted the aims of provincial leaders who wanted more autonomy in regards to provincial affairs, particularly the Punjab and Bengal. Partition was the only way that Jawaharlal Nehru could have a one-party dominant system in India, and thus a strong centre and the only way the Muslim League could discipline Muslim-majority provinces. Divisions between centralism and regionalism endured in the new nations after partition. After partition, both India and Pakistan pursued a strong centre although Pakistan struggled more due to having to build a centre from scratch and having to control the security of both its Eastern wing and Western wing which were separated by thousands of miles of Indian territory. Jalal and Bose argue that centre-region tensions are primarily the result of partition rather than existing cultural divisions in the sub-continent.10 The provinces were left dissatisfied in both nations, resulting in a lack of internal cohesion. Nehru was ambivalent to Potti Sriramalu’s 1952 fast to death for Congress to recognise a separate state for the 11 Telugu speaking districts of Madras and had a delayed response to the language riots in Bombay in the 1960s which ultimately separated Gujarat from Maharashtra. If partition had accommodated for factors like language rather than primarily religion, perhaps such upheaval could have been avoided. When India and Pakistan went to war over Kashmir in 1948 and again in 1956, Pakistan needed to extract heavy resources from its provinces to fund the defence effort, which antagonised provinces like Bengal which had little interest in Kashmir.11 Debates between centralism and regionalism lent themselves to regional dissent, showing that the problems of minorities and communitarianism, which had been another cause of partition, was not adequately addressed. Tan Tai Yong and Gyanesh Kudaisya contend that the divisions that existed before partition were merely plastered over and then replaced by new problems.12 Yong and Kudaisya argue that Pakistan considers Kashmir an ‘unfinished business of partition’ explaining why Kashmir remains a battlefield, plaguing inter-state relations.13 The tussle between India and Pakistan has only served to aggravate the Kashmiri’s - while some passionately call for Kashmiri separatism, others argue that it is only logical that Kashmir, with a Muslim-majority population, should join Pakistan. Bengal was another province which was left dissatisfied by partition. The partition of Bengal followed no consistent criteria and the Muslim East Bengal was left economically fragile with Calcutta, a commercial and industrial hub, being granted to Indian West Bengal. East Bengal received very little economic assistance from West Pakistan and resented the imposition of Urdu as the official language in 1950. This resentment would eventually culminate in the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971 after the Awami League had gained significant political support after challenging East Pakistan’s lack of representation at the centre. This once again showed that the causes of partition did not provide an accurate picture of its consequences – a common religious bond did not unify East and West Pakistan as partition had hoped and instead, as Jalal and Bose state, Hindu India needed to intervene 9 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. Pg 149 10 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. Pg 171 11 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. Pg 177 12 Tan, Tai Yong & Kudaisya, Gyanesh. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. Pg 230 13 Tan, Tai Yong & Kudaisya, Gyanesh. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. Pg 220

to ‘save’ the Muslim population of one region from its oppressors in another.14 This is why Pankhuree Dube argues that it is impossible to state that religion was the primary cause of partition as this view does not account for the differentiated groups in South Asia who rejected the religious sectarianism imposed upon them.15 While most historians agree that partition was a tragic failure in solving the problems it was meant to address, there is disagreement concerning whether the violence of partition was the necessary price to pay for new nation states. While nationalist historians disregard much of the violence perpetrated as partition was ‘an aberration that had no connection to the glory of independence’,16 others argue that the inherent violence of partition overshadows the achievement of independence and thus makes it necessary to account for the experiences of South Asian people in the partition era and the years following it. Gyanendra Pandey’s subalternist work sought to challenge partition historiography which supposedly focuses too much on the broader political dynamics of partition and its long term historical consequences and not the people it impacted in the short term.17 Pandey found that ‘partition’ and ‘independence’ were intertwined in the minds of partition survivors and so the large scale rapes, massacres and abductions should be considered as immediate problems of partition. It was estimated that between 75,000 and 100,000 women were kidnapped and raped during the riots following partition.18 While Pandey contends the unacceptability of the violence of partition,19 M.N. Das’s nationalist stance is clear in his argument that had it not been for partition, India would not be the successful democracy it is today – the Muslim-majority areas now constituting Pakistan and Bangladesh would have come in the way of India’s democratic progress due to potential influence from religious fundamentalism and would have been economic liabilities.20 In conclusion, the partition of British India failed to solve the problems it was meant to address. Divisions between Hindu’s and Muslims still exist both between India and Pakistan, as shown in the contest for Kashmir which has its foundations in the 1947 partition, and within the new nations, as demonstrated with far-right Hindu nationalism and attacks against Muslims in Modi’s India. The problem of communalism and centre-province disputes endured long after partition and ultimately created a new nation state, Bangladesh in 1971. It may well be possible that Jammu and Kashmir will head in the same separatist direction as Bangladesh did. However, speaking of religious problems, communitarianism and political tussles broadly neglects the experiences of ordinary South Asians who had lived through partition. Partition failed Hindu’s, Muslim’s, Sikh’s, men, women and children alike – many had no role to play in the causes of partition, which were pushed by elite politicians, but had to bare the brunt of its violence and had to shoulder its enduring problems. 14 Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. Pg 181 15 Dube, Pankhuree R. “Partition Historiography.” Historian. 77:01 (2015) Pg 58 16 Dube, Pankhuree R. “Partition Historiography.” Pg 68 17 Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001) Pg 58 18 Aftab, Tahera. Inscribing South Asian Muslim Women: An Annotated Bibliography & Research Guide. Boston: Brill (Annotated ed: November 2007) p. 224. 19 Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Pg 178 20 Das, Manmath Nath. Partition and Independence of India. Inside Story of the Mountbatten Days. New Delhi: Vikas (1982) Pg 309

Word count: 1973 Bibliography: 1. Bose, Sugata & Jalal, Ayesha. Modern South Asia History, Culture, Political Economy. New York: Routledge. (2nd Ed. 2004) 1. Das, Manmath Nath. Partition and Independence of India. Inside Story of the Mountbatten Days. New Delhi: Vikas (1982) 2. Dube, Pankhuree R. “Partition Historiography.” Historian. Volume 77: No.01 (2015) 3. Gilmartin, David. ‘The Historiography of India's Partition: Between Civilization and Modernity’. The Journal of Asian Studies. Volume 74: No. 01 (February 2015). 4. Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2001) 5. Roy, Asim. "The High Politics of India's Partition: The Revisionist Perspective." Modern Asian Studies. Volume 24: No. 2 (1990) pp 385-408. 6. Tan, Tai Yong & Kudaisya, Gyanesh. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London: Routledge (2000). 7. Zamindar, Vazira Fazali-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia; Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press (2010)...