Wounds remain unhealed, lessons unlearnt

Harish Khare

With rare exceptions, the world has simply not known how to divide a nation amicably and peacefully. The division of India in 1947 to carve out a new state of Pakistan inevitably produced its own ghastly share of violence, dislocation and disruption.

Admittedly, the British decision to grant India independence was principally driven by the simple fact that the four-year-long World War II had totally exhausted the imperial will to rule; in fact, the British desire to hold on to India had already been tested morally and ethically by the Indian National Congress, which under the Mahatma’s leadership had waged a unique peaceful freedom struggle. The British middle classes, with their pretensions to liberal values, had no answer to the Mahatma’s saintly leadership. The Union Jack had to be lowered from Red Fort, sooner than later. 

But by the time the British came to the conclusion that they could no longer stay in India, they had already instigated mischief among the Indian leadership. The colonial rulers had cynically worked on the Indian society’s religious fault lines, encouraged and cultivated sectarian agendas which ultimately coalesced into the demand for a separate nation.

The Muslim League, under Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had already legitimised use of violence in pursuit of its demands. The League’s call for ‘Direct Action’ was an invitation to chaos and the mobs. Once a society develops a taste for violence, its leaders are rarely able to calibrate and control the streets. By the time August 15, 1947, came the Muslim League’s leadership skills were already over-extended even in what came to be known as East Pakistan and West Pakistan. In India, the Congress leadership was barely able to push the mobs back. 

Still, a monumental tragedy was destined to take place. The sheer scale of the number of Hindus and Sikhs, who found themselves forced to migrate out to India and of the Muslims in India who had to leave for Pakistan, was maddeningly benumbing. Grand statistics simply cannot convey the trauma and the tragedy that engulfed this part of the world soon after August 1947. 

A sympathetic American reporter and an eye-witness described the post-Partition days as “one of the great convulsions of modern history.” On December 12, 1947, he tried to convey the nature of disaster that overtook the two nascent nations: “Consider what has happened. In an orgy of religious-communal madness, some 10 million citizens of the north-western provinces had been routed from their homes. An unknown total, probably between 2,00,000 and 5,00,000 (compared to 2,95,000 American war-dead in World War II), had been put to sword, machine-gunned, or roasted alive. The splintered Punjab administrations were quickly swamped and there even appeared danger that the infant central governments of India and Pakistan Dominions might succumb.” Phillips Talbot (An American Witness to India’s Partition).

The frenzy in the East was no less violent, no less gory, no less bloody than it was in the West. The Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs joyfully discovered their capacity for inflicting violence and death on their erstwhile neighbours as well as total strangers. The massacres, the mayhem and the madness outpaced humanity and all known civic-minded virtues; the trauma and tragedy touched nearly every home, every life. No one was unaffected; no one could remain emotionally unmolested by this continental turbulence. 

After a few months the mobs could be rolled back and blood could be washed off the streets, but the memory of Partition-centric violence was now etched on the soul of an entire generation on both sides. The two successive states had entrenched habits and protocols of acrimony and suspicion and political leaders and sectarian interests saw to it that India and Pakistan would not settle down to a peaceful co-existence. 

The raw memories of Partition also impacted on how the two states went about the business of creating an internal political order. Once Jinnah was gone, Pakistan hastily abandoned his ideas of an inclusive society and nation. In India, the Mahatma was assassinated. The murder was planned by those who wanted to make India a Hindu State and they thought the Old Man was an obstacle. Ironically, the assassination settled, once for all, how India would grant equal protection and equal citizenship to all its minorities. 

Perhaps some in India would argue that Partition’s unfinished agenda still remains unattended. May be, after 70 years, we should simply revisit those horrible, horrible days of chaos and disorder before we embark on another self-defeating journey…