(A sightly edited version of this article was published by Asia Times Online on August 29, 2013 as "India's partition debate best left to artists")
More than six decades later, the debates around partition of India have become no less intense. While a book on partition and a recent column by a historian put India’s architect Jawaharlal Nehru in spotlight for extreme myopia and culpability, a 2010 novel and a recent Hindi movie go on to explore the terrible cost of partition.
“Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.”
These words of Saadat Hasan Manto, the legendary short story writer who arguably depicted the horrors of partition of India most comprehensively, probably capture the essence of the tragedy that followed the much awaited independence of India, and also Pakistan, from Britain.
One of the massive human tragedies of the past century, the event of partition continues to invite debate to date in the subcontinent and even elsewhere, particularly among the historians, sociologists and psychologists. Was the horror and nasty bloodletting inevitable? If it was not, then who precisely was responsible for the tragedy? These questions have been variously debated even though no infallible conclusion can be reached as such.
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| "With the tragic legacy of an uncertain future, a young refugee sits on the walls of Purana Qila, transformed into a vast refugee camp in Delhi." Margaret Bourke-White, 1947 (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
As the newly independent states of India and Pakistan pursued their own, albeit diverse, fates after partition, most of the physical wounds of the cataclysmic violence gradually subsided even though a recovery to pre-partition status was an impossibility. This, however, was not the case with the mental trauma forced upon millions of people: those who had not participated in the violence had witnessed it and at the end, there was no answer to the question as to how the people in the subcontinent could live in peace, as evidenced by the lingering tension between the two states that flares frequently enough.
Who was the culprit?
One line of argument about culpability for partition of India goes like this: the British as the colonial power had so finely sown the seeds of internecine conflict in the subcontinent in their attempt to strengthen their hold of the territories that some kind of mass confrontation between the religious communities was inevitable; that it came in the form of partition-related violence was only a manifestation of an inevitable development.
While this argument does have merit and partially explains the state of perpetual tension between religious communities in colonized India, it would be well off the mark to conclude that the violence of that scale was inevitable and that it was impossible to avoid it. Also, this argument injudiciously absolves the then leaders of India, to-be-born Pakistan and the then government of Britain of any responsibility towards avoiding the violence.
For decades after partition, as India under Jawaharlal Nehru fared comparatively better than Pakistan, it was implicitly believed in India that the partition was the result of the intransigence of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League (ML) who were ready to go to any length to realize their dreams, rather vested interests, of a separate Muslim state. By implication, the historic culpability for inciting one of the gravest human tragedies in recent human history thus fell more or less squarely on Jinnah and ML. Leaders of new India, particularly Nehru himself, were thus depicted as having been rather unsuccessful at preventing the bloodletting nevertheless not directly responsible for the same.
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| A refugee train on its way to Punjab, Pakistan. (Source: Wikimedia Commons) |
Many scholars and historians, however have had objections to the narrative from the very beginning. Moreover, the issue of culpability, negligence and myopia of the then leadership of India came further into scrutiny after some recent outspoken critiques of Nehru and his brand of politics in India before, through and after partition. In 'Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence' the Indian politician-turned-biographer Jashwant Singh has chronicled how Jinnah was relentlessly pushed to the position by Nehru-led Congress from where it was impossible to demand anything but independent Muslim state.
In a recent column, historian Zareer Masani has come up with an all out criticism of Nehru, the then British Viceroy for India Mountbatten and the then PM of Britain Attlee for colluding in a terribly myopic arrangement whereby partition was hastily 'forced' into India. While the imaginary scenario of avoiding partition sketched by Masani in the article could be debated for merits, he has substance on arguing that any provisional arrangement for the time being, akin to an unhappy marriage, would have been far better than the hastily executed plan to sever the territory at the terrible price.
This reference to two statements of Nehru in the article speak a lot about why exactly Nehru cannot be absolved of the responsibility for being instrumental to a situation which led to bloodletting:
As for Nehru, he first crowed about the mangled Muslim state that emerged from the cutting up of Punjab and Bengal, saying, “The truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having.” But a year later, he said, “Perhaps we acted wrongly.... The consequences of that partition have been so terrible that one is inclined to think that anything else would have been preferable.... Ultimately, I have no doubt that India and Pakistan will come close together...some kind of federal link.... There is no other way to peace. The alternative is...war.” Even as he spoke, the two new states were already at war over Kashmir.
