India’s Partition:Its Meanings, Memories, Actors, and Undercurrents

Cody ValdesSouth Asia, 1000-2000Professor Ayesha Jalal

December 6, 2009Essay Question #3

1947 is the most cataclysmic and defining year in the history of the Indian subcontinent,

both for the geopolitical legacy of British India’s partition and the tremendous loss of life and

community it entailed for nearly 20 million people. But today it is not always treated as such; seen

through the prism of chauvinistic nationalism or religious communalism, both Indians and

Pakistanis are wont to attribute partition to Britain’s policy of divide and rule and the insensible

determinations of a unified and separate Muslim nation, while the atrocities committed by Sikhs,

Hindus and Muslims are left to fester as myths of ideologically-constructed histories. While

surviving Muslims who were forced to abandon their homes in eastern Punjab and western Bengal

and flee to the new state of Pakistan recall the pain of their journey in vivid detail, particularly

remembering the daughters they lost and the Hindu and Sikh brothers they were torn from,

partition is somehow treated as a ‘victory’ for India’s Muslims. Did partition not, so goes the

argument, result in a brand new state through which a religiously unified Muslim nation could

pursue an Islamic political agenda? While the despotic and Islamic rule of General and President

Zia al Huq a generation later would seem to validate such a notion, this was hardly the objective or

the vision of Pakistan’s founders.

Rather than a unified Muslim polity, partition gave Jinnah control of the same recalcitrant,

particularistic provinces that he knew prior to 1947. By demarcating India’s population along

religious lines, British colonialists ensured the emergence of individuals claiming to represent their

own religions. The result was that individual Muslims, primarily landed elites, claimed to speak on

behalf of their regional Muslim communities despite their obvious class objectives.1 This explains

the reluctance of Punjab property owners to embrace an all-India Muslim party during the 1920s

and instead to form an agriculture party with their fellow Hindus and Sikhs.2 If religious

communalism was the greatest motivator of British India’s Muslims, then the need for a strong all-1 Aside from class differences, Bengali Muslims were clearly divided between the localized, indigenous blend of Hindu, Muslim, and Sufism, and the “urban-based, foreign-born Islamic elite who strongly resisted assimilation into indigenous Bengali culture.” Naila Kabeer, “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam, and the State in Bangladesh,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed, Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 118.2 Lecture, Ayesha Jalal. November 16, 2009.

India Muslim voice would have been widely recognized and the Muslim League and Jinnah might

have garnered more than the 4.4 percent of votes in the 1936/7 elections. Instead, Punjab and

Bengal were more interested in the British ideas of federalism and provincial autonomy put forth

in the 1935 Government of India Act. Only after World War II did these provinces come to resent

British rule and align themselves with the all-India Muslim League.

Winning 75 percent of the vote in the Muslim-majority provinces and all of the reserved

seats at the all-India level in the 1945 elections, Jinnah’s Muslim League was given new impetus

to demand protection for the Muslim communities from Congress and the Viceroy. By the Lahore

Agreement in 1940, the Muslim Leaguers had adopted the idea of a Muslim Nation in their

discourse, but they were much more ambiguous about the idea of a Muslim state. Jinnah actively

sought to present himself as the sole spokesperson for India’s 95 million Muslims in the years

leading up to partition, despite the competing agendas of his co-religionists living in Muslim-

majority provinces (Punjab, Bengal) and those rooted in provinces where Muslims were minority.

It was religion, according to Bose and Jalal, which “came to Jinnah’s rescue, less as a device to be

deployed against rival communities, and more as a way of papering over the cracks in the

splintered ranks of Muslim India.”3

But Jinnah could not ensure the partition of India alone, nor did the idea appeal to him in

the slightest. In his calls for a unified state post-independence, he was as strong an “Indian

nationalist” as Nehru, Gandhi, Menon and the rest of his Congress counterparts, despite the

vociferous demands for provincial autonomy of his constituent leaders in Punjab and Bengal.

Never able to give a clear vision for the geographical and political makeup of his Pakistan, he

puttered along with the ambiguous objective of “achieving an equal say for Muslims in [an] all-

India arrangement at the center.”4 Jinnah’s hopes lied in his ability to convince Mountbatten and

the Congress that India’s Muslims were, as a whole, greater than the sum of their parts; in other

3 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia, 159. 4 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: University Press, 1985), 241.

words, he attempted to promulgate a vision of a separate (and unified) Muslim nation within the

Indian state, claiming the backing of what he knew to be a contradicted Muslim base. This ran

counter to the “powerful provincialism” that “lay behind the demands of most groups in Muslim

provinces” like Assam and Bengal, who were wary of a strong center no matter which party held

rule.5 Neither did Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan entail the partition of Muslim-majority Punjab and

Bengal, two hearts of Indian productivity and human capital.6 Knowing that his vision for Pakistan

left out nearly 40 percent of India’s minority Muslims, Jinnah proposed to keep Punjab and Bengal

unified so that, through a reciprocal arrangement, his minority coreligionists would receive the

same fair treatment as these provinces’ Hindu and Sikh minorities would under Pakistan.7

Jinnah’s insistent demands for parity in Hindu-Muslim representation were questionable in

one way. Maybe Muslim-majority provinces felt they "cannot accept" Gandhi's vision of a

Constituent Assembly, for they were opposed to any such reinforcement of the state's central

powers, but Jinnah was perhaps wrong to repackage this demand as the demand of a

distinguishable Muslim nation fighting for communal representation, which was ultimately a false

construction of the colonial British and ignored the highly integrated nature of local society

between Muslims and non-Muslims.8 In this way, his lack of trust for Gandhi’s vision of political

inclusiveness, which was admittedly reinforced by the Muslim experience in Congress-dominated

provinces,9 propelled the communal divide in India. But perhaps the train of religious division had

by this time too much momentum.

Ultimately, however, it was a stubborn Congress and a hurried Mountbatten that precluded the

5 Ibid., 180. 6 According to Jinnah, “Pakistan without Calcutta would be like asking a man to live without his heart.” Ibid., 179. 7 Jinnah’s insistence on popular democracy and equal treatment under a secular Pakistani government was meant to “[take] the sting out of the League’s communal propaganda.” Ibid., 277. 8 Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents: 1906-1947 (Karach: National Publishing House, 1970), 335. Jinnah’s assessment was in reaction to that of Lala Lajpat Rai, who claimed, “Hindu-Mohammedan unity…is neither possible nor practicable.” He went on to claim, despite centuries of shared history and culture: “The Hindus and the Muslims…neither intermarry, nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.” 9 Jinnah’s address to the Twenty-seventh Session of the Muslim League in Lahore, March 1940: “From the experiences of the past two and a half years of Provincial Constitution in the Congress-governed provinces… we are now, therefore, very apprehensive and can trust nobody.” Pirzada, Foundations of Pakistan, 330.

emergence of a unified state with regional power and minority protections, as the Cabinet Mission Plan

of 1946 originally would have ensured, but Congress can hardly be blamed either for wanting control

over a strong, centralized state in the aftermath of Britain’s departure. Without powers to reign in the 40

percent of its territory that was ruled as princely states, Congress would have faced a potential loss of

land far greater than the 25 percent it eventually conceded to Jinnah’s Pakistan. Congress sought to

hasten the transfer of British power by accepting Dominion Status from a (now self-congratulatory)

Mountbatten, leaving the fate of Punjab and Bengal’s for later when they would “see that they had more

to gain by ditching Jinnah and the demand for Pakistan.”10 The loss of the Muslim provinces was a

difficult price to pay for India’s independence, but one that a group of “tired men,” as Nehru blithely

remarked, were eventually willing to concede.

In the end, the winning of Muslim statehood was inimical to the interests and vision of the

greater Muslim nation. Rather than the two-nation-under-one-state solution that Jinnah had

demanded all along, he received the “moth eaten” Pakistan that he had twice rejected in 1944 and

1946 from Chakravarthi Rajagopalachari and Congress.11 Indeed, the fact that approximately 40

percent of British India’s Muslims were “left high and dry inside a country over which their more

numerous co-religionists to the east and west had no influence,” forces one to question whether

today’s Pakistan can be fully justified.12 For the Muslims of Sind, NWFP, and Baluchistan, whose

only common feature was a “fierce attachment to their particularistic traditions, and a deep

antipathy to any central control,” the events of 1947 thrust them “willy-nilly… under the tight

central control which Pakistan had to impose if it was to survive,” 13 evincing the deep resentment

towards Islamabad that persists in these regions today. Moreover, Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s partition of

Punjab, which was allegedly influenced by a pro-India Mountbatten to place three northeastern

districts in India’s possession despite their Muslim-majority populations and their contiguity with

10 Ibid., 270. 11 Jalal, Lecture. November 16, 2009. 12 Pirzada, Foundations of Pakistan., 3. 13 Jalal, Sole Spokesman, 3.

the future Pakistan, would soon allow India direct military access to the disputed state of Jammu

and Kashmir and control of headwaters that flowed into Pakistan through the Punjab.14

Jinnah’s political emphasis on religious nationhood, combined with the horrific violence

following partition that was cloaked in purely communal terms,15 explains the prevailing bitterness

in the discourse of Indian nationalists and Hindu majoritarians towards his purported role in

dividing Gandhi’s nation. From the perspective of post-partition Pakistani nationalists, who were

forced to seek justification for their own country’s existence in the history of partition, Jinnah’s

work was seen as a triumph for a politically and religiously oppressed minority, and it would be

inconceivable to suggest otherwise. But a sober look at the realities of post-partition Pakistan

forces one to question this premise. For Indian nationalists, Jinnah’s role as the divisive thorn in

India’s independence movement was a source of resentment and regional enmity, despite his

sincere struggle to keep the subcontinent united.

Works Cited

Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia. New York: Routledge, 2004. Jalal, Ayesha. Lecture. Tufts University. November 16 & 21, 2009.--- The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge:

University Press, 1985.Kabeer, Naila. “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam, and the State in Bangladesh.” In

Deniz Kandiyoti, Ed. Women, Islam, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Nawaz, Shuja. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within. Oxford: University Press, 2008.

Pirzada, Syed Sharifuddin. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents: 1906-1947. Karach: National Publishing House, 1970.

14 Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 39-40. The significance of Radcliffe’s decision, and of this particular moment of the subcontinent’s partition, for the future of Pakistan’s security cannot be overstated. The Indus River feeds the agricultural breadbasket of Pakistan and the Kashmir conflict has become the flashpoint between the two nuclear powers, not to mention a massive drain of state resources that could otherwise have remained in the provinces. 15 The motivations of those who committed these atrocities were more opportunistic than ideological, though there were undoubtedly instances where religious fervor supplemented the clamoring for “zam, zar, and zamin,” or women, wealth, and land. Lecture, Ayesha Jalal, November 21, 2009.

State and Society in the Subcontinent, Post-Partition

Cody ValdesSouth Asia, 1000-2000Professor Ayesha Jalal

December 6, 2009Essay Question #4

Out of imperial necessity, the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms imposed religious

categorization as the mechanism of the British Raj’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy. The fact that India

and Pakistan were born along the arbitrary lines of religion four decades later would mean that

identities based on regionalism, caste, language, and ethnicity were relegated to the second tier of

political importance, from whence they would suppurate tremendous civil unrest in the ensuing

decades. In both countries, this unrest would take the form of communal violence and regional

assertion by provinces demanding greater autonomy and a fair share of national resources. For the

leaders of Pakistan, the task of reigning in what one might call “rogue” provinces of Baluchistan,

NWFP, and Sindh with one hand while securing their grip on the far-off province of Eastern

Pakistan with the other would prove a gargantuan task, one that would ostensibly need the overt

authoritarian rule of the military for 38 years of the country’s 62 year existence.

For India, regional dissidence was no less of a thorn in the central government’s side and

would frequently be quelled through the same heavy-handed use of armed forces, but the sanctity

of elections would ensure the survival of the state’s democratic process. Indeed, while Pakistan has

the unfortunate and “unenviable distinction of being the only country in the post-colonial world to

have experienced a successful secessionist movement,”16 conflict between center and periphery

was enormous in India as well, despite the rapidity with which Nehru was able to institutionalize

the processes of formal democracy. According to Bose and Jalal: “Independence from colonial

rule was claimed by the Congress as the triumph of centralism and nationalism. Yet the creation of

a Pakistan had underlined the partial success of regionalism and religious communitarianism.”17

The moorings of India’s democracy could have easily fallen apart given the enormous strain India

was under to quell regional uprisings and dissidence in the Northeastern and Southern provinces

of, among others, Assam and Tamil Nadu.18 So while on paper and in relation to India, Pakistan

16 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective (Cambridge: University Press, 1995), 183. 17 Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia, 167. 18 Arguably, it did, given the strident reliance on its military to quell regional dissidence in provinces such as Assam, Nagaland, Mizoland, Punjab, and Kashmir. The people of these regions could hardly have been said to live under a democratic contract with the Indian state.

appears to have failed as a post-colonial experiment in democracy, the difference between overt

democracy and authoritarianism has often been Lilliputian in India, while the scourge of

chauvinism and communalism has spared neither country.

The evolution of center-region, secular-communal, and civil-military relations in both India

and Pakistan after partition was in many ways a matter of ideas: who had the monopoly on ideas

and how that monopoly was exercised. In neither country could the main political party claim to

speak on behalf of its entire constituent population, but India’s Congress party fared much better

than Pakistan’s Muslim League in rallying around the idea of a strong central government and

driving home the message that there would be no further partitioning of Indian territory. This was

partly made possible by, as Jinnah astutely predicted, India’s inheritance of the name India and not

the appellation Hindustan.19 Bequeathed a nominal colonial legacy that symbolized democracy, the

idea of an independent India rested on an expectation of continuity, perseverance, and unity

throughout the twentieth century. For Pakistan on the other hand, rather than emerging on equal

existential footing beside a sovereign Hindustan, its birth was seen as an act of secession by virtue

of India’s nomenclature. India’s constitution, which ironically drew the majority (68 percent) of its

stipulations from the once-maligned Government of India Act of 1935, was unitary in substance

but presented a façade of federalism to appease its dissenting provinces.20 With searing memories

of the communal atrocities that erupted during partition, Indian politicians of all stripes were

precluded from agitating on religious grounds.21 However, the voice of secularism was

increasingly drowned out by ideas of Hindu majoritarianism and Sikh separatism (branded as

communalism) embodied by parties such as the Shiv Sena and the Akali Dal, and by the 1960s the

ruling Congress Party had “began to play the Hindu communal card for electoral gains” as well.22

19 Of course, India also benefited from the physical trappings of the British Indian administrative bureaucracy and central institutions – a far cry above the tents from which Pakistan’s central leadership was forced to operate and exert control over their rebellious provinces. Ayesha Jalal, Lecture, November 30, 2009. 20 Lecture, Ayesha Jalal, November 30, 2009. 21 Lecture, Jalal, December 2, 2009. 22 Amrita Chhachhi, “Forced Identities: the State, Communalism, Fundamentalism and Women in India,” in Deniz Kandiyoti, ed, Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 151.

But while religious affiliations are politicized in state- and increasingly province-level rhetoric, at

the community level, children, mothers, and elders continue to reject inter-communal hostility.

For Pakistan, the immediate factors threatening its survival as a secular democracy were a

lack of a strong center (from which could grant provincial autonomy); weak organization of the

Muslim League party in the territories; a shifting balance of power, domestic and internationally,

towards the unelected branches; and a gulf between the 17.5 percent of British India’s financial

assets it received and the enormous defense spending required to secure its borders with hostile

neighbors.23 But a disjunction of ideas between the fledging Pakistan army and the political

leadership under Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan eventually brought the democratic house of

cards down in 1958. The Kashmir War experience of 1947-8 left Pakistan’s military commanders

bitter at the perceived inadequateness of the civilian politicians, marking the “beginnings of

Bonapartism in Pakistan’s polity” and furthering the ideological distance between the elected and

non-elected bodies, who were already separated by a vast stretch of land.24 The idea of a “secular

state in which all men are free to pursue their own religious sensibilities” that Jinnah had

propounded until his death was clearly dismantled by Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization agenda in the late

1970s, but even he “had to contend with… Pakistan’s regional and linguistic diversities [which

posed] major impediments to the imposition of doctrinal Islam as the only authentic basis for

cultural unity.”25 Unlike in India, Pakistan’s leaders utilized religion both as their raison d’être and

their divine mandate for quelling regional dissidence.26 In this way, authoritarianism and Islamism

23 Ibid. 24 During the confrontation with Indian armed forces over disputed Kashmir immediately after partition, members of the army’s higher command pushed the leadership in Karachi to capitalize on India’s weakness and expand Pakistan’s involvement in the war, but to little avail. Chief among the Pakistan army’s aggressors was none other than the British army chief of Pakistan, General Sir Douglas Gracey, who was motivated by as much nationalism as any Pakistani could have said to have been. With the army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi and the politicians’ in Karachi, there was a fateful lack of interface between the two branches of the Pakistan state. According to Shuja Nawaz, “Kashmir became both a reason for not allowing a democratic polity to emerge and a massive financial hemorrhage for the new nation state.” Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 73.25 Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, 329. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Zia’s predecessor, was also heavily invested in the idea of an Islamic socialist republic, as the 1973 Constitution shows.26 “In the words of the late President, Zia-ul Haq, ‘Take Islam out of Pakistan and make it a secular state; it would collapse.’” Naila Kabeer, “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam, and the State in Bangladesh,” in Kandiyoti, Women, Islam, and the State, 117-8. But Nehru too was at times passive when it came to secularism, as

were inextricable.

Ashis Nandy asked the question in 1980, “Why do some women in India reach the

pinnacles of public power and recognition while women in general have kept out of large areas of

public life?”27 His query touches on the fundamental perplexity of gender relations in South Asia –

that is, how to reconcile the proclivity of female political leaders in South Asia – Begum Khaleda

Zia, Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Sheik Hasina, Sonia Gandhi – and the lethargy of progress

towards greater female agency in the private sphere. For example, Amartya Sen gave a stunning

estimation that in 1986 gender inequalities in India had resulted in some 37 million “missing

women.”28 He also noted, “Congress Party had women Presidents fifty years earlier than any major

British political party. On the other hand, the ration of women members of the Indian parliament is

at this time [2005] significantly lower than in Britain.” Rather than advancing the progressive

cause of gender inequities, Indira Gandhi’s foray into populist mobilization was a political tactic to

ensure her Congress party’s survival, (though it entailed a loss of central authority and the

devolution of power to regional forces, a development that was inimical to the “logic of

inclusionary nationalism” that her father had propounded).29 Amrita Chhachhi argues that

authoritarianism has been in direct response to the demands of religious fundamentalists, for

whom female subjugation is proxy to ‘reclaiming’ customary laws.30 To the west, “The emergence

of Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister has been only superficially fortuitous for the proponents of

women’s rights in Pakistan.”31 Her brand of populism had never been wedded to gender interests,

when he permitted the continuation of the Muslim personal law and rejected a unified civil code in 1954. 27 Ashis Nandy, “Woman versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Social and Political Psychology” in Asis Nandy, ed. At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture (Dehli: O.U.P., 1980), 42. 28 Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (New York: Picador, 2005), 226. Missing women are those dead who, but for discriminatory norms within the family unit in particular, would have had access to the basic amenities of life to survive. 29 Bose and Jalal, Modern South Asia, 184. The creeping authoritarianism and intra-party nepotism that marked her rule in the mid-70s was seen as a counterbalance to this trend.30 Chhachhi, “Forced Identities,” 168-70. She argues for a two-pronged attack on discriminatory practices from within Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Christian religious communities and from the implementation of a uniform civil code on the part of the state, noting that female agency is fundamentally tied to the “democratization and decentralization of political and economic structures” by the state. 31 Ayesha Jalal, “The Convenience of Subservience: Pakistan,” in Kandiyoti, Women, Islam, and the State, 107.

as central members of Pakistan’s upper class women’s organizations allowed the benefit of their

class-induced status to override the concerns of the repressed female masses. Benazir Bhutto’s

Pakistan People’s Party took a stance against Zia’s discriminatory Ordinances less because of a

concern for women’s rights and more to distinguish itself from an unsavory predecessor.32

The dialogue between centralism, religious majoritarianism, and authoritarianism in both

India and Pakistan (and after 1971, Bangladesh) has been a variable one since the partition of

British India, but the three ideas have remained inextricably linked. While regional demands have

often been branded as communal, like in the case of Punjab’s Akali Dal, it was often the state that

embraced the majority religion for deterring provincial dissidence, with the additional support of a

strong military. Finally, authoritarianism became a tool of religious fundamentalists and social

conservatives to keep women in their ‘proper place’ in the domestic sphere, and the great visibility

of women in leadership positions was a rather shallow achievement for the cause of gender parity.

Works Cited

32 Ibid.

Bose, Sugata and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia. New York: Routledge, 2004. Jalal, Ayesha. Lecture. Tufts University. November 30 & December 2, 2009.--- “The Convenience of Subservience: Pakistan.” In Kandiyoti, Ed. Women, Islam, and the State. .

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.--- Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative and Historical Perspective.

Cambridge: University Press, 1995. --- The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge:

University Press, 1985.Chhachhi, Amrita. “Forced Identities: the State, Communalism, Fundamentalism and Women in

India.” In Deniz Kandiyoti, Ed. Women, Islam, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Kabeer, Naila. “The Quest for National Identity: Women, Islam, and the State in Bangladesh.” In Deniz Kandiyoti (ed) Women, Islam, and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Nandy, Ashis. “Woman versus Womanliness in India: An Essay in Social and Political Psychology.” In Asis Nandy, Ed. At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Culture. Dehli: O.U.P., 1980.

Nawaz, Shuja. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army, and the Wars Within. Oxford: University Press, 2008.

Pirzada, Syed Sharifuddin. Foundations of Pakistan: All-India Muslim League Documents: 1906-1947. Karach: National Publishing House, 1970.

Sen, Amartya. The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Picador, 2005.