Posted by F. Sheikh
Was partition of Indian Subcontinent inevitable? In this an intellectually provocative and critical analysis of historical events, the author argues that the partition could have been avoided if Gandhi did not have injected a massive dose of religion into the national movement, and if Gandhi and Nehru were not arrogant and short sighted to dismiss out of hand Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s initial idea of a confederation of independent states. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was looking for autonomous states with central confederation but was rejected because it would have meant a weak central Government, less dominance of Hindus and diluted power for Congress Party and its top political leaders. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was dismissed both by Congress Party leaders and British as a crackpot just bluffing. Congress Party and its leaders arrogantly thought that the demand of independent confederation of states and later demand for a separate state (Pakistan) was a temporary non-viable demand that will die down itself. It was serious a miscalculation. In my opinion, Muhammad Ali Jinnah embraced the idea of Pakistan to pressure Congress Party to accept confederation of states, but Pakistan slogan turned out to be a populous slogan embraced by Muslim masses and it took a life of its own with no turning back. Even Allama Iqbal in his famous 1930 speech had both options on the table and said “Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire,”
Perry Anderson , a historian, recently wrote a book “ The Indian Ideology “ and this Article is from the book.
Before reading some excerpts or full 26 page long article, it is worth reading some comments by Mr. Namat Arora, a historian himself, about nationalistic Indian and Pakistani historian’s jaundiced view of the history( Dr. Mubarak Ali also expressed similar views at TFUSA meeting) and why accounts by Mr. Perry Anderson carry more weight.
“Nations without a past are contradictions in terms,’ wrote Eric Hobsbawm. A precursor to every modern nation are stories about its past and the present — stories full of invention, exclusion, and exaggeration — which help forge a ‘national consciousness’. Historians, wrote Hobsbawm, have ‘always been mixed up in politics’ and are ‘an essential component of nationalism’. They participate in shaping a nation’s mythos and self-perception. In his vivid analogy, ‘Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.’ The more nationalist a historian, he held, the weaker her bid to be taken seriously as a historian’
“But not all historians are equally complicit. Some are deeply skeptical of the dominant national histories and claims of nationhood. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation,’ wrote Ernst Renan. The skeptical historian may see value in nationalism, but she always sees a pressing need to inspect and critique its claims, assumptions, omissions, myths, and heroes. Scrutiny may reveal that a ‘cherished tradition’ is neither cherished, nor a tradition; likewise for supposedly ancient origins and customs, traits and virtues, arts and culture, and other qualities of life and mind said to define the essence of a nation and its people. This approach is especially common among Marxist historians, who seek to write history from below and attempt to expose the actual conditions of social life, including the divisions, conflicts, and oppressions that plague a nation (their analytical orientation defines the genre, not their views on communism). This, then, is the vantage point of British Marxist historian Perry Anderson’s magnificent and lucid new work, The Indian Ideology. “
The Author writes in concluding paragraphs of the essay;
“But if the independence of the subcontinent was inevitable, was its division too? A century later, the struggle against the Raj ( British) has generated a vast literature, within India and beyond it. But it is striking how rarely this issue is ever centrally or candidly confronted. The major question posed by the modern history of the region has yet to receive analytic treatment commensurate with it.”
“Popular conceptions in India blaming the creation of Pakistan on a British plot are legends.”
The author argues in previous paragraphs of the essay that the Raj ( British), contrary to its previous policy of divide and conquer, it had economic and political interests to keep independent India as one country aligned to Commonwealth and Britain, and then writes on other reasons for partition;
“ If the Raj can be eliminated as an efficient cause of partition, we are returned to the famous remark of a veteran of Non-Cooperation at the Round Table Conference of 1931: ‘We divide and you rule.’ The ultimate drivers of the split were indigenous, not imperial. How were they distributed? The official view in Delhi, shared across the political spectrum, has always been that it was Jinnah’s personal ambition that fired Muslim separatism, destroying the unity of the national liberation struggle and wrecking what would otherwise have been its natural culmination in a single ecumenical state coinciding with the borders of the Raj and bearing the proud name of India. Like most politicians, Jinnah was certainly ambitious. But he was also an early architect of Hindu-Muslim unity; had little mass following down to the end of the 1930s; and even when he acquired one, probably aimed at a confederation rather than complete separation. The division in the struggle for independence, when it came, was confessional, but it was not Jinnah who injected religion into the vocabulary and imagery of the national movement, it was Gandhi. That he did not do so in any sectarian spirit, calling on Muslims to defend the caliph in the same breath as Hindus to restore the golden age of Rama, was of little consequence once he jettisoned mobilisation against the British without regard for his allies in the common struggle. Non-Cooperation died as a campaign to evict the Raj. It lived on as an all but permanent description of political relations between the two communities it had once brought together. What remained was Gandhi’s transformation of Congress from an elite into a mass organisation by saturating its appeal with a Hindu imaginary. Here, unambiguously, was the origin of the political process that would eventually lead to partition.”
“By the mid-1930s, Congress as a party was close to monolithically Hindu – just 3 per cent of its membership were Muslim. Privately, its more clear-sighted leaders knew this. Publicly, the party claimed to represent the entire nation, regardless of religious affiliation. The reality was that by the end of the 1930s, it commanded the loyalty of an overwhelming majority of the Hindu electorate, but had minimal Muslim support. Since Hindus comprised two thirds of the population, it was already clear that free elections on either an unaltered or a universal franchise would deliver Congress absolute control of any future all-India legislature. Common sense indicated that from a position of such strength, it would be necessary to make every feasible concession to ensure that the quarter of the population that was Muslim would not feel itself a permanently impotent – and potentially vulnerable – minority. Ignoring every dictate of prudence and realism, Congress did the opposite. At each critical juncture, it refused any arrangement that might dilute the power to which it could look forward. In 1928, after Congress had initially been persuaded to accept allocation to Muslims of a third of the seats in a national legislature, Motilal Nehru’s Report reduced it to a quarter, and Jinnah was shouted down for attempting to revert to the original agreement. In 1937, coalition government in Uttar Pradesh was rejected, and the Muslim League told to dissolve itself into Congress. In 1942, the Cripps Mission scheme for a postwar India was rebuffed by Congress for allowing constituent units the freedom to choose whether or not to join a future Indian union. In 1947, Nehru killed off the cabinet mission plan as a confederation for giving too much leeway to areas where the Muslim League was likely to dominate. The display of blindness was unvarying.”
“Finally, and most fundamentally, the ideology and self-conception of Congress rested on a set of historical myths that disabled it from taking sober stock of the political problems confronting the struggle for emancipation from the Raj. Central to these myths was the claim that India had existed as a nation time out of mind, with a continuous identity and overarching harmony prior to the arrival of the British. Congress, in this outlook, was simply the contemporary vehicle of that national unity, in which differences of religious faith had never prevented ordinary people living peacefully side by side, under the aegis of enlightened rulers. Imperialism had sought to set community against community, and a handful of self-seeking Muslim politicians had colluded with it, but independence would show the world an India stretching from the North-West to the North-East Frontier Agencies, at one with itself, a democracy governed by a party in the tolerant traditions of the greatest emperors of its past, the modern expression of a six-thousand-year-old civilization.”
Was the division inevitable because of the deep religious antagonism and differences? The author writes;
“Yet it can of course be argued that no political force could have averted that division, so deep and so long-standing were the differences, and latent antagonisms, between the two major religious communities of South Asia.
Such a conclusion, however, is not more palatable to polite opinion in India than the alternative. Confronted with the outcome of the struggle for independence, Indian intellectuals find themselves in an impasse. If partition could have been avoided, the party that led the national movement to such a disastrous upshot stands condemned. If partition was inevitable, the culture whose dynamics made confessional conflict politically insuperable becomes a damnosa hereditas, occasion for collective shame. The party still rules, and the state continues to call itself secular. It is no surprise the question it poses should be so widely repressed in India.
Historically, the larger issue could be held undecidable. What is not beyond accounting, however, is something else. Whether or not partition was bound to come, the plain truth is that the high command of Congress took scarcely any intelligent steps to avert it, and many crass ones likely to hasten it; and when it came, acted in a way that ensured it would take the cruellest form, with the worst human consequences. For even were a scission of the subcontinent foreordained by its deep culture, its manner was not. At the hour of division, the political cupidity of Congress, in collusion with the dregs of the viceregal line, not only inflicted enormous popular suffering, which certainly could have been avoided, but compounded it with a territorial greed that has poisoned India’s relations with its neighbour down to the nuclear stand-off today.
Mr. Namat Arora, a historian, writes about Gandhi and religion in his review of the book ” The Indian Ideology”
Gandhi’s success however came at a huge cost, writes Anderson, mostly due to his religiosity. To him ‘religion mattered more than politics’ as it did not even to Ayatollah Khomeini. Anderson presents, in a fresh way, a portrait of Gandhi, including the peculiar grab bag of Hindu beliefs, inflected with Christian ones, that he embraced, which would also inspire his odd ideas about sexuality and abstinence that have caused much head-scratching ever since. Would it were that his faith had played out only in the bedroom. Instead, it was part of a worldview that despised the social changes wrought by modernity — machines, railways, hospitals, and modern education — and defended all manner of atavisms. To ‘real intellectual exchange he was a stranger’ and ‘rarely disavowed directly anything significant he had once said or written’. He had ‘limited knowledge of, or interest in, the outside world’, as evident in his extreme misreading of Hitler. Allergic to socialism, his political ideal was a nebulous Ram Rajya. Floods and earthquakes were punishments for human failings. While he despised untouchability and even campaigned against it, he naively held that ‘the caste system is not based on inequality’, that discrimination could be removed by transforming minds while preserving castes, that the ‘hereditary principle is an eternal principle. To change it is to create disorder.’ Hinduism had a built-in mechanism for social justice since misbehaving Brahmins would be demoted in the next life and vice versa. “Over time, faced by Ambedkar’s attacks, he would tone down his views. Anderson observes that he knew little about Islam and warned his son to never marry a Muslim for it was against dharma. He claimed to revere the cow, reflexively imagined India as a Hindu nation, and was really a ‘Hindu revivalist’. The basic facts here are not new; what’s striking is Anderson’s choice of material and the narrative he weaves out of it.”
Mr. Namat Arora wrote a review on the Book ” The Indian Ideology ” and following is an excerpt from the review;
“A tragic impact of Gandhi’s takeover of Congress, writes Anderson, was that he ‘injected a massive dose of religion — mythology, symbology, theology — into the national movement.’ Despite his sincere belief in the parity of all religions, it was inevitably a Hindu imaginarium. It increased the popular appeal of Congress to Hindus but also sowed the seeds of Muslim alienation in Congress — which, behind the rhetoric, had only 3 percent Muslims in the 1930s when a quarter of the population was Muslim — culminating in Partition. . It inspired his ‘thoroughly regressive’ Khilafat campaign, opposed by secular-minded Muslims like Jinnah. It also led him to sabotage the British grant of a separate electorate to the Untouchables, championed by Ambedkar, who was ‘intellectually head and shoulders above most of the Congress leaders’ and held that ‘No matter what the Hindus say, Hinduism is a menace to liberty, equality and fraternity’. To Gandhi, observes Anderson, tackling the ‘sin of untouchability’ didn’t merit a fast unto death but blocking a political approach to empower the Untouchables did. After all,”
‘If Untouchables were to be treated as external to the Hindu community, it would be confirmation that caste was indeed, as its critics had always maintained, a vile system of discrimination … and since Hinduism was founded on caste, it would stand condemned with caste. To reclaim the Untouchables for Hinduism was an ideological imperative for the reputation of the religion itself. But it was also politically vital, since if they were subtracted from the Hindu bloc in India, its predominance over the Muslim community would be weakened. There were ‘mathematical’ considerations to bear in mind, as Gandhi’s secretary delicately reported his leader’s thinking on the matter. Most menacing of all, Gandhi confided to a colleague, might not Untouchables, accorded separate identity, then gang up with ‘Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus’?’
“More contentiously, Anderson argues that ‘contrary to legend, his attitude to violence had always been — and would remain — contingent and ambivalent.’ Nor did he have much success withSatyagraha, or non-violent resistance, for ‘each time Gandhi had tried it, the British had seen it off.’ Anderson claims that success in the nationalist struggle came from his rebuilding of Congress, its rise as a popular political force, and the steady expansion of the electoral machinery from 1909 — not from the mass mobilization of Satyagraha. But even if true, surely the latter amplified the former by raising mass consciousness. Moreover, wasn’t non-violence still preferable in this struggle to violent resistance? Anderson seems unconvinced. He admires the secular-leftist leader Bose, his ‘fearless militancy and commanding intellectual gifts’, and criticizes Gandhi’s undemocratic eviction of him from Congress. In Anderson’s view, the violence that Satyagraha‘spared the British was decanted among compatriots’, as in communalism and Partition. For Gandhi’s infusion of Congress with Hindu religiousity — of which, Anderson argues, Satyagrahawas a part — ‘was the origin of the political process that would eventually lead to partition.’
One has to read full essay to get the full picture, including Kashmir,other territorial disputes, Gandhi and Raj’s complicity in violence that took thousands of lives and last minute changing of borderlines. To read full article click on the link below: It is 26 page long article, but once you start reading, time flies.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n14/perry-anderson/why-partition
The author has two more articles ” Gandhi Center Stage” and ” After Nehru”
References used by Mr. Perry Anderson
Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia by Aijaz Ahmad (Verso, 377 pp., £14, 2002, 978 1 85984 358 1)
The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts by Ishtiaq Ahmed (Oxford, 500 pp., £32.50, March, 978 0 19 906470 0)
The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power by Tariq Ali (Pocket Books, 336 pp., £8.99, 2009, 978 1 84739 374 6)
The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition & Memory in the North-West Frontier by Mukulika Banerjee (James Currey, 256 pp., £17.99, 2000, 978 0 85255 273 5)
Nehru: A Political Life by Judith Brown (Yale, 407 pp., £18, 2005, 978 0 300 11407 2)
The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932-47: Contour of Freedom by Bidyut Chakrabarty (Routledge, 288 pp., £100, 2004, 978 0 415 32889 0)
Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932-47 by Joya Chatterji (Cambridge, 324 pp., £36, 2002, 978 0 521 89436 4)
The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917-47 by Ian Copland (Cambridge, 320 pp., £40, 2002, 978 0 521 89436 4)
The Rediscovery of India by Meghnad Desa (Bloomsbury, 512 pp., £25, 2011, 978 1 84966 350 2)
The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer (HarperCollins, 672 pp., £8.99, 1997, 978 0 00 638887 6)
Independence and Partition: The Erosion of Colonial Power in India by Sucheta Mahajan (Sage, 428 pp., £31.99, 2002, 978 0 7619 9368 1)
Britain Since 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy by David Marquand (Phoenix, 512 pp., £14.99, 2009, 978 0 7538 2606 5)
An Autobiography by Jawaharlal Nehru (Penguin, 672 pp., £13.99, 2004, 978 0 14 303104 8)
The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru (Penguin, 656 pp., £29.99, 2004, 978 0 670 05801 3)
War and Peace in Modern India by Srinath Raghavan (Palgrave, 384 pp., £60, 2010, 978 0 230 24215 9)
The Garrison State: Military, Government and Society in Colonial Punjab, 1849-1947 by Tan Tai Yong (Sage, 333 pp., £39.50, 2005, 978 0 7619 3336 6)
[*] Aijaz Ahmad, radicalising Mushirul Hasan’s original sentiment.