BaKhabar, July 2012, Page-5 [India and Pakistan: Lengthening Shadows of a Toxic Past, Part-4, by sister Asma Khan]

India and Pakistan: Lengthening Shadows of a Toxic Past, Part-4

... By Asma Khan* (asmaanjum.khan@gmail.com)

Sixty-four years after they parted ways, their toxic past and violent split still continues to haunt India and Pakistan and hundreds of millions of people on both sides of the divide. [ Part-1 || Part-2|| Part-3 ]

Note: Part-1 of this long essay appeared in the April issue of BaKhabar. The next parts of this historical-but-still-highly-relevant essay would appear in coming issues of BaKhabar.
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Mani Shankar Aiyer, well known Congress politician and former diplomat, who has extensively written on the issue agrees; suggesting that the Hindutva mind is not ready to accept the Muslim unless he sheds his Musalmaniyat. In his Confessions of A Secular Fundamentalist [2004], Aiyer argues that in accordance with its ideology and Golwalkar’s legacy, the Sangh Parivar wants all the minorities of India to call themselves as Hindu Muslim or Hindu Christian, and expects them to feel proud of being so.
This nomenclature and approach to existence, the Sangh Parivar reasons, would “purge” the thought process and way of life of the minorities--purged of all that the Sangh Parivar regards as ‘impure, retrograde, perverse’ or even sinful! The Muslim, however, has refused to ‘merge’ himself with ‘them.’ Some feeble attempts on their part have met with cold response from the Fundoos, the name given by Khushwant Singh, the grand Old Daddy of Indian journalism to the Hindutva fanatics. He also calls them “Professional Community Haters,” pointing out time and again that what the Hindu right is doing is absolutely against the spirit and ethos of India.

The fact of the matter is that when diverse people of varied races, faiths, languages and traditions come to live together, some tension and friction and even violence is unavoidable.
Nirad C Chaudhury‘s insight into the Hindu-Muslim equation is fascinating and helps us understand the roots of this conflict and the social and ideological factors that dictate our communal behavior even today. This social, psychological and ideological Hindu-Muslim rift eventually formed the basis and genesis of the tragedy of Partition. When the split eventually took place, its far reaching ramifications and consequences proved too overwhelming even for its chief architects.

I have always wondered and still do, how any one in their right mind and spirit would agree to cut his/her country into two bitter halves? Maulana Abul Kalam Azad‘s anger after Nehru and Gandhi agreed to it is well documented in his special Thirty Pages, that were part of his book, India Wins Freedom, but were published decades later. He for one could never agree to the idea of Pakistan and fought Jinnah and other leaders of the community time and again over the issue. Azad the great Islamic scholar was once called Imamul Hind (leader of India’s Muslims) but went the secular, liberal way and it was the secular and liberal Jinnah, who studied law at Lincoln’s Inn and as a senior Congress leader had been a passionate believer in composite culture long before Gandhi arrived in India, found himself championing the cause of a separate Muslim homeland and eventually achieving it.

It is said that Jinnah’s isolation in the Congress and the growing dominance of conservative Hindu leaders including Gandhi in the party also played a role in paving the way for the Muslim alienation. Jinnah, it is said, had once protested that the idea of Pakistan was ‘foisted’ upon him by what he called the Hindu public opinion. So this blame game for fracturing a country is almost as old as the Partition itself. Nirad Chaudhury has blamed Gandhi’s Swadeshi movemen as responsible to some extent for furthering the divide along the religious lines.
Gandhi-Jinnah-divide?!

Khushwant Singh in his treatise, End of India [2003] endorses it by claiming that, “The Indian Freedom Movement was biased against the British as it was against Muslims.”(47) He also categorically affirms that “Muslims have as much right to this country as anyone else. If they are foreigners, we all are. The only people who are indigenous are the adivasis, whom we have all but made extinct.”[131]
Singh declares that the Muslims cannot perpetually be made to pay for the sins of some of their rulers, who were more concerned about their empire than the common people.
One of the most intriguing and mysterious factors about the Partition is also that the job of dividing the country was entrusted to a lawyer from England, Cyril Radcliffe, who had neither travelled much outside of his country nor knew much about India and its traditions and history. There are huge misgivings then and even today about the lines drawn on the map. But then any other arrangement would have seemed just as awful.
Cyril Radcliffe had an unenviable task to be completed within a deadline. The trio Nehru, Sardar Patel and Jinnah reportedly insisted on a timeline for the work of dividing the nation. The man tasked with the unprecedented project, who literally divided and carved out India in two parts was as befuddled as some of us might be about the complexities and intricacies of nuclear physics. W.H. Auden, the eminent Anglo-American poet (1907-1973) describes the devastation and mystery of the great drama of Partition, at the hands of a diffident Radcliffe in a most haunting way,
Shut up in a lonely mansion, with police night and day
Patrolling the gardens to keep assassins away,
He got down to work, to the task of settling the fate
Of millions. The maps at his disposal were out of date
And the Census Returns almost certainly incorrect,
But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect
Contested areas. The weather was frightfully hot,
And a bout of dysentery kept him constantly on the trot,
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided,
A continent for better or worse divided.
The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

The predicament of Radcliffe is understandable. What makes little sense is the haste and desperation of India’s nationalist leadership to go along with the dissection of the motherland. Radcliffe was asked to draw the stripes on the basis of ‘contiguous majority areas.’ Other ‘unnamed factors’ were also under consideration. However, it is well established documented now that none of these factors were addressed. Not surprisingly, prodded by a guilty conscience, Radcliffe wrote to his stepson a day before the so-called tryst with destiny, as Nehru famously described in his midnight speech, to tell him why he was planning to scamper away soon:
“Nobody in India will love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and travelled and sweated_ on I have sweated the whole time.” --The Idea of India (P..201)
However, the 80 million people whom Radcliffe imagined to be thirsting for his blood were rejoicing in Delhi, the capital from where the Muslims had ruled for nearly a thousand years and where the first Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru was having his “tryst with destiny.”
What I find intriguing is why those celebrating multitudes failed to see the Great Game being played out in plain sight.

* Asma Anjum (Khan), a social reformer, is Asst. Professor in Solapur. She has taken over as Chief Eidtor of BaKhabar starting May 2012 issue