Was Partition a historic blunder?
Rafiq Zakaria
[The author is an Islamic scholar and former Congress MP and his son,
Fareed Zakaria is a Newsweek editor]
Developments of the last few weeks compel us to wonder whether the partition of India was not the greatest blunder that the Congress leaders, in particular Nehru and Patel, committed. They agreed to it because they were made to believe by the then Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, that it was the best solution of the Hindu-Muslim dispute. In fact, it turned out to be the worst.
Ram Manohar Lohia has explained in his book, The Guilty Men of Partition that the Congress leaders were too tired, and hungry for power, and so they gave in, much against the advice of Gandhi. In the wake of the carnage that followed, one million Hindus and Muslims died and 15 million were mercilessly uprooted.
Soon thereafter both Nehru and Patel regretted their decision. In Nehru's words: "When we decided on Partition I do not think any of us ever thought that there would be this terror of mutual killing after Partition. It was in a sense to avoid that that we decided on Partition. So we paid a double price for it, first, you might say politically, ideologically; second, the actual thing happened what we tried to avoid."
Patel confessed, also rather late, that he should never have consented to Partition. As he put it: "You cannot divide the sea or the waters of the river." He said that Partition was wrong because no one could "destroy the reality that we are one and indivisible".
But even after more than fifty 50 years, we do not seem to be free of the curse; it is continuing to eat into the vitals of our polity. It has not only endangered our stability, but what is worse, threatened our security. Moreover, Jinnah's two-nation theory has become a millstone round India's neck.
At first it was Kashmir which caused the hostility; it subjected us to three wars. Now it is terrorism, which has already killed 70,000 of our people. Last month the terrorists, trained and sponsored by Pakistan, attacked Parliament, the very heart of our democracy. No Indian leader has tried as hard as our present Prime Minister to establish friendly relations with Pakistan; but instead of responding, the Pakistani leadership has spurned every move of his.
In my latest book: The Man who divided India (Popular Prakashan), I have diagnosed the permanent damage done to South Asia by Jinnah's pernicious two-nation theory, on which Pakistan is based. I have pointed out that unless Pakistan gets rid of it there will be no peace in South Asia. It has not only proved to be the most serious threat to India's security but has also done the greatest harm to the Muslims of the subcontinent.
As Prof Akbar Ahmed, the eminent Pakistani scholar, has said, "The damning argument against Pakistan is that it took a community spread throughout the subcontinent, chopped it into several communities, gave it first one country and then two and left the others dangling in mid-air. People who once possessed the culture, customs and history of a whole subcontinent were left with neither a nation nor an idea of themselves as community. Pakistan was a double disaster for the Muslims in India: first they lost their sense of coherence and political strength in the Indian Union along with their leadership and middle classes which migrated to Pakistan by the thousands; secondly, they were forever damned in India for having voted for Pakistan and broken the unity of India."
Jinnah, who had no love for Islam, exploited religion to whip up communal frenzy among the Muslims and made them believe that only a separate homeland, carved out of united India, would free them from Hindu domination. The result has been exactly the opposite.
In undivided India they were in power in five out of the eleven provinces; being one-third of the population they were a decisive factor at the Centre. After Partition they have been divided into three parts: Pakistani Muslims, Indian Muslims and Bangladeshi Muslims, with little contact with one another. Far from being freed of 'Hindu domination', two-thirds of them have been put under, to use Jinnah's terminology, 'permanent Hindu domination'. And in Pakistan they neither have democracy nor basic human rights.
The Indians immigrants, who are called Mohajirs, who went to Pakistan in the hope of finding a heaven there, are living in hell. Poor Biharis, who opted for Pakistan, are still rotting in Dhaka. Their undisputed leader, Altaf Husain, has publicly declared, "Partition was the biggest disaster in human history."
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Kashmir is an offshoot of the same divisive 'two-nation theory'. It has nothing to do with the right of self-determination of its people. If it is tempered with, it will not only destabilise our secular republic of which it is the cornerstone, but may provoke a bloody backlash against 140 million Muslims who are more than the Muslims in Pakistan. America and the rest of the Muslim world should take serious note of it. |
