India
and Pakistan: Lengthening Shadows of a Toxic Past, Part-1
... By
Asma Khan (asmaanjum.khan@gmail.com)
Asma Khan, a
social reformer, revisits the partition of India to discover that
sixty-four years
after India and Pakistan parted ways, their toxic past and violent
split still continues to haunt them, and hundreds of millions of people
on both sides of the divide.
Everything about India and its opposite is true, Mark Twain had said
long ago. This may be why we have Formula One cars zipping around while
our politicians are still not ready to get down from their
raths. We all know rather too well that the last rath yatra
of Lal Krishna Advani, who is said to have read Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kempf in jail during the Emergency, was nothing but typically fascist
shortcut to power and glory. This trend to couch fascist agenda in the
garb of a democratic exercise has grown stronger with time.
The prophets of doom continue playing such games. Last rath
yatra did not just leave behind a bloody trail but also wrote a new
chapter in the history of communalism in India. Numerous Commissions of
inquiry have acknowledged that in all those Hindu-Muslim riots after
Independence, over 75 per cent of casualties in terms of life and
property have been Muslim.
Let me state here at the outset my strong belief that the person who
suffers in such grave situations is the Indian who may just happen to
be a Hindu or a Muslim. This conflict between these two
religious groups has been exploited by leaders of both communities. It
has a history that had once changed our geography and the acidic
chemistry between the two fosters serious conflict among our people,
even today.
My attempt here is to glean references from various sources about the
tragedy of Partition of India and to locate them within history, as it
is linked to the larger question of peace in the region. The
responsibility for this catastrophe in the subcontinent’s history has
often been credited entirely to one single individual named Muhammad
Ali Jinnah. Jinnah’s name immediately conjures up all the horror and
devastation that marked the division of subcontinent to create the Land
of the Pure.
Pakistan has never been the same since the 9/11 attacks on
the United States that were quickly blamed on Afghanistan-based Al
Qaeda militants. Islamabad had little choice but join America’s terror
war. In any case, Pakistan never runs out of its
usefulness for western powers. Now it seems, they can neither swallow
it nor throw it up in disgust.
Eminent historian and cricket writer Ramchandra Guha in his
book, India After Gandhi, [2007] argues that since 1947 Britain saw
Pakistan as a potential ally in the Cold war and a strong bastion
against communism whereas India was perceived to be soft on the
Communist Soviet Union. Sir Winston Churchill, he adds, had endorsed
this idea of Pakistan as a strong ally on Russia’s eastern flank as
Turkey was on the western.
Such line of thinking should give us an idea about the real
agenda and motives of the West. Guha cites former US Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger’s view that, “The defence of Afghanistan [from the
Soviets] depends on the strength of Pakistan.” Any guess why the Af-Pak
region is so important for the West today?
We in India have always had a love-hate relationship with the
Western neighbour of ours. ‘Pakistan was created to
blackmail India’ was the line that made me dig deeper into this
conundrum called Partition and which never fails to titillate our
imaginations to this day . Given our uneasy equation with it ,Pakistan
has always perplexed me, the generation born after the event.
especially when some terrorists with affiliations to our neighbor
strike. Right from my childhood, when I used to have agitated moments
to witness my uncles get all excited over Pakistan’s victory in cricket
matches to the present times when this very name spells disaster or it
is made to appear so, it has never ceased to confound me.
Indeed, we Indian Muslims have a very complex relationship
with Pakistan. Most of us would account for the fact that, at one or
the other stage of our lives we have been made to feel guilty for the
debacle of Partition. In India painting us all as Pakistani
sympathizers, or worse, traitors comes easy for some. It seems we
simply cannot escape it. As a youngster it was impossible for
me to comprehend the logic behind it but as times went by, the medley
of assorted pictures began taking shape in the mind.
Eventually
the mind began
wondering, how a nation as grand as India could be cowed down into
being carved up into two halves? How illogical, it seems to
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me even today! While
thinking this aloud and overheard by a friend, her tongue
in cheek comment was, “That world famous lunatic
Tobatek Singh too
might have felt the same way!” So be it.( Anyways, I can
always find
consolation in George Bernard Shaw‘s (1856-1950) cryptic remark about
the United States that “An asylum for the sane would be empty in
America!
Toba Tek Singh, they said, was mad. The Partition too was a
lunacy that was perhaps never seen before in history. Millions of lives
were lost and more were displaced. This humongous tragedy has cast its
shadow on the Indian Muslim psyche in a way that cannot be even
imagined by the rest of the world. We have paid a heavy price as our
loyalty to the country permanently remains under a cloud of suspicion.
Here is an
attempt to understand this whole business of Partition, which still
haunts many of us and for which we Muslims are squarely blamed and made
to feel guilty every now and then by the religious and political bigots
this side of the border. Indeed, this has become the
proverbial albatross around the neck of the country’s largest minority.
M N Roy, a 20th century philosopher, freedom fighter and founder of
humanist movement in India in his essay on Muhammad Ali
Jinnah in Independent India, September 19, 1948, maintains that Jinnah
was not the only one responsible for the Partition, “But he was not the
devil of the drama, as he was made out to be.”
Roy further details about the man who is considered to be
architect of this catastrophe by majority of the middle class
India, saying that, “The fact, however, is that, if distrust and hatred
of the British were the hall mark of patriotism, Jinnah was always as
staunch a patriot as any other Indian. The more that fact was willfully
ignored by his opponents and he was maligned and
misrepresented deliberately, the more was Jinnah naturally embittered
and spitefulness became the motive of his politics .But even then his
ambition was not to gain political power but to avenge the wrong which
he believed had been done to him.”
Roy then offers an incisive analysis of the effects of Partition on
those Muslims, who were left behind and who in their right mind, never
did fancy going to an alien country. My grandfather was one of them. He
was personally invited by Jinnah to join Pakistan but refused outright.
But the tragic irony of the situation is such that the epithet ghaddar
[traitor] has stuck with us. As Khader Mohiuddin, a poet from
Hyderabad, puts it like this,
Long before I was born
My name was listed
Among the traitors,
Where circumstances “make me a refugee
in the very country of my birth.”
Commenting on the absurdity of questioning Indian Muslims’ loyalty,
which has forever remained under doubt, M N Roy wrote: “The
establishment of the largest Muslim state meant, leaving many millions
of Muslims in the lurch. Having been fighters for Pakistan, the
millions of Muslims left in the Indian union are in the most difficult
position. Most of them feel betrayed. Jinnah was fully conscious of
that tragedy, which must have haunted his last days. Indeed the
homeland for the Indian Muslims was a Utopia; any territorial division
was bound to leave many millions of them out in a very delicate
position of being regarded as aliens, suspected of disloyalty to the
land they must live in.”
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