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Sir John Strachey.
In Strachey’s view, the differences between the countries of Europe were much smaller than those between the ‘countries’ of India. ‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like the Punjab.’
‘They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them and we give it them straight.’
it has also been an anomaly for academic political science, according to whose axioms cultural heterogeneity and poverty do not make a nation, still less a democratic one. That India ‘could sustain democratic institutions seems, on the face of it, highly improbable’, wrote the distinguished political scientist Robert Dahl, adding: ‘It lacks all the favourable conditions.’
When one looks at this vast country and its 524 million people, the 15 major languages in use, the conflicting religions, the many races, it seems incredible that one nation could ever emerge. It is difficult to even encompass this country in the mind – the great Himalaya, the wide Indo-Gangetic plain burnt by the sun and savaged by the fierce monsoon rains, the green flooded delta of the east, the great cities like Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It does not, often, seem like one country. And yet there is a resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can
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A vast majority of the billion-plus Indians are Hindus. But India also has the second largest population of Muslims in the world – about 140 million (only Indonesia has more).
to pay proper respect to the social and political diversity of India, and to unravel the puzzle that has for so long confronted scholar and citizen, foreigner as well as native – namely, why is there an India at all?
15 August 1947. This date was selected by the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, as it was the second anniversary of the Japanese surrender to the Allied Forces in the Second World War.
So freedom finally came on a day that resonated with imperial pride rather than nationalist sentiment.
‘People are dying of hunger all round,’ answered Gandhi. ‘Do you wish to hold a celebration in the midst of this devastation?’7
Gandhi marked 15 August 1947 with a twenty-four-hour fast. The freedom he had struggled so long for had come at an unacceptable price. Independence had also meant Partition.
The violence of August–September 1946 was, in the first instance, instigated by the Muslim League, the party which fuelled the movement for a separate state of Pakistan. The League was led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, an austere, aloof man, and yet a brilliant political tactician.
The historian Robin Jeffrey has pointed out that, at least until the month of August 1947, the Sikhs were ‘more sinned against than sinning’. They had been ‘abandoned by the British, tolerated by the Congress, taunted by the Muslim League, and, above all, frustrated by the failures of their own political leadership . . .’14
The task of partitioning Bengal and the Punjab was entrusted to a British judge named Sir Cyril Radcliffe. He
The boundary award was finally announced on 16 August. The award enraged the Muslims, who thought that the Gurdaspur district should have gone to Pakistan instead of India. Angrier still were the Sikhs, whose beloved Nankana Sahib now lay marooned in an Islamic state.
Ten million refugees were on the move, on foot, by bullock-cart, and by train, sometimes travelling under army escort, at other times trusting to fate and their respective gods.
The peace held, prompting Lord Mountbatten to remark famously that one unarmed man had been more effective than 50,000 troops in Punjab.
He also permitted himself the hope ‘that, though geographically and politically India is divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and respecting one another and be one for the outside world’.
evident in government employment, where care was taken to balance numbers of Muslim and Hindu staff, and in politics, where the British introduced communal electorates, such that Muslims voted exclusively for other Muslims.
The call for Pakistan was first made formally by the Muslim League in March 1940.
‘there is more likelihood of obtaining Hindu consent to Division than Muslim consent to Union’.
‘You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.’
Lord Wavell.
‘Vasco da Gama epoch of Asian history’
Mountbatten’s talk to the Chamber of Princes was a tour de force.
Mountbatten dealt with the symbolism of the princes’ integration with India; V. P. Menon with the substance. In his book, Menon describes in some detail the tortuous negotiations with the rulers. The process of give and take involved much massaging of egos: one ruler claimed descent from Lord Rama, another from Sri Krishna, while a third said his lineage was immortal, as it had been blessed by the Sikh Gurus.
He saw this as ‘one of the greatest, if not the greatest, tragedies that has ever befallen mankind’. For now the ‘States, the Moslems, and the entire mass of people who relied on British justice . . . suddenly find themselves totally helpless, unorganised and unsupported’. The only course left to the Nawab now was to ‘die in the cause of the Moslems of the world’.
And so the Maharaja of Jodhpur also came round, but not before a last-minute theatrical show of defiance. When presented with the Instrument of Accession in the anteroom of the viceroy’s office, Jodhpur took out a revolver and held it to the secretary’s head, saying, ‘I will not accept your dictation.’ But in a few minutes he cooled down and signed on the line.38
On 15 August the national flag was hoisted by Congress workers in different parts of Hyderabad state. The offenders were arrested and taken off to jail.50
V. P. Menon,
My love of the mountains and my kinship with Kashmir especially drew me to them, and I saw there not only the life and vigour and beauty of the present but also the memoried loveliness of ages past . . . When I think of India, I think of many things . . . [but] above all, of the Himalayas, snow-capped, or some mountain valley in Kashmir in the spring, covered with new flowers, and with a brook bubbling and gurgling through it.
A popular government in Kashmir, he added, ‘will not be the government of any one community. It will be a joint government of the Hindus, the Sikhs and the Muslims. That is what I am fighting for.’
The Maharaja has told me that his ambition is to make Kashmir the Switzerland of the East – a State that is completely neutral.’22
These two questions lie at the heart of the Kashmir dispute;
They flew over the Punjab, seeing ‘long strings of refugee caravans below them’, with ‘an odd house or village still smouldering’.
Jinnah countered by saying that the maharaja had brought this upon himself by his ill treatment of Muslims in Poonch.
‘Don’t think I will desert you, even if you desert me. I will resign and join those people in the Indian Union who will also fight for economic betterment of the poor.’
The fragility of the Pakistani state and its ideology was personalized in the ambivalent identities of its main leaders.
If the transfer of populations had been ‘the greatest mass migration’ in history, now commenced ‘the biggest land resettlement operation in the world’.
Displaced from their homes by forces outside their control, refugees everywhere are potential fodder for extremist movements.
the operation to recover abducted women was led by Mridula Sarabhai and Rameshwari Nehru.
The refugees who came into India after Independence numbered close to 8 million.
WITH 395 ARTICLES AND 12 schedules the constitution of India is probably the longest in the world.
Outside this Congress trinity the most crucial member of the Assembly was the brilliant low-caste lawyer B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar was law minister in the Union government; and also chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution.
Serving with him were two other formidable minds: K. M. Munshi, a Gujarati polymath who was a novelist and lawyer as well as freedom fighter, and Alladi Krishnaswami Aiyar, a Tamil who for fifteen years had served as advocate general to the Madras presidency.
B. N. Rau,
What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?’
‘firstpast-the-post’
‘Those who want that kind of thing have a place in Pakistan, not here,’ thundered Patel to a burst of applause. ‘Here, we are building a nation and we are laying the foundations of One Nation, and those who choose to divide again and sow the seeds of disruption will have no place, no quarter, here, and I must say that plainly enough.’
Begum Aizaz Rasul.
