An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

In speeches, interviews and articles throughout late 1945 and early 1946, he expressed the belief that, free of foreign rule, the Muslims of India would relinquish any thought of secession. The Muslims of India, he wrote, ‘are only technically a minority. They are vast in numbers and powerful in other ways, and it is patent that they cannot be coerced against their will… This communal question is essentially one of protection of vested interests, and religion has always been a useful stalking horse for this purpose’. He even argued that Congress should grant the right of secession just to allay any Muslim fears, not in the expectation that the Muslim League-ruled provinces would actually exercise it. But whether, as many Indian analysts have suggested, Jinnah had really meant to establish a separate state or was merely advocating Pakistan to obtain leverage over the Congress, his followers had taken him at his word. A state of their own was what they were determined to have, and by the spring of 1946 Nehru’s idealism appeared naïve, even dangerously so. Tragically, divide et impera had worked too well. A device to maintain the integrity of British India had made it impossible for that integrity to be maintained without the British.