Pakistan or the Partition of India

by B.R. Ambedkar

There is no use blaming the British for insisting upon such a settlement as a condition precedent to the transfer of power. The British cannot consent to settle power upon an aggressive Hindu majority and make it its heir, leaving it to deal with the minorities at its sweet pleasure. That would not be ending imperialism. It would be creating another imperialism. The Hindus, therefore, cannot avoid coming to grips with Pakistan, much as they would like to do.

Further, if the Hindus are hoping that the British will use force to put down Pakistan, that is impossible. In the first place, coercion is no remedy. The futility of force and resistance was pointed out by Burke long ago in his speeches relating to the coercion of the American colonies. His memorable words may be quoted not only for the benefit of the Hindu Maha Sabha but also for the benefit of all. This is what he said: " The use of force alone is temporary. It may endure a moment but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again : a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered. The next objection to force is its uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force, and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed you are without resource; for conciliation failing, force remains; but force failing, no further hope of reconciliation is left. Power and Authority are sometimes bought by kindness, but they can never be begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence. A further objection to force is that you impair the object by your very endeavours to preserve it. The thing you fought for (to wit the loyalty of the people) is not the thing you recover, but depreciated, sunk, wasted and consumed in the contest." Coercion, as an alternative to Pakistan, is therefore unthinkable.

Again, the Muslims cannot be deprived of the benefit of the principle of self-determination. The Hindu Nationalists who rely on self-determination and ask how Britain can refuse India what the conscience of the world has conceded to the smallest of the European nations, cannot in the same breath ask the British to deny it to other minorities.

The Hindu Nationalist who hopes that Britain will coerce the Muslims into abandoning Pakistan, forgets that the right of nationalism to freedom from an aggressive foreign imperialism and the right of a minority to freedom from an aggressive majority's nationalism are not two different things; nor does the former stand on a more sacred footing than the latter. T...

It will be the greatest folly to suppose that if Pakistan is buried for the moment, it will never raise its head again. I am sure, burying Pakistan is not the same thing as burying the ghost of Pakistan. So long as the hostility to one Central Government for India, which is the ideology underlying Pakistan, persists, the ghost of Pakistan will be there, casting its ominous shadow upon the political future of India.

Civil disobedience does not require learning. It does not call for the shedding of life. It is an easy middle way for that large majority who have no learning and who do not wish to undergo the extreme penalty and at the same time obtain the notoriety of being patriots. It is this middle path which made the Congress more popular than the Liberal Party or the Terrorist Party.

Linguistic difference is simply another name for cultural difference.

Nationality is a social feeling. It is a feeling of a corporate sentiment of oneness which makes those who are charged with it feel that they are kith and kin. This national feeling is a double edged feeling. It is at once a feeling of fellowship for one's own kith and kin and an anti-fellowship feeling for those who are not one's own kith and kin. It is a feeling of " consciousness of kind " which on the one hand binds together those who have it, so strongly that it over-rides all differences arising out of economic conflicts or social gradations and, on the other, severs them from those who are not of their kind. It is a longing not to belong to any other group. This is the essence of what is called a nationality and national feeling.

Speaking about language, Renan points out that :— " Language invites re-union ; it does not force it. The United States and England, Spanish America and Spain speak the same languages and do not form single nations. On the contrary, Switzerland which owes her stability to the fact that she was founded by the assent of her several parts counts three or four languages. In man there is something superior to language, —will. The will of Switzerland to be united, in spite of the variety of her languages,' is a much more important fact than a similarity of language, often obtained by persecution."

Having shown, that race, language, and country do not suffice to create a nation, Renan raises in a pointed manner the question, what more, then, is necessary to constitute a nation ? His answer may be given in his own words :— " A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the common possession of a rich heritage of memories ; the other is the actual consent, the desire to live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided inheritance which has been handed down. Man does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, and sacrifices, and devotion. Ancestor-worship is therefore, all the more legitimate ; for our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory,—1 mean glory of the genuine kind,—these form the social capital, upon which a national idea may be founded. To have common glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again,—such are the essential conditions for the . making of a people. We love in proportion to the sacrifices we have consented to make, to the sufferings we have endured. We love the house that we have built, and will hand down to our descendant. The Spartan hymn, ' We are what you were ; we shall be what you are,' is in its simplicity the national anthem of every land. " In...

The political and religious antagonisms divide the Hindus and the Musalmans far more deeply than the so-called common things are able to bind them together. The prospects might perhaps be different if the past of the two communities can be forgotten by both, Renan points out the importance of forgetfulness as a factor in building up a nation :— " Forgetfulness, and I shall even say historical error, form an essential factor in the creation of a nation; and thus it is that the progress of historical studies may often be dangerous to the nationality. Historical research, in fact, brings back to light the deeds of violence that have taken place at the commencement of all political formations, even of those the consequences of which have been most beneficial.

First, there is a difference between nationality and nationalism. They are two different psychological states of the human mind. Nationality means " consciousness of kind, awareness of the existence of that tie of kinship." Nationalism means " the desire for a separate national existence for those who are bound by this tie of kinship." Secondly, it is true that there cannot be nationalism without the feeling of nationality being in existence. But, it is important to bear in mind that the converse is not always true. The feeling of nationality may be present and yet the feeling of nationalism may be quite absent. That is to say, nationality does not in all cases produce nationalism. For nationality to flame into nationalism two conditions must exist. First, there must arise the " will to live as a nation. Nationalism is the dynamic expression of that desire. Secondly, there must be a territory which nationalism could occupy and make it a state, as well as a cultural home of the nation. Without such a territory, nationalism, to use Lord Acton's phrase, would be a " soul as it. were wandering in search of a body in which to begin life over again and dies out finding none."

Thus history shows that the theory of nationality is imbedded in the democratic theory of the sovereignty of the will of a people. This means that the demand by a nationality for a national state does not require to be supported by any list of grievances. The will of the people is enough to justify it.

It is no use saying that the Congress is not a Hindu body. A body which is Hindu in its composition is bound to reflect the Hindu mind and support Hindu aspirations. The only difference between the Congress and the Hindu Maha Sabha is that the latter is crude in its utterances and brutal in its actions while the Congress is politic and polite. Apart from this difference of fact, there is no other difference between the Congress and the Hindu Maha Sabha.

Similarly, it is no use saying that the Congress does not recognize the distinction between the ruler and the ruled. If this is so, the Congress must prove its bonafides by showing its readiness to recognize the other communities as free and equal partners. What is the test of such recognition ? It seems to me that there can be only one—namely, agreeing to share power with the effective representatives of the minority communities. Is the Congress prepared for it ? Everyone knows the answer. The Congress is not prepared to share power with a member of a community who does not owe allegiance to the Congress. Allegiance to the Congress is a condition precedent to sharing power. It seems to be a rule with the Congress that if allegiance to the Congress is not forthcoming from a community, that community must be excluded from political power.

But as Prof. Toynbee points out : " We must be on our guard against ' historical sentiment ', that is against arguments taken from conditions which once existed or were supposed to exist, but which are no longer real at the present moment They are most easily illustrated by extreme examples. Italian newspapers have described the annexation of Tripoli as recovering the soil of the Fatherland because it was once a province of the Roman Empire; and the entire region of Macedonia is claimed by Greek Chauvinists on the one hand, because it contains the site of Pella, the cradle of Alexandar the Great in the fourth century B.C. and by Bulgarians on the other, because Ochrida, in the opposite corner, was the capital of the Bulgarian Tzardom in the tenth century A. D., though the drift of time has buried the tradition of the latter almost as deep as the achievements of the ' Emathian Conqueror ' on which the modem Greek nationalists insist so strongly.

These data reveal in a striking manner that the fighting forces available for the defence of India mostly come from areas which are to be included in Pakistan. From this it may be argued, that without Pakistan, Hindustan cannot defend itself. The facts brought out by the Simon Commission are, of course, beyond question. But they cannot be made the basis of a conclusion, such as is suggested by the Simon Commission, namely, that only Pakistan can produce soldiers and that Hindustan cannot. That such a conclusion is quite untenable will be seen from the following considerations. In the first place, what is regarded by the Simon Commission as something peculiar to India is not quite so peculiar. What appears to be peculiar is not due to any inherent defect in the people. The peculiarity arises because of the policy of recruitment followed by the British Government for years past. The official explanation of this predominance in the Indian Army of the men of the North-West is that they belong to the Martial Classes.

Chaudhari 24 [f.24] has demonstrated, by unimpeachable data, that this explanation is far from being true. He has shown that the predominance in the Army of the men of the North-West took place as early as the Mutiny of 1857, some 20 years before the theory of Martial and Non-martial Classes was projected in an indistinct form for the first time in 1879 by the Special Army Committee 25[f.25] appointed in that year, and that their predominance had nothing to do with their alleged fighting qualities but was due to the fact, that they helped the British to suppress the Mutiny in which the Bengal Army was so completely involved.

The gaps created by the revolt of the Hindustani regiments (of the Bengal Army) were at once filled up by Sikhs and other Punjabis, and hillmen eager for revenge and for the loot of the cities of Hindustan. They had all been conquered and subjugated by the British with the help of the Hindustani soldiers, and in their ignorance, they regarded the Hindustanis, rather the handful of British, as their real enemies. This enmity was magnificently exploited by the British authorities in suppressing the Mutiny. When the news of the enlistment of Gurkhas reached Lord Dalhousie in England he expressed great satisfaction

And after the Mutiny, General Mansfield, the Chief of the Staff of the Indian Army, wrote about the Sikhs: ' It was not because they loved us, but because they hated Hindustan and haled the Bengal Army that the Sikhs had flocked to our standard instead of seeking the opportunity to strike again for their freedom. They wanted to revenge themselves and to gain riches by the plunder of Hindustani cities. They were not attracted by mere daily pay, it was rather the prospect of wholesale plunder and stamping on the heads of their enemies. In short, we turned to profit the esprit de corps of the old Khalsa Army of Ranjit Singh, in the manner which for a time would most effectually bind the Sikhs to us as long as the active service against their old enemies may last ".

These figures show that in 1856, one year before the Mutiny, the men from the North-West were a negligible factor in the Indian Army. But in 1858, one year after the Mutiny, they had acquired a dominant position which has never received a setback.

It will thus be seen that the distinction between Martial and Non-martial Classes, which was put forth for the first time in 1879, as a matter of principle, which was later on insisted upon as a matter of serious consideration by Lord Roberts 26 [f.26] and which was subsequently recognised by Lord Kitchener as a principle governing recruitment to the Indian Army, had nothing to do with the origin of this preponderance of the men of the North-West in the Indian Army.

This division between Martial and Non-martial Classes is, of course, a purely arbitrary and artificial distinction. It is as foolish as the Hindu theory of caste, making birth instead of worth, the basis for recognition. At one time, the Government insisted that the distinction they had adopted was a real distinction and that in terms of fighting qualities, it meant so much fighting value. In fact, this was their justification for recruiting more men from the North-West of India. That this distinction has nothing to do with any difference in fighting qualities has now been admitted.

Sir Phillip Chetwode, 27[f27] late Commander-in-Chief of India, broadcasting from London on the constitution of the Indian Army, took pains to explain that the recruitment of a larger proportion of it from the Punjab, did not mean that the people of the Peninsula were without martial qualities. Sir Phillip Chetwode explained that the reason why men of the North were largely recruited for the Indian Army was chiefly climatic, as the men from the South cannot stand the extremes of heat and cold of North India. No race can be permanently without martial spirit. Martial spirit is not a matter of native instinct. It is a matter of training and anybody can be trained to it.

It is possible to say that Afghanistan will never think of invading India. But a theory is best tested by examining its capacity to meet the worst case.

Having an Army, they will not be free to use it because the League objects. Using it, it will not be possible to depend upon it because its loyalty is doubtful. This is a position which is as pathetic as it is precarious. If the Army continues to be dominated by the Muslims of the Punjab and the N. W. F. P., the Hindus will have to pay it but will not be able to use it and even if they were free to use it against a Muslim invader, they will find it hazardous to depend upon it.

Which is then better for the Hindus : Should these Musalmans be without and against or should they be within and against ? If the question is asked to any prudent man, there will be only one answer, namely, that if the Musalmans are to be against the Hindus, it is better that they should be without and against, rather than within and against.

A safe Army is better than a safe border.