The Partition of India

14 August, 1947, saw the birth of the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan. At midnight the next day India won its freedom from colonial rule, ending nearly 350 years of British presence in India. During the struggle for freedom, Gandhi had written an appeal "To Every Briton" to free their possessions in Asia and Africa, especially India (Philips and Wainwright, 567). The British left India divided in two. The two countries were founded on the basis of religion, with Pakistan as an Islamic state and India as a secular one.

Whether the partition of these countries was wise and whether it was done too soon is still under debate. Even the imposition of an official boundary has not stopped conflict between them. Boundary issues, left unresolved by the British, have caused two wars and continuing strife between India and Pakistan.

The partition of India and its freedom from colonial rule set a precedent for nations such as Israel, which demanded a separate homeland because of the irreconcilable differences between the Arabs and the Jews. The British left Israel in May 1948, handing the question of division over to the UN. Un-enforced UN Resolutions to map out boundaries between Israel and Palestine has led to several Arab-Israeli wars and the conflict still continues.

1885-Indian National Congress founded by A. O. Hume to unite all Indians and strengthen bonds with Britain.

1905-First Partition of Bengal for administrative purposes. Gives the Muslims a majority in that state.

1909-Revocation of Partition of Bengal. Creates anti-British and anti-Hindu sentiments among Muslims as they lose their majority in East Bengal.

1916-Lucknow Pact. The Congress and the League unite in demand for greater self-government. It is denied by the British.

1919-Rowlatt Acts, or black acts passed over opposition by Indian members of the Supreme Legislative Council. These were peacetime extensions of wartime emergency measures. Their passage causes further disaffection with the British and leads to protests. Amritsar Massacre. General Dyer opens fire on 20,000 unarmed Indian civilians at a political demonstration against the Rowlatt Acts. Congress and the League lose faith in the British.

1919-Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms (implemented in 1921). A step to self-government in India within the Empire, with greater provincialisation, based on a dyarchic principle in provincial government as well as administrative responsibility. Communal representation institutionalised for the first timeas reserved legislative seats are allocated for significant minorities.

1920-Gandhi launches a non-violent, non-cooperation movement, or Satyagraha, against the British for a free India.

1922-Twenty-one policemen are killed by Congress supporters at Chauri -Chaura. Gandhi suspends non-cooperation movement and is imprisoned.

1928-Simon Commission, set up to investigate the Indian political environment for future policy-making, fails as all parties boycott it.

1930-Dr. Allama Iqbal, a poet-politician, calls for a separate homeland for the Muslims at the Allahabad session of the Muslim League. Gandhi starts Civil Disobedience Movement against the Salt Laws by which the British had a monopoly over production and sale of salt.

1930-31-The Round Table conferences, set up to consider Dominion status for India. They fail because of non-attendance by the Congress and because Gandhi, who does attend, claims he is the only representative of all of India.

1931-Irwin-Gandhi Pact, which concedes to Gandhi's demands at the Round Table conferences and further isolates Muslim League from the Congress and the British.

1932-Third Round Table Conference boycotted by Muslim League. Gandhi re-starts civil disobedience. Congress is outlawed by the British and its leaders.

1935-Government of India Act: proposes a federal India of political provinces with elected local governments but British control over foreign policy and defence.

1940-Jinnah calls for establishment of Pakistan in an independent and partitioned India.

1942-Cripps Mission o India, to conduct negotiations between all political parties and to set up a cabinet government. Congress adopts Quit India Resolution, to rid India of British rule. Congress leaders arrested for obstructing war effort.

1942-43-Muslim League gains more power: ministries formed in Sind, Bengal and North-West Frontier Province and greater influence in the Punjab.

1944-Gandhi released from prison. Unsuccessful Gandhi-Jinnah talks, but Muslims see this as an acknowledgment that Jinnah represents all Indian Muslims.

1945-The new Labour Government in Britain decides India is strategically indefensible and begins to prepare for Indian independence. Direct Action Day riots convince British that Partition is inevitable.

1946-Muslim League participates in Interim Government that is set up according to the Cabinet Mission Plan.

1947-Announcement of Lord Mountbatten's plan for partition of India, 3 June. Partition of India and Pakistan, 15 August. Radcliffe Award of boundaries of the nations, 16 August.

By the end of the 19th century several nationalistic movements had started in India. Indian nationalism had grown largely since British policies of education and the advances made by the British in India in the fields of transportation and communication. However, their complete insensitivity to and distance from the peoples of India and their customs created such disillusionment with them in their subjects that the end of British rule became necessary and inevitable.

However, while the Indian National Congress was calling for Britain to Quit India, the Muslim League, in 1943, passed a resolution for them to Divide and Quit. There were several reasons for the birth of a separate Muslim homeland in the subcontinent, and all three parties-the British, the Congress and the Muslim League-were responsible.

The British had followed a divide-and-rule policy in India. Even in the census they categorised people according to religion and viewed and treated them as separate from each other. They had based their knowledge of the peoples of India on the basic religious texts and the intrinsic differences they found in them instead of on the way they coexisted in the present. The British were also still fearful of the potential threat from the Muslims, who were the former rulers of the subcontinent, ruling India for over 300 years under the Mughal Empire. In order to win them over to their side, the British helped establish the M.A.O. College at Aligarh and supported the All-India Muslim Conference, both of which were institutions from which leaders of the Muslim League and the ideology of Pakistan emerged. As soon as the League was formed, they were placed on a separate electorate. Thus the idea of the separateness of Muslims in India was built into the electoral process of India.

There was also an ideological divide between the Muslims and the Hindus of India. While there were strong feelings of nationalism in India, by the late 19th century there were also communal conflicts and movements in the country that were based on religious communities rather than class or regional ones. Some people felt that the very nature of Islam called for a communal Muslim society. Added to this were the memories of power over the Indian subcontinent that the Muslims held on to, especially those in the old centers of Mughal rule. These memories might have made it exceptionally diffficult for Muslims to accept the imposition of colonial power and culture. They refused to learn English and to associate with the British. This was a severe drawback for them as they found that the Hindus were now in better positions in government than they were and thus felt that the British favored Hindus. The social reformer and educator, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who founded M.A.O. College, taught the Muslims that education and cooperation with the British was vital for their survival in the society. Tied to all the movements of Muslim revival was the opposition to assimilation and submergence in Hindu society. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was also the first to conceive of a separate Muslim homeland.

Hindu revivalists also deepened the chasm betweent he two nations. They resented the Muslims for their former rule over India. Hindu revivalists rallied for a ban on the slaughter of cows, a cheap source of meat for the Muslims. They also wanted to change the official script form the Persian to the Hindu Devanagri script, effectively making Hindi rather than Urdu the main candidate for the national language.

Congress made several mistakes in their policies which further convinced the League that it was impossible to live in a undivided India after freedom from colonial rule because their interests would be completely suppressed. One such policy was the institution of the "Bande Matram," a national anthem which expressed anti-Muslim sentiments, in the schools of India where Muslim children were forced to sing it.

The Muslim League gained power also due to the Congress. The Congress banned any support for the British during the Second World War. However the Muslim League pledged its full support, which found favour form them from the British, who also needed the help of the largely Muslim army. The Civil Disobedience Movement and the consequent withdrawal of the Congress party from politics also helped the league gain power, as they formed strong ministries in the provinces that had large Muslim populations. At the same time, the League actively campaigned to gain more support from the Muslims in India, especially under the guidance of dynamic leaders like Jinnah.

There had been some hope of an undivided India, with a government consisting of three tiers along basically the same lines as the borders of India and Pakistan at the time of Partition. However, Congress' rejection of the interim government set up under this Cabinet Mission Plan in 1942 convinced the leaders of the Muslim League that compromise was impossible and partition was the only course to take.

"Leave India to God. If that is too much, then leave her to anarchy." --Gandhi, May 1942

The partition of India left both India and Pakistan devastated. The process of partition had claimed many lives in the riots. Many others were raped and looted. Women, especially, were used as instruments of power by the Hindus and the Muslims; "ghost trains" full of severed breasts of women would arrive in each of the newly-born countries from across the borders.

15 million refugees poured across the borders to regions completely foreign to them, for though they were Hindu or Muslim, their identity had been embedded in the regions where there ancestors were from. Not only was the country divided, but so were the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, divisions which caused catastrophic riots and claimed the lives of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike.

Many years after the partition, the two nations are still trying to heal the wounds left behind by this incision to once-whole body of India. Many are still in search of an identity and a history left behind beyond an impenetrable boundary. The two countries started of with ruined economies and lands and without an established, experienced system of government. They lost many of their most dynamic leaders, such as Gandhi, Jinnah and Allama Iqbal, soon after the partition. Pakistan had to face the separation of Bangladesh in 1971. India and Pakistan have been to war twice since the partition and they are still deadlocked over the issue of possession of Kashmir. The same issues of boundaries and divisions, Hindu and Muslim majorities and differences, still persist in Kashmir.

Un-enforced UN Resolutions to map out boundaries between Israel and Palestine has led to several Arab-Israeli wars and the conflict still continues...

This is why I continue to laugh and jeer at those who insist upon characterizing the U.N. as the embodiment of all EEEEE-VILLLL, and the vehicle by which the U.S. will be destroyed.

In fact, the U.N. is simply the embodiment of incompetence, and proof that anything designed by committee is going to be a farce.

These people can't even keep a couple of FOURTH world African nations (like Rwanda and Burundi, Liberia and Angola, etc.) from blowing up.

They are the Keystone Kops of our age.

Many years after the partition, the two nations are still trying to heal the wounds left behind by this incision to once-whole body of India. What once-whole body of India? The British did not come in and conquer some pre-existing entity whose boundaries matched British India. It conquered, co-opted, and coerced innumerable "empires," principalities, and smaller entities, with Victoria eventually assuming the title of empress. Kashmir is key to India, because the independence or separation of Kashmir from Delhi could be the first step in an unending series of pleblicites, rebellions, and secessions.

IMHO, the word that strikes the most fear in Delhi today is not jihad or nuclear exchange -- it is Yugoslavia.

Yes, one ill-effect of British Imperialism was the discovery by millions of Indian people that they had sufficient common interests to form large nation-states that could help them maintain a degree of cultural independence from Europe.

Otherwise, they would have pursued the creation of numerous small independent nations which have been as easily fleeced by Europeans as were the numerous African small independent nations created in the 1960s.

This has been very bad for European merchants and investors in India. Today they even have to pay taxes!~

Nice to see someone else who understands that the Indian subcontinent is nothing close to a natural nation-state. Linguistically, culturally, religiously and ethnically it is far more diverse than the European subcontinent. Yet we don't talk of the "natural unity" of Europe and for that matter take its history of thousands of years of division quite for granted.

The problem with this theory is that you can't get blood from a turnip. Nothing much was stolen from Africa after independence by Europeans for two main reasons: there wasn't much to steal and what was the local thieves stole first.

:Many years after the partition, the two nations are still trying to heal the wounds left behind by this incision to once-whole body of India.

What once-whole body of India? The British did not come in and conquer some pre-existing entity whose boundaries matched British India. It conquered, co-opted, and coerced innumerable "empires," principalities, and smaller entities, with Victoria eventually assuming the title of empress. Kashmir is key to India, because the independence or separation of Kashmir from Delhi could be the first step in an unending series of pleblicites, rebellions, and secessions.

I agree. I don't believe that the Mughal Empire's boundaries extended to all of what became British India, nor was the Mughal Empire a nation-state.

As we speak European interests continue to obtain subsaharan oil, diamonds, coffee, cocoa, etc. at lower cost than elsewhere.

If they had to deal with a real country, they'd be paying a lot more for it.

BTW, "fleece" does not necessarily mean "steal" - it is usually used in the sense of "cheat".

As we speak European interests continue to obtain subsaharan oil, diamonds, coffee, cocoa, etc. at lower cost than elsewhere.

So Nigeria sells oil for a couple of dollars less than market value. Isn't that a contradiction in terms? If oil is cheaper in Nigeria than elsewhere, won't buyers flock there and compete to purchase Nigerian oil till the price is back up to where it is equal to market price elsewhere?

What you probably mean is that African officials can be bribed to sell their country's products at a discount. Or steal it, sell it and pocket the money. Whether this occurs has little to do with a country's military strength and everything to do with the value its culture places on honesty. For some obscure reason Singapore, despite negligible military potential, doesn't have this problem.

You strike me as one of those who want to blame the West for all failures of African countries. Who are we to force our value of (relative) official honesty on another culture?< / > sarcasm

If the legal rulers of a country put a price on their products that is "below" what it "should be," how should the West react, in your opinion? Refuse to purchase the products? Set an artificially high price, which will just add to the dictator's resources for oppressing his people?

Or go in militarily and set up somebody we think is more "democratic?" Isn't that the opposite of "democracy?"

Sheltonmac stated: "Once again, we can see the ill effects of imperialism.".

I believe he was pointing to the Partition. My comments all occurred in that context, and knowing a bit of the history of that part of the world, I don't consider the Indian colonial experience under the Brits all that bad. In many respects it was a tremendous improvement over some of their indigenous expansionist states. The Partition was probably, on balance, one of the best things to happen to India since the day the Aryan people first decided to move down river from the Harrapan!

Amazingly no one ever complains about the Partition of Buddhist Ceylon from India, or Buddhist Burma from India, or Buddhist Bhutan from India, or Buddhist Nepal from India. It's only their brothers, the Moslems, whose separation gets the Hindu guts churning for enosis!

Your statement: "You strike me as one of those who want to blame the West for all failures of African countries. Who are we to force our value of (relative) official honesty on another culture?" strikes me as totally irrelevant to what I said. It really does pay to keep track of the context.

An historic note here, the Indian experience under French colonialism was superior to that which came about under the Brits, but the best was, by far, the Portuguese colonialism. They moved into fine homes to stay. They purchased brides at the highest prices. If profits were made, they were ploughed back into India. They were the last colonialists kicked out! (SEE: Goa)

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