The easiest
way before an Indian audience to get hands clapping, is to accuse the British
of the Partition of India. Try it for yourself and say out loud: “Partition was
engineered by the wily Britishers in
their nefarious design of ‘divide and rule’”, success assured. And the applause
is sure to follow no matter whether the audience, whose sensibilities you may
not know, is Gandhian, Nehruvian-secularist or Hindu nationalist. Yes, Hindu nationalist
too.
“Jinnah was
brainwashed into dividing India”, I read in RSS mouthpiece Organiser. Well, if it is that
easy, why doesn’t the RSS brainwash the Indian Muslims into becoming
India-loving Hindus? Incidentally, how is it done, this “brainwashing”? In
reality, the Hindu nationalists are taking a cheap shot at the British in order
to mask their fear of pinpointing Muslim guilt.
One would
have expected at least Mahatma murderer Nathuram Godse to have criticized
Islam, apart from laying as much of the blame as possible at Gandhi’s feet. But
Godse says very little about the guilt for Partition. He accuses the British of
a “divide and rule” policy, alright, but doesn’t make this the cause of the
Pakistan movement. He accuses Gandhi of not countering the Muslim League’s
demand of Partition with his trademark means of action, viz. the fast unto
death; but he does not go into the question of why the Muslim League made this
demand in the first place. So, even among Godse’s fans you won’t find many
articulate opponents of the British conspiracy thesis.
In this
article, I will argue that the British had nothing to do with Partition, and
that this was a purely Muslim operation necessitated by the present democratic
age’s belief in numbers. In the medieval period, the Muslims constituted far
less than the 24% of the Indian population which they were in the 1940s, yet
they ruled. Mohammed Ali Jinnah thought that this was no longer possible in
modern times, so if they wanted to be in power, they needed a smaller country
where they would constitute the majority. So, the Two-Nation Theory espoused by
the Muslim League necessitated two separate states, one of which would have a
Muslim majority.
To be sure,
the British were guilty of many things, and the fixation of Hindu nationalists
on them is understandable. Principally, they caused several very serious
famines, they dismantled the technology and economic structure of India, and
they imposed a foreign ideology that harmed the natives’ self-respect. This did
not make British rule “the biggest crime in history”, as L.K. Advani claims on
his blog (15 July 2012), but it was pretty bad. However, none of that made them
guilty of Partition. Nor did their policy of “divide and rule” cause the
pre-colonial or post-colonial (and generally not even the colonial) hostility
between Hindus and Muslims. It was a tactic used at the negotiation table, not
meant for the streets (where riots would only upset economic life), much less
for a final Partition of the Indian empire.
Viceroys
Lord Victor Linlithgow and Lord Archibald Wavell told Jinnah to his face that
they would not countenance the division of their nice and neat Indian empire,
not even in the event of decolonization. Their successor, Lord Louis
Mountbatten, only accepted Partition because the Muslim League threatened and
started violence. Congress leaders did the same, including even Mahatma Gandhi
in June 1947. All his so-called fasts unto death, his promise that “India will
only be divided over my dead body”, proved hollow in the face of the real
chance that these opponents would not give in, so that his fast would only be
concluded with his death. .
It is only
the fledgling Cold War that made the British and also the Americans see a
silver lining in the Partition, viz. that one of the parties would join the
Western camp and provide it an outpost to monitor the Soviet threat. This was apparently also what made
Lord Mountbatten more pliable. But it was only in 1945 that the Soviet ally became
an enemy, five years after the Muslim League adopted the Pakistan resolution,
and more than ten years after the idea of Pakistan was first mooted.
In reality,
the ideology of Partition was rooted in Islam. According to Islam, Muslims must
always be in power. Thus, Muslim men are allowed to marry non-Muslim women but
non-Muslim men are not allowed to marry Muslim women because wives are deemed
to be at the husbands’ command. In the Middle Ages, Muslim minorities had seemed
to subdue the Hindus by military means, and Muslim leaders with a medieval
mindset concluded logically that numbers were unimportant to decide who will
dominate whom. Thus, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (who had given an emigration fatwa
during the Khilafat movement) is mis-termed a Nationalist Muslim but aimed in
fact at the Islamic domination of the whole of India. However, Jinnah had
interiorized the modern value of democracy and didn’t dare to ask for more than
a country in which Muslims would form the majority.
Islam is
against multiculturalism unless it is treated with utmost respect and has at
least the perspective of becoming dominant. By contrast, the Hindu nationalists
including Nathuram Godse were prepared to give the Muslims far-reaching
concessions in order to keep India united. They were not guilty, Congress was
not guilty when it proved insufficiently accommodating to the League, and the
British rulers were not guilty. If a section of the Muslims had not desired
Partition, then Partition would never have happened.
Hindus who
blame the British for Partition, show that they are afraid of the truth, and
afraid of Islam. It is far easier to accuse the British, who have safely
departed, than to lay the blame at the door of Islam. Blaming Islam opens a can
of worms, it is difficult to deal with this religion. It is a challenge to
one’s courage, but it is mainly a challenge to one’s intelligence. If you are
deficient in these departments, then go ahead and blame the British.
On the
other hand, if you have courage and intelligence, it should be easy to face the
fact of Muslim causation of the Partition of India. Today, it takes a moderate
dosis of courage to criticize Islam: you risk the ire of the institutions (and
your job if you are a scholar in the Humanities), the violence of some
indignant Muslim, and if you are a Hindu, also the displeasure of your fellow
Hindus. But these risks are manageable, and as I will explain on some future
occasion, I do not buy the myth of Hindu lack of bravery. Criticizing Islam
also requires a large amount on intelligence, viz. the power to discriminate
between causes (the doctrine of Islam) and symptoms (the behavior of Muslims,
only partly caused by this doctrine), and the balancing act between
uncompromising criticism of the doctrine and sympathy at the human level. Even
you could have been born and brought up as a Muslim and developed an attachment
for Islam’s irrational beliefs. If you believe in reincarnation, you should
realize that you even could have been a Muslim, perhaps several times over. So,
responsibly criticizing Islam and its role in the Partition of India requires
intelligence.
It is here
that I have more reason to worry. Though Hindus have shown great intelligence
in the literature of the past and ICT initiatives of the present, they have
mostly failed to apply their intelligence to the Islam problem, though this is
staring them in the face every day. But I am confident that now you will do
something about it.
Read more!