The conference considered five cases: India, Palestine, Cyprus, Ireland, and Bosnia. Since it was the first partition to take place after world war II, the South Asian event came up for discussion first. Most participants judged it to be a successful instance of partition in the sense that even though East Pakistan separated to become Bangladesh, the international boundaries which resulted from the 1947 division of India have remained largely stable, and it is possible today to envisage normal relations among South Asia's constituent states.
Ironically, South Asian participants tended to qualify so generous a conclusion. There was a broad consensus that Kashmir's contested status is the remaining obstacle to normal Indo-Pakistan relations, and that such normalization is likely to have significant impact on international relations and political economy. The more interesting, of course, were the conclusions one could draw from the partition of India fifty years ago. The subcontinent divide testified to the forest fire speed with which ethnic and religious conflicts can spread. Until almost the end of the 1930s, Muslims tended to support the Indian National Congress or provincial parties other than the Muslim League. Mohammed Ali Jirmah, Pakistan's founding father, was himself a leading Congress leader once and widely regarded as an 'ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.' In the first Indian elections of 1937, the League suffered a severe defeat. Yet, three years later it formulated the demand for Pakistan, and in 1947 achieved it. A discussion of how so dramatic a turn-around occurred suggested that majority leaders' failure to comprehend the anxieties and insecurities of a minority people can result speedily in the alienation of the minority community from the dominant party. In the age of nationalism and mass politics such alienation is likely to be translated into the demand for 'self-determination' and separate statehood. In such situations, there is a premium not merely on goodwill but also on statesmanship.
The partition of India was a product not of ancient animosities but of modem forces among which one should mention especially colonialism, nationalism, the growth of a modem state structure, and the promise of democracy. Hindu nationalist ideologues often portray Muslims as a conquering people fundamentally alien to India. Muslim nationalists too locate the roots of their separate identity deep in history. These claims notwithstanding, there is little in the centuries-long history of Hindu-Muslim relations to anticipate the demand and creation of separate statehood. An overwhelming majority of the subcontinent Muslims were indigenous people who shared the languages, cultures, and historical memories of their Hindu or Sikh neighbors. They were converted to Islam not by the sword but by social forces including the Sufis who were widely revered in the countryside by members of both communities.
Tension and conflicts between Hindus and Muslims did occur, as they did also within each community. Similarly, communal violence occasionally broke out especially at proximate sites of ritual observation. Yet, organized communal violence was rare until the beginning of the 20th century when it began to make its appearance in urban areas. By and large, Hindu-Muslim relations in India may be described in the same terms as relations between various Hindu castes - as characterized by a tolerant mix of antagonism and collaboration. It is comprehensible then that in the last and most widespread and violent resistance to the implantation of British rule - the uprising of 1857 - Muslim and Hindu masses and aristocracy should have rallied symbolically around the enfeebled Mughal throne in Delhi.
The roots of the 1947 partition lay rather in contemporary realities. Great Britain, the colonial power, pursued a policy of 'divide and rule', and remained committed to it until it had lost the will to rule, and decided to 'divide and quit* in a haste that was irresponsible and costly in human lives, property and sheer mayhem. But divide-and-rule policies were not the only divisive factors associated with colonialism. There was also the contrast in Hindu and Muslim responses to the colonial encounter. For a variety of reasons Muslims tended at first to resist colonial rule more violently than did the Hindu elite and leadership classes. More importantly, Muslims shunned western culture and education for nearly a century and did not begin to acquire modem knowledge until the later half of the nineteenth century. Thus, the first western influenced, reformist Hindu movement - the Brahmo Samaj led by Raja Ram Mohan Roy - preceded its first Muslim counterpart - Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's modernist movement - by nearly a century.
The effects of this contrast in the nature of Hindu and Muslim responses to the West were dialectical; therefore, far reaching. For example, in the colonial administration Muslims were late comers and under- represented. It followed that they were behind also in founding and joining modem political parties, and in articulating nationalist demands. Among the Muslim upper and middle classes of the 1920s and 1930s, there was a certain sense of anxiety over having fallen behind, an anxiety which will be accentuated as the promise of independence and democratic rule appeared increasingly realizable. Their first instinct was to seek guarantees of minority representation in government and politics. When these were not conceded sufficiently by the dominant party - the Indian National Congress - some Muslims would turn to alternatives, to class and confessional formations.
It is a noteworthy fact that until after the elections of 1937 Muslims remained engaged largely with the Indian National Congress. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, two-term president of the Congress, was the most popular Muslim leader until Mr. Jinnah wrested Muslim support away from him. The Maulana would later ascribe this turnabout to Congress leaders' failure to show generosity toward the defeated Muslim League and invite their participation in the many provincial governments which the Congress led following the 1937 elections. The failure of the Congress leadership lay also in not recognizing the class clout of the Unionist landlords in Punjab, the mobilizing power of A.K. Fazlul Haq's peasant populism in Bengal, or the Muslim League's ability under Jinnah's leadership to make tactical alliances and compound its power and influence. After the suppression of the 1857 revolt, India formally became a crown colony. The event heralded, among other developments, the organization and expansion of a modem state and the steady growth of a native 'salariat to serve it. The state, not a growing capitalist economy, was the parent of India's middle class, its nurturer and provider. The culture of this middle class, its outlook and aspirations, jealousies and competitive spirit were shaped by the requirements and promises of serving the state. Muslims, who had earlier shunned modern education as western and colonial, eagerly sought it, following Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's movement, in the second half of the 19th century.
In the period between the world wars, as the colonial state expanded and also opened the doors of its superior civilian and military services to Indians, the competition for jobs became both broader, more intense, and more political. British policy of establishing quotas on the basis of religion and castes underlined the importance of jobs in the state sector, and also legitimized the expectation of communal claims on the resources of the state. As the prospect of self-rule increased, so did the competition for representation in and control over the state.
Beginning with the Morley-Minto Reform Act of 1909 India made gradual advances toward representative government. By 1935, it had become obvious that within a decade or two India will be self-governing at least as a British dominion if not as an independent state. The Muslim minority viewed the prospect of self-rule and democracy with a mix of hope and anxiety. Broad-based Muslim support for the Congress in the 1937 election was an expression of the hope. Their rapid turn toward the Muslim League in 1939-1940 marked the arousal of anxiety. The gap between hope and anxiety was widened by rival nationalism, elements of which had become integral to the Muslim League as well as the Congress although the latter was, in principle, a non-communal party.
From its beginnings Indian nationalism had three divergent streams: self-consciously secular, Hindu, and Muslim. Such early nationalists as Aurobindo Ghosh and later Bal Gangadhar Tilak not only employed Hindu religious symbols but also portrayed the Muslim, along with the British, as the other. Mother India, they claimed, had been the victim of both. Muslim nationalism, on the other hand, drew on the pan-lslamic rhetoric and symbols which were in vogue during the late 19th and early twentieth centuries throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Secular and communal nationalism often resided in the same individual. Tilak was both a Congress leader and a Hindu nationalist. Mohammed lqbal, the great Urdu/Persian poet, wrote nationalist as well as pan-lslamic poems. In Pakistan, he is honoured as a founding father while in India's Republic-Day celebrations, its armed forces "beat the retreat" to the tune of an lqbal poem. The communal strains of nationalism coexisted for a time inside the Congress, converging under the umbrella of secular Indian nationalism.
Mahatma Gandhi presented a most remarkable instance of such convergence when he joined Maulana Mohammed Ali to lead the Khilafat movement, an anti-British agitation in support of the Ottoman caliphate which had hardly any defenders left even in Turkey. This political gesture was in complete harmony with Gandhi's style of deploying cultural and religious symbols and themes as a means to mobilizing the masses in the struggle against colonialism.
Ironically, it was Jinnah, then a Congress leader, who warned against such spiritualization of Indian politics. He was right. For the amalgamation of religious and secular motifs and ideas reinforced sectarian outlook among Muslims and Hindus alike. As India approached independence, leaders of sectarian outlook and sentiments such as Sardar Vallabbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad had gained commanding positions in the Congress. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was already leading the Muslim League which formulated in 1940 the demand for a separate Muslim state.
Was the partition of India inevitable? It is too early for a definitive answer. I believe, nevertheless, that India could have remained united but the price would have been the centralized colonial state. Since the end of World War I, Jinnah had been proposing decentralization of power as a way to defuse minority fears and make independent India more governable. As nationalists everywhere have been prone to do throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, India's leaders too equated national unity and good governance with centralized power arrangements.
The last opportunity to save India's unity was presented by the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 which envisaged a loose federation with a relatively weak central government. Both the Congress and the Muslim League accepted the plan. Then the Congress had second thoughts on it, expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru. Jinnah, known by then as the Quaid-i-Azam, decided to protest against this rejection with a "Direct Action Day" which passed peacefully elsewhere in India but in Calcutta ignited large-scale communal violence. Mass level violence occurred next in the predominantly Muslim district of Noakhali, then a communal carnage happened in Bihar, a predominantly Hindu province. In all three instances. Congress and Muslim League leaders cooperated to end the violence. Mahatma Gandhi campaigned at length to restore communal peace in Noakhali and Bihar. But the fire spread with astonishing speed, and eventually devoured the Mahatma himself. Large-scale violence rendered the partition of India a certainty.
Barely half a year later, on June 3, 1947, the partition plan was announced. Congress and Muslim League leaders ignored the dire warnings of Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar when they acquiesced in Lord Louis Mountbatten's callous and mindless haste to become Britain's last Viceroy in India. The fire spread then with astonishing speed, devouring all in its way, including Mahatma Gandhi.