What If India Were Not Partitioned?

This is the quintessential ‘What If’ question. It is counterfactual because now we can never know what would have happened if India had not been partitioned. But we can speculate about the possibilities and try and construct plausible scenarios for purposes of understanding and discussion.

In this post we argue against the scenario presented by Aakar Patel in his op-ed in The News on September 22, 2008. Aakar Patel’s one-line conclusion is that an unpartitioned India would have been a disaster for both Hindus and Muslims.

Let us first list the points we aim to contend:

1. Unpartitioned India would be the word’s largest country (1.4 billion people), the world’s largest Muslim country (500 million) and… the world’s poorest country (over 600 million hungry).
2. In undivided India, religion would have dominated political debate, as it did in the 30s and 40s, and consensus on reform would be hard to build internally. All energy would be sucked into keeping the country together. Undivided India would have separate electorates, the irreducible demand of the Muslim League and the one that Nehru stood against. A democracy with separate electorates is no democracy at all.
3. Hindus would never have been able to rule Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan or the Frontier.
4. Without Partition there would have been no Nizam-e-Mustafa.
5. The fault line of national politics in undivided India would have remained Hindu versus Muslim. Jinnah alone understood that from the start. Nehru and Patel understood it much later, agreeing to Partition. Gandhi never understood it; if he did, he never accepted it.
6. Three parts of undivided India had a Muslim majority. The west became Pakistan, the east became Bangladesh. Sooner or later, the north will become something else: the Muslims of Kashmir do not want to be India. But Indians do not understand that.

Let us now respond in order and present a different perspective:

1. Undivided India need not have been the world’s poorest country. The resources, attention and energy that have gone into the continued hostility since Partition could have been channeled into development. (See the cost of conflict estimated by the Strategic Foresight Group, Mumbai). The huge market and the complementarities of arbitrarily divided ecosystems could have yielded great benefits. Huge investments went into making up for the division of the Indus water system, for example.
2. A democracy need not be a mechanical and rigid system. Malaysia, with three, not two, hostile communities found a way to adjust its system of governance to suit its constraints. South Africa, with its bitter history of apartheid, found a way in its constitution to work around the hostilities. There was no reason India could not have found a similarly workable formula.
3. There is no reason to think in terms of one community ruling the other. Indeed, that is a framework that is incompatible with democratic governance. The fact is that almost right up to Partition, the Punjab’s Unionist Party had found a mechanism to govern with a coalition of the major communities.
4. Even after Partition there is no Nizam-e-Mustafa. The fact that a large number of Hindus in India today want the Kingdom of Ram does not mean that their demand needs to lead to a redefinition of India. These kinds of demands need to be resolved in the political arena.
5. Jinnah did not feel from the start that the fault-line in undivided India would have remained Hindus versus Muslims. In fact, Jinnah was the advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity because he believed it was possible. The management of any fault line is up to the leadership as shown by the examples of Malaysia and South Africa mentioned earlier. Ireland is another example.
6. Three parts of undivided India had a Muslim majority but the demand for Pakistan did not originate in these areas. In fact the Muslim majority areas of the west were the last to sign on and even then very reluctantly. The Muslims of Kashmir seemed quite satisfied with the situation under the Farooq Abdullah government. Their attitude is more a function of India’s mismanagement (and post-partition Pakistan’s incitements) than of some innate hatred of Hindus. There is no cure for mismanagement. Even the Muslim west and east could not coexist in the face of political folly.

It is quite possible to argue that there were many possible resolutions of the situation that prevailed in India in the 1930s and 1940s. It was a failure of leadership that the worst possible alternative was chosen. India lacked a statesman of the caliber of Mandela who could see beyond the immediate political gains and losses.

The cost of the Partition is hard to imagine – almost a million deaths, ten million homeless, and continued conflicts. Add to this the subsequent costs in Bangladesh and the ongoing ones in Kashmir. If the inability of Hindus and Muslims to live together is given as the sole reason for the Partition, it should be considered that in all the one thousand years that Muslims lived in India, there was never once this scale of conflict or bloodshed.

It was possible to live together. In fact Hindus and Muslims continue to live together in India even though their relations were poisoned and made immensely difficult by the fact of the Partition.

One could just as well argue that the Partition was a disaster for both Hindus and Muslims as also for the Sikhs whose homeland was cut into two. A united India would never have allowed the Saudis or the Americans to set up madrassas and train jihadis within its territories. Dim-witted dictators would never have been able to occupy the positions of power they were in post-Partition Pakistan and Bangladesh.

We can say that Manto in Toba Tek Singh had the right perspective on the partition of India.

PARTITION OF INDIA

Though partition of India broke into history suddenly and ruthlessly, it had been in the making for a long time. Its roots were visible in the Hindu-Muslims riots which started as early as 1881 and the British encouraged the religious conflicts.The formation of the All India Muslim League at Dacca (now Dhaka) in December, 1906, provided a focal point for Muslim political aspirations. In 1937, when the Congress and the Muslim League started working provincial ministries, the rivalry between the two organizations came into the open.

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. So, when freedom was granted after a protracted freedom struggle under the leadership of Gandhiji, the leader of the Muslim League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, insisted on claiming a separate state for the Muslim minority.

This demand was preceded by an election in 1937, in which Jinnah's Muslim League could not obtain enough majority to come to power and so he needed another strategy by which to get a loud enough voice in India for the Muslims. It is notable that he had previously supported Hindu-Muslim unity, but after the election his thinking changed and he started to be in favour of a separate Muslim state. In 1947, the Indian subcontinent became the independent nations of India and Pakistan. Pakistan was made up of West Pakistan (along the Indus River plain) and East Pakistan (which is now Bangladesh). Gandhiji was deeply distressed by the partition and said “ My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine is for me a denial of God. ”

The Partition of India is one of the biggest catastrophies in the history of South Asia. It led to a massive loss of lives and forced many to evacuate their lands. East and West Punjab, North West Frontier Province, North India and Sind were engulfed in an orgy of violence for months. Mammoth migrations of Muslims from India and Hindus from Pakistan took place, shattering both communities down to their core. Nearly, 5,00,000 people died in the holocaust and 55,00,000 people were forced to migrate from their abodes.

What did the partition lead to ? The ‘communal politics' which was meant to be buried by the partition only assumed more menacing proportions in all the three countries (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). The breakup of erstwhile Pakistan into Pakistan and Bangladesh buried the ‘Two Nation Theory'. Relations with Bangladesh, which was born with help and support from India, are not particularly friendly. Lohia's idea of ‘India-Pakistan' federation stands rejected by the people of both the countries.