Paying the price of dividing two nations

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): It is the fiftieth anniversary of Britain's decision to partition its Indian empire between Moslems and Hindus in 1947. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British civil servant who had never been there before, was sent from London to draw the new borders dividing the subcontinent. The independent state of Pakistan came into existence at midnight on Aug. 14, followed by India a day later.

If a different decision had been taken, an undivided India today would be the world's biggest country, with a slightly larger population than China. It would also be much richer, for India and Pakistan have spent much of the past half-century fighting wars or preparing for them.

Almost one-third of the people in an undivided India would be Moslem, and they would account for over one-third of the world's Moslems. Such an India might be a disaster for all who lived in it, Moslem and non-Moslem alike. But then again, it might not.

Was Pakistan necessary? The immediate result of partition, after all, was one of the 20th century's worst episodes of 'ethnic cleansing': up to a million people were killed and 10 to 15 million became refugees as Moslems, Hindus and Sikhs who wound up on the wrong side of the new international frontier fled the carnage.

Within months India and Pakistan were at war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. A further war in 1965 set the stage for the cataclysm of 1971, when India intervened in a bloody civil war between the western and eastern wings of Pakistan to ensure the independence of Bangladesh (former East Pakistan). A trillion rupees have been poured down the drain for 'defense', and India and Pakistan are now both 'threshold' nuclear powers, a few nuts and bolts away from nuclear weapons that could devastate whole cities.

So the cost was staggering -- but was partition necessary anyway, whatever the cost? And if it wasn't truly necessary, was it still inevitable in the political context of the times?

Moslems are a disadvantaged community in India, with lower- than-average literacy and incomes, as they have been ever since the British conquest. (As India's former rulers, the Moslem minority was less willing to collaborate with the British than Hindus were, and so Hindus moved more quickly into modern education and the new professions). But the status of Indian Moslems has not fallen further since independence -- and they still have higher literacy rates and average incomes than Pakistanis or Bangladeshis.

A separate state for Moslems cannot be justified by material reasons -- which leaves only the argument (made by Pakistanis today) that Moslems cannot flourish culturally and spiritually in a society where they are not in control. Perhaps, but the men who worked to create Pakistan did not really believe that.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah is now revered in Pakistan as the 'Quaid- e-Azam', the Great Leader whose determination made a separate Moslem state possible and inevitable. And in a state now defined as 'Islamic', it's only natural that Jinnah should be shown in a 'sherwani', the national costume, and portrayed as a devout Moslem.

The 'Islamization' of Jinnah has gone so far that Majid Nizami, editor of the leading newspaper Nawa-i-Waqt, based his campaign against inviting Jinnah's only child Dina Wadia (who lives in New York) to Pakistan's 50th anniversary celebrations on the grounds that "The Quaid-e-Azam disowned his daughter when she married a non-Moslem." Which is ridiculous.

The truth is that Jinnah was himself married to a non-Moslem. Indeed, his wife Ruttie, a Zoroastrian, was known to bring him ham sandwiches for lunch when he was addressing political meetings. He was deeply concerned for the welfare of the Moslem community, but there is no evidence that he was personally devout, while all the outward signs suggested otherwise.

Jinnah was a rich and successful Bombay lawyer who drank whisky, smoked cigarettes, spoke English and wore Western clothes. He was uncomfortable in Urdu, Moslem India's main language, and in traditional garb -- and contrary to the myth perpetuated by hostile Indian historians, he was a secular, tolerant man with strong democratic instincts.

Not only Jinnah and his Moslem League colleagues, but also the mainly Hindu leadership of the main independence party, the Indian National Congress, were convinced that the mounting communal violence of 1945-1947 was caused by the machinations of the wicked imperialists. It would all stop, they thought, once the British left. Indeed, in August 1947 Jinnah left most of his household goods in his family house in Malabar Hill in Bombay, convinced that he would be popping back regularly for visits.

Three decades before partition, in the Lucknow Pact of 1916, Congress and the Moslem League agreed on the basis for a self- governing India. Congress accepted separate electorates for Moslems and Hindus and extra representation for the minority in the joint parliament, and the Moslem League committed itself to a single, undivided India. At that time the young Jinnah belonged to both organizations.

It was only after Congress's overwhelming victory in the 1937 elections that it moved away from that deal. That drove the Moslem League to its fateful 1940 demand for a separate Moslem homeland, and so inevitably down to the harassed Sir Cyril Radcliffe, sitting night after night through the hottest Delhi summer in 70 years, fortified only by Alsatian wine, drawing up to 30 miles (50 km) a day of new international frontier through districts where Hindus, Moslems and Sikhs had lived side by side for centuries.

The most striking thing about partition, looking back, is how contingent, how accidental, how non-inevitable it was. But that's all water under the bridge; water from Himalayan snows that melted fifty years ago. What can be said today about the new countries that were carved out by partition?

The first thing is that Pakistan and Bangladesh were bound to have a rockier post-independence road than India because they were new creations with no traditions and no established networks. Apart from the part of Punjab province that went to Pakistan, they were all under-developed, low-income areas with no major cities (even Karachi was a backwater of half a million people in 1947).

The new Moslem countries had to create almost everything from scratch, but they are now going concerns of 125 million people each. However desperate their economic plight, moreover, they are now both democracies.

Deeply cynical democracies, it must be admitted, suffering the national equivalent of 'battered spouse syndrome'. As gadfly columnist Ardeshir Cowagee asked recently in Dawn: "In what sort of democracy do known robbers, looters of public wealth, breachers of truth, misappropriators of widows' and orphans' funds, contest election to Parliament?"

The answer, alas, is that there are knaves everywhere, and that democracy takes time to get right. As another Pakistani commentator said recently: "Compare us to the House of Windsor, not the House of Commons -- on that basis we come out all right."