India: A History. Revised and Updated (95 page)

DIVIDING AND SPOILING

Partition meant a division of British India’s institutions, assets and responsibilities as well as of its people and territory. Everything from the air force to the exchequer and from the stationery stores to the national debt had to be meticulously apportioned between the successor states. Overall the new India, by virtue of a population more than five times that of Pakistan and a landmass more than four times, did well out of this division of the spoils. It inherited most of the country’s infrastructure, nearly all its industrial, mineral, commercial and agricultural enterprises and a disproportionate share of its private capital. Because Hindus and other non-Muslims were especially well represented in education, the law and the administration, it also inherited the staff for an effective government, including the vast majority of those non-Britons who had gained entry to the elite Indian Civil and Political Services.

The new India had much else in its favour. At the provincial level the long-established governments of the Madras, Bombay, Central and United provinces remained fully operational, largely unaffected by Partition and little depleted by emigration. In addition, India’s portion of partitioned Bengal brought with it Calcutta, still the country’s greatest metropolis; its portion of partitioned Panjab brought Simla, the summer retreat of the raj; and in New Delhi its incoming government succeeded to a custom-built capital of majestic dimensions complete with parliament building, secretariat, head of state’s residence, embassies, archives, monuments and all the other emblematic structures of statehood. The Union, and soon to be Republic, of India (after the 1950 adoption of a new constitution) was thus a going concern from day one. The reins of power had but to be gathered up. Constitutional experts, social scientists and economic planners could begin work immediately recasting the state as the strong, socialist, secular and non-aligned democracy of Nehru’s dreams. As the Congress-wallahs in their Gandhi caps and Nehru jackets streamed through the secretariat’s colonnades on Delhi’s Raisina Hill, few of them doubted that their new India was the direct and undisputed successor of the mighty raj.

It was very different in the two extremities of the ex-raj that constituted Pakistan. Separated by 1500 kilometres of an already hostile India, bipolar Pakistan lacked not just physical integrity but almost every other requisite of statehood. Here the power being transferred by the British was more potential than actual. The organs of government had to be created from scratch, staffed from a mere handful of senior administrators with the necessary qualifications and experience, and funded from a pitiful share of
undivided India’s cash balances. Of the five provinces and part-provinces that composed the new country, none furnished a reassuring example of stability; nor did any of them have much in common with the others save, of course, religion. The two most populous were maimed products of partition: East Bengal with an economy heavily dependent on jute came minus Calcutta, the processing centre and port for all jute exports, while west Panjab with its prosperous canal colonies came minus a guarantee of adequate water from what were now the Indian-held rivers on which its irrigation depended. As for the other provinces, Sind was a recent creation still economically dependent on the Bombay province from which it had been carved twelve years earlier, and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) boasted a record of such hostility to the Muslim League that at the time of Partition it still had a Congress ministry. Finally Baluchistan, most of it either a tribal region or under princely jurisdiction, was openly defiant. In 1948 a deal was struck between its principal ruler and Jinnah but large parts remained semi-autonomous for the next thirty years.

Formulated with more enthusiasm than precision, and then realised far sooner than expected, Pakistan was further hobbled by a set of fundamental contradictions. The nation’s premise was its shared faith, yet the role that Islam was to play remained undefined, as did the preferred form of that faith. Addressing Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly just before Independence Jinnah had sounded much like Nehru:

You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan … You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State … We are starting with this fundamental principle: that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.
²

If this was meant to reassure the commercially influential non-Muslim community in Sind (Panjab and the NWFP were already being confessionally cleansed), it failed; most of Karachi’s Hindus migrated to Bombay or Gujarat. Secular sentiments – like ‘religion having nothing to do with the business of the state’ – though congenial to many and much quoted by opponents of Islamicisation, barely survived Partition in public utterances. Within six months they were being contradicted by Quaid-i-Azam (‘Supreme Leader’) Jinnah himself when he casually invoked the goal of an Islamic state, in fact ‘a truly great Islamic state’. The rationale was simple: any nation defined by its faith must, if it was to realise its full potential, adopt principles and policies in conformity with that faith.

Yet the prospect of a doctrinal state was widely contested and was problematic in itself. For while protestations of Islamic intent were always useful in papering over the divisions and insecurities that beset the new state, they also exposed the credentials of any government that dabbled in them. In the ideal Islamic state sovereignty lies with Allah, laws are preordained by the
sharia
and their interpretation rests with the scholarly
ulema.
A role for the masses and their legislating representatives depends on the questionable assumption that this sovereignty has been devolved to the people by some divine dispensation. Even then the recipients of such delegated authority are generally taken to be the worldwide Muslim community, the
dar-ul-Islam,
an entity that transcends all lesser loyalties, political, ethnic or territorial. Quranic sanction for the competitive instincts of a localised ‘nation’-state, albeit one based on the Muslim component of a subcontinent, would be hard to discern. Thus in the run-up to Partition most of the doctrinal parties (or
Jamaat),
far from supporting the call for Pakistan, had in fact opposed it.

There were other contradictions that were inherent in the two-nation theory on which Pakistan was based. The theory had originally been formulated and championed by the Muslim elite in UP (the United Provinces, later Uttar Pradesh). As a vocal but vulnerable minority within an overwhelmingly Hindu province, UP’s Muslims had espoused the idea of a separate Muslim nationhood in order to challenge the supremacist claims of Congress and safeguard the electoral advantage afforded them by the British system of separate electorates for Muslim minorities. When in 1940 Jinnah’s Muslim League made the two-nation theory its own, UP was therefore its natural constituency and provided many of its leaders, including Liaquat Ali Khan, its general secretary. On the other hand, provinces with a Muslim majority like Bengal, Panjab, Sind and the NWFP had shown little interest in the idea; indeed they opposed it, being happier with the opportunities and leverage already available to them as Muslim majorities in autonomous provinces. Not until 1945 and the advent of a Labour government at Westminster did the likelihood of an imminent British withdrawal shift the focus from the provinces to New Delhi and lend urgency to the question of who was to control power at the centre.

Jinnah had taken full advantage of this twist. The Muslim League mobilised as never before and its propagandists poured into the Muslim majority provinces. Their message was simple: unless all Muslims rallied behind the League’s ‘Pakistan’, a ‘Hindu raj’ at the centre would ride roughshod over both Muslim rights and provincial autonomy. This did the trick. At last, and with the exception of the NWFP, the Muslim majority provinces responded. Jinnah’s triumph in the 1946 elections was rightly hailed as a
‘breakthrough’ and a ‘turnaround’. The League’s claim to represent Muslims throughout the subcontinent had been vindicated, as had Jinnah’s claim to be their ‘sole spokesman’.

But this ‘breakthrough’ had been hastily contrived, the ‘turnaround’ might be easily reversed and with the achievement of nationhood the ‘sole spokesman’ would need a new script. Lacking an organisational base in the Muslim majority provinces, the League had relied heavily on accommodations with existing parties and power-brokers plus the appeal of ‘Pakistan’, a cry so emotive that few had cared to define it. Had they done so, they would have realised that the two-nation theory when applied to the provinces of Panjab and Bengal, both of which had nearly as many non-Muslims as Muslims, might well mean their dissection. Thus the two most productive provinces of the notional Pakistan would be deprived of their existing integrity regardless of what happened to their autonomy. Meanwhile Muslim minorities in provinces far from Pakistan’s core territories and so not susceptible to partition, like UP, could only wring their hands in despair – or pack their bags. In effect, Partition meant that the Muslim majority provinces that had been most ambivalent about separate nationhood got to enjoy it and those in the Muslim minority provinces who had championed it were left to fend for themselves.

Much followed from this paradoxical outcome. For one thing, the Muslim League in Pakistan, in marked contrast to the Congress in India, lacked an organisational base and a political pedigree. It was more like a single-issue coalition of assorted landowning and service elites than the mouthpiece of a nation or the product of a groundswell of grievances and aspirations. Though indeed riding a wave of popular support, the League, once its objective of nationhood had been achieved, could neither presume on whole-hearted support in Pakistan’s provinces nor rely, like Congress, on an elaborate country-wide structure of elected party delegates and boards committed to the implementation of its policies.

Nor, for that matter, had the League a pre-agreed programme awaiting implementation. In Pakistan’s peculiarly fraught circumstances, establishing an effective government came first; and for that the immediate priority was simply survival. Despite expectations of collapse – gloatingly aired in India, gloomily confided in Pakistan – it did survive, though the same could not be said of its seniormost leadership. Tragically, within thirteen months of Independence, M. A. Jinnah, the founding father, first governor-general (effectively president), living embodiment of the League and undisputed ‘supreme leader’ of the nation, lay dead of cancer (September 1948). Then three years later Liaquat Ali Khan, his long-serving deputy and the nation’s
first prime minister, was assassinated (October 1951). The League was left leaderless and the nation spokesmanless. In India it was the other way round: ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi was assassinated within months of Independence (January 1948), while natural causes claimed Vallabhai Patel three years later (December 1950). The loss and the sense of national bereavement tinged with guilt were identical on both sides. But whereas India retained the services of another founding father in the redoubtable Jawaharlal Nehru, Pakistan was orphaned into the care of ill-assorted godfathers, many of them in uniform.

Wider issues of survival were paramount on both sides of the new border. In the midst of these leadership crises the new governments were grappling with a monumental refugee problem. Over a period of weeks in the west (Panjab, Rajasthan and Delhi) but of years in the east (Bengal, Bihar and Assam), up to 7 million Muslims are thought to have fled India for Pakistan, and rather more than 7 million non-Muslims to have fled Pakistan for India. They arrived, if they did in fact arrive, in a state of destitution. The reception, feeding, accommodation, rehabilitation and re-employment of such numbers would have taxed the resources of a superpower. Both governments rose heroically to the challenge; there was even some mutual collaboration in dealing with it. But Pakistan was at a marked disadvantage. For while 7 million into India’s 300 million was manageable, 7 million into Pakistan’s 70 million was less so, especially when another 60 million Muslims marooned in India might take it into their heads to follow them.

By way of reassuring Muslim minorities in provinces like UP that were not destined to be part of Pakistan, the Muslim League had emphasised the vulnerability of the Hindu/Sikh minority that would be left in Pakistan. This was the basis of the so-called ‘hostage theory’: simply put, it meant ‘fair treatment for
your
co-religionists in
our
country depends on fair treatment for
our
co-religionists in
your
country’. But in fact rather few non-Muslims remained in Pakistan after the horrors of Partition, and those that did were largely confined to its remote eastern wing, otherwise East Bengal. This was not reassuring for the Muslims of UP, Bihar, Delhi, Hyderabad and the Central Provinces, who were therefore more inclined to migrate. Nor was it reassuring to the hard-pressed Pakistan authorities, who did their best to dissuade them; the hostage theory was again talked up, the two-nation theory talked down. Nevertheless, in the months immediately after Partition several hundred thousand of these Indian Muslims made the long journey to Pakistan and there often settled in Karachi. Known as
mohajirs
(a word loaded with religious sanction because of its etymological association with
hijra
denoting the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to
Madina), they added another volatile element to the local demography. As a politically minded minority without landed roots or long-cultivated constituencies in the new Pakistan, the
mohajirs
would feel democratically disadvantaged, wary therefore of electoral arithmetic and often receptive to the vote-transcending claims of Islamic ideologues.

But of all the contradictions that beset Pakistan and prejudiced its chances of equilibrium, the most serious was the most obvious. Its two halves were hopelessly incompatible and were so far apart as to be barely within non-stop flying distance of one another. Other than mosques and madrassahs, the four north-western provinces had almost nothing in common with East Bengal. The one was predominantly rugged frontier country, the other a mostly flat backwater. It was like pairing Bulgaria and Belgium. Their peoples spoke different languages, ate different food and rejoiced in different cultures. The wheat-growing west was dominated by feudal landowners and tribal leaders, conservative in outlook and martially inclined. The rice-growing east was notable for its small landholdings and multitude of peasant proprietors whose bare subsistence generated radical leanings and populist dissent. Damned as ‘a rural slum’ by the British, the east accounted for only a sixth of Pakistan’s territory, much of it semi-submerged. It was also subject to frequent famines, had some of the worst poverty on the subcontinent, lacked infrastructure and industry and depended entirely on imported manufactures. Its contribution to the new Pakistan in terms of senior administrators came to under 18 per cent and of senior army officers to barely 2 per cent.