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INDEPENDENCE FOR INDIA AND PAKISTAN

The legacy of the Second World War in India differed from that of other countries in south Asia in one vital respect. Japanese armies had never penetrated deeply into Indian territory. The British viceroy, the Indian civil service, and the Indian army remained the vital forces in the united provinces, while the six hundred princes who had accepted British rule continued to govern their princincipaltiess. Only those Indian soldiers who had been taken prisoner by the Japanese in 1942 and who had agreed to join the Indian National Army became collaborators against the British. Their welcome as heroes on their return to India in 1945 proved that opposition to the British overrode all other issues confronting Indians in the postwar years.

The End of British Rule

The National Congress leaders had vowed from the time they began their struggle for independence to preserve the unity that the British had given the subcontinent. They desired national independence and a democratically elected government that respected the rights of the entire population, regardless of religion or social rank. For Mohandas Gandhi, Congress's inspirational leader, special privileges for any religious community were a betrayal of his deepest belief in civic equality for all citizens ("secularism") within a free Indian nation-state. This vision was threatened by the social antagonism (termed "communalism") that divided the Muslim and Hindu communities, and by the political program of the Muslim League. Indian unity and independence were inextricable goals for the National Congress, but only independence proved attainable.

The half-century before 1945 had witnessed a rising number of violent incidents and riots pitting Hindus against Muslims. Every province mingled the two communities, though overall Hindus were the large majority. No single territory was exclusively Hindu or Muslim. The population of Calcutta, largest and most industrial of lndia's cities and the capital of the province of Bengal, was almost equally divided between these two groups. Their very proximity was a cause of friction and political rivalry, because self-rule raised the specter of one community losing power to the other. Individual rights appeared to many Indians less important that communal solidarity (italics added). National independence threatened to tear India apart.

The Muslim League preferred the partition of the subcontinent between Muslim and Hindu territories to one unified nation-state. If a unified Indian state, ruled democratically, placed government in the hands of the National Congress, the league feared that the new rulers would deprive the minority Muslims of civil and political rights, regardless of the promises of Congress leaders.

What to liberal idealists appeared democratic (p.102) safeguards of individual freedom to seemed to the league a threat of minority persecution (italics added). In the postwar years, it made the achievement of a separate Muslim state of Pakistan its immediate objective. Its leaders did not seek a religious (theocratic) regime, for they considered the label to be an ethnic marker of social and cultural identity (italics added) . Their plan was a tremendous (p.103) gamble, for no such nation-sate organized around Muslim religious loyalty had ever existed. Still, the followers of the Muslim league were prepared after war's end (1945) to resort to communal violence to prevent Indian national unification and achieve their goal of Pakistan.

Preparing for Indian independence was the first priority for British and Indian leaders. The British Labor government supported freedom for peoples of the subcontinent as strongly as they did the Empire's other Asian colonies. Its postwar financial crisis dictated rapid liberation for India, whose hose rule placed a heavy burden on the impoverished British treasury. Mass demonstrations and violence were a constant threat. The British proposed new elections to select an Indian leadership ready and able to negotiate the terms of independence.

When those elections were held in 1946, National Congress candidates won a majority in nearly all the provinces. Yet the Muslim League received the support of most Muslim voters. Who then spoke for India? Congress and the League both agreed to negotiations with the British, but each on its own terms. Mohammed Ali Jinnah, head of the Muslim League, demanded that Muslim representatives be granted an equal voice in negotiations alongside the Congress. But Jawaharlal Nehru and the other influential leaders Congress refused to recognize the right of the League to represent the Muslim community, fearing that to do so would represent a fatal concession to partition (that is, such a step would bring India closer be divided). In July 1946, Jinnah concluded that his party could not become the sole negotiator for India's Muslims by legal means. He called on his Muslim supporters to prove forcefully to the British and to Congress their hold over the Muslim population.

The League's Day of Direct Action in August 1946 was the real turning point in the history of postwar India. Jinnah proclaimed that "the only solution to India's problem is Pakistan," that is partition of the Indian subcontinent into what he referred to as "Hindustan" and his Muslim state. To make clear that civil war was the alternative, he demanded of Muslims throughout India that they join in "direct action," including strikes, meetings, and demonstrations. He and the other League leaders must have known that rioting would accompany the demonstrations and that communal conflict would inevitably result. He accepted the possibility, saying: "We also have a pistol." The Muslim League's agitation did lead to Muslim-Hindu riots throughout the country.

Ethnic hostility and fear deepened as the tragic process of partition began.

Bengal was the scene of the greatest bloodshed. Its capital city, Calcutta, was the scene of such violence that observers later called the events of those terrible days the "Great Calcutta Killing." Perhaps six thousand people died in that city alone, most of them innocent Hindus or Muslims attacked by mobs from both sides. British forces moved into the centers of rioting, gradually restoring order. Gandhi, horrified at the violence, set out on a personal pilgrimage through Muslim as well as Hindu areas of Bengal to restore peace and tolerance by his own personal example and teaching. Although he risked death at the hands of a fanatic, he helped calm the population, but only temporarily.

It was tempting to blame partition on the League. Nehru himself, without any deep religious feeling and cosmopolitan in his political ideology, hated the League and all it embodied. He considered the Muslim religious solidarity that the League cultivated to be "medieval," a dangerous anachronism in a "rapidly changing world of industrialism, science, and nuclear power." He repeated over and over his conviction that other religious groups "have nothing to fear from the Hindus." After his visit that August to riot torn of the northern province of Punjab, he expressed despair and "shame" that Indians should have betrayed the "great ideals that [Gandhi] has placed before us." That year he and the other Congress leaders persisted in working for a free and united India. But the country was too deeply
(p.104)and bitterly divided. The Muslim League had inflamed, but not created, that bitterness and hostility. Its fault lay in condoning and leading the mob action. Ultimately, religious and social divisions, not political manipulation by the League, decided the fate of India (Italics added).

Frustrated and baffled by the impasse in negotiations, the British cabinet in February 1947 proclaimed that Great Britain would pull out of India within a year. It was prepared to leave even if it failed to bring agreement among the Indian negotiators on a constitution and the means for the peaceful transfer of power. The statement was a declaration of defeat in the form of an ultimatum. The British government refused to take responsibility any longer for the escalating violence. One British official called the country's ethnic riots to be the "natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem." Jinnah had made his point. That spring the British government appointed a new viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, to make one last effort to achieve a negotiated settlement. He concluded that partition presented the only solution. The Muslim League, he reported, was ready to "resort to arms if Pakistan in some form were not conceded."

Partition of the Indian Colony

This outcome was impossible without the agreement of the National Congress. It spoke for the majority of India's population. Partition did not have the support of Gandhi, whose entire life and moral preaching had been dedicated to fellowship and toleration. He had pursued national independence because he believed it to be the path to Indian spiritual rebirth. Acceptance of Pakistan meant recognizing communalism and the victory of religious separatism. He considered the partition to be destructive and evil. But he did not impede the settlement. He allowed Nehru to assume leadership of the National Congress and to take on his shoulders responsibility for Indian independence. That spring Nehru concluded that partition was inevitable. In June 1947, Mountbatten announced to India and the world that the subcontinent would receive independence not as one but as two states.

Partition cut through the fabric of Indian political, economic, and social life. The provinces with a substantial Muslim population would go to Pakistan, the rest to India. The populations of two key provinces, Bengal and Punjab, were divided among religious groups. The Punjab contained within its borders the Sikh religious community as well as Muslims (as numerous as the Sikhs), and a smaller group of Hindus. Provincial leaders reluctantly agreed to the partition of their two regions. A British official secretly rewrote the map of India to draw the boundaries separating the two states. The partition left the Indus River valley in the west and part of Bengal in the east in the new Pakistan state, itself divided into two separate territories. Three fourths of the subcontinent's population went into India, under Congress leadership.

The partition required the division of land, communities, economic systems, and the institutions of state administration and army. East Bengal's economy, dependent on the export of jute, lost its principal port and center of industry, Calcutta, which went to India. The vast irrigation system in the province of Punjab was disrupted because the frontier cut across its river and canal systems. The Sikh community there was split in two, with its holy city of Amritsar in India and its capital of Lahore in Pakistan. Millions of Hindus remained in Pakistan, and one third of all Muslims were still in India. August 15 was set as the day of independence.

Nehru spoke to the Indian people on Independence Day. He exulted in the newly won freedom from empire. "We are a free and sovereign people and we have rid ourselves of the burden of the past." Despite Jinnah's objections, his state kept the name of India. Even with partition, it remained one of the most populous countries in the world. The removal of the "burden of foreign (p.105) domination" was in his eyes a great historic event it was part of the liberation of colonial peoples in their move to equality with the western nations. He had ambitious plans for dealing with the "great economic problems of the masses of the people," including industrial development, redistribution of wealth, irrigation, and hydroelectric projects. First, however, the country had to "put an end to all the internal strife and violence."

In the capital of Pakistan, Jinnah spoke to his people. He prayed that "God Almighty Give us strength to make Pakistan truly a great nation among all the nations of the world." He urged that Pakistani Muslims respect the rights of his country's Hindu population. That day the exact boundaries of India and Pakistan were made public, revealing the true dimensions of partition.

Centuries of British rule had created a legacy that helped shape the new states. British administrators had formed the Indian civil service, whose authority extended into the rural districts to the level of village life. British officers had trained an Indian army in Western military skills. After independence, Indian administrative and military personnel immediately began to serve in the new regimes, replacing the departing British officials. English had been the language by which many educated Indians communicated among themselves and acquired direct access to Western learning. It became the first official language in both states.

The constitutional origins of self-government lay in the Government of India Act that Great Britain had promulgated in 1935. It had created a federal state that allotted separate legislative powers to the provinces. It had proclaimed the principle of legislative control over the executive in a cabinet form of rule, modeled on the British parliamentary system. This constitution provided the basis of government for both Pakistan and India in their first years of existence. The era of British colonial domination also passed on a valuable economic inheritance. The enormous Indian railroad network and the ocean ports, sinews of an industrial economy, became the property of the new states, as did irrigation system and hydroelecric dams. The formal transfer of power from Great Britain to India and Pakistan occurred remarkably easily, and the new leaders imagined that their populations would heed their calls for peace and accept the partition as the necessary price their freedom.

Independence and War

Neither the British nor the nationalist understood the intensity of communal antagonism among Muslims, Hinduss, and Sikhs. As a result, they could not foresee the outpouring of anger and panic provoked by the announcement of the new boundaries on August 15. Westernized leaders such as Nehru and Jinnah had built up a vast following among the masses, yet were separated from them by class and education. They did not heed the warning from Sikh leaders in the Punjab that "our swords shall decide it" or note the rising numbers of Sikh men joining armed bands in anticipation of conflict with Muslims. Only Gandhi sensed the tremendous tragedy that partition had precipitated.

The two partitioned provinces, Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west, were the regions where greatest violence was likely. Calcutta, capital of Bengal, had been the scene of the worst rioting in 1946. At the urging of Lord Mountbatten and with the backing of the leader of the city's Muslims, Gandhi agreed to go there. He was prepared to place his own life in jeopardy to prevent blood from flowing again in the city. He went to live in the worst slums of the city, proclaiming a fast to death unless the leaders of the religious communities there agreed to collab-orate in keeping their peoples from rioting. So great was his moral authority that, almost single-handedly, he maintained peace in Bengal that month.
In the Punjab, however, violence erupted immediately. Refugees began to move across the (p. 106) border becoming easy targets for mobs.

Rumors of atrocities on both sides of the boundaries set Hindus and Sikhs against Muslims in Indian Punjab, while in Pakistan Muslim bands attacked Sikhs and Hindus. The fifty thousand troops that Mountbatten had at his disposal could do little to stop the rioting. The number of refugees swelled to a torrent as terrified families and entire villages set out on foot or in trains to find sanctuary, the Muslims to Pakistan, the Hindus and Sikhs to India. They became victims of roving bands of killers and robbers. The violence spread to the Indian capital of Delhi, where Hindu refugees from Pakistan spread stories of massacre, mass rape of Hindu women, and widespread looting by Muslims. In retaliation, Hindus attacked the city's large Muslim population. Mountbatten and Nehru, collaborating closely to prevent chaos from engulfing the country had to call out the army to keep order there.

In the country side, order was restored much more slowly. Perhaps a half-million lndians and Pakistanis died as a result of flight or of mob violence. By mid-1948. An estimated five million refugees had arrived in India and perhaps an equal number in west Pakistan. Independence brought the worst civil strife in Indian history and left in its wake intense animosity between the peoples of the two countries. Nehru attacked the Muslim League as "fascist" and vowed never to let such religious fanaticism destroy the democratic and non-violent principles of the Congress movement. Two years later he recalled in a sort of self-confession the anguish of those terrible months, when Indian leaders became "slaves of the events that inexorably unroll[ed] themselves before our eyes" and succumbed to "fear and hatred." He shared with his people the anger aroused by mob violence.

Gandhi himself came to Delhi late in the year to continue his crusade for peace and understanding. His efforts were directed toward the leaders of the two states as well as toward their peoples.
He attacked fanaticism no matter who preached intolerance. Hindu or Muslim. He received all who wished to talk with him despite rumors of plots against his life. On January 20, 1948, a Hindu political extremist, outraged at Gandhi's message of peace and conciliation, shot him as he was going to prayer. Gandhi died a martyr's death, another victim of the partition.

Most of the territories ruled still by Indian princes went peacefully, with some strong persuasion by British advisers, to the state in which the principalities were located. But the prince of Kashmir refused to make a firm commitment, causing a major, and long-lasting crisis. In late 1947, the Indian Government decided to use military force to brine, this land into their state. Although the prince was Hindu, the majority of his population was Muslim. Among them were strong supporters of unification with Pakistan. They had begun violent demonstrations to force their prince to agree to join the new Muslim state. Pakistani troops moved over the border to bring additional pressure on him. But Nehru, whose family was from Kashmir, was determined to keep the mountainous region in his state. That October Indian troops stopped the Muslim invasion and occupied most of the province. Nehru denied that his state was an aggressor nation and claimed that the Pakistani attack represented "aggression of a brutal and unforgivable kind, aggression against the people of Kashmir and against the Indian Union."

In fact, both sides were guilty of aggression, turning to their armed forces for control of the vital Himalayan area.The conflict over Kashmir escalated into open war between Pakistan and India. Pakistani troops attempted to expel the Indian forces from Kashmir. After several months of fighting, both sides a-reed to an armistice, with the front lines close to their original location. The war had succeeded only in partitioning Kashmir by force. The failure to settle this issue left behind a poisonous legacy of Muslim-Hindu hostility in the mountainous province. The final consequence of partition was to turn Pakistan and India into out-right enemies. Their conflict endured for the next fifty years, and erupted twice in new wars. Pakistan, the weaker state, sought military alliance and foreign aid from the United States; India accepted military aid from the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, both states secretly developed nuclear weapons for possible use against their neighbor. The division of Kashmir turned that front-line territory, once so beautiful it may be the source of the myth lf "Shangri-la," into a war zone. Partition was a tragedy for the population and a terrible burden for the new states.