Following a protracted freedom struggle spearheaded by the Indian National Congress, the British imperialists finally relinquished their stranglehold over India by transferring power to its indigenous inhabitants. Apart from transforming one of the richest countries in the world into one of the poorest, the British can be credited with presiding over the mental subjugation of the Indian population together with sowing the seeds of communalism through their very deliberate policy of divide et impera. The seeds of this policy achieved full blossom in August 1947 when it transferred power to two disfigured dominions rather than to a united, composite, multicultural country that it was in the past and, but for this betrayal of the highest order, it should have been again in the future. The vivisection was performed at the behest of the blatantly communal Muslim League, led by its anglicised, non-Urdu speaking spokesperson, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who modern Pakistanis, habitually refer to as Quaid-e-Azam, and ultimately accepted by the equally anglicised, self-styled secularist, Jawaharlal Nehru from the Indian National Congress. Such a division was, of course, very much cut from a template of other such divisions that Britain had for their own strategic ends, deceptively helped usher in throughout the 20th century, be it in North Yemen/South Yemen, Ireland/Northern Ireland, Palestine/Israel, Iraq/Kuwait, North Cyprus/South Cyprus etc.
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The partition of India shattered the dreams of those non-communal patriots such as Subhas Chandra Bose, Shaheed Bhagat Singh and ‘Bacha’ Abdul Gaffar Khan who longed for a united country that would have the potential to stand as a great power in the world, and would have, as any basic geographical study would reveal, highly favourable features, be it an ideal climate for agriculture, expansive river and canal systems, a substantial rail network and natural frontiers to guard it against foreign invasions, with the Himalaya forming its northern perimeter and the Indian Ocean serving as its protection to the west, east and south. But perhaps more poignantly, the biggest regret of the partition of India lay chiefly in the humanitarian calamity that accompanied it. The violence associated with Partition claimed anywhere between one and three million lives and anywhere between 15 and 20 million people migrating across the newly drawn international borders, the vast majority of whom doing so in fear of their lives. Unknown estimates of women were raped, abducted, and forcibly married to members of the ‘enemy’ community, with ancestral property, land and shrines, looted and defiled. The level of barbarity was truly unimaginable. Humanity had, save few cases, simply ceased to exist.
After the violence had settled, and the permanency of the political division had become apparent, both Pakistan and India faced the Herculean task of rehabilitating millions of displaced persons, together with trying to build nation-states capable of thriving in the post-1945 world order. Their tasks were made that much harder owing to the unresolved issue of Jammu and Kashmir between the South Asian powers. The Kashmir dispute, as it has become, whilst only one of the many thorns in the relationship between Pakistan and India is an accurate modicum of everything that is wrong with the subcontinent. Both sides have spent literally billions on this dispute and lost thousands of lives in the process. Both sides, entranced by nationalist ego and jingoism claim the state as their own (albeit Pakistan, unsurprisingly, do not claim any part of the state that is claimed or held by China), but neither side will ever be able to wrestle from the other side what it wants.
Meanwhile, India, for all its recent progress, still contains one-third of the world’s malnourished children, and hundreds of millions of its people lack basic sanitation. Talk of approaching superpower status, or any kind of parity with China, is, frankly, unthinkable in the short to medium term. Pakistan on the other hand is a politically hapless state, enslaved to its military establishment and their foreign handlers. Provocative as it may sound to some, that Pakistan is an enslaved country is clear, just as the freedom fighter Maulana Azad predicted it would be, with its former Prime Minister, despite his huge popularity, Imran Khan, deposed from office in April 2022 for reasons that any student of geo-politics knows only too well.
Furthermore it is a country that has developed the unfortunate reputation of being a professional beggar, by intermittently pleading for cash injections from the IMF as well as historic donor countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United States, and falling ever deeper into the debt trap laid out by their staunch Chinese allies, a romance that began with the gifting of the Trans-Karakoram Tract to the latter in 1963 and looks like it could end culminate with Pakistan becoming a fully-fledged tributary state of Beijing. But never mind, it is better to be an international beggar, with all the humiliation that comes with it, than have the Muslims of the subcontinent play second fiddle to the Hindus in a united country, right?
After all Pakistan is proudly, the only Muslim nation that has nuclear weapons capability and therefore is able to protect the ummah from forces inimical to it. But protect the ummah from whom? Was it the Pakistani or Indian military that were behind the genocide in Bangladesh? Is it Pakistani or Indian leaders that in light of the gaping black hole in their country’s finances, live lives of luxury in central London, under full security protection, while funding their children and grandchildren’s education at some of most elitist schools, or, for the more entrepreneurial hearted are busy investing into a chain of well-known pizza restaurants?
What the Pakistani public fail to realise is that the Hindus have never been their enemies. Anyone with even a basic objective reading of Indian history will know that, and to suggest anything else would be the height of perversion. While it is true that today in India there are some bigoted Hindus in public life, the same can be said for all religious groups in the country and indeed for every group in every country in the world. The fact is that India, despite claims to the contrary, remains the most diverse country in the world, and certainly one of the most tolerant in the global South, as those who live in, or visit the country frequently, would indeed testify.
Naturally anyone that can distance themselves from their communalistic and blindly nationalistic positions can see that the partition of the subcontinent has been an unmitigated disaster. While Partition has definitely had its winners, namely the military establishment in Pakistan, as well as the looters and thieves that stole property and persons they had no right to, the vast majority of common people have gained absolutely nothing, and have been deprived of belonging to a country that could actually have held its own internationally. When something has been so utterly devastating, it is necessary to perform a post-mortem of the act itself as a necessary first step in the process of re-unification. Only the reunification would restore the glory to the subcontinent, an entity that had been united under the Mauryans, Mughals and British, but that had been created by nature, and, as per Hindu reading, nourished with the blood and body of the first avatar of Goddess Parvati. It is time that the children of the subcontinent, irrespective of caste or creed, realised this, but not, of course, before the ridiculous flag waving ceremonies of 14 and 15 August have been completed.
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