Should India Have Been Partitoned in 1947?

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

The advocates of today’s fashionable but often utopian ideal of multiculturalism are usually critical of states based on national or religious beliefs.

Such authors lament the partition of the Indian subcontinent in August of 1947, when, after almost three hundred years, the British finally left, and two independent states, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, emerged.

Even before the British pulled out, large parts of the subcontinent were descending into chaos, as the implications of partitioning the Indian Empire along religious lines became clear to the millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who would be caught on the “wrong” side of the new borders.

There began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to West and East Pakistan (the latter now known as Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction, to India.

Some twelve million people would be uprooted and as many as a million murdered. There were massacres, arson, forced conversions, and rape. Whole villages were torched, and refugee trains, with all their passengers, set on fire.

Those who consider partition an avoidable disaster assert that for centuries, Hindus and Muslims co-existed in a world of intermingled traditions, languages and cultures that cut across religious lines.

The British are typically blamed for bringing religious division to the fore during their long administration, and so setting the stage for the carnage that followed the Second World War.

Others make Hindu and Muslim politicians, in particular Jawaharlal Nehru of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party and Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, responsible.

Their clash of personalities led to a truculent Nehru refusing Indian Muslim demands for a looser federation that would provide them with greater power and security, and hence making possible Jinnah’s demands for a separate sovereign Muslim state, to be named Pakistan.

Events moved rapidly as the war ended; people moved out of mixed neighbourhoods and cities became informally partitioned into Hindu and Muslim zones.

In the Bengali capital of Calcutta (now Kolkata) major violence broke out in what is known as the “Great Calcutta Killing.” Between August 16 and 19, 1946, four days of massive Hindu-Muslim rioting resulted in 5,000 to 10,000 dead, and some 15,000 wounded. Partition now became the preferred option for all.

The British, realizing they had lost control of events, quickly speeded up their date of departure, and announced they would be gone by August 15, 1947. The rush exacerbated the chaos, with a British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, assigned to draw the borders of the two new countries – and given little more than a month to do it.

Most of the violence now centered in the states of Bengal and Punjab, with their mixed Hindu-Sikh-Muslim populations, as the partition lines would run through them.

The two countries that emerged – both now nuclear powers – have had an uneasy relationship ever since, including two wars over the disputed Muslim-majority state of Kashmir, most of which remains within India, and a 1971 conflict when East Pakistan became the new country of Bangladesh.

But what would have been the alternative? As it stands, there have been horrific massacres inflicted by both sides since 1947, even after the creation of two (and later three) separate states.

For example, in the Indian state of Gujerat, which has a large Muslim population, a three-day period of inter-communal violence in February-March 2002 was triggered by the bombing of a train.

According to official figures, the riots resulted in the deaths of 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus; 2,500 people were injured non-fatally, and 223 more were reported missing. Other sources estimate that up to 2,000 Muslims died.

Meanwhile, on the Pakistani side, after the initial exodus of Sikhs and Hindus, the society has turned its fury on Christians, Shi’ites and Ahmadis (the last two considered “heretics” by Sunni Muslim extremists).

Imagine a united India, stretching from Kashmir to the Burmese border, with a population of close to one billion Hindus and some 530 Muslims, with Hindus rallying behind Narendra Modi’s “Hindutva” nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and Muslims in turn supporting various radical Islamic parties as a reaction.

The country would be ungovernable. So, to paraphrase Churchill, “Partition was the worst outcome, save for all the others.”