74 YEARS OF PARTITION | The Evolution of the relationship between Pakistan, India and Bangladesh

After listening to the discussion in the on the above I was prompted to reflect on the topic and write something on the topic.

Some elements of the developing imaginations of the Hindu nationalists in India during the 19th and early 20th centuries progressively became an existential threat to the Muslims of India. The Muslims were othered and, to a great extent, marginalised and delegitimised by emerging writings on and explanations of Indian history; the greatness of Indian Hindu past; Muslim invasions of India; discussion of what constitutes a nation; ideas of culture and identity, etc. The subsequent reactions of Indian Muslim elites from the late 19th Century onwards were primarily based on two elements. First, that the poverty and backwardness experienced by Indian Muslims were increasingly explained as a recent phenomenon that resulted from defeats inflicted by the British and their subsequent rule over Indian Muslims – an awareness of ‘Islam’s and Muslims’ glorious past’ started to become an inspiration for the ‘future greatness of Islam and Muslims’. in the minds of many Indian Muslims, particularly the elites.

The emerging Indian Muslim imagination during the early 20th century was very similar to the developing imagination of the Hindu nationalists in India at that time, although chronologically the Hindu nationalists imagination developed earlier. The similar imagination of the Indian Muslims was, to a great extent, a nationalism that resulted from a reaction to the developing Hindu Nationalism of the time.  Second, some among the Indian Muslim elites began to imagine, wrongly, that the Muslims of India was a separate nation.

When I think about this I do find the idea of Muslims in India constituting a separate nation to be extremely bizarre, primarily because Muslims in India came from all kinds of linguistic, racial and ethnic groups, as also did the Hindus of India. Even though the Hindus in India, as Indian Muslims, came from all kinds of ethnic, racial and linguistic groups, from a Hindu nationalist point of view it was more rational and understandable within the framework of nationalistic ways of imagining the idea of a Hindu nation of India.

According to the Hindu nationalist imagination, Hinduism and India were inseparable with several thousand years of historical togetherness, whereas historically Muslims in India were invaders and the Muslims population of India were mostly the descendants of Hindus forced to convert to Islam by Muslims in the past.  Though many Indian Muslims, especially some among the elites, believed and claimed that they were indeed the descendants of Muslims who came to India in the past when Muslims ruled the subcontinent, they could not imagine leaving India for their ancestral lands because they did not know where exactly their ancestors came from, and after several centuries no countries would welcome them back as their long lost relatives. Most Indian Muslims – the ordinary people who were the majority – however, knew that India was their country and they were Indians.

Although the secular and non-nationalists elements from both religious groups did not subscribe to the ideological explanations of the Hindu nationalists on India’s past and policies for its revival and the Muslim nationalist reactions with their counter thoughts and accounts, all groups in India and the foundations on which their thoughts and ideas emerged and developed had some shared elements and ingredients. These were introduced to India through European intellectual, cultural and political interventions, particularly by the British. Both the Hindus and Muslims in India, although chronologically the time-frame differed – in terms of when the seeds were first sown in their respective communities and how the plant grew, matured and bore fruits – they were both nourished, to a large extent, by the same sources towards mutual hatred and separation. The secularists and non-communal forces in India had some elements of their thoughts shaped by Hindu nationalist ideas, which imprisoned them, perhaps unconsciously, and made them impotent in finding creative solutions and preventing the impending disaster of 1947 partition.

It seems to me that the idea of a Muslim homeland in India, although an extremely bizarre idea, was thought, unsurprisingly, highly sensible and proper by many educated and elite Muslims as the best solution for the crisis of Muslims legitimacy in India. This was not an original idea that emerged from the depth of despair experienced by Indian Muslims, from the context of India’s complexity and its history as lived and experienced by the people of India. When some Indian elite Muslims came to Europe to study in the 1920s and 1930, they became familiar with many political ideas and movements, including that of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Most Muslims students and elites in Europe at that time could not operate at the cutting-edge levels of intellectual thoughts and imagination due to their undeveloped ability for engaging at the highest levels of critical thinking. Some of them found the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine to be ripe for adoption by them as the was considered to be the eureka solution for the othering and delegitimising of Indian Muslims.

Partitioning Bengal, for example, and separating the Hindus and Muslims into different geographical units, based on the two-nation theory of India – most probably developed from the Jewish homeland idea in Palestine – should have been considered as madness by Indian Muslims. But reason did not prevail as it was thought that to be a sensible solution to the increasing hate against and the marginalization and delegitimisation of Indian Muslims. How can one expect to effectively, peacefully and happily divide places like Punjab and Bengal; engineer and organise population exchanges involving millions of leaving their ancestral lands, properties and businesses; facilitating smaller Muslims linguistic, racial and ethnic groups all over India to migrate and effectively settle in a land of larger India Muslim brotherhood? Ultimately, it did not work as Bangladesh and Pakistan have not become homelands for Indian Muslims. Bangladesh became a Bengali Muslims nationalists state and India’s total Muslims population is larger than the total population of Bangladesh. Those Behari Muslims who migrated to East Pakistan did not experience brotherhood for long and the promised homeland became a nightmare for them. They are destined to remain a marginalized/delegitimised group for the foreseeable future.

The Indian subcontinent has deep divisions, the foremost now being the religious Hindu/Muslim divide.  Nationalisms throw fuels to the fire of divisions and secularism in the Indian subcontinent does not work, primarily because it requires people from both the Hindu and Muslim communities to become secular to become friends and interact with each other respectively as fellow citizens.  As the vast majority among both the Hindus and Muslims will not become secular, leaders in society should focus their creative imagination on how ordinary Hindus and Muslims can and should become friends and interact each other at different levels of society without necessarily becoming secular. Until now, ordinary people were in the Indian subcontinent were left to their devices to find a way to live together while nationalists’ ideas have been twisting their minds causing many to participate in a deadly game of mutual hatred.