India

by John Keay

  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 Br
itish, 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.

  Yet East Bengal was far from being a liability. Thanks to its jute crop, its export earnings were Pakistan’s only source of foreign exchange and so a crucial ingredient in the whole country’s development. Its labour force was equally preponderant, dwarfing that of Pakistan’s Panjab which was the next most populous province. In fact East Bengal’s population of some 40 million in 1947 was not only greater than that of any of the north-western provinces but exceeded their combined aggregate. Economic and electoral logic therefore argued strongly for a Pakistan tilted towards the east; Bengalis rather than Panjabis should be calling the shots. But other considerations – historical profile, strategic priorities, Islamic contiguity, military recruitment and the social preferences of the League’s leadership – dictated an irresistible bias to the west. The east might provide the motive power for the new nation but it was the west that would decide its direction. The 1940 ‘Pakistan resolution’ had been passed there, the 1947 transfer of power had been conducted there, and without question the federal capital of Pakistan had to be located there.

  Lahore, the Mughal city that had been the capital of the undivided Panjab, would have been the obvious choice. Unfortunately the new Indian frontier passed within an hour’s drive of it. For security reasons therefore, Karachi was preferred, and in this then sleepy port-capital of Sind, using a variety of requisitioned venues and makeshift accommodations, the new government set up shop. Tin sheds did duty for the airy offices of the Delhi secretariat; for want of desks, clerks spread their files on packing cases and, in the absence of pins, state papers were held together with thorns. Quite senior figures put up in the railway station. The arrangements were supposed to be temporary, but the acres of Panjabi scrubland that would eventually host a gleaming new capital were still being grazed by goats. Not till the 1960s would a custom-built Islamabad, conveniently sited beside the garrison city of Rawalpindi, rise from the firing ranges and be ready to receive its bureaucratic flock.

  The physical proximity of civil and military establishments would be deliberate. For though otherwise so comprehensively disadvantaged in the division of the spoils, Karachi had been better served than New Delhi in one crucial respect. Crudely put, while the new India had inherited all the trappings for a state, Pakistan had inherited the vital ingredient for an army. Like everything else, the erstwhile British Indian army had been apportioned between the two successor states. Of its weaponry, munitions, transport and stores, a miserly 17.5 per cent was earmarked for Pakistan and not all of this materialised; re-equipping would be a top priority for Karachi. But manpower was a different matter. The Muslim component – and so Pakistan’s – of undivided India’s armed forces was put at a hefty 30 per cent.

  This was because in the Panjab and neighbouring parts of the NWFP the new state embraced what had been the main reservoir of British recruitment ever since the 1857 Great Rebellion. Here traditions of loyal service were deeply embedded as were military expectations of preferential treatment from the organs of state. Recruits had been drawn from the same clans and hereditary networks for generations; military remittances sustained whole villages; military service opened opportunities for advancement and for acquiring skills (in truck maintenance for example) that were in civilian demand; and pensioners had often been rewarded with access to land in the highly productive canal colonies. Some of the beneficiaries had been Sikhs, who had since opted for the new India. But most were Muslims. They included many from East Panjab who, once they were accommodated on lands vacated by non-Muslims in West Panjab, exhibited such robust attachment to their new homeland that comparisons would be drawn with other settler communities, Afrikaner, for instance, or Israeli. Whether incomers or natives, it was this mainly Panjabi-speaking constituency that furnished Pakistan with the corps of a disciplined and privileged soldiery. Politicians in Karachi no less than landowners in Lahore and jute growers in Bengal saw the army as representing the vanguard of the new state, a guarantee of stability and the nation’s oustanding attribute of statehood. So did its generals.

  GROUND RULES

  Nothing in the acrimony occasioned by the division of undivided India’s spoils necessarily launched the successor states on opposed trajectories. On the contrary, by each freely enrolling as a dominion within the British Commonwealth, they seemed to signal a willingness to collaborate. Commonwealth membership was meant to promote understanding and parallel development. Ideally it secured a future in both countries for liberal values, representative government and mutual non-aggression, not to mention British exports and Indo-Pakistani co-operation in matters of imperial defence and communications. Likewise Pakistan’s inbuilt contradictions – its physical division, demographic imbalance, political fragility and ambivalence about the role of Islam – argued as much for cohabitation as for confrontation. Communications, for instance, between the east and west of Pakistan depended on Indian goodwill for both an air corridor and overland transit rights. Even Pakistan’s military potential could be seen as a stabilising factor, since only with a formidable army would it be able to defend the vulnerable north-west frontier that was as much the new India’s as its own.

  Yet all this turned out to be wishful thinking. The fear and loathing engendered by the horrors of Partition could not be laid to rest. They easily negated the platitudes of the Commonwealth charter and trumped even Nehru’s lofty commitment to non-interference in the affairs of other nations. By 1948 ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi was almost alone in rising above the Pakistan paranoia that gripped India. In January that year he undertook a protestcum-fast aimed at forcing Delhi to honour its financial obligations to Karachi and to afford protection to Muslims in India. His demands enraged not only the millions who had just fled Muslim atrocities in Pakistan but most of his Congress colleagues. A few days later he was assassinated. Nathuram Godse, the Brahmin who fired the shots, had once been involved with the RSS, an allegedly ultra-Hindu and paramilitary organisation, descriptions that they deny. But Godse had also been a Gandhian disciple and seems to have been acting not as the witless pawn of ‘Hindu nationalist’ hotheads (whose cause would suffer by his action) but as a sincere, if deluded, patriot. As he explained at his trial, only the death of ‘Gandhiji’ would silence counsels of ‘Muslim appeasement’ and so ‘save the nation from the inroads of Pakistan’. Naturally his action was universally condemned and he himself executed. But his point was not lost. The RSS and its allies were soon exonerated, Muslims in India continued to be treated with suspicion or worse, and Delhi was more paranoid than ever about the ‘inroads of Pakistan’.

  Equally hostile sentiments were being aired in Pakistan. While in East Bengal Hindus suffered discrimination and dispossession, in Karachi the hand of an irredentist India was discerned behind every outbreak of dissent from the Afghan frontier to the Chittagong Hill Tracts (near Burma). In Pakistan, as in India, the hostility was exacerbated by the ongoing Kashmir crisis; and in Pakistan, because of that catalogue of internal contradictions, it had a bearing on the protracted business of state-building. All these factors would combine to render the political process there highly vulnerable to intervention. In an age of global competition between the Soviet bloc and the Western powers, this combination of pressure points would propel Pakistan in a direction wildly at variance with that of India.

  Initially both nations applied themselves to making good the most glaring deficiencies of colonial rule. Constitutions must be drafted and elections on a universal franchise held. The social needs of the poor must be addressed, caste and gender discrimination ended, land more equitably distributed and health and education facilities provided for all. To stem
the haemorrhage of scarce foreign exchange and lay the foundations of a productive modern economy, development plans for industry, agriculture and infrastructure needed careful formulation. And to ensure the implementation of all these things, the authority of the central government vis-à-vis the provinces must be stressed and the leadership’s grip on power consolidated. In both countries the agenda was almost identical. But not the results. For, while Delhi delivered, Karachi dithered. It took Pakistan nine years to draft a constitution, which was then promptly suspended. And the first national election on a universal suffrage had to wait until 1970.

  By then India was gearing up for its fifth election. Each of them had been comfortably the world’s largest exercise in democratic selection; and despite the mind-boggling logistics (2 million ballot boxes, a quarter of a million polling booths, several hundred parties etc), all had been conducted with efficiency and impartiality. Instances of voters being intimidated, booths captured and boxes lost or tampered with were widely reported; bloc-voting by village, caste, clan or sect was standard. But blatant malpractice did not go unpunished; in 1970–1, for using government facilities for electioneering purposes, even the prime minister would be disqualified. The results, overall, were accounted highly creditable. Those diehards, like Winston Churchill, who had scoffed at the idea of a largely illiterate electorate exercising its vote responsibly had got it wrong. Since each candidate’s political party was pictorially identified on the ballot paper by a symbol – such as cart, cow, plough, lamp – even the unlettered could position their mark with confidence. Fair elections and gender-free suffrage, far from being the exclusive prerogatives of ‘advanced’ nations, were shown to be practical in larger, less privileged societies and just as productive of representative governments. The world’s other elected governments took heart. With each Indian election, the conviction grew that what was loosely termed ‘democracy’ might be a universal panacea, a long-sought penicillin in the war against ideological infections, whether communist or confessional.