The present turmoil in Kashmir and Indo-Pakistan relations over Kashmir can turn into a god-sent opportunity if it provokes, to begin with, some individuals on both sides of the ‘great divide’ to review the meaning and consequences of partition. Such a small beginning can, in my view, lead to great things in course of time.
Partition, as I wrote last week parenthetically, was a desperate measure resorted to in a desperate situation, including by Mohammad Ali Jinnah who was the principal architect of that desperate situation. It settled nothing and it proved nothing. I believe that the Hindus missed the opportunity it gave them to try to recover and renew their heritage and tackle problems according to their genius. But to say that is not to say much. For implicit in my proposition is the admission that the Hindus were not ready to seize the opportunity partition offered them. And I do not think they are equipped for the task today. On the contrary, their elite remains escapist, imitative and alienated. This is what the talk of secularism and modernisation amounts to.
Partition doubtless represented a repudiation of the one-nation theory as propounded and propagated by the Indian National Congress; no amount of argument by the tallest amongst us, Gandhi and Nehru, could have annulled or has annulled this reality. But, equally important, partition did not validate the two-nation theory either. The frenzied campaign of hate against the Hindus, built up in the name of ‘Islam in danger’, could, and did, split the country; it could not, and it did not, help build a Muslim nation in the new entity called Pakistan.
It is a dangerous failing on our part to think that Jinnah was in reality committed to partition from the time he raised the demand for Pakistan in 1940. He was not. His was a plan for a virtual restoration of Muslim rule without an intervening civil war, if possible, and after a civil war, if necessary. His scheme involving a grouping of Muslim majority provinces in the west and of Bengal and Assam in the east and his insistence on Hindu-Muslim and Congress-League parity at the centre (with limited powers) meant nothing less than that. Mercifully for us, Nehru and Sardar Patel saw through the game which incidentally Lord Mountbatten, the great ‘friend’ of India, was more than willing to promote, and they scotched it.
The subject is too vast and complex to be discussed here. Those interested in the subject should at the very least read Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) which has been reprinted in India by Orient Longman. All I would wish to add is that Jinnah’s surviving friends and admirers such as the well-known jurist H.M. Seervai are only wasting their time, energy and invaluable skill when they go into great details to prove that it was not Jinnah but Nehru and Patel who finally opted for partition. Of course, Jinnah did not opt for partition; he only acquiesced in it reluctantly; his goal was the whole of India and not just one-fourth of India which was what he finally got. Quite appropriately, he described it as a ‘moth-eaten Pakistan’. There was more than a touch of madness in the man. But what great man has ever been free from delusions of grandeur!
The point I wish to make is that I doubt whether Jinnah ever seriously believed that the Indian Muslims could become a nation in a part of India to be called Pakistan, though I must hasten to add that it is possible that he was so preoccupied with his strategic and tactical moves that he just did not bother himself with this basic problem. He could mobilise the Muslims on an anti-Hindu platform which he did with great skill and success; he could not have given them an independent identity; indeed, he did not possess such an identity himself.
The non-viability of Pakistan was patent from the very start. It became evident in 1948 when the Quaid-e-Azam himself faced a hostile demonstration in Dacca on the language issue, led incidentally by the same Sheikh Mujibur Rehman who was to become the first president of a sovereign Bangladesh in 1971. Jinnah had said that Urdu would be the sole official language of Pakistan and the Bengali Muslims were not prepared to accept it. Thus the groundwork for the break-up of Pakistan had been laid by the founder of Pakistan himself within a year of the formation of Pakistan.
Only mental laziness can lead us to argue that Jinnah could have been accommodating on the issue. A little application of the mind would suffice to dispel this superficial view. Jinnah could not have conceded the demand in respect of the Bengali language without facing at once a similar demand by the Sindhis, the Pushtoons and the Baluchis, and he could not have conceded these demands without alienating his Urdu-obsessed constituency and indeed without negating the very dynamics which had led to the formation of Pakistan.
Jinnah, to sum up the issue brusquely in view of the constraints inherent in a newspaper article, was face to face with the old enemy (Hindu India) in a new form. Bengali is a daughter of Sanskrit and so is Sindhi. To have owned them as national languages of Pakistan was to have put a time-bomb under the very foundations of Pakistan. The bomb got suitably placed in East Pakistan with well-known results and it is ticking away in Sind. But that is a different proposition which need not detain us presently.
I am by no means suggesting that Urdu is not essentially an Indian and therefore a Sanskritic language. It is. But the daughter proper, once called Hindavi and now Hindi in its Sanskritised form, was given a Arabic-Persian dressing and etiquette which could enable millions of Muslims to believe that they had acquired an autonomous identity and could therefore build a nation. Clearly the belief was ill-founded.
Bangladesh has been a fact since 1971 and the Sindhis continue to struggle for the preservation of their language and through it their Indie personality. They are gravely handicapped since their main cities have been taken over by Urdu-speaking Mohajirs and they have been reduced to the status of drawers of water and hewers of wood in their own land. But they have not given up. Indeed, it is an eloquent commentary on the fragility of Pakistan that the Urdu-speaking people in Sind have come to regard themselves as the fifth nationality in that country, and formed the Mohajir Quomi Movement to protect their interests.
As I noted in an earlier article in this space, it also looks as if the Punjabis too are finally beginning to stir in affirmation of their Sanskrit-derived language and thereby of their Indic personality. This search is still vague; it has still not thrown up a leadership; its articulation is essentially limited to some highly westernised individuals who are beginning to be concerned over the slow death of their language and culture; the use of the Urdu (Arabic-Persian) script for Punjabi books (and the one small newspaper in Lahore) remains a disabling factor. But it needs to be remembered that the effective literacy rate in Pakistan is around 14-15 per cent, the official figure being 23 per cent. Which means that the potential constituency for the Punjabi language and a culture based on it remains enormous.
Pakistani society, it can be argued, is no different from Indian society in respect of its linguistic plurality. But this is a superficial view. While India is the case of diversity in unity and not of unity in diversity, as Nehru put it in disregard of the Vedic-Sanskritic foundation of Indian civilisation, Pakistan is a case of diversity in diversity. Islam imposes a form of unity but from above and the outside.
In India’s case every major North Indian language is based on Sanskrit and all ‘Dravidian’ languages have been so deeply permeated (not just influenced) by Sanskrit that it is difficult to identify concepts and practices which are not rooted in the Sanskrit-based culture. In the deepest sense of the term ethnicity, India has for millennia been an ethnic entity which neither the Christian nor the Muslim world has been. Again, in a fundamental sense, Punjab and Sind in present-day Pakistan have been and remain part of this Indic ethnicity.
India has, of course, not been a monolith. Thank god (without the capital ‘g’ for the obvious reason) for it. Only the dead can be a monolith. A living culture is like a living tree which throws up hundreds of branches and millions of leaves and so has India throughout the millennia of its existence. But the very concept of Pakistan involves reduction of the tree to a ‘monolithic’ trunk, indeed a log, not only without branches and leaves but also without roots. Or to put it differently, it involves the suppression, if not the destruction, of diversity natural to India in view of the primordial (Sanatan) nature of its civilization.
The imposition of the state of Pakistan on the constituent units bears comparison with the imposition of the communist ideology on the Russian empire; as in the case of the latter, it is impossible to say which component has been the worst sufferer. For if in the Soviet Union’s case, it is as plausible to argue (with Solzhenitsyn) that the Russians have paid the highest price for the misadventure as it is to suggest that other ethnic groups have been sat upon, in Pakistan’s case it is as legitimate to sympathise with the Punjabis for the erosion of their identity as to plead that they have treated badly the Sindhis and the Baluchis and up to 1971 the Bangladeshis.
Such an entity could not possibly define itself in terms of its past, all attempts by Pakistan historians of I.H. Qureshi School to invent a history for Pakistan beginning with the Muslim invasion of Sind notwithstanding. As such, it was just not possible for it to go in for either a democratic dispensation at home or for a policy of friendship with India. Thus Jinnah appropriately gave himself the office of Governor-General (with over-riding powers) and not, unlike Nehru, of Prime Minister and ordered an invasion of Jammu and Kashmir. It is obvious that the logic of the move in respect of Jammu and Kashmir has not been exhausted and I for one have never believed that it has ever been realistic on our part to believe that democracy is, or can be, more than a facade in Pakistan.
The formation of Pakistan coincided with the onset of the cold war. The cold war at once helped sustain it and limit its aggressiveness. With the termination of the cold war, Pakistan must at once feel more desperate and become more intransigent in its attitude towards India. Fortunately some voices of reason and sanity still survive there, as reflected in a recent editorial in The Pakistan Times on the Kashmir issue. But whatever the turn events take, the conclusion is inescapable that Pakistan has not been a success story in any sense of the term. The failure of Zia’s Nizam-e-Mustafa reinforces this conclusion.
Judging by the Pakistan High Commissioner’s recent interview to the Sunday Observer and Zia’s reported remarks to visiting Indian journalists earlier, the Pakistani rulers regard me as a war-monger. They are likely to be strengthened in this behalf by the present piece. They shall be as mistaken now as they have been in the past. I invite them to join the debate not in the spirit of lawyers out to score points on technical-legal grounds but in the spirit of seekers after deeper truths. These have escaped the Indians as much as they have escaped the Pakistanis. India too, in my assessment, has been a failure even if to a smaller extent. I shall discuss this issue next week unless some urgent development in the on-going turbulence intervenes.
Sunday Mail, 11 February 1990