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Partitions: Reshaping
States and Minds THE present work is a collection of research papers on ‘Partitions compared and lessons learnt, issues, in the politics of dialogue and peace’ prepared between October 2001 and January 2002 within the framework of international programme for advanced studies at the Maison des Scholars at Reid Hall. The authors have undertaken the challenge of analysing the nature of partitions, and their consequences within a multidisciplinary and comparative approach. Quite a few scholars, including Yves Locosta, David Goodman and Sanjay Chaturvedi, participated in the discussions on the subject. The last chapter sums up the proceedings of the interaction among scholars on the sensitive and complex theme of partition. Though research is based on extensive secondary sources, the questions posed and the thematic novelty are striking. The general proposition emerging in the presentations is that partitions do not resolve problems, but create more, which prove worse than the remedy suggested. The authors generally follow a common sociological and anthropological framework, within which empirical data is fitted. The whole intellectual exercise is cluttered up with a series of assumptions, but the conclusions drawn are revealing. For explaining the trauma of partitions, it is maintained that it is ethnic politics that leads to geopolitics. Thus, the people are presented as ‘dehumanised pawns’ on the geopolitical chessboard of territorial rivalries. The assertion that "Partitions can ensure harmonisation between boundaries of imagined territorial realms and identity groups" is also maintained in these presentations. Leaving aside the theoretical formulations, Sanjay Chaturvedi, in his perceptive article The Excess of Geopolitics: Politics of British India, shows how the British imperial power, by following the notorious ‘Divide and Rule Policy’ had used map-drawings, census operations and notions of separate electorate and succeeded in fashioning, crystallising and consolidating the distinct and separate Hindu and Muslim identities, which led to the division of the country. Chaturvedi brings into focus some of the schemes floated in the 1930s and 1940s that were conceived and formulated with the idea of carving out a separate homeland for the Muslims. The author specifically mentions Chowdhary Rahmat Ali’s scheme, which is generally regarded as a prelude to Partition. Jinnah dismissed Rahmat Ali’s scheme as chimerical (137-138). This scheme came into limelight in 1933. Sir Agha Khan’s scheme of the ‘United States of Asia’ envisaged a federal system of government, shared both by the Hindus and the Muslims and not in any case a separation from India. Then there was Sikander Hayat Khan’s scheme (1939), which divided India into seven zones, with a common central government. Sikander Hayat Khan, the Prime Minister of Punjab, had prepared his scheme with the assistance of Prof Reginald Coupland, a constitutional expert who was teaching at Oxford. A staunch critic of Jinnah’ s Partition scheme, Sikander tried his best to secure Mahatma Gandhi’ s support to avert Partition, but in vain. The Congress was unwilling to cooperate with the Unionist Party, which it regarded as a stooge of the British Government. Curiously enough, Chaturvedi does not mention poet-philosopher Sir Mohammad Iqbal’s scheme of establishing a separate homeland for the Muslims within or without India, which he had expounded in his presidential address he delivered at the Muslim League session held at Allahabad in 1930. This scheme, combined with some additional information, provided by Iqbal in his correspondence with Jinnah during 1937-38 approximates closely to Jinnah’s Pakistan resolution of March 1940. Chaturvedi also discusses two other schemes — Veer Savarkar’s Akhand Bharat and Shiromani Aka1i Dal’s ‘Khalistan’, which claimed a separate state for Sikhs extending from the Yamuna to the Chenab. The contributors to the volume emphasise that partition is a complex problem and besides the division of a country, it generates other consequences, which are catastrophic, particularly immigration of people from one state to another, which entails untold suffering and misery .The contributors treat partitions not as a local problem, but a global phenomenon, which produces colossal displacements in countries like Yogoslavia, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, India, Pakistan, etc. In this work, the partitioned countries are shown as the breeding ground of ethno-political conflicts, which as a nation they are unable to handle. The partition is regarded in this study as cancer, and only global strategies are needed to avert it. Such a proposition is illusionary and impractical. On the other hand, goodwill, peaceful co-existence and the setting up of a plural society are worthy ideals which are seldom followed in the midst of sound and fury of the ethno-political passion aroused for imagined utopias. Ranabir Samadar, in his editorial note, raises the question of responsibility for the partitioning a country. Each country tries to hold the other responsible for having partitioned the country, and the most grotesque example of disowning responsibility for partitioning is, of course, Israel, which largely enjoys international support. From this study, it appears rather a paradoxical feature that the introduction of a responsible government in India by the British came to be acknowledged as a ‘shameless charade of responsibility’. The avenging force of fact is that the Morley-Minto Reforms, the Montague-Chelmsford Reforms, the Simon proposals, the Government of India Act (1935) and the Independence Act (1947) introduced divisions and disrupted the unity of the country.
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