Academic’s analysis of 1947
G.S. Bhargava

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan
by Yasmin Khan.
Penguin Viking.
Pages 242. Rs 495.

It is not pleasant to open the review of a book with a caveat about its title. In this case, however, it becomes unavoidable because the subtitle of the book, The Making of India, is both historically and technically wrong. As V. K. Krishna Menon validly pointed out in the United Nations, "India is a residuary State"; while Pakistan is the product of "the great Partition" as Yasmin Khan calls it. With the result that Pakistan had to be admitted to the United Nations—like Israel born of the division of Palestine—while India retained its UN membership albeit in attenuated size and shape. Also, incidentally, India voted for the admission of both Pakistan and Israel, whereas Afghanistan, among the neighbours, cast a negative vote in the case of Pakistan (and the Arab States vis-a-vis Israel).

The bulk of the book reads like a doctoral thesis, although it is not stated to be one. Both the grandparents of the author had links with India and Pakistan—one was an officer in the British Indian army stationed in what had later become Pakistan, while the other was a Muslim League activist in what remained as India. Further, in the name of recalling history backwards, Yasmin Khan has introduced the red herring of ‘south Asia’ into the narrative. (It recalls to mind the Pakistani practice in the early 1960s of describing Akbar in the school textbooks as a Pakistani Emperor who ruled over India.) South Asia is a much later conceptual and political development following the emergence of ASEAN as a viable and successful regional grouping in the wake of stabilisation of the European Union.

The idea of looking beyond the national boundaries in understanding history and visualising the future emanated from Nehru’s Discovery of India, written between 1942 and 1945 while being detained in the Ahmednagar Fort in today’s Maharashtra. The 1946 Asian Relations Conference, held in the historic Purana Qila in New Delhi, was its offshoot, reflecting Nehru’s wish or vision of India and China striving jointly for Asia’s progress. Ironically, the Kuomintang and Generalissimo Chiang-kai-Shek were in China’s seat, not merely in the UN Security Council.

The author writes: "we could even go as far as saying that Indian and Pakistani ideas of nationhood were carved out diametrically, in definition against each other, at this time." Here again, the flawed historicity of the assertion impairs analysis; practically from the genesis of the Indian National Congress in the fading years of the 19th century, the urge for self-government was the engine of India’s—and consequently future Pakistan’s—political preoccupation. There was neither ambiguity nor doubt about it. The only aspect debated for decades was whether it would be full self-government or ‘Dominion Status’. It was thrashed out by 1936 when Nehru as Congress president unfurled what was then our national Tricolour on the banks of the Ravi in Lahore declaring ‘purna swaraj’ (full self-government) as India’s goal.

Interestingly, the Muslim League, with Quadi-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah as its president, adopted the Pakistan resolution almost at the same site in 1936. The idea of a homeland for the Muslims of India had been mooted at least a decade earlier by Allama Iqbal and also fleshed out by a Muslim student in London.

‘Separate electorates’ or determining electoral colleges on the basis of religion is an innocuous electoral provision in the eyes of the author, whereas the Congress saw it as the thin end of the wedge of division on the basis of religion. It had been a raging bone of contention in municipal politics, especially in Uttar Pradesh. C.Y. Chintamani, as editor of The Leader, de facto mouthpiece of the National Liberal Foundation, resisted its introduction at the cost of falling foul of Motilal Nehru who headed the board of management of the newspaper. Gandhiji was its most uncompromising opponent.

The author’s allusion to Aligarh Muslim University as intended by its founder Sir Syed Ahmed Khan "as a place to blend Islamic instruction with the demands of the encounter with the Western world, an institution that would impart all the manners and educational benefits that an English public school could offer" could be an eye-opener to the champions of quotas and religion-based reservations in government-funded educational institutions.

The diligently done research, which is an asset to the book, is avoidably marred by inadequate attention to detail. For instance, B.G. (Bal Gangadhar) Kher, Bombay’s first premier after the 1937 election is described as A.G. Kher. The integration of princely states into India by Sardar Patel is dismissed in one sentence and so was Jinnah’s inaugural address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in which he visualised the new State in non-denominational terms! The author’s assessment of political events is uniformly obtuse. Maulana Azad’s seminal work, India Wins Freedom, the last chapter of which, held back for 25 years, rued the failure of the Congress Party to live up to Gandhiji’s ideal of equal treatment for all communities is mentioned for "A. K. Azad’s appreciation of the Calcutta police deference to him after his release from detention in 1945."

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