UPSC History India after Freedom NCERT Extracts - Understanding Partition

 Partition or Holocaust?

• During partition, several hundred thousand people were killed and innumerable women raped and abducted. Millions were uprooted, transformed into refugees in alien lands.
• The term "holocaust" in a sense captures the gravity of what happened in the subcontinent in 1947, something that the mild term "partition" hides.
• The "ethnic cleansing" that characterised the partition of India was carried out by self- styled representatives of religious communities rather than by state agencies.
• India-haters in Pakistan and Pakistan-haters in India are both products of Partition.
• Some scholars see Partition as a culmination of a communal politics that started developing in the opening decades of the twentieth century.
• They suggest that separate electorates for Muslims, created by the colonial government in 1909 and expanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature of communal politics.
• During the 1920s and early 1930s tension grew around a number of issues. Muslims were angered by "music-before-mosque", by the cow protection movement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samaj to bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi ) those who had recently converted to Islam.
• Yet it would be incorrect to see Partition as the outcome of a simple unfolding of communal tensions. As the protagonist of Garm Hawa, a film on Partition, puts it, "Communal discord happened even before 1947 but it had never led to the uprooting of millions from their homes".
• Partition was a qualitatively different phenomenon from earlier communal politics, and to understand it we need to look carefully at the events of the last decade of British rule.
• On 23 March, 1940, the League moved a resolution demanding a measure of autonomy for the Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent. This ambiguous resolution never mentioned partition or Pakistan.
• In fact Sikandar Hayat Khan, Punjab Premier and leader of the Unionist Party, who had drafted the resolution, declared in a Punjab assembly speech on 1 March, 1941 that he was opposed to a Pakistan that would mean "Muslim Raj here and Hindu Raj elsewhere.
• The origins of the Pakistan demand have also been traced back to the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal, the writer of "Sare Jahan Se Achha Hindustan Hamara".
• In March, 1946 the British Cabinet sent a three member mission to Delhi to examine the League's demand and to suggest a suitable political framework for a free India.
• The Cabinet Mission recommended a loose three-tier confederation. India was to remain united.
• Only Mahatma Gandhi and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan of the NWFP continued to firmly oppose the idea of partition.
• After withdrawing its support to the Cabinet Mission plan, the Muslim League decided on "Direct Action" for winning its Pakistan demand. It announced 16 August, 1946 as "Direct Action Day".
• Communalism, then, is a particular kind ofpoliticisation of religious identity, an ideology that seeks to promote conflict between religious communities.
• The name Pakistan or Pak-stan (from Punjab, Afghan, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan) was coined by a Punjabi Muslim student at Cambridge, Choudhry Rehmat Ali, who, in pamphlets written in 1933 and 1935, desired a separate national status for this new entity. No one took Rehmat Ali seriously in the 1930s, least of all the League and other Muslim leaders who dismissed his idea merely as a student's dream.

The One-Man army

• The 77-year-old Gandhiji decided to stake his all in a bid to vindicate his lifelong principle of non-violence, and his conviction that people's hearts could be changed.
• He moved from the villages of Noakhali in East Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) to the villages of Bihar and then to the riot-torn slums of Calcutta and Delhi, in a heroic effort to stop Hindus and Muslims kill each other, careful everywhere to reassure the minority community.
• At times when the men feared that "their" women - wives, daughters, sisters – would be violated by the "enemy", they killed the women themselves.
• Urvashi Butalia in her book. The Other Side of Silence, narrates one such gruesome incident in the village of Thoa Khalsa, Rawalpindi district.
• During Partition, in this Sikh village, ninety women are said to have "voluntarily" jumped into a well rather than fall into "enemy" hands.
• On 13 March every year, when their "martyrdom" is celebrated, the incident is recounted to an audience of men, women and children. Women are exhorted to remember the sacrifice and bravery of their sisters and to cast themselves in the same mould.
• Amrita Pritam, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Dinesh Das have written memorable poems on Partition in Punjabi, Urdu and Bengali respectively.
• You may also want to see films directed by Ritwik Ghatak (Meghe Dhaka Tara and Subarnarekha), M.S. Sathyu (Garam Hawa), Govind Nihalani (Tamas), and a play, Jis Lahore Nahin Vekhya 0 Jamya-e-nai (He Who Has Not Seen Lahore, Has Not Been Born) directed by Habib Tanvir.