Maira Hilal
IN August 1947, when, after three hundred years in India, the British finally left, the subcontinent was par titioned into two independent nation-states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. Immediately, there began one of the greatest migrations in human history, as millions of Muslims trekked to Pakistan, as well as millions of Hindus and Sikhs headed in the opposite direction throughout the 1950s till the 1970s. Here we must keep in mind with the partition of India not all Muslims were migrated to India, there were also those who act in the Pakistan movement but did not go there for purely economic reasons. They formed a sizable minority in a country that was not under Muslim hegemony, and within which they were so widely scattered that their absolute large number amounted to very little in terms of power politics. Therefore, across the Indian subcontinent, communities that had coexisted for almost a millennium attacked each other in a terrifying outbreak of communal violence, with Hindus and Sikhs on one side and Muslims on the other—a mutual genocide as unexpected as it was unprecedented. So keeping in view the miseries that Muslims had faced in the pre-and post-partition era the main purpose of this article is to elaborate why we called the creation of Pakistan was a blessing for Indian Muslims rather than a mistake? To justify the answer let’s have a look at the post-partition era.
Firstly, after partition in Punjab and Bengal—provinces abutting India’s borders with West and East Pakistan, respectively—the carnage was especially intense, with massacres, arson, forced conversions, mass abductions, and savage sexual violence. Some seventy-five thousand women were raped, and many of them were then disfigured. In princely states, the violence was often highly organized with the involvement or complacency of the rulers. Particularly in the Sikh states except for Jind and Kapurthala, where the Maharajas were believed to be complacent in the ethnic cleansing of Muslims while other Maharajas such as those of Patiala, Faridkot, and Bharatpur being heavily involved in ordering them. The ruler of Bharatpur is said to have witnessed the ethnic cleansing of his population, especially at places such as Deeg. Secondly, the more far-reaching as well as more vicious, assumption that had been shattered was tacit in the Muslim communal writings of the past one hundred years, i.e. that Islam meant Urdu language, Perso-Arabic culture, and of the more recent feudal and capitalist society.
It means wherever Urdu was in direct competition with Hindi it suffered a great deal. In Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the so-called heartland of Urdu, even the existing facilities for providing education in Urdu disappeared. Urdu-medium teachers became scarce; their training suffered. Text-books were either never prepared or were printed in small numbers. Special efforts went into erasing the already existing public signs in Urdu. Before 1947, Urdu had a university and a large number of institutions; but after separation, there was no university and very few colleges and high schools. It means that in just the two states of UP and Bihar, twelve million persons were not allowed to enjoy the guarantees made to them in the Constitution. Most of the blame for such conditions lies in the State governments, but the hands of the federal authorities were not entirely clean.
Lastly, the ferocity of communal riots in India was one of the defining features of post-independence Indian politics. In 1961 there were 92 incidents; in 1965, 676. In 1966 the number went down to 133, perhaps because the Indian Muslims had “proven” their loyalty in the war against Pakistan in September 1965. But the trend worsened the next year. In 1967 there were 220 incidents; in 1968, 346; in 1969, 519; and in 1970 there were 413 incidents reported. Reports indicate that at Allahabad, Bihar, Orissa, West Bengal, Ranchi, Bhivandi and Jalgaon, election rolls were also used to identify the houses and property owned by the Muslims. It became manifest that the local police and administrative authorities cannot always be trusted to maintain even as a semblance of impartiality. Equally saddening was the fact that more and younger people, even students of colleges and professional schools, were found taking an active part in the riots, which at several places should properly be called limited anti-Muslim programs.Moreover, in the pre-and post-partition era the regions comprising Pakistan and Bangladesh were described as having climates that were “unsuitable for industrialization” because they were Muslim-majority areas. Hence the non-Muslims would set up textile mills in Ahmedabad and jute mills in Calcutta, even though cotton was produced in West Pakistan and jute in East Pakistan. Muslims were thus condemned to be peasants, and this would not have changed even if India had remained untied. Proof of this is that the first textile and jute mills in Pakistan and Bangladesh were set up by Muslim refugees after partition.
So at the end suffice it to say that from its inception, rather than serve the cause of Indian Muslims, India has harmed Pakistan by its rabid anti-Pakistan and anti-Islam posture, by closing its borders and putting restrictions on travel, by hampering even the sale or exchange of Muslims trades. Basically, the polarization of Hindus and Muslims occurred during just a couple of decades of the 20th Century, but by the middle of the century, it was so complete that many on both sides believed that it was impossible for adherents of the two religions to live together peacefully. So apparently, India has failed in its alleged aim to “provide” religious liberation to the Muslims of the subcontinent. There are now more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan, but they have led a miserable life compared with the non-Muslims of Pakistan. More importantly, the new framework of politics in the country is such that they are neither ruling over someone nor have the authority to take part in politics.
—The writer is MPhil scholar (Asian studies), Taxila Institute of Asian civilization, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
