Partition—Empire’s revenge for independence

The partition of India displayed three million refugees (Photo: WikimediaCommons)

The horror of Partition will forever sour anniversaries of Indian independence. Some three million died as a result of tearing the country apart—Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. Their blood permanently stains the collective memory.

India finally won freedom from the British Empire, known as the Raj, on 15 August 1947, but the new countries that emerged—India and Pakistan—were born in anguish.

The preceding year had seen the worst communal rioting in the country’s history.

Right wing Hindu organisations screamed that Muslims were the “eternal enemy” and that every Hindu must keep “daggers and spears at his home and carry a sharp knife with him”.

The Muslim League organised its own militia and proclaimed, “Pakistan or death”. In 1946, it organised Direct Action Day to further its demands and in Calcutta, as British authorities stood by helplessly, at least 10,000 people—Hindu and Muslim—died in the rioting that followed.

The pattern was repeated time and again.

Columns of refugees were sometimes four miles long. On one side of the road would be Muslims heading north to Pakistan, and on the other, Hindus and Sikhs heading south to India. By the end of 1947 there were three million refugees living in camps in both countries.

Bapsi Sidhwa was one of many novelists whose work conveyed the violence and utter repugnancy of Partition.

“A train from Gurudaspur has just come in…. everyone in it is dead. Butchered,” she wrote in Ice Candy Man. “They are all Muslim. There are no young women among the dead. Only two gunny-bags full of women’s breasts.”

Some observers today suggest that communal hatred was inevitable in India. But that ignores the centuries in which different religious groups lived side by side.

In the fight for liberation, many Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus fought alongside each other.

In Bombay in 1946, for example, there were uprisings in the Royal Indian Navy and other armed forces.

Mutineers demanding equal pay between white and Indian sailors captured 20 naval vessels in the harbour. They celebrated their unity by hoisting three flags upon the ships they controlled—the tricolour of the Indian National Congress, the green flag of the Muslim League and the red flag with hammer and sickle to represent the Communist Party.

The division between India’s different religious groups was not a natural phenomenon. It was a bomb, carefully planted by the British.

The Raj tactic of dividing Muslims from Hindus had its origins in the response to the 1857 Indian uprising against the British—known as the Indian Mutiny.

But in the 20th century divide and rule was to play an even more important role to undermine the newly formed Indian National Congress and its leader Mohandas Gandhi—better known by the honorific Mahatma.

In 1905, for example, the Raj announced the partition of Bengal, saying it was too big to manage.

But the British Home Secretary was more honest.

“Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in several different ways,” he wrote. “One of our main objects is to split up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.”

But the hateful policy backfired as anti-British rebellion against the division took hold. It was further weakened by the spirit of unity that erupted during the First World War.

A growing class of Indian bourgeois chafed against their imperial masters. They increasingly came to demand a form of “home rule” in which they would hold the whip hand.

Congress, which had originally been timid, became their mouthpiece.

Spiralling food prices caused by the war also gave rise to sporadic rioting, with many poor people rightly blaming the British for their plight.

The Raj feared radicals were cultivating sedition.

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In Russia in 1917, workers had overthrown the monarchy and were creating a new society. They appealed to oppressed masses in all countries under the yoke of colonialism to join them.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Indians—in Europe as part of the British Indian Army and ostensibly fighting for democracy and the rights of weak nations—grew tired of the hypocrisy.

Gandhi organised mass movements in Gujarat and Bihar to take up the demands of the poor, and began to cultivate a body of trained and disciplined followers to help coordinate his strategy of non-violent action.

The governor of Bombay described him as “honest, but Bolshevik, and for that reason very dangerous”.

But the governor had misread his adversary. Gandhi did not want to abolish the categories of rich and poor.

He wanted to mediate between the two classes, saying, “In India we want no political strikes… We must gain control over all the unruly elements… We seek not to destroy capital or capitalists, but to regulate the tensions between capital and labour.”

Despite this contradiction, Congress led huge movements against the British. But as the threat of the independence movement grew, so did British attempts to divide and conquer.

The Raj deliberately favoured Muslims in an attempt to split Congress, which at that time still organised in both groups.

The British wanted to create animosity and fear of Hindu domination in a post-British India. The result was wave after wave of communal rioting.

While Gandhi’s movement appeared to be going forward, unity prevailed. But when Gandhi called a halt to action in fear of mass violence, the threat of communalism grew.

Congress refused to appeal to the poor of all religions to unite to fight their landowners, bosses and the British because of its fear of the class struggle this would unleash.

But there was a possible alternative to Congress and its strategy of class collaboration.

Groups inspired by Russia came together to form the Communist Party of India in 1925.

Despite repression, the Communists grew quickly and enlisted many of the most radical freedom fighters and working class militants—Hindu, Muslim and Sikh alike.

The Party played a central role in the development of mass trade unionism and was from its inception an uncompromising opponent of communalism.

Throughout 1928 and 1929, a strike wave spread across Indian railways, iron and steel plants and the textiles industry—there were 31 million strike days in 1928 alone.

However, the Communists, already hampered by repression, were hamstrung by the leadership of the Communist International.

By 1928, Russia was firmly under the grip of Stalin’s counter-revolution and the Moscow leadership no longer believed in spreading revolution internationally.

Stalin initially instructed Indian revolutionaries that the most left-wing leaders of the nationalist movement were their enemy because, he said, they sowed illusions in moderates.

This cut the Party off from the next wave of the freedom movement, just as it entered its most radical phase.

Then, in 1935, he ordered Indian Communists to join the Congress-led movement uncritically at a time when many activists were grappling towards more radical approaches.

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Lastly, after Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Stalin ordered the Indian party to cease all agitation against the British “anti-fascist allies”.

Each time Gandhi launched and then abandoned mass campaigning, disillusionment grew. But there was no organisation with the credibility to challenge him.

So the chief beneficiaries of the demoralisation that followed were the communalists who wanted to set the different religious groups against each other.

By 1945, sections of the British ruling class, including the newly elected Labour government, came to believe that partition was inevitable.

Many Muslims flocked to the Muslim League, led by landowners and capitalists, which now dominated Bengal and Sindh provinces.

And Congress leaders, desperately hungry for power and now prepared to use Hindu iconography to win support, were prepared to accept some form of Muslim state as the price of bringing an end to the Raj.

But by legitimising Partition, the Muslim League and Congress set in motion a terrible process of ethnic cleansing.

Each new horror was vigorously promoted by communal politicians, maintaining the cycle of violence. Even many who had opposed Partition now felt it was the only way to stop the bloodbath.

But today the horrors continue. India and Pakistan have fought four border wars, and both are nuclear armed states.

Divided Kashmir is at the centre of those conflicts. While the Indian state persecutes the Muslim majority, Pakistan shoots Kashmiris demanding democracy.

Yet there has always been an alternative strategy—one that sought to unite workers and the poor of all faiths under the banner of class struggle and opposition to imperialism.