It is time to rethink Partition of the Indian Subcontinent

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent by the British Government of Atless and the Congress Party headed by Jawaharlal Nehru left behind a trail of blood gore and bitterness. The fact that the Congress under Nehru was impatient for power left little time for a settled peaceful and civilized transition of power. Nehru exultant speech about his "tryst" with destiny insults  the victims of Partition on both sides of the Border. Gandhi in his own way tried to preserve the Unity of India by offering the Prime Ministership to Jinnah. It was the utter obscenity for political office that made Nehru reject the suggestion and though the Congress Working Committee rejected Jawahrlal Nehru as the candidate for prime Minister , Gandhi the doddering dutch Uncle of Jawaharlal Nehru ensured that the opposition to Nehru's elevation is brushed aside and his chosen favorite mounted the throne.

During the run up to Partition, especially during the Cripps Mission a number of important proposals were put forward which aimed at preserving the Unity of the country. The Congress which was wedded to a short sighted policy of agitational  politics rejected the Cabinet Proposals with disastrous effect on the unity and integrity of India. The hang over of the triumphalist approach to Indian History, the one associated closely with Bipan Chandra and his acolytes, avoids all difficult issues pertaining to the Nationalist/Partition Movement. The political errors in mass resignation after India's entry into World War II, the bringing forward of the date of Freedom from June 1948 to August 1947 all contributed to the chaos that ensued and in the process the mistakes and false strategies used by the Congress Party were neither questioned nor assessed. In fact anyone questing the politics of the Congress was labeled "Communal" and hence important questions were neglected.

It is time to pick up the threads from where they were left in 1947. A set of Constitutional proposals need to be debated in order to reduce the hostility between India and Pakistan.Since the creation of Pakistan was based on identity, the Muslims of India and the Hindus of Pakistan should be given the right to choose their homeland and the respective populations can be made voters in their respective Nations of choice. Thus a Hindu from Pakistan or Bangladsh can be a voter in India and a Moslem if he so chooses can ve a voter for Pakistan. Thus this proposal unshackles Partition. A joint Constitutional Council with shared Sovereignty will be the Governing Council and the Military of both countries brought under a common command on the basis of mutual agreement.

These proposals will effectively put an end to partition, solve the Kashmir dispute and help put these two benighted societies on the way to prosperity.

The Massacre of the Sikhs by the Congress Party in 1984: Memory and History, Helium, a Novel

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Helium
Jaspreet Singh
Bloomsbury, 2013

Violence is a part of History and the Nation States of today prefer to erase violence, especially collective and concentrated acts of demonic destruction of life from the pages of History. India is not an exception. In the West, the Holocaust is passed off as a Nazi aberration with the ordinary Germans participating only as innocent bystanders and this version history sits quite comfortably with the ideological and political realities of the Cold War and post Cold War geo political environment. In India too, there has been a denial of violence as a factor in the collective existence of India. The "Secular" scholars wax rather eloquently about the "Idea of India" which they associate with Jawaharlal Nehru ignoring the fact the he oversaw the largest mass killing in the history of the Indian subcontinent when the political leadership of the Congress and Lord Mountbatten decided to bring forward the date of Indian Independence from 1948 without bothering to prepere for the enormous tragedy that was to unfold. We may not ever know the numbers, but a figure of 3 million killed or displaced on both sides of the border is certainly possible, making the birth of the so called democratic republic of India one of the most bloodstained in the twentieth century. Yet the acolytes of Nehru pretend that Nehru and his Interim Government cannot be blamed.

The "communal factor" and the "comunalism" in Indian politics is one thmeme that plays itself out in Indian historiography without any theoretical or empirical understanding. The framing of the political issues either prior tpo Partition or Post Partition (I deliberately do not use the world Independence) as "communal" or "secular" is a game that began with the Congress when it participated in the 1937 Elections in the United Provinces and other parts of British India under the Government of India Act of 1935. The Congress did not win a single seat earmarked for the Muslims though it presented itself as a "secular" and the only organization that represented all sections of the Indian population. Instead of introspecting and trying to comprehend the alienation of the Muslim population the Congress did what it always does best: it created a bogey man so that it could use the bogeyman to frighten the Muslims into supporting the Congress. From 1937 after the Congress failed to win even a single seat and when the Muslim League swept all the Muslim seats thereby exposing the fact that the Congress did not enjoy the support of the muslim minority, the Congress leadership particularly Nehru and his "progressive" faction within the Congress started virulently attacking the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtrtiya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and converted the political discourse on the future of India as a common homeland for both Muslims and Hindus into one of conflicting religious identities.  The more stridently Nehru lambasted the so called Hindu organizations whose strength was very poor amidst the electorate, the more aggressively Jinnah put forth his case for Pakistan. The fact is that the failure of Congress leadership and its cynical use of a non existing threat to garner support of the Muslim minority resulted in strengthening the march toward Partition. To this of course, we can add the folly of the resignation from the Minstires in 1939 anf the 1942 Movement. This rehearsal of history is needed to set the stage for the most horrendous act of violence committed by the Congress party in Novemnber 1984 when it organized the killing of Sikhs in different parts of Northern India and the capital, New Delhi on  a scale that even the Germans would have found amazing.

The failure to confront the real the structural underpinnings of violence in modern India, meant that the country could live in denial and pretend that violence did not exist in India in any organized sense. The fact is that the Congress party, particularly in Northern India had begun to use violence as an instrument of political mobilization even in the pre partition days. Gyanendra Pandey and other historians conflate all acts of political violence as "communal violence" thereby giving the Congress party the benefit of doubt. 

In 1984 soonn after BBC announced the death of Indira Gandhi at the hands of Beant Singh and Satwant Singh her two Sikh bodyguards, the leadership of the Congress party in New Delhi decided to take vengence. Rajiv Gandhi famously justified the violence saying , "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes". For three whole days rampaging mobs of Congressmen went from house to house looking for Sikhs. They were armed with a database of names and addresses inn the form of telehone directories and electoral rolls. Whereever Sikh men were found, the Congressmen cut their beards and hair and doused them with petrol and burnt them alive. What was worse is that successive Congress Governments abetted the crime by destroying evidence and impeding investigation. Not a single man was convicted though it is well known thta H K L Bhagat, Lalith Maken, Arjun Das, Sajjan Kumar, and Jagdish Tytler were all involved in the killings. In several of them were even appointed ministers.

The novel, Helium which we are reviewing is a classic inn its own right. It is a work of fiction but fiction is only the form because it explores the dark savagery of 1984. Violence is often the starting point of great works of literature of which Primo Levi's works come to mind. Jaspreet Singh too has done just that. He is a memory keeper, a conscience keeper, a record keeper and above all a Historian who uses his novel to memorialize the unthinkable and verbalize the pain and suffering of countless victims. As one who has also relentlessly worked to keep the memory of 1984 alive, I salute Jaspreet Singh and have no hesitation in saying that this is one of the best novels ever written on a difficult and contentious theme. The acolytes of the Congress Party and the apologists of 1984 want to deflect blame and undermine memory by drawing a false parallel with 2002. 1984 like the holocaust is a unique event. and cannot be that easily domesticated in categories of ordinary experience.

The story revolves around the son of a Delhi IPS officer who perhaps under political compulsions looks away when a Sikh Professor at IIT is killed. Raj carries the burden of the guilt of his father and much later in life meets Nelly Kaur, the widow of the Professor who has collected the documentary and visual evidence of the horrors of 1984 in an archive in Simla. The memory of dark deeds committed even in the soft glow of political and ideological consensus can devastate a human being and this novel explores that aspect in detail.

Lastly: In these so called post colonial times when History is seen as a "discourse" without any contact with a reality, we need novelists like Jaspreet Singh who use the craft of the historian to document the horrors of the past as sirens warning the future about the devils lurking within us.And History has to be retrieved, recorded and remembered.

AN Objective Assessment of Nehru" The Indian Ideology Reviewed

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Perry Anderson, the author of The Indian Ideology i8s a well known historian and the author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism and the Lineages of the Absolutist State. In this book reviewed in this blog, Perry Anderson has raised questions which Indian historians writing history in nthe service of the nation state have failed to ask. Worse anyone even attempting a critical analysis of the Nehruvian Era is dismissed as a "communal" historian,a label which makes serious historiography well neigh impossible. The result is that modern Indian historiography is dominated by myths which are repeated without the slightest fear of being exposed as myths. The political trauma of 1947 created not one but two identity based states and while Pakistan is content with its status as an Islamic confessional state, India under Nehru has pretended to be a "secular" state and as Perry Anderson has shown the Congress even at the height of its popularity in the 1930s did not attract more than 3% of its membership from the Muslim community. The conceit of the Congress Party that it represented the entire nation made the party reluctant to seek accommodation with the Muslim League and contri8buted to the process of India getting fragmented. In Indian historiography this episode is usually painted as the wily Jinnah manipulating the Viceroy behind the backs of the Congress leadership when most of them were in Jail. The truth lies as Perry Anderson points out in the arrogance of the Congress leadership which refused to compromise with the League even when Jinnah showed a keen desire to engage with the Congress. The second point that Perry Anderson makes which deserves serious consideration is the fact that the Elections held under the 1935 Government of India Act the Congress did not win even a single Muslim seat. And when the Congress leadership decided to quit office in 1939 after the declaration of war, the field was open for the league to interact with the Muslim masses and further its ends. Rather than blaming the League, the politics of the Congress needs to be reassessed. Another myth exposed by Perry Anderson which stands modern Indian historiography on its head is the acknowledgement that the Congress pursued a communal agenda and the violence directed against Muslims during Partition emanated from Congress men rather than the favorite whipping boy of the liberals, the RSS. Given the fact that the Congress was responsible for the biggest massacre of post Independent India when thugs of the Congress Party killed more than 15,0000 Sikhs in north India and successive Congress regimes have abetted in the crime by ensuring that the perpetrators are not brought to justice, the analysis of Perry Anderson is certainly close to the truth. The historians maintained by the state lie Bipan Chandra and S Gopal do not seem to understand that the very dynamics of the movement led by the Congress contributed to the violence of Partition. Perry Anderson's analysis of the Nehruvian era from 1947 to 1964 is not only accurate but is also a sophisticated study of Nehru's methods of statecraft. As Anderson points out Nehru did not run a Government, he presided over a Court with fourth rate individuals like Krishna Menon, O Mathai, B M Kaul etc. The result was the political disaster in 1962 when India was soundly defeated by China. Anderson rightly points out that the McMohan Line which Nehru took as sacrosanct was the result of British chicanery and China showed every willingness to negotiate. But given the arrogance inherent in the Nehruvian vision of India, there was no place for negotiation or diplomacy: Throw the Chinese out was the motto of the so called forward policy which led to disaster. In suppressing the Revolt of the Nagas after Independence, Nehru permitted his Army, armed with the Armed Forces Special Powers Act to indulge in extra legal killings and human rights abuses on a monumental scale and the result is there form all to see. And in Kashmir also the same policy of using a local collaborator, Sheikh Abdullah and then discard him when he began to take Plebiscite promised by Nehru too seriously. Amd all this while quiety promoting his dynasty which still unfortunately is in power. The Indian Ideoly is a great book and all students of modern Indian history must read this book. Nehru was a giant with feet of clay and it is time Indians are told the truth about their recent past.