It is difficult to believe in these days when feelings are running high and terrorism has affected even our next door neighbour, that a Pakistani can write about the Partition of India with any degree of objectivity. But that is precisely what Yasmin Khan, a third generation Pakistani, has done and all credit to her. Time sometimes lends enchantment to the scene with objectivity coming a close second. Yasmin does not lay blame on any one party, community or religion. As she puts it quite early in her introductory chapter, ?Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus suffered equally as victims and can equally be blamed for carrying out the murders and assaults?. The killings, as all those who were alive in those terrifying times will tell ?bridged the barbaric and the calculatedly modern, both haphazard and chillingly specified?.
Those killings that accompanied Partition, especially in Bengal and Punjab, but more specifically in the then undivided and larger state of Punjab spared neither children, the elderly and the sick and, as Yasmin delicately observes, ?conversion from one faith to another occurred alongside systematic looting and robbery, clearly carried out with the intention of ruining lives?. Despair, hate and frustration were the hallmarks of those times to such an extent that when Jawaharlal Nehru once visited a refugee camp, one of the refugees slapped him on his face, crying: ?Give my mother back to me! Bring my sisters back to me!?. Stunned, Nehru could only shed tears.
There were riots practically everywhere in India though most were limited to the north. There were more than 160 government-operated refugee camps in Independent India with 85 in East Punjab, 32 in the then Bombay Presidency and only three in Madras. They could hardly have met the needs of the refugees, considering that there were 12 millinon displaced people. Partition set in motion a train of events, unforeseen, says Yasmin ?by every single person who had advocated and argued for the division?, including, it might be added, M.A. Jinnah.
This is a book which tells it all, how war-time politics ended and the politics of Partition began. Yasmin does not deal with what happened right from the start of the Cripps Mission nor of what discussions took places within the British Cabinet but notes that the second world war had almost changed the face of India which provided Britain two and a half million soldiers?the largest volunteer army in history. In the run up to Partition, writes Yasmin, ?something had gone badly wrong between Indian Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims? and the ?nature of this breakdown remained mysterious and unfathomable?.
That is where Yasmin errs. There was nothing mysterious and unfathomable about Partition. It had become practically inevitable to those who watched the history of India from the twenties to the mid-forties and there is plenty of information available on the subject. Yasmin herself concedes that ?among educated nationalists during those years, a sense of separateness and self-conscious awareness of difference had set in? strengthened by memories of tyrannical Mogul rule ending in 1857. Yasmin gives credit of sorts to the Communist Party ?for acknowledging the Muslim right to self-determination?. It was a most foolish and criminal thing to do, as events showed. Conceding to minorities the ?right to self-determination? was self-destructive, as the entire country was soon to learn.
Not all Muslims wanted Pakistan; the author draws pointed attention to what the president of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema had done. In a fatwa issued in 1945, he had called Jinnah as the great heathen, Kafir-i-Azam. The truth is that by getting arrested on the issue of Quit India, Congress leaders had lost ground to the Muslim League and could not make up in those two years that began with their release and ended with the British departure from the scene. In recounting those days Yasmin has missed out on a whole lot of history richly available. Significantly, even as Partition was being worked out there were many politicians, including India'sfirst President, Dr Rajendra Prasad, who really believed that there was every chance that the sub-continent would be re-united within a decade.
Indeed several books have provided great detail of what went on in the British ruling circles in London, especially in the Labour cabinet that came to power following the end of the war. Partition has been discussed ad nauseum in years past though Yasmin, for reasons best known to her, believes that ?there are still taboos on what can be said of Partition?. What is pleasant to note is that towards the end she expressed her satisfaction that ?a peace-process is under way in earnest? between Pakistan and India and that ?Partition deserves renewed consideration and closer attention for abundant reasons?. There will be many who will agree with her. If the Berlin Wall could collapse, if ancient enemies like Germany and France can come under the European Union umbrella, why can'tIndia and Pakistan come together? Unfortunately Yasmin does not give much attention to this possibility. What would happen in the years to come only time can tell.
