Part 10 of our exclusive serialisation of a new book on the history of class struggles in India, written by a long-time supporter of the Workers’ International Network.
At every stage, whenever the call had been given for a real mass struggle – whenever the eyes of the people were lifted beyond their daily misery to the hope of a worthwhile future – communal prejudices had faded into the background. And once their struggles had been yet again betrayed, they were always cynically rekindled. whipped up by reactionary demagogues under the encouragement (and sometimes the direct pay) of the British administration
Even Chandra tells us that during the Bengal peasants’ struggle in the 1880s, there were “no communal overtones, in spite of the fact that most of the ryots (peasants) were Muslim and most of the zamindars (landlords) Hindu“; that “there was complete Hindu/Muslim unity during the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-2“; that it was only following Gandhi’s termination of the campaign that “in the absence of a mass movement, communalism raised its ugly head“; that it was “mainly Muslim villagers” who gave shelter to Surya Sen and his fellow rebels for three years following their abortive capture of the Chittagong police armoury in 1930; and that in 1942 “there was a total absence of communal clashes“.
As so many times before, but this time with deadly consequences, it was against the background of an ebbing mass movement and at the instigation of malevolent demagogues that the virus of communalism had spread, and the foundation was laid for partition, with all the horrors that that was to bring in its wake, leaving the sub-continent in turmoil, crudely carved up into a nominally secular Hindu-ruled India and an explicitly Muslim-ruled Pakistan, in an orgy of plunder, rape, mutilation and massacres.
Throughout the uprising, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh workers had stood side by side. Their common symbol was the red flag. Britain was now desperate to withdraw, and to hand over power quickly even to those to whom it had shown contempt only yesterday, rather than submit to a united revolutionary movement of the masses.
The British had systematically fostered divisions between Hindus and Muslims, and quite cynically said so. It suited the colonial administration to prop up the Muslim League, initially an obscure minority cult of Islamic separatists demanding a separate Muslim state. This was the time-honoured strategy of British imperialism wherever it had planted its flag. Ireland was partitioned along sectarian or communal lines. In Palestine it had promoted the initially obscure Zionist sect within the Jewish ghettoes of central and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The same poisonous techniques were deployed in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), setting the Tamils against the Sinhalese; similarly in Cyprus between the Turkish and Greek populations; in East Africa with an imported Asian population, etc.
Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah
Jinnah was an eminent King’s Counsel who regularly appeared at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, earning £25,000 a year (equivalent to at least £2 million today), living in a three-storey villa in Hampstead with eight acres of garden, and travelling in a chauffeur-driven Bentley. The unlikeliest conceivable champion of the Muslim cause, Jinnah was (as Lal Khan described him) “a man with a weakness for a drop of whisky and a ham sandwich” who drank alcohol, ate pork, shaved and spoke no Urdu. But he now saw his chance to avenge past slights. And the British, who had long fostered communal discord as a well-tried strategy, and were alarmed at the turn events had taken, eagerly encouraged him.
Still cultivating his adopted saintly posture, Gandhi for his part craftily offered the Muslim League exclusive power over an independent India, rather than accept any share of responsibility for the crime of partition. But in reality this was a devious legalistic ploy. Such a proposal would obviously be unthinkable to the Hindu population, and could only have stoked still higher the flames of communalism. So the botched solution of partition was hastily rubber-stamped by all the parties to the negotiation.
The lunacy of partition was hastily accepted by all concerned parties. A minor civil servant who had never before set foot on Indian territory was hurriedly flown in from the English home counties with instructions to carve up the sub-continent and devise in secret a map of the two new entities. It took just forty days for his hastily scrambled team to scrawl at random a few crude lines across the map. Their botched plan left tens of millions of people on the “wrong side” of the new borders; but, as he remarked with a shrug: “I am going through this terrible job as fast and as well as I can… and it makes no difference because in the end, when I finish, they are all going to start killing each other anyway.”
This fiasco nevertheless enabled the noble Viceroy and his entourage to fly straight home to safety four thousand miles away from the ensuing bloodbath. The British promptly evacuated, leaving their former colony plunged into a bloodbath of massacres, mutilations and rape. Aptly condemned by Gandhi as “vivisection”, this crude carve-up led to the largest transmigration in history, bringing in its wake utter carnage.
Horror
The price was paid by millions in a bloodbath of internecine horror rarely precedented in history. Hundreds of thousands were crammed, crushed and choking, in the trains which became caravans of genocide. Whole streets were set ablaze. The gutters ran literally red with blood. The charred remnants of roasted corpses piled up, their eyes gouged out or hands or feet chopped off. The amputated penises of murdered men were stuffed into the mouths of Muslim women.
The partition of India prompted the largest transmigration in world history. According to later research (from the Harvard Learning Centre for Population and Development Studies and others), at least 17.8 million men, women and children were driven from their homes, and some 3.4 million slaughtered. In addition to the millions killed; many more millions found themselves displaced and stranded. Billions of rupees’ worth of property lay ravaged and ruined. All that was left after a couple of centuries under the “civilizing mission” of the British empire was a sub-continental conflagration of chaos, terror, mayhem and despair.
In the words of Lal Khan, “partition was a wound inflicted on… a civilization that was rich in art, architecture, music, literature… Its cultural diversity was its greatest beauty. The pain still remains and has left an indelible scar.”
The shame of partition rests first with British imperialism, then with the reactionary upper classes of Congress and the Muslim League, and – most despicable of all – the renegade leaders of the working class.