Column for 18th May 2003
Perhaps it is time again to talk of cross border ties and of friendships on hold, of shared joys and sorrows.
The partition of the country (14th and 15th August 1947) is a living memory for those who were adult at that time. It is as well to remember that the Indo-Pak animosity, taken for granted today, did not exist at the time of the two countries becoming independent. It is not as if the division was welcomed by all. The jubilation was unrestrained amongst the proponents of Pakistan and there was dismay in the hearts of those who had opposed Partition.
St. Stephens College had 325 students and a number of them were Muslim. A distinguished teacher, Dr Ishtiaque Hussain Qureishi, had moved from being head of History at the college where he had been a student and a teacher to the newly created chair of History in the Delhi University.
Dr Qureishi was politically active from his student days. He had responded to the call for non-cooperation by giving up studies and joining the Khilafat Movement. His whole world came tumbling down when that movement was called off. The cause failed leaving him penniless and uneducated.
Penniless because he came from a family of jurists who had become unemployed when the British grabbed all the senior jobs for themselves and uneducated because he gave up studies to respond to the call of non-cooperation.
Qureishi came to be interviewed for admission into St Stephens college wearing Khadi and quite sure that the anglicized principal Wrangler S.N.Mukarji would not admit him. Mukarji did and Qureishi became a star pupil of historian Percival Spear who was later Master of Selwyn.
The Pakistan idea is said to have taken shape in the University of Cambridge in the 1930s. Qureishis doctoral thesis on The Administration of the Delhi Sultanate won him a Ph.D. from Cambridge in 1936. He believed in Islamic Socialism and was close to the Cambridge Union of Socialist Communists (CUSC).
Qureishi became Constitutional Advisor to the Muslim League and saw no conflict of interest in retaining his chair in Delhi University while traveling as often as needed to Pakistan to advise them as necessary.
The Bombay legal luminary, Muhammad Ali Jinnah who had been a paragon and symbol of Indian nationalism looked upon communal politics as a means for coming into power. As he could not compete with Gandhi in the national sphere he lowered his sights and took to Muslim politics. Henri IV said Paris is worth a Mass when he became Catholic to win the French crown. Jinnah learnt to offer namaaz in much the same spirit. He even started to sport Indian clothes and a karakul cap. He continued to drink his scotch, and eat his bacon ham and sausages. He also kept his house in Malabar Hill Bombay, as he thought he would return home to it after serving his term of office as Governor General of Pakistan. Apparently he also ordered a Rolls Royce to be delivered to him at Bombay at the time he retired!
No one reckoned that there would be the kind of bloodshed arson and outrage that occurred. Except perhaps the British who had the experience of partitioning every land they ruled including their neighbouring island, Ireland.
The justification of British rule in India was The White Mans Burden. That Indians could not be expected to rule themselves and provide the kind of governance needed by a society where many communities lived together separately. The British thesis was that not a rupee nor a virgin would be left in Bengal the day after the last Tommy sailed from Alexandra Docks. As Alexandra Docks is in Bombay Bengal meant India.
The only priority for the departing alien rulers was that all their own people should leave India and Pakistan unharmed. Nothing else mattered or was provided for. The trained goons of British Raj, the professional Hindus and the Muslims who had been the agents provocateur to spark and trigger riots in the decades gone by were the only organized force left in the civil society. The houses of rich Hindus in Lahore and other places in Pakistan or rich Muslims in Mussoorie and Dillee and other places in India were easy soft and lucrative targets.
To make sure that there was no resistance offered riots were engineered and murders rapes and the stripping and parading of nude women took place without any interference from the police.
No one has estimated the numbers of the dead wounded mutilated and raped but anywhere between a quarter million and half a million lives were lost. Tens of thousands of women were abducted raped mutilated and made into whores and prostitutes. As the chastity of a woman is the property of the male in a patriarchal society and the honour of the family is involved there was no place for the abducted woman to return to even if she were recovered. The incidents add to the Tale of The Never-Ending Wrong!.
The British left without a single hair on their heads harmed by the violence caused by their insistence on partitioning the country before they left
The idea that the successors to the British, the present bearers of the White Mans Burden, the U.S. Americans are behind the Indo-Pak détente shows that the old order changeth to yield place to the new; and God fulfills himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world. It is very pleasing. The chances of success are bright, We shall, from our files, resurrect the poem of Ahmad Faraz to proceed positively into a future of peace and amity.