Partition of India: Constructing a Religious Identity or a Political One

The eve of August 14th, 1947 marks the partition of British India into India, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (Bangladesh). The decision to divide India to create Pakistan, the Land of the Holy, displaced over 12 million people including Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and was the reason for over a million communal deaths and a major refugee crisis. Many scholars and historians have pondered upon all the different reasons for the partition, writing it in a ten page essay would seem futile and shallow. Using the events of the partition, this essay attempts to deconstruct whether it was a religious reason that made the partition inevitable, or a political one.  Two lenses to explain one level: Constructivists would argue that the history of conflict between the distinct religious identities of Hindus and Muslims had created irreparable hostilities between the two communities, inevitably leading to demands for a separate country necessary for the self-determination and liberation of Muslims. Realists on the other hand argue that States and leaders act in their own self-interest; they would look at the role of the British East India Company, the balance of powers between the Allies and Axis, and the nature of interactions between Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and the members of the Indian National Congress, to conclude that the division was prompted by the nature of the political climate at the time. It is important to note that the narrative of the partition is one that stirs up a lot of emotion, and is often written in black or white, one-sided ways that do not always paint a complete picture. This essay will try to take a more wholistic view of this.

Depending on where one chooses to start the story of the Independence struggle, one may draw different conclusions, finding different underlying factors. For the purposes of this essay, I see 1919 as a key turning point in the story. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Jawaharlal Nehru, Maulana Azad, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel were some of the key members of the Indian National Congress (INC), the leading political party at the time. Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League was one of the key patrons for Hindu-Muslim unity within India. In the early 20th century, there arose a pan-islamic movement known as the Khilafat movement (Indian-Muslim movement) that looked at the restoration of the Ottoman Caliphate. Key leaders like Jinnah, Azad, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar, and Hakim Ajmal Khan argued for the rights and better conditions for the Muslim community in Turkey (then dismantled Ottoman Empire). Until the year 1919, Gandhi believed in cooperating with the British. Before that, many Indians had passively accepted their inferior, secondary status within their own country. The Jallianwalla Bagh Massacre: on April 13th 1919, Acting Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered troops of the British Indian Army to fire at a group of unarmed peaceful protesters, killing over a thousand Indian citizens: prompting Gandhi to have a change of heart to non-compliance. Being an influential leader of the INC, he combined the Khilafat movement with his own Satyagraha, a non-violent, non-cooperation movement against the Rowlatt Act (suspended civil liberties for peaceful freedom fighters) and for the Independence of India. This gave birth to the Government of India Act of 1919 that provided a dual form of government, promising Indians authority over certain provinces. 

By 1935, this evolved into provincial autonomy, allowing Indians to hold elections under the condition that there would be cooperation on the side of the INC (a bargain of sorts). They had in place special electorate reservations for Muslims and Scheduled Caste minorities (fought for by Jinnah and B.R. Ambedkar respectively) but Ambedkar had to yield after Gandhi went on a fast unto death in opposition. In 1935, Nehru spoke against special reservation for Muslims, sparking some of the first conversations amongst the Muslim League about Pakistan, a separate country for Muslims. The INC was vehemently against splitting the country, arguing for a secular India, yet couldn't see need for Jinnah’s and Ambedkar’s argument of representation being the key to liberating minorities. The Muslim League conducted an investigation into the conditions of Muslims in society and found that there was a growing fear that the British rule would be replaced by a Hindu majority rule and Muslims would remain second class citizens even in free India.

In 1942, Congress launched the Quit India Movement, going back on the provincial autonomy agreement and demanded Independence. Just as the Congress was rebelling, Jinnah gave orders to the Muslim League to cooperate completely with the British; Nehru torpedoing the special electorates and reservation forced the Muslim League to side with the British for support. Contrary to popular notions, Jinnah was an ambassador for unity until being betrayed by the Congress; he called on the Muslim League for Direct Action Day in 1946. A day of great violence over highlighting the demand for a Muslim nation, more than 4000 people died. 

A conversation within the Congress on whether choosing Jinnah as the Prime Minister of free India, instead of dividing the country into Pakistan was shot down and Nehru was appointed as Prime Minister to-be. Sardar Patel was a prominent leader of the Congress who supported Jinnah and the Muslim League in their want for a new country and represented India on the Partition Council. The British finally agreed to give India independence and Lord Mountbatten, the Viceroy at the time, advanced the date of independence by six months because the British Army was worried it wouldn’t be able to handle the potential violence.

Eventually, a Pakistan that was carved out of India was born a day ahead, on August 14th 1947. Constructivists and realists would look at different events and factors to argue whether the Partition was inevitable or not.

Constructivists believe that a State is based not on material but on social needs. They focus on identities, cultures, norms and national interests; leaders are not only motivated by material interests but also by their sense of collective identity, social morality and what cultures consider appropriate. Chandler et al see identity as a source of power, and would argue that Indians didn’t have much power over the British because ‘Indian’ wasn’t an identity until the Independence struggle and the people of the Indian subcontinent were divided into more than 70,000 princely states. This made it easy for the British to divide and rule Indians. For example, the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 that Gandhi led was to help liberate farmers growing indigo, who were paid a pittance and yet were highly taxed by the British. In a post-Cold War theory that looks back on events as reasons for actions and identifies a State as anarchic depending on the distribution of identities with it, this is a clash of identities and class that this theory might classify as anarchic. 

Constructivists such as Weldt see power in discursive, changing terms. Muslims had little power being the minority and the Muslim League didn’t have as much power because they weren’t being elected as much as the INC. This power dynamic changed in 1935 when the Muslim League allied with the British during the INC’s non-compliance movement. Constructivists would look at the religious identity of Jinnah and how he fought for special electorate representation to preclude Muslims from becoming a powerless minority. Gandhi’s power within the INC and his staunch opposition to a separate electorate would have reenforced Jinnah’s fears. The only way he saw his community avoiding an inferior status yet again was to fight for Pakistan. 

State sovereignty according to Constructivists is a contested concept with the assertion that States don’t have absolute control over boundaries. The boundaries making between Pakistan and India was so rushed and haphazard, it caused the displacement of 12 million people and the then Viceroy Lord Mountbatten is heavily criticized for it. The seemingly arbitrary lines on the map forced the majority Muslim population in undivided Punjab (West Punjab went to Pakistan and East Punjab went to India) and the majority Hindu and Sikh communities in current day Bangladesh and Pakistan to uproot their entire homes and herds to switch sides. This is in line with the Constructivists argument that neither Pakistan nor India can suddenly claim a rigid boundary that has been part of certain communities for generations. 

We now transition out of how Constructivists view sterile map making to the charged atmosphere of forced mass migration. This evokes a lot of heart-rending emotion due to the amount of egregious, inhuman violence that was sparked by fermenting religious differences (see picture on first page). Constructivists would argue while it is tragic, the Partition was inevitable. They would look back to pre-colonial India and see an irreparable history between the iconoclasts and the Islamaphobes, a feud that still goes on to this day. They see war as a reaction to escalating tensions. 

Benedict Anderson who studied the origins of nationalism argues that it is a product of print capitalism. While proliferation of vernacular and independent print media and the growth of communication certainly helped mobilize citizens against British rule and unite India under the goal of Independence, it also had the unsavory repercussion of inter-community violence on a national, perhaps even global scale. In a Cambridge article titled Muslims Against the Muslim League by Qasmi and Robb, they quote several Marxist and Secular-Nationalist Muslims, stating that several class conflicts have been maliciously misrepresented. Tensions between Muslim landlords and Hindu tenants, or vice versa would be labelled in the news as religious conflicts, spreading a national level hatred between the two communities. Constructivists would look at media as an instrument that exacerbated already fraying relationships and caused these growing tensions to explode into civil wars, such as the one seen on Direct Action Day. While this Constructivist approach is one that most Partition scholars take, there are several criticisms to looking at it solely through a religious prism.

In his podcast, The History and Context of Partition, Sunil Amrith from Harvard University argues that widespread cultural and religious illiteracy forces the narrative that religion was the reason for Partition. Holding the entire Muslim community responsible for the actions of Jinnah falsely implicates innocence. Religion can be dehumanizing and marginalizing, and he argues that we must look at the events as they transpired instead of attributing religious motives and boxing leaders into identities. He sees religion as a cultural context that is ever changing with the socio-political-economic climate. While Constructivist scholars look to the Two Nation theory (Hindus and Muslims are separate identities hence the need for separate nations as evidence) for the Partition, the reality is that Indian Muslims aren’t one identity. As history later showed, Bengali Muslims deemed themselves entirely different from Pakistani Muslims and hived off their own country, Bangladesh. Whether or not the Muslim League or the INC knew this at the time, dividing the country based on Muslim exclusivity denies India of a rich history and culture to which Islam has been a generous contributor. The importance placed on religion has forced so many pre-Partition Indians to pick between their religious identity and their cultural identity, choosing whether they are Muslim first or Indian first has instilled so much hatred and violence between the two communities. Another perspective that doesn’t see religion as a main factor is the Realist view on international politics.

Realists see the nature of international politics as being in a constant state of anarchy. Paraphrasing Hobbes, the relationship between those who wanted Pakistan, those who fought for India and the British was in a constant state of stormy weather. Power, according to Morgenthau is the ability for humans to control other humans; States and leaders, like individuals always act in self-interest. The British had control over the Indian subcontinent through a gradual take over, their relationship with then collection of princely states changed from from trade (East India Company) to rule. 

Unlike Constructivists who see identity as a source of power, Realists like Mearshimer see military strength and wealth having an upper hand. The East India Company were able to grow their economy, profiting off Indian labour and resources such as dye and spices, and had over 200,000 soldiers in the Indian subcontinent. They also divided them into provinces, often across socio-religious boundaries, making it easier for them to rule. Realists argue that a balance of power is important in the preservation of national self interest. When the system is unipolar and there is one State with the most power, such as the British at the time, they make small compromises to other players in order to stay the pole power.  Every Government of India Act was a British concession of power through elections and provincial autonomy, so that they could remain the ruling power and the smaller parties were kept in abeyance. 

The power dynamic between the INC, the Muslim League and the British is one that gets strained at various points in history; including on August 9th, 1942. The INC along with Jinnah had a conversation about the future of an independent, sovereign homeland, especially during World War II. By this time, the Germany on the West had conquered all the way to Alexandria and Japan from the East had taken over Burma and were at the gates of Assam (a north eastern state of India). It appeared to Gandhi that the Axis powers were getting particularly strong and he was worried that they would wage war on British India for being affiliated with an Allied power. Acting in self-interest as Realists would argue, they were debating whether India should continue to cooperate or take advantage of a weakening of Britain’s global power and strike out, possibly allying with Japan. Both Jinnah and Nehru were opposed to this; Nehru was specifically worried about losing China as an ally. Nevertheless, Gandhi won the debate and the Congress launched the Quit India Movement, a non-violent, non-cooperative stance against the British. 

This was when Jinnah gave orders to the Muslim League to ally with the British. This changed the balance of power within the Indian Subcontinent. With the INC going back on the provincial autonomy agreement and denouncing special reservation of electorates, Jinnah was forced to act in self-interest and campaign for the Partition of India and for a Muslim-exclusive Pakistan. If the British were clearly a stronger power, why did they concede and accept Independence and the Partition of Indian? 

Liberals offer a criticism and an explanation to that. Unlike Realists, Liberals believe that States are non-unitary and the kind of government in rule matters in International politics. In 1945, there was a change in British administration from Churchill’s Conservatives to the Labour Party with Prime Minister Clement Attlee. While Churchill made it amply clear that he would continue to hold India hostage under the British Crown, Liberals would argue that the kind of government, in this case the labour administration, changed the dynamic of the international system. Under the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan, the British government aimed to transfer power to Indian leadership and to preserve Indian unity. Their agenda for a united India stemmed partly from pride in having unified a sub-continent and partly from their apprehensions that Pakistan was viable. The mission found that both the INC and Muslim League had done fairly well in the elections, the Muslim League winning 90% of the special electorate seats. However, their temporary patronage of the Muslim League coerced them to agree to a partitioning. With agreement by prominent leaders of the INC such as Sardar Patel, they haphazardly partitioned Hindu-majority Bengal and Punjab away, forming East Pakistan and West Pakistan. This is looked at as one of the reasons for major inter-religious violence and disharmony.

The reason for partition is not something that can be substantially explored in a 10 page article, but the intersectionality of the religio-political motives can be debated. Examining the epoch defining events through the lenses of Constructivists and Realists arguments make sense in synergy yet none of them make sense in isolation. Trying to break down and understand multi faceted event such as the Partition will only make sense if looked at as a confluence of a number of reasons . The political climate at the time shaped a shared consciousness within Indians, a term of identity that wasn’t a familiar one until colonization. The political state of India that was influenced by a British conquest that happened to have a geo-political identity before a socio cultural one. The by-product of both World Wars, and the invasions at the shores of India, further cemented political unity in the country that didn’t exist. As Constructivists would argue, this shaping of identities where Indians looked at themselves as part of a larger country, rather than one of the 70,000 sub-nations that existed before, was important in their claim to their own homeland. Realists would agree that many of the decisions made by the key leaders were driven by self-interested. The tussle between the British wanting to maintain power and maliciously building religious fervor with vested interest helped them maintaining a balance of power between Hindus and Muslims and fermented these divides to remain a power centre with the highest leverage. Indians also looked at pre-independent colonial India as one sovereign entity in the global system during World War II, they had to preserve allies and establish their place in the balance of power even though the British didn’t see it that way. Undeniably, international pressures brought on Britain caused a decline in their ability to manage India and they didn’t have the military or economic strength to subdue a disproportionately sized country like India. This complex confluence of events cannot be pigeon-holed into a singular rationale. While all of these theories explore an in-depth view of solitary reasons for partition, the richness of events cannot be captured through one lens, they must be taken together to form the full picture, the whole is definitely more than the sum of the parts.

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