Independence

Having spent the entirety of my summer holidays in India from the age of 1 to 10, I can't begin to explain the happiness and joy the month of August brings to its people. The kite flying, the street food, the carnivals and the tangible euphoria in the atmosphere is something that I will never forget.  As the streets flood with hundreds of people, the national anthem’s instrumental blares from any working speaker and the slightly off-beat sound of ‘saare Jahan se acha…’ (better than any other nation) begins to echo through the subcontinent. I, being British and disinterested in this slightly embarrassing spectacle, often would mumble some random words or try and use this opportunity to rap some couplets in the hopes of securing the record deal I have always wanted. I would then have fun watching the other kids fly their kites, a skill that I can't seem to learn, and eventually go home with my cousins, aunty and uncle. I would be reminded that the British were kicked out of their country in 1947. Reminded that I’m not Indian, I would get berated with statistics about India and it's general superiority to my homeland. I would then submit to the torment and release a flood of tears in hopes that they would stop this barrage. Finally, my uncle would calm down the bullying and pacify the situation, after of course hearing me surrender my case.

 

 

After these quasi- traumatic events I developed a kind of hatred for the topic, avoiding reading about it or discussing it. I became wilfully ignorant to a part of history so important to my people. I listened to my father tell me about his father’s struggles moving from Pakistan to India with an emptiness in my eyes and no emotion in my heart because I never took the time to understand the severity of what happened in 1947.

 

However, as I finally decided to let go of my ignorance, I realised I wasn’t alone. My friends, family and peers all seemed to have developed an avoidance of the issue. Maybe, like me, they developed a patriotic attachment to Britain and didn’t want to hear about the atrocities committed by their homeland. Or maybe they had been, like my baba, scarred by the events of those times and became hardened against the topic.

 

So in this blog, I want to explore the story a little bit, delve into the legacy of those events and explore the true meaning of the festivities I was a part of in my youth. I want to question the story passed down to me by my family and challenge the image of a triumphant India reigning over the British.

The story.

 

I am not here, and certainly not qualified, to give an exhaustive account of what happened in India in 1947.  I think it is important to read accounts of the events by the authors themselves to truly understand what happened and to appreciate their effect on those involved.

 

However, I will attempt to tell you on a surface level what happened and hope to do justice by the millions who suffered just so their story is even more visible to those, who like me, may be looking for some clarity.

 

So what happened…

 

The 200 years of British rule came to an end on the 15th August 1947 when the Indian Independence Bill was passed through parliament. It was a bill that was motioned months earlier after the British had decided that the cost of running India now became a conflict with their interests. The strain of world war two and the added tensions coming from the east proved too much to be handled unless some serious sacrifices were to be made.

 

The Raj, although consistently opposed to by the Indian people, struggled to hold onto India since the start of  twentieth century. The pressures imposed from the world wars, the political and economic turmoil in the British isles, as well as the constant pressure of maintaining order in the Indian subcontinent, meant that the grip Britain once wielded so strongly began to slip. In addition to this, the freedom movement finally had order and unity to it, numbering the days they could feasibly hold onto the land they had happened across two centuries earlier.

 

The Indian people had evolved as did the world. The British at the end of the world war had realised that their economy couldn’t be held afloat through the imperialism they had used previously. The emergence of the United States of America as a superpower meant that the British finally had a counterpart to which they were accountable. The days of more taxation than profit came to an end, as did their tight noose on the Indian people. But the evolution of the Indian people also meant that any means of holding onto power was no longer possible. The people that were once meek and subservient now began to acquire smarts and the means to learn from the British how to defeat them. The anglicised-lawyers came back to their motherland to free her. Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah had seen enough suffering and mobilised the Indian people in a way that was never seen, nor ever possible, before them.

 

The culmination of the international and national climate was the decision to free India, to create from her body three nations that would rule themselves and be free of British interference. India, East Pakistan and West Pakistan would now stand as nations in their own right.

 

It was thus decided in the aftermath of World War Two that the British would exit the nations in the following two years. The man tasked with organising the transition was Louis Mountbatten and the drawing of the borders would be done by a Lord Radcliffe. It was also decided that the two nations would be led by the leaders of the independence movements. On the one side there would be the Hindu leader Nehru, Gandhi’s successor/protégé, who would hold onto the position as the Independent India’s first Prime Minister. On the other, there was Jinnah, the Muslim independence leader, who was given control of the Pakistans and the fate of the Muslim population.

 

The partition of the two nations then came through religious, romantic and preferential divisions. Nehru, the more liked of the two leaders and Mountbatten’s close friend, got preferential treatment throughout the negotiations because of his relationships but also his religion. Religion you see was of great importance during any decision made by the British when it came to the splitting of India. It is because of this that two men from the same part of India, who shared the same anglicised training in law and who shared the same goal of a free nation, became so far estranged in the process. The history of the two of course shows their issues with one another, but a wider glance at the relation between Hindus and Muslims shows that their issues were symptomatic of something much larger. The British hatred of the Muslims is what I, as well as a great number of scholars, believe to be the reason behind the hatred between Gandhi and Jinnah but also of the general Hindu and Muslim populations. 

 

Since the British Raj had taken India over, there were always religious lines drawn between the religions of Hinduism and Islam. The patented idea of ‘divide and conquer’ was used smartly by the British to reign over the subcontinent without having to exhaust their resources. This characteristic way of ruling then came to be of great importance to them in 1857 when, at sea, Muslim crewmates protested and mutinied against the British due to them using pork in their bullets and making the Muslims chew them before use, knowing full well it was forbidden in the Islamic religion. This uprising on the part of Muslims was then stopped by the British with the help of the Hindus, creating a precedence of favourable behaviour and an alliance that alienated the Muslims along the way.

 

Back to 1947 though, the year of independence. Jinnah had been seen by the Hindu population as an uptight leader who would only favour the Muslims. The Muslims had also formed this opinion about Gandhi and the now more relevant Nehru. The societal pressures, opposing ideologies and the British induced jealousy for one another meant that the proceedings were never going to be fair. However, with the added support of Mountbatten to Nehru, it was clear that Pakistan would have to fight for everything they got.

 

Mountbatten handed the job of splitting the two nations to Lord Radcliffe, a judge from Britain who had never visited (nor would ever visit) the nation of India. He, through the instruction of Mountbatten, consensus data about the religious inclinations of villages on the proposed borders and through viewing an atlas, decided to draw the lines up. He was ordered to split Pakistan into two, an Eastern Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (Pakistan). He was told to reject Jinnah’s request for a corridor through India that would connect the two nations. He was asked to keep all forts within India. He was instructed to do all of this in a matter of seven months and to announce the split two days after independence.  This shameful methodology would be like the EU deciding to oust the UK, telling them what they will get without negotiations and giving them seven months to comply, bearing in mind that the actual Brexit negotiations have been going on for four years.

 

What came next was a complete dissolving of morality. The British ensured their safety as they displaced fifteen million people. They left the thousands murdered behind as they filled suitcase after suitcase with money, gold and Indian treasure intending to resettle back in their homeland. The population of this now divided country however focused on perpetuating the hatred for one another, setting stricter religious boundaries and burned in the fire ignited by the Brits.

 

The Legacy of Independence

 

It is clear to me now that the Independence is something to be celebrated because it is almost as if the puppet strings that were attached to the people of these nations before had now been taken off. But, just as with the puppet without the string, the countries became formless and flaccid. 

 

The people divided, the lives ruined and the seeds for hatred planted, India and Pakistan were now enemies. The events of the following years show this perfectly and even now we look at Kashmir and the atrocities going on there as a result of 1947 and the preceding issues.

 

I’m not going to ramble on about the intricacies of the issues between India and Pakistan as they are well documented and far too numerous for this blog. However, we need to recognise the issue at hand. Two neighbouring countries have been at odds with one another to what is approaching a century. There is fake news, political propaganda and threats shared by both of them at an alarming rate and I think that this is symptomatic of a semantic issue. The semantics used, the words Hindu and Muslim as well as the connotations each nation assign to the other are all things that make peace an unachievable goal. When one nation discusses issues with another they can be resolved, but when you only look at the other nation as a group defined by their religion, such peace seems unattainable. A Hindu would never say that they’re wrong when their identity as an individual is replaced by their creed, as to accept defeat would be the same as accepting the issues with their religion. The lines upon which these nations were divided may have been religious but how can we perpetuate this stigmatisation of every Indian as a Hindu nationalist and every Pakistani as an Islam nationalist when the two nations aren’t, and have never been homogenous in terms of religion. India’s second-most populous religion is Islam and whilst Pakistan had a majority Muslim population, it still doesn’t make sense to characterise their actions as being Muslim because every Muslim on the planet isn’t Pakistani.

 

So today we are left in a place where Muslims and Hindus globally are divided because of the chaos put into place in 1947. The British intention of dividing and conquering has been fulfilled as they left fifteen million people in jeopardy but still face no responsibility because the two nations can't seem to agree on a singular stance. Racial divisions are arbitrary, to say the least, but it seems as though a religion that a person is born into also affects their whole life’s trajectory and that is downright preposterous.

 

For the older generation that reads the news from back home and gets influenced by the WhatsApp messages they’re sent, you are a part of the problem because you don’t question what you’re told. And to the younger generation that have inherited these issues, this war that had been waged by the British as their safety clause is one that you needn’t perpetuate as it's one that will hold you back.