Freedom and Fear: India and Pakistan at 70

In the midst of the monsoon of August 1947, British India ceased to be and gave way to two independent nations. The logic of this partition being religious and regional, the older and larger India was reinforced as a Hindu majoritarian society, while the newer and smaller Pakistan emerged as an Islamic country. No partitions are total and absolute but this one was especially terrible and ambiguous; it left about a 20 percent religious minority population on both sides. Moreover, it created two wings of Pakistan with a hostile Indian body-politic in the middle.

This event was not entirely of subcontinental making. The British Empire in Asia cracked under the hands of the Japanese army during World War II, most spectacularly with the fall of Singapore in February 1942, and began to crumble in South Asia after the war. Along with India and Pakistan, Burma (today’s Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) also emerged independent (both in 1948) at this time. All this was to bring about many changes, both internally in India and internationally. Europe, the ravaged battlefield of the world wars, ceased to be the center of the Western world, with political and economic power shifting decisively to the Soviet Union and the United States, representing two contrasting and conflicting ideological visions for the post-1945 world.

The end of British rule in South Asia happened alongside the emergence of this conflict, christened the Cold War. The road to freedom and partition of India and the creation of Pakistan was a long one and accompanied with fundamental social, economic, and political changes. From the mutiny of 1857 to the massacre of 1919 in Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar; from the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 to the establishment of the All-India Muslim League in 1906; from fighting for king and country in two world wars to seeking self-rule in the interwar years; and from the development of an elaborate civil and military bureaucratic and infrastructural apparatus and a space for provincial politics – all these were to completely transform Indian society.

This transformation and its underlying tensions ultimately contributed to that final moment, when in the middle of August 1947, Britain finally bid farewell to its prized colony after being there in one form or another as traders, marauders, administrators, and rulers for over 300 years. Weakened by World War II, the British were forced to accept the new realities of a determined nationalist struggle and an emerging new world order in which old-fashioned colonialism no longer seemed feasible. The journey toward this reality was slow and painful.

This year, on August 14 and 15, the Pakistani and Indian state and society, respectively, will mark 70 years of freedom. The bulk of both countries will be in celebratory mode as much of them were in 1947. Neither will want to remember the hard history of this freedom, nor face the harsh realities of it today. Back in 1947, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was in Karachi and Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi, both welcoming a new dawn of freedom, but also engulfed in the fear and flames of communal violence. The worst of this was in the partitioned province of the Punjab in North India, where from March 1947 onward in Rawalpindi, communal violence and forced migration of people completely changed the landscape. Over the next year, but largely concentrated in August-December 1947, approximately 1 million were massacred and over 10 million were forced to move from one side of the Radcliffe line to the other. Bengal in East India, the other province to be partitioned, experienced similar, if slower, migration but not murder on the same scale. Other provinces, like Sindh, United Province, Bihar, Assam, Bombay, and the North-Western Frontier Province, also saw religious riots and exchanges of refugee populations.

Partitions are never easy; they are fraught with physical uprooting and dislocation, emotional and psychological separations, and, often, bitter memories of enmities. The partition of British India, though, appeared inescapable in early 1947, once constitutional attempts to secure a confederal arrangement for the Muslims in India to live in a post-colonial Hindu-majority country, without fear, collapsed. The movement for a home for Indian Muslims had gained currency in the interwar period, with poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s presidential address to the 25th session of the All-India Muslim League in December 1930, envisioning “a consolidated, North-West Indian Muslim State” amalgamating “the Punjab, North-West Frontier province, Sind, and Baluchistan” and self-governing “within or without the British Empire.” It culminated, almost 10 years later, in March 1940, in the lawyer-politician Jinnah’s speech at another session of the League. Describing Muslims as a “nation,” not merely a community, Jinnah demanded “homeland, territory, and state” for them.

Jinnah, however, was less clear about what this new imagined homeland would look like. Partition was supposed to provide a single, peaceful solution to the question of self-determination of Muslims in British India. The reality was much more complex because Muslims were scattered all over the 11 provinces of British India and were in a simple, numerical majority in only four of them. Then, alongside British India, there existed over 550 princely states, semi-autonomous and indirectly ruled from Delhi, which comprised two-fifths of the area of the subcontinent and one-third of its population. Integrated – voluntarily as well as forcibly, in some cases – into India and Pakistan after the end of British paramountcy, the bloody partition of British India set off mass migration and violence among them too. The departing as well as incoming authorities were unprepared for this “unmixing” of people, which amounted to approximately 15 million people being forced to flee their homes due to the fear of violence that was spiralling out of control. This fear was neither necessary nor entirely unexpected and the authorities should have been better prepared but, in the event, it was employed to cynically and heartlessly justify the partition-laced freedom.

Gyanendra Pandey’s work, Remembering Partition (2001), contends that partition violence should not be seen in isolation or as some aberration. As he argues, “in the history of any society, narratives of particular experiences of violence go towards making the ‘community’ and the subject of history.” The history of violence in South Asia, particularly partition violence, is hardly an isolated case. It is in continuum of previous trends in rising levels of communal violence, dating at least from the early 1890s, and post-1947, there has hardly been a pause. It can also be contextualized globally, as Eric Hobsbawm argues, that the 21st century is “The Age of Extremes;” certainly it is one of the most violent to date. Thus, periodic flares, riots, pogroms, state violence, or whatever we call them, remind us that the history of using fear and violence has existed temporally and spatially on a wider scale. Free Indian and Pakistani states and societies have been eager beneficiaries of this colonial fear. Both countries have forgotten the syncretic, non-violent strands of their shared history, which lies on the brink of erasure in one and is discredited in the other.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and his idiosyncratic follower in the North-West Frontier Province, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (popularly known as Bacha Khan), were the torchbearers of this non-violent struggle against colonialism. Both had an enormous following committed to the principals of a non-violent and peaceful struggle, though there was always an element of them being rendered down to mere figureheads, where their own form was more important than their followers. Bacha Khan emerged from an area renowned equally for its tribal and aggressive approach to life, as well as its generosity and hospitality. But, soon after Pakistan was created, Bacha Khan’s ministry was dismissed on August 22, 1947. His past association and affiliation with the Indian National Congress could no longer be tolerated nor did it fit into the emerging state narrative in Pakistan. He was imprisoned, his legacy and contributions erased from history books, and generations of Pakistanis have now grown up without any knowledge of the legendary figure of Bacha Khan and his civil disobedience movement in the North-West Frontier Province.

On the other hand, India, from Nehru to the present Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has steadily whittled down the Gandhian philosophy of truthful protest and non-violence, Satyagraha and Ahimsa, and Gandhi’s stature as a national icon has declined. From embarking upon a big state (including forcible incorporation of Hyderabad, Nagaland, and Goa), in the 1950s and 1960s to witnessing three wars and a spell of internal emergency in 1960s and 1970s, to unleashing caste and communal mobilization and violence of an unprecedented degree since 1947 in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in Punjab and Assam, to, finally, embracing the economic free-market laissez-faire approach accompanied by deep inequities that have exposed existing social faultlines, India today has no place for Gandhi’s values beyond memorials and museums. The signs were there in 1948 when Nathuram Godse, a right-wing Hindu nationalist and a former member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), assassinated Gandhi. The RSS organization, established in 1925 “to carry out the supreme task of consolidating the Hindu society, for the Hindu culture was the life-breath of Hindustan,” in the words of its founder, was banned then, as it was in 1992, in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya.

The longue durée legacy of the subcontinent, then, has been hostile, violent, and communalized. Shortly after the euphoria of independence settled, the realization of the “unfinished business of partition” dawned; India and Pakistan began an “undeclared war” as early as October 1947. Pakistan feared that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, among the largest, most strategically located regions and comprising communal complexities in that a Muslim majority population was ruled by an unpopular Dogra-Hindu Maharaja, would accede to India. The princely states theoretically had a choice to determine their future accession to either India or Pakistan, but the practical imperatives of geography, demography, military, and ideology limited the exercise of this choice. Kashmir was especially sensitive. For Pakistan, it was difficult to imagine a bordering area with a Muslim-majority population belonging to a hostile India. Further, if the logic of partition was followed then it rightfully belonged to them. For the Indian National Congress, it was important to ideologically refute Pakistan’s whole premise, its raison d’être – the two-nation theory – and to reinforce its claim that India was a country for all communities. Besides, it was also the homeland of Nehru, a Kashmiri Pandit. The inclinations and sympathies of Maharaja Hari Singh, otherwise a hesitant and unsure figure, veered between dreaming about independence and declaring for India, and his population rose against him, to be aided and abetted by tribesmen entering from Pakistani territory. As they sought military assistance from India, Delhi extracted the political price of accession to India and Karachi responded accordingly, triggering the first India-Pakistan war.

The breathtaking beauty and harsh rugged elevations of the Jammu and Kashmir region are only matched by the rivalry between the two countries. To date this remains one of the main obstacles in achieving peace in the region. In the past 70 years, there have been some periods of relative peace; the vast majority, however, has been in the shadows of occupation, insurgency and conflict. The de facto Line of Control, established in 1972, is a harsh border that divides the Kashmiri people and neither country dares ask the people of Kashmir what their wishes and desires are. The denial of national self-determination and the consequent fear of uprising, especially in the Indian nation-state, is a reminder that Jammu and Kashmir has always been treated as “special.” The Indian state’s heavy militarized occupation, alongside its political facade and economic investments in the region, reflect the dissonant reality of a democratic India’s non-democratic relationship with Kashmir.

Last year many were asking what compelled a young 15-year-old boy to join the militancy against Indian rule in Kashmir. Burhan Wani emerged as the voice of oppressed Kashmiris and gained popularity using social media, but the young boy had known nothing but state suppression and insurgency in his short life. Seen as a potential threat, he was targeted and killed in July 2016, at the age of 21, which triggered further unrest. The fear of violence and subversion and a desire for freedom from oppression continues to dominate the narrative of Kashmir. The dreams and aspirations of the youth continue to wilt away with limited possibilities of changing the narrative that has dominated the political landscape for the past 70 years but especially since 1989, when the current cycle of violence began.

These dissenting voices are evidence that the struggle for freedom from colonialism has not continued in a linear tradition. The multiple nationalisms were ambiguous and contradictory – from the Congress’ to the League’s, with regional counterparts in Sindh and Bengal and in E. V. Ramasamy’s south India-based Dravidian movement and Master Tara Singh’s call for a Punjabi-speaking suba. There were revolutionary and radical elements as well, with the Communist Party of India and other such groups all contesting, conflicting, and seeking attention and influence. Thus it is no surprise that 70 years later these conflicting ideas and visions still exist, even if in varying forms. The difference is that India today is economically powerful and thus can use its economic muscle to exert influence and regionally come across as bullish and arrogant. Combine this with a government in power that is committed to cultural nationalism encased in the values of Hindutva, and the veneer of secularism quickly diminishes.

Pakistan, on the other hand, has gradually, since General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in the 1970-80s, moved toward a more enshrined and formalized Islamic identity. This in recent years has provided the foundations for further radicalism, violence, and fear to seep into everyday society. Some of these though were unresolved issues from trying to create a united Pakistan. Thus the language riots of 1952, the Baloch insurgency that started as early as 1948, the Sindhi-Mohajir conflict, and the anti-Ahmadi movement in 1953 are all examples of early dissent that showed faultlines cutting across the nation-state meta-narrative. The legacy of mixing religion and politics, though, is hardly a new phenomena; it was an integral part of colonial rule. While there were contesting forces and ardent supporters of secularism, or the radical left, and even individuals committed to Hindu-Muslim amity, it seems today, 70 years from independence that the two-nation theory still holds true, perhaps even more so than it did in 1940. While the two-nation theory may have been refuted by the Indian National Congress in the wake of partition and it certainly suffered a setback in 1971 when East Pakistan decided that its ethnic and linguistic identity was worth declaring independence for, in contemporary South Asia, religious nationalism is alive and well. The fear instilled by these forces is not too difficult to see.

Pakistan, although imagined on the basis of a homeland for the Muslims of India, still welcomed other groups. At the time of partition, the population of Pakistan consisted of 25 percent other communities. Indeed, the white strip on the Pakistani flag represented the other religious minorities in the country. Today, however, the number of minorities in Pakistan has dwindled down to less than 5 percent, in part because Bangladesh was created in 1972 (which had a significant Hindu population) and more recently Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, and Sikhs have all suffered from the fear of being persecuted as a minority. Ahmadis were declared non-Muslim and minorities such as Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs, have frequently been targeted by suicide attacks, particularly in their neighborhoods. Minority places of worship are now guarded by barbed wire and tight security for the fear that they may be attacked. This goes against the whole principle of having an open door for worshippers and those looking for spiritual guidance or solace. This stands in sharp contrast to the vision that Jinnah had for Pakistan, when on August 11, 1947 he said, “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan.”

While violence toward minorities in recent years has seen a surge, the fear of the “other” has always been there. In 1949 Liaquat Ali Khan, shortly after Jinnah’s death, put forward the Objectives Resolution. This was to lay the foundation for the constitution but crucially it assumed that sovereignty lay with Allah. In the dizzy days of formalizing Pakistan’s first Constitution in 1956, it was ideas such as these that ultimately saw Pakistan transformed from a Republic to an Islamic Republic. Under the first democratically elected government of Pakistan, we also saw Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto outlaw the Ahmadiyya community as heretics in 1974 while a bitter civil conflict continued between the state and Balochistan – again under the influence of Islamist parties. During this process of defining Pakistan as a nation-state, the idea of who is a legitimate and worthy citizen has increasingly been at the cost of marginalizing other communities. This has set the foundation for “othering” the non-Muslims of Pakistan and limiting the parameters of what it means to be a Muslim. Pakistan has moved toward looking to Mecca and Medina as its spiritual homeland, at the same time downplaying its historical and cultural ties with South Asia and Persia. This was particularly visible in the 1970s, when first the birth of Bangladesh led to a further strengthening of core “Islamic” values and then General Zia openly embraced and promoted this agenda.

Meanwhile, during the 2014 election campaign in India, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s star campaigner and prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, rekindled an old flame. The man who had been the chief minister of Gujarat during the 2002 riots, in which more than 2,000 Muslims were killed, reached back into the late 19th century to pluck out cow protection societies.

The movement, then spearheaded by Hindu reform societies such as the Arya Samaj and Sanatan Dharma Sabhas, had helped to politicize the ritual slaughter of cows. They called for a complete ban, especially around the Muslim festival of Bakrid, and caused the first, large-scale, organized riots of modern India, in 1890-1893 from Multan to Rangoon. The movement, which had a strong upper-middle caste and class bias and was largely urban-based across north India, served to cement a greater rift between Hindus and Muslims in colonial India. And, in spite of Gandhi’s aversion to bans, in independent India, the gau-rakshaks (cow-protectors) have returned, fuelled by similarly fantastic fears and concerns of upper-caste Hindus. They reveal the realities of India’s current trendy bovine nationalism, whose fusion with constitutional state and territorial sovereignty has been challenged thrice; on all three occasions, tellingly, by Punjabi Sikhs, Christian Nagas, and Kashmiri Muslims.

The BJP is now the governing party in India and in half of its states. In the most recent elections in Uttar Pradesh – an Indian state with a population of more than 204 million, making it larger than the entire country of Pakistan – the party got a thumping majority and has installed Yogi Adityanath as chief minister. Yogi Adityanath is head priest of the Gorakhnath Temple in Gorakhpur, and founded a militant, private outfit of young men called Hindu Yuva Vahini in 2002. Inspired by the “Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan” template, the party has embarked on a violent and indiscriminate campaign against beef consumption. Jingoistic nationalism is running amok, pursued by self-appointed guardians, vigilantes, and protectors of Bharat Mata (Mother India) and her holy cow, targeting “outsiders” for eating, storing, or trading in beef and emblematically being of divided sacred loyalties. This has resulted in a spike in attacks, in which the vast majority (86 percent) of the casualties have been Muslims and Dalits. Many of the attacks taking place have been based on little more than rumor and in their low-intensity, psychological impact are all about creating an atmosphere of fear in free India for some and an India free from fear for others.

In 2015, a mob entered the house of a 52-year-old Muslim man, Mohammed Ikhlaq, in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, on the suspicion that the meat is his refrigerator was beef. He was lynched to death. There ought to be multiple outrages here, yet this was seen as an anomaly. Recently on June 22, a 15-year-old boy, Junaid Khan, was on a train from Delhi when he and his brothers were targeted for allegedly eating beef. Khan was brutally attacked and then left to die; there was an audience of travellers and people passing by. No one intervened or objected.

These anomalies have become too frequent. How does secular free India justify or equate mob rule? All liberal democracies are less liberal and democratic than their self-image; still, Khan’s murder shows that today these sights have become far too regular, even the “new normal.” Intolerance has created the space to justify these acts of brutality in the name of nation and religion. On each of the key faultlines – religion, caste, tribe, gender, language, ethnicity, and class – minorities, Dalits, Adivasis, speakers of regional languages, and those truly on the margins, the poor, may well ask, what sort of freedom is this and what does independence mean for them?

Interestingly, the BJP has been using 19th century reform and reprisal initiatives such as Shuddhi (purification) to bring people back into the folds of Hinduism. The Ghar Wapsi (homecoming) program has inevitably been used to further communalize identities and has created insecurity among minorities. While in Pakistan there have numerous cases of forced conversion, this is a pressurized and perverse form of asserting the Hindu identity in India. The RSS has controversially been attempting to convert Adivasis to Hinduism, particularly in reaction to those escaping the trials and tribulations of Hindu social organization by getting attracted to the more egalitarian and education-minded Christian missionaries who work in the interiors of India. Here too, parallels with colonial India are clear to see.

The RSS have been very assertive about the Hindu identity, in which “foreign” religions like Islam and Christianity – as well as “foreign” ideologies like communism and socialism – are targeted to be broken down by violence and oppression. Conversely, others like Sikhism, Buddhism, or Jainism are tolerated and sought to be assimilated because they are either home-grown or considered an offshoot of Hindutva. The RSS, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Bajrang Dal – the latter two of Ram-Janmabhoomi Movement fame, which pulled down the Babri Mosque and desires to see a Ram Temple built on that spot – and the ideas they have appropriated – nationalism, loyalty, honor, pride, military, and territory –  today reach deep into Hindu-Indian society. They provide the ideological framework for the BJP and its brand of overlapping Hindu-secular ideologies, thereby reducing Indian Muslims and Christians to secondary citizenship. It is difficult to see how the diverse and more tolerant voices of India, tarnished by the charges of “minority appeasement” and “pseudo-secularism,” will survive in the coming years.

It is not farfetched to imagine that in a generation India will be a mirror image of Pakistan.

Pakistanis still lament the deep and damaging impact of General Zia, which paved the way for a deeply insular and narrowly defined Islamic identity to shape future generations. The millennial generation or the “burger kids” in Pakistan have known only of a deeply Islamic society; the relatively more open and tolerant 1950s and ‘60s are alien to many. Even though in 2013 Pakistan had its first successful transition from one democratically-elected government to another since 1947, it remains difficult to challenge the power of the mullah and military in Pakistan today.

Although this recent increase in mobocracy and spectator violence has made many question notions of freedom, equality, and patriotism in India, it is not entirely isolated. This falls into a continuum of evolutionary violence from the colonial to the post-colonial. And Pakistan, too, has not been immune to it. There the blasphemy laws have been similarly used to settle personal vendettas or target minorities. One of the most shocking recent attacks involved a young student victim. Mashal Khan was an aspiring student at Abdul Wali Khan University in Mardan, in northwest Pakistan. On  April 13 he was dragged out of his room at the university hostel by a crowd of students, beaten, and shot. Graphic images of the disgraced corpse were recorded on mobile phones and shared widely on social media. Khan was 23 years old, studying journalism and, earlier in the day, had been accused of posting blasphemous content online, though the fact that he alleged some university staff were corrupt is seen as a more accurate explanation. Others were threatened by his liberal and secular views; he was also vocal about his opinions.

British-era laws designed to prosecute faith leaders, writers, or those promoting inter-communal violence are now openly used to accuse people of blasphemy, a crime punishable by death. Before 1986, only 14 cases were ever reported under these laws, yet between 1987 and 2017, 1,472 people have been charged. Some 65 people have been murdered since 1987 because of alleged blasphemy. Mainstream parties have been reluctant to speak up about repealing these laws for fear of Islamic parties and religious conservatism. The fear is genuine as people like Saleem Taseer, who was the governor of Punjab province, and Shahbaz Bhatti, a federal minister for minorities, both were assassinated in 2011 for their opposition to the blasphemy laws. Taseer’s killer, Mumtaz Qadri – who was hanged in February 2016 – instead of being vilified, became a cause celebre.

What cases like Junaid Khan and Mashal Khan show is how there is a fear of difference, and an indifference toward freedom for “internal other(s).” These are values that can potentially threaten the very core of these two democracies, notwithstanding their self-disavowals. The fact that young men like Mashal Khan and Junaid Khan can be murdered by mobs in broad daylight, while people watch this most gruesome act as spectators, should compel both countries to think carefully about what and whose freedoms they are protecting.

By the same token, many commentators, and rightly so, argue that the cow is safer than women in today’s India, which is a reference to the high number of women who face sexual violence everyday. Freedom was gained in 1947 and many thought it would mean the freedom of speech, expression, territory, equality of opportunity, and so forth. Yet Hindu India has never completely reconciled itself with the idea of an Indian Muslim and Pakistan has continued to deny the minority (non-Sunni Muslims) a rightful place in the Islamic Republic.

Supporting secular voices, tolerating a diverse range of oppositional voices, and creating a strong civil society are important to making a country safe. Framed constitutionally and bureaucratically as colonial entities, with an enduring mid-20th century governmentality bequeathed by the British, who also left the legal apparatus, an intact army, and the English language, among other things, these post-colonial nation-societies have built on the legacy of violence and fear since 1947 by their mutilated modernities and mimicries.

Protests at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016 and Ramjas College at Delhi University in 2017, with chants of Azaadi (freedom), clearly showed that the idea of freedom is not merely an act of political freedom and is certainly not a freedom from thought in the increasingly mind-numbing and stealth homogenization of the millennial generation. It entails actual and real freedoms, freedoms which allow citizens to exist without fear of persecution, fear of raising critical voices, fear of consumption and cultural practices, fear from oppression and, above all, freedom from having a question mark at their very existence just for being.

The role of any democratic country, with a well-defined rule of law, is to protect all its citizens, ensuring that their rights and freedoms are safeguarded. This is especially true of countries where, as in the case of Pakistan, there is a significant minority; and in the case of India, though a majority Hindu state, secularism is enshrined in its constitution. It is in fact difficult to imagine these lands without the heterogeneity that forms the essence of being South Asian. It is this vibrancy and diversity that gives it character and strength. To move toward a homogenous culture is not only problematic but also dangerous because it is based on exclusivity.