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The partition of British India ranks among the most cynical and coldly calculated acts inflicted by a European colonial power as it surrendered the jewel in its imperial crown in 1947. The British have been known to draw lines on the world map to suit their economic, military and geostrategic interests, and call the divided bits countries. In most cases, these lines were drawn with diabolical foresight to keep the resulting countries prone to internal and external infighting. The Anglophile elite in these countries would paper over the deep wounds left behind by the British with flags, national anthems and constitutions which, in hindsight, have had little or no meaning other than to exacerbate tensions, wars and strife among the bits of the originally undivided country. The examples of the division of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, the division of Germany after World War 2, and the division of Korea in 1951 stand out as actions initiated by the British whenever they found themselves in complex or even intractable political or economic crises. However, even among these acts of vivisection of people who generally had no wish to be divided artificially into new countries, the partition of India is unrivalled in its sheer brazenness and disregard for all moral scruple.
Britain was an empire in 1947, and one of the features of an empire, as opposed to a country, is that its influence extends beyond its political borders. In partitioning India, Britain was exercising its hegemony over undivided India, even as it was ostensibly leaving its Indian Empire. Here were a people, roughly 350 million strong, of diverse ethnicities, races, cultures, religions, and languages, all of whom belonged to a 5000-year-old culture characterised by a plurality of thought, tradition, and temper. India was not merely a country in 1947. It was a civilizational state, and it is because of this simple fact that it survived reasonably intact as a civilisation in a world where other ancient civilisations, Egypt, Greece, Maya, Inca, and, in a sense, even China, either vanished or mutated into a pale version of their former selves. India was, is and always will be different, because its religion, which I will not call Hinduism but Sanatana Dharma, is not a religion in the Abrahamic sense; Christianity and Islam are revealed through books and prophets, but Sanatana Dharma is imbibed and absorbed, so that it becomes a faith in a universal code that distinguishes between what is right and what is wrong, in other words the eternal Dharma of the universe.
For this reason, Muslims had co-existed with Hindus in India for nearly 1000 years. Even though for many of these centuries certain select classes of them occupied the positions of the ruling class, and in this sense were able to enforce, to a limited extent, their dominance over the majority Hindu population through brutality, conversion, taxation and subjugation, they were unable or even unwilling to interfere with the Sanatani way of life in India. One could argue that the adherents of this fiercely dogmatic and intolerant religion even absorbed aspects of the Sanatani culture, as has been brought out admirably in the 2012 survey of Hindus and Muslims in India by the Pew Research Foundation.
Till the 1920s, that is, around the time when there were stirrings among Indians that the British should leave India to its own devices, there was never a feeling among Muslims in India wanting a separate country of their own or even feeling that they could not live in a Hindu majority India, if and when the British actually did leave India. The embers of discord were fanned to a fine pitch by the British, and the history of events in the period 1931 to 1947 is all too well known to warrant repetition here. I will only name Rahmat Ali, Linlithgow, Wavell, Churchill, Mountbatten, and the most useful of idiots, Jinnah, for playing into the plan to divide not a country, but an intact 5000-year civilisation for the sake of petty political gains. Our own leaders, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Prasad, Rajaji and Ambedkar simply were tired out by the game being played by the British against India. They became exhausted, and one should not blame any of them for the partition. All of them loved the concept of a civilisational Bharat, including Ambedkar. They were simply not up to the wiles and stratagems employed by the British against India.
It is in this context that one may term 1947 not the birth of two new countries, but rather the transfer of power by imperial Britain to two territories it had divided artificially on religious grounds. This happened in a land that emphasised a concept of ‘religion’ that went far beyond gods, prophets and books. Sanatana Dharma transcends all religions and has been universally acknowledged as such by leading thinkers of the 20th century, including Vivekananda, Tagore, Radhakrishnan, Einstein, Schrödinger, and Oppenheimer.
With this background it is incumbent on all the inhabitants of the “India” side of the original British Undivided India, what roughly corresponds to today’s “Republic of India”, whether they be Hindu, Muslim or anything else, to restore land, culture, thought and identity status quo ante to what may be a reasonable approximation of what one might well call “Bharatavarta”, the sacred land that gave birth to the universal dharma. This is the unfinished business of partition – the unfinished agenda.
Land is sacred to a civilisation because it is only through the land that culture, tradition, economics, and outreach can be established. Take away the land, and there is no civilisation. We lost a third of our sacred geographical space in partition. This space is holy because it contains our gods and goddesses, who are merely representatives of the Absolute Reality that cannot be seen. Through this Reality, our civilizational character is expressed. This has nothing to do with religion as practised at a mundane, local level, to put the matter in specific terms. For example, the entire Sindhu River system today straddles three countries: India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Sindhu is the life-giver to millions. Yet today, because of the odd nature of partition, this river system, which cannot be divided in any way, finds itself locked in between two warring neighbours, with the net result that it is politically, geostrategically, and ecologically unviable.
Taking today’s political realities into account, India must redraw its borders to reflect its eternal civilizational character better. This would need to be done on both our western and eastern flanks. On the western side, it would not be impossible to imagine, say, within a decade from now, that the Sindhu becomes a natural geographical border between a greater India and a greater Afghanistan. In the end, the name India is derived from the word Sindhu and refers to all the land to the east of this great river. On the eastern side, the geographical oddity of the Siliguri Chicken’s Neck makes our vulnerability to foreign aggression extremely high. At the same time, the retaking of the Chittagong Hill Tracts is practically mandatory. The recovery of land and restitution and readjustment of identity and values is not a novel phenomenon–the Reconquista of Spain, and more recently, the facile absorption of Goa after four centuries of Portuguese rule (and with a large Christian population) are historical facts. Insofar as the Muslims who choose to inhabit these recovered lands are concerned, their ancestors lived with the ancestors of Hindus for a complete millennium, and any problems they pose are not of a nature that a resolute, firm, and clear-headed administration cannot resolve.
In the end, the matter is not technical or procedural. Attending to the unfinished agenda of partition is a civilizational imperative for Bharat.
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