Am I the child of another nation less Indian than you are?

At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awaken to life and freedom,” thus spoke the designated Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, on August 14, 1947. But on that day, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the supposed victor of that freedom movement, was in Calcutta. And the national capital and its surroundings were convulsed in communal mayhem, Indian against Indian. 

So, Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Mahatma, writes in a biography of C Rajagopalachari, his maternal grandfather, Rajaji, A Life: ‘The Mahatma was feeling the pain of fratricide, not the thrill of freedom.” When the so-called liberated India’s first new year dawned in 1948, a Thai visitor complimented Gandhi on India’s independence. But in dolorous response, Gandhi said to him, “Today, Indian fears brother Indian. Is this independence?”

Centuries ago, a Chinese Buddhist monk traversing this land wrote of it in the early seventh century CE, “People of distant places, with diverse customs, generally designate the land they most admire as India.” India has, indeed, been politically united only for a brief fraction of its timeless history. But is it  political unity alone that constitutes what we today identify as a nation? For all its political convolutions India has, in fact, remained as Xuanzang, the Chinese monk I mention, saw it. While describing his holy land as the Five Indias, he perceived “India as a single cultural, sacral and geographical unit”. I contend that my India has in fact so remained throughout its history since at least the time of the Solasa mahajanapadas, the 16 great states of the 6th century BC, a millennium before the venerable monk’s pilgrimage and what he saw India to be. And I would differ from William Dalrymple, from whose book The Golden Road I have quoted Xuanzang; in that this nation survived in continuum because of the infusion of Islam into the brew. This was until it was finally brutally sundered at the stroke of that midnight hour. 

Winston Churchill, the last bastion of the lost citadel of what had been an empire on which the sun never set, moaned that India was simply a geographical expression. It should be clear that these were the utterances of a charlatan. India’s nationhood had been demonstrated by India’s 1857 war of independence wherein both India’s principal communities, whether in the Company’s army or in India’s Hindu heartland of Awadh, my home, united in support of a decrepit Muslim emperor.

Then again it asserted its hold in the 1920s in the first exclusively Indian anti-colonial mass mobilisation, unmatched until then anywhere in its vast empire, against the British with the Khilafat Movement. Of the Ali brothers who led the movement, the younger, Mohammed Ali had, in 1916 while in jail, been elected President of the Muslim League and then in 1923 President of the Congress. The November 1919 meeting of the Central Khilafat Committee was presided over by none other than the Mahatma. On this Committee was Maulana Azad, and the movement helped draw Muslims en masse into the Congress for the first time — rallying against colonial rule across Asia

Tragically the education imbibed from the Raj — the more Anglicised the education, the deeper the failure to understand ourselves — construed otherwise. This is what has been described as the “colonization of the mind” by Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal, although I doubt if she’d concede that the very theory of two nations constituting India was in itself a consequence of that colonial mindset Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India will bear me out. In this a young Englishman, which was what Nehru had become from his Harrovian upbringing, revels in the glories of India, which, he argues manfully, carries a bright future if its components can be molded into a nation. 

Through this prism the geographical entity, India, was made up of many nations that had been constantly in conflict. Put simply, such a conclusion completely ignores the huge symbolic message of Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas. The Avadhi language of this composition caries the genesis of the Urdu language, which came in the mid-20th century to be divisively identified as the language of Muslims. 

More fraught with symbolism is the Taj Mahal. Conceived by an orthodox Sunni Muslim emperor, genetically more Rajput than Turk, for a Shia Muslim Empress, with its architectural flourish, construction material and adornment of gems drawn from the far corners of South Asia by artisans of every ethnic hue, the Taj is a dramatic display of the multidimensional character of India. This was more recently manifested in the modern restoration of the Taj precursor, the Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, executed by another product of such fusion, the Agha Khan Foundation. And so, although to the disinterested eye India’s history screamed otherwise, that although India was indeed a divided society, cloven along lines of caste and profession, these divided communities were all dependent on each other, together creating what was intrinsically a nation, which today we call India.

This accounted for the wealth of India that nurtured Dalrymple’s Golden Road, but also secured the stability of India’s social fabric despite its gross inequalities all well recorded. For example, Dalrymple waxes eloquent on India’s ancient silk industry. Today weavers across north India are Muslim while traders in their vibrant products, were until recently exclusively Hindu —- trade being the business of the Hindu Bania community, whilst the artisan across India largely accepted Islam.

Notwithstanding, the bulk of UP Muslims never supported the idea of a separate homeland. The electoral success of the Muslim League in 1937 cannot be cited as support for such a homeland because the electorate were largely the landowning class of Muslim society terrified of the prospect of Congress’ socialism with its avowed land reform.

My own politically active family, part of the old feudal leadership of Avadh, was scattered in 1947 between India, Pakistan and the UK. My grandmother Inam Fatima, a leader of the Muslim League, had headed the party’s women’s wing which she had founded in the party’s Patna session in 1938. 

In my childhood conversations with her she rarely spoke of her admitted mentor Jinnah, but often and proudly of the Ali brothers. She described them as the true architects of India’s freedom movement.

In the family arguments on Partition, often acrimonious, what was at issue was the opportunities created by the birth of Pakistan, never that Partition was necessary to separate two warring nations. My grandmother’s own principal reason for supporting the League was to work for the emancipation of Muslim women, on which she had Jinnah’s strong support.

She herself was the first among the Avadhi Talukdar women, the majority of whom were Rajput and Kayasth, to shed the purdah. And when the time arrived leaving home was not even a choice. Nor did the bulk of the Muslim community of the UP, the largest of any state in India, migrate under the compulsions of Partition.

And what of India’s Muslim leadership? The undisputed leaders of Muslim thinking in the early years of the 20th century, even as Lord Curzon actively promoted the idea of a distinct Indian Muslim nation actively endorsed by intellectuals as different as Veer Savarkar and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, were the brothers, Shaukat Ali and Mohammad Ali, leaders both of the Congress and the then Muslim League.

Maulana Mohammad Ali whose representation of India’s Muslims in London’s Round Table Conference, from which he never returned to India is now legend, had this to say, “I belong to two circles of equal size, but which are not concentric. One is India and the other is the Muslim world….We as Indian Muslims came in both circles. We belong to these two circles, each of 300 million and we can leave neither.” As an Indian and a Muslim myself, I would broadly agree. But the Indian circle is woven through the “concentric” of professional distinctions, which today is sought to be promoted as pasmanda (destitute) and ashraf (privileged). 

And finally, the colonial mindset had its day, which led to the final distortion of India’s identity. The key Indian intellectuals in the drama of Partition were Jawaharlal Nehru, a visionary statesman who dreamt of unifying India’s peoples in the unity of the proletariat, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, India’s greatest lawyer, who looked upon India as two nations, one Hindu and the other Muslim, juxtaposed by geography and little else.

Both declared their commitment to secularism. But both stood firmly grounded on one falsity — that India, a conglomerate, required to be sculpted into nationhood. And so, their consequent response to Mountbatten’s offer, really an ultimatum — Partition or continued British rule —- from a government worsted in a war that had been won in Europe by the Soviet Union and in Asia by the US.

The ultimatum was, in fact, a cut-and-run operation from a spent power, bankrupt economically, militarily and politically. The last British Viceroy, the pretentious Mountbatten and his headstrong wife Edwina were chosen instruments. And so, Gandhi’s plea to his party’s working committee that while we might agree to Partition, but its details be worked out between ourselves was firmly rejected. This monstrous and acutely sensitive enterprise, including, riot, exodus of millions and evacuation was left to an administration appointed by the defeated colonial arbitrator, resulting inevitably in turning Indians against each other.

That the Partition of India was a human tragedy is recognised. The tragedy of the Holocaust is also universally acknowledged as a crime for which all Europe should have been held accountable, but has not. But then, Partition, in many ways was an even greater crime committed by India upon itself even though the catalyst might have been a dying Empire. India — and what is today Pakistan and Bangladesh — must accept that. Only then can we move to heal a wound suppurating now for close on a century. 

Let me end with a question to my readers. Can I as a Muslim Indian, proud of my Indian heritage and having done my bit in the service of India as have my parents before me and their forbears, am I the child of another nation less Indian than you are? And could this be simply because I’m a committed Muslim?

Wajahat Habibullah is a J& K cadre bureaucrat and former Chairman, National Commission for Minorities