open Democracy News Analysis - The partition evasion, Sumantra Bose - Comments

KVB Tharoor on "The partition evasion"

KVB Tharoor — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 12:04:29 +0100

Rosross, I think any serious student of Indian history would be wary of such categorical use of terms as "racially-linked", and would also caution against overstating the difference between southern and northern India (difference is diffuse through India, not concentrated along a single fault line). You are not generous enough to the success of India as a national idea: it is a nation like no other precisely because it bases itself on no narrow sense of common identity, but rather a consensus in difference. I think many countries in the 21st century, jealous of their notions of identity, could learn from the Indian model.

It has struggled at times, but persevered where so many other decolonised democratic states have failed. Of course, Kashmir and Assam are issues that must be resolved, but for a nation its size, India has done well to stay whole and democratic in its 60 years.

rosross on "The partition evasion"

rosross — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:26:25 +0100

The difficulty for India, like Yugoslavia, is that it was an 'artificial' construct established over centuries, first by the Moorish occupiers and then by the British occupiers. Historically the peoples of southern India had different religions, languages and cultures to that of northern India. Numerous parts of India are not even racially linked and should never have been included in an established India after the British left. While clearly partition on religious lines was a disaster, the reality is that after the British occupation ended, Indians should have been given a choice as to whether or not they wanted to belong to a nation called India or to form their own separate states, as Assam for example may have wished to do. But, trying to tidy up history is always difficult. Sadly, the frailty of human beings, and the greed, means that new messes are created on top of old ones.

omarali502000 on "The partition evasion"

omarali502000 — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:49:28 +0100

There is no need to look for possible excuses for partition. It was a bad idea and has led to many bad consequences, not the least of which is the forced movement of millions away from their ancestral homes for the sake of someone else's millenial fantasy of Islamic renaissance or pure hindu rashtra. The question of public support for the idea has little or no bearing on whether it was a good idea. Even if a majority of the muslims of North India supported the idea (and they may have, though we have no way of knowing for sure because there was no unrestricted adult franchise in those days), YOU dont have to like it for that reason. People do make mistakes. The majority of the american public may have wanted Bush as president, but you dont have to LIKE or APPROVE just because of that...you may have to reluctantly live with that, but you dont have to approve.

KVB Tharoor on "The partition evasion"

KVB Tharoor — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:40:13 +0100

Oddly enough, the population transfers between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s and the partition of India in 1947 were seen by many at the time as necessary to bring those countries into modernity: the era of nation-states. To enter into the 20th century, some argued, multi-lingual and essentially "multicultural" polities such as the Ottoman Empire and British India had to be hacked artificially into states based on narrower identities (in imitation of the western European nation-state system that evolved over a much longer period of time, and with considerably more blood).

Many Indians resisted this logic, including the supposed "ideologue of Pakistan", Mohammed Iqbal, who though he was always critical of the Indian National Congress, wanted to establish an autonomous Muslim "homeland" within India, not a separate nation-state with Islam as its defining principle. I'd suggest that Iqbal would be appalled by the Pakistan he would see today.

Suggesting, then, that partition is now "an idea out of time" is implicitly to suggest that the logic of the nation-state, too, is running out of time. This is a far larger claim that the author doesn't make. But I wonder how we - as on one hand, international citizens aware of the sanctity of "the right to self-determination" and, on the other hand, concerned humanists wary of the primitive force of parochial claims to identity - should think about such claims in the 21st century. At what point do and in what circumstances can we countenance the further fragmenting of the already fragmented map?

The partition evasion, Sumantra Bose

Sumantra Bose — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:40:00 +0100

I grew up, in India, regarding the partition of 1947 as an abomination. This was due to reasons more complex, and powerful, than any reflexive Indian nationalism. My father's family, prominent activists in India's long march to freedom, struggled and sacrificed much for the cause of an united, undivided India. My paternal grandfather, Sarat Chandra Bose (1889-1950), a Congress leader of undivided Bengal and India for more than two decades, was among very few major figures of the time to oppose the partition, on grounds of political morality as well as practicality, until the bitter end.

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