Will Indo-Pak relations ever be good? (Part 6)

Even Jinnah did not expect to see the creation of Pakistan during his lifetime. However, after World War II circumstances changed rapidly. Churchill lost the elections in Britain and Clement Atlee became the new resident of 10, Downing Street. Atlee was favourably predisposed to granting India independence and sent Lord Mountbatten to New Delhi with the specific purpose of expediting the transfer of power. Mountbatten held last-minute parleys with leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League to explore the possibility of averting partition. However, irreconcilable differences between the two parties coupled with the lack of feasibility of the alternatives he presented made partition ultimately inevitable.

Dividing British India along communal lines was not at all easy. There were Hindus and Muslims in every city, in every village of India. So, Muslim-majority areas were demarcated to constitute the new state that was proposed. Even this proposition presented its own problems. Muslim-majority states were at two opposite ends of the geographical expanse in the north of India. However, Jinnah was adamant. He insisted on his Pakistan, no matter what. Even a last-ditch attempt to make him the prime minister of an undivided India by Gandhi failed. In any case, Nehru and Patel were also totally opposed to any such move. They felt they could not trust Jinnah and feared they would not be able to work with him. Further, in their opinion the move would be very unpopular among the people who had stood solidly behind the Congress.

The Radcliffe Line became the border between India and Pakistan on 17th August 1947. The line was decided by the Border Commission chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was to divide equitably 1,75,000 square miles of territory with 88 million people dwelling in it at the time. It was a stupendous task that the man was called upon to execute at very short notice. Naturally, everybody was not pleased with the outcome. Jinnah labelled the Pakistan he got as a “truncated and moth-eaten Pakistan”. Actually, Jinnah had dreamed of getting the whole of Punjab and both East and West Bengal. Furthermore, he also eyed Assam although the region did not have a Muslim majority in it. Besides, he assumed that the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir would fall into his lap eventually, any way, given its demographics.

Unfortunately, things did not go as he had hoped, and perhaps, even calculated. The states of Punjab and Bengal got divided on the basis of religious identities, and the Hindu-majority areas remained with India. What is more, eventually, even Kashmir acceded to India. In the runup to partition, Jinnah had tried to carve out a much bigger Pakistan than we see today on the map of the globe. He had even tried to weave together a larger coalition of all non-Hindu populations in the Indian subcontinent to make this dream come true. With this in mind, he had even reached out to the Akalis. However, despite his obvious intellectual ability, Jinnah betrayed a shallow knowledge of history. Sikhism had originated as a bulwark against the march of Islam, and avowedly to "protect" and "purify" Hinduism. With the result, there was no way, the Sikhs would have preferred the Islamic Republic of Pakistan over a secular India.

From the outset, from the time Pakistan came into existence, Jinnah was an unhappy and bitter man. He blamed everybody from Mountbatten to Gandhi to Nehru. He did not even attend Gandhi's funeral and chose to stay put in Karachi, which was initially the capital of Pakistan. He merely sent a condolence message to the Indian Government stating rather caustically that “India had lost a great 'Hindu' leader”. The atmosphere was further vitiated by the large-scale communal carnage that ripped apart the very fabric of the Indian subcontinent. The ill-will that was generated during those turbulent times kept many a wound festering. The psychological scars left indelible marks in the minds of people on both sides of the divide.

* To be continued...