Midnight’s Descendants: South Asia from Partition to the Present Day

Other markers of identity prove less amenable. Beyond the Nepali concentrations in northern West Bengal, and beyond the enclaves and chars along the Indo–Bangladesh border, a tendon of Indian territory tugs at a knotted fist of mainly ethnic discontent in the remote hills along the Burmese border. By one reckoning India’s cluster of states in the far ‘north-east’ is plagued by over a hundred insurgency groups, most of them pressing their grievances on the grounds of disadvantaged ethnicity: ‘Manipur tops the list [for the number] of militias with 35, Assam is second with 34 and Tripura has 30; Nagaland has four and Meghalaya checks in with three militias.’4 At any given moment these groups vary greatly in terms of support, objectives and militancy. But with India, Bangladesh, Burma (now Myanmar) and China all interested parties in the political jigsaw of South Asia’s north-eastern extremity, ethnic grievances invariably involve territorial disputes, and these readily translate into war-worthy issues involving international sovereignty.

National identities cannot here be taken for granted. Even where the borders are not themselves in dispute, the loyalties of those living on either side of them may be. Like the fickle ‘distributaries’ of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, the very idea of the nation state is dissipated and frayed into complex strands of competing allegiances. A Naga, for instance, may subscribe to half a dozen identities.

I am from Khonoma village of the Angami tribe … Now within the village I belong to the Iralu clan. The Iralu clan belongs in turn to the Meyasetsu clan. The Meyasetsu clan in turn belongs to the still wider and larger clan called the Merhuma Khel. The Merhuma Khel is in turn one of three major Khels that make up Khonoma village. The Khonoma village in turn belongs to the Angami tribe and the Angami tribe belongs in turn to the Naga nation … [T]hese ethnic and national identities are precious to me. They in fact define my political existence as a man with a country to call his own. As such, I can never surrender this birthright to India or any other nation on earth.5

Statements like this from a Naga nationalist are dismissed by the Indian authorities as secessionist and totally unacceptable. The Bangladeshi authorities take exactly the same line with their own disaffected Chakma peoples. Both governments classify such communities as ‘tribal’ and attribute their recalcitrance to poor education, misguided leadership, discriminatory policies and foreign interference. Yet Mahatma Gandhi himself once assured the Nagas that if they did not wish to be part of India they would not be compelled to integrate with it; India would recognise their independence. To the apostle of non-violence, forcibly incorporating any disaffected group contradicted the whole idea of free association on which the modern Indian nation was founded.

This all raises a more fundamental question about whether the correlation between a nation and a state is not itself the problem. In South Asia as a whole, and particularly in the chaotic circumstances of the north-east, other cherished affiliations – of kinship, creed, locality, language, tribe, clan, profession and caste – may need to be factored into considerations of identity. The twinning of sovereignty with territory may need to be ‘unbundled’, and the very notions of political authority and territorial integrity may need re-examination.6

By dividing British-ruled South Asia into a mainly Muslim Pakistan and a mainly Hindu India, the Great Partition of 1947 severed – and sometimes pocked – not just the landmass of South Asia but its society, economy and infrastructure, and above all its two main religious communities. Religion was indeed the mentor of Partition. It provided the motivation for division, dictated the criteria for realising it and underwrote the zealotry that accompanied it. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Partition was principally about separating two competing belief systems. Doctrinal differences rarely entered into the debate at the time: religious parties, like the Jamaat-e-Islami of many orthodox Muslims or the Mahasabha of many nationalistic Hindus, in fact opposed territorial division. Even the prophets of Pakistan, like the pragmatists of a truncated India, anticipated the presence of religious minorities within the partitioned states. Indeed they competed in offering guarantees of citizenship and fair treatment to all such ‘confessional enclaves’.

When a community is under stress, its sense of itself frequently transcends its attachment to specific tenets. Diversity in matters of faith is trumped by an insistence on communal solidarity that may ignore lesser doctrinal and devotional distinctions. Thus the different traditions of Islam represented by Sunni, Shi’ite and Sufi practice were no more evident in the rhetoric of Partition than was the rivalry among those cults, disciplines and doctrines that go to make up ‘Hinduism’.

Rather was it – and is it – conduct, culture and kinship that comprise the markers of confessional identity and constitute the bonds that bind a community together. These may include things like where and to whom one was born; how one washes and dresses; what one eats and when one fasts; what work one does; when, where and how (not to mention whom) one worships; who one consorts with and marries; to what or to whom one looks for justice and redress; whom one idolises and whom one demonises; and what songs, verses and aphorisms one carries around in one’s head. Like that tribal layering of Naga identity, all these things define one’s existence as a member of a community – though not necessarily of a community with a country to call its own.

In the 1940s the desire to protect these markers from the perceived threat of Hindu rule on the part of Muslims, and of a privileged Muslim separatism on the part of Hindus, buoyed demands for communal autonomy. The hope was that autonomy would reassure all parties by ‘ring-fencing’ their interests and preserving their integrity. But in line with the contemporary partition in Palestine, and with almost no debate on the matter, the objective soon underwent a sea-change. Areas, not individuals, became the currency of partition, districts rather than households the unit of exchange. As per the last British Viceroy’s June 1947 partition plan, ‘the parties appear to have accepted that communal autonomy was to be realized by the creation of separate territorial sovereignties’, writes Joya Chatterji.

There are subtle but significant differences between the notions of communal autonomy and territorial sovereignty. The first emphasizes the rights of the people of a community to self-determination, rights which could in theory be achieved within a single state. The second stresses the bounded space within which a community is sovereign and could be realized only by a territorial separation.7

In the last hectic months of British rule, when parts of the country were already beset by sectarian massacres, sovereignty alone seemed to safeguard communal autonomy, with fixed frontiers being its surest guarantee. Yet sixty-five years later, communal discord within and between the post-Partition states of South Asia is more acute than ever. ‘Whenever there is a riot in India, we suffer here,’ says a spokesperson for the Hindu minority in Bangladesh.8 Whenever a Pakistan-trained terrorist opens fire in India, India’s Muslims come under suspicion; and whenever India’s Hindu nationalists vent their spleen on the internet, more Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims sign up for jihad. Just as the tides, the migrants and the hawk-eagles come and go unchecked across the Sundarbans, so the tit-for-tat of outrage and retaliation ricochets along the 7,000-kilometre length of those brave new frontiers ordained by Partition’s insistence on a territorial separation.

Over the last half-century the shadows of Partition’s brutal dislocation have grown ever longer. They slant across the whole course of events in post-Independence South Asia. Some observers liken Partition to a nuclear explosion whose lethal fallout will go on being felt for generations to come. Others see it as a recurring natural phenomenon that, having severed the subcontinent, then (de facto) the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, and then the two-part Pakistan, is ever-ready to strike again. Nearly all see it as unfinished business. Every war, near-war and insurgency fought in the subcontinent since the end of British rule owes something to the legacy of Partition. And so long as this sore festers, any ‘normalising’ of relations between the partitioned states proves elusive.

Elsewhere in the world various political unions, defence pacts, free-trade associations and hegemonic doctrines (Monroe, Brezhnev, etc.) have lent some coherence to the conduct of international relations. In South Asia, a region where geography, history, economics and culture all argue strongly in favour of the closest possible association, even modest attempts at regional cooperation flounder. The subcontinent continues to be defined not in terms of shared interests but of past traumas, contested loyalties and irreconcilable ambitions. Encouraged by governments of every hue, national identity still owes much to an obsessive awareness of the hostile ‘other’ just across the border. Antagonism reigns, officially.

This ‘othering’ extends even to ideology. Each successor nation presents a political profile that seems to challenge that of its neighbour. The Republic of India is secular, democratic, internationally respected and increasingly regarded as an economic success. Pakistan and Bangladesh, on the other hand, are determinedly Islamic, susceptible to military rule, internationally disparaged and economically struggling. (Nepal and Sri Lanka, the other sizeable components of what scholars now prefer to call ‘South Asia’ rather than ‘the Indian subcontinent’, are currently too traumatised by recent civil wars to be easily categorised.) Partition did not just divide most of the region: it launched the successor states on such diametrically opposed trajectories that to this day South Asians commonly prioritise ‘Partition’ over ‘Independence’. The second half of the twentieth century is not the ‘post-Independence era’; it is the ‘post-Partition era’. The euphoria of freedom has been silenced by the shock of division.

The consequences of this division are critical, and not just for South Asia. By 2020 India will have the largest population in the world, and South Asians as a whole will comprise a quarter of the people on the planet. Nor, on the grounds of negligible disposable income, can these numbers any longer be discounted as a statistical irrelevance. Already India’s middle class is one of the world’s most numerous, and its corporate sector includes more multinationals and generates more billionaires than anywhere else in Asia except China. The world’s largest market and its largest pool of unskilled labour is rapidly becoming its largest reservoir of innovation and expertise. South Asian excellence now extends to everything from pharmaceuticals and telecoms to finance, info-technology and prize-winning literature.

It also includes rocketry and a terrifying military capability. With both India and Pakistan in possession of nuclear weapons, with neither eager to submit to international controls and with China’s nearby arsenal dwarfing both, the potential for a nuclear conflagration is here all too real. What may be the most promising zone in terms of the world economy is located in what US analysts have dubbed the most dangerous arena on earth.

Worldwide, South Asians account for two out of every five Muslims; and of these nearly as many have their roots in India as in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Through them, Islam’s international grievances (over Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else within range of a drone) get internalised in South Asia; and through them and other disaffected parties, South Asian grievances (over Balochistan, Nagaland, numerous other hotspots and above all Kashmir) get externalised in the West. The blood-letting occasioned by a dispute about a mosque in Uttar Pradesh can surface in the British House of Commons. Confrontations in the high Himalayas can bring the world to the brink of armageddon.

Yet to the outside observer South Asia’s peoples seem to have a lot more in common than not. In the world’s departure lounges they are as ubiquitous and just as hard to allocate to a particular part of the subcontinent as the Chinese. Regardless of nationality, they look not unalike, they often wear loose, baggy attire, and they travel with too much luggage. They are also rather particular about their dietary preferences. They converse in languages (including English) some of which are mutually comprehensible. They enjoy the same movies and opt for the same music channels. Nearly all admit to regularly engaging in some form of devotional activity, nearly all marry within approved circles, and nearly all take pride in their familial, communal and regional identities.

Down on the ground, were it not for the border fence, you could still pass from India’s West Bengal into Bangladesh without realising you had changed countries; likewise from the Indian states of Rajasthan and Punjab to the Pakistani provinces of Sind and Punjab (each country has a Punjab, because the British province of that name was itself partitioned). The differences between one country and another are much less obvious than those between most adjacent European states. Non-Islamic India is still home to nearly as many Muslims as either Pakistan or Bangladesh. Hindu women may cover their faces like their Muslim sisters; and Pakistani men may wear pyjamas like their Indian brothers. Despite its newly trumpeted affluence, India still has more of the malnourished, the unlettered and the socially deprived than Pakistan and Bangladesh combined. Even the excitement over its growth rate may be deceptive. Only twenty years ago it was Pakistan that was slated to join the Asian periphery’s ‘tiger economies’. Thirty years ago it was Sri Lanka. What one economist has called ‘persistent orderly hunger’ is one of the region’s shared and all-too-enduring characteristics.

So too is the confidence born of a deep and incredibly rich matrix of tradition and devotion. Here globalisation comes wreathed in garlands and incense. A podgy Ganesh presides in the boardroom; temple and waqf are quoted on the Mumbai stock exchange. In Muslim areas night turns to day during Ramadan. Everywhere matrimonial expenditure chomps into GDP. Pride in the past, an unshakeable sense of one’s community and a dazzling array of cultural references are not peculiar to the region. But in South Asia their resilience and centrality is second to none.

Even the constitutional tags are not quite as irreconcilable as they seem. Once in power, democratically chosen leaders have frequently displayed authoritarian tendencies, while autocrats invariably pine for popular endorsement. Military coups have often proved less bloody than elections; and avowedly secular regimes may harbour as much fanaticism and discrimination as avowedly sectarian ones.

Despite Partition and all that followed, South Asians have more in common than they may care to acknowledge. Indeed, Partition itself needs to be seen as a shared experience. By devastating whole provinces, displacing perhaps fifteen million people and leaving as many again feeling unwelcome in the land of their birth, it everywhere loosened some of those non-doctrinal bonds of community and encouraged a new mobility.

In 1947 the majority of refugees headed for the nearest of the new borders. If they made it to the other side – a big ‘if’ in the Punjab – they settled down among their co-religionists in India or Pakistan. Some were allocated land that had been vacated by refugees moving in the opposite direction; others swelled the populations of the cities and thereby transformed the parent state’s demography. Karachi, the interim capital of Pakistan, attracted so many displaced Muslims from India that these muhajirs soon outnumbered the city’s native Sindhis. Delhi, if judged by its taxi-drivers, became a city of Sikhs, mostly refugees from Lahore; Lahore became a city of Muslims with scarcely a beturbanned Sikh to be seen; and Calcutta lost its public spaces when parks, gardens, railway stations and even cricket pitches were turned into makeshift dormitories by the displaced from all over eastern Bengal.

A few migrants quickly changed their minds and went back, some doing so several times. Others had their minds changed for them. When in 1971 East Pakistan became Bangladesh, refugees from India who had been welcomed into East Pakistan as Muslims in 1947 found themselves interned as non-Bengalis in a now proudly Bengali Bangladesh. Perhaps 100,000 of these so-called ‘Biharis’ are still there, eking out a pitiful existence in Bangladesh’s refugee camps; others have been shunted across India to Pakistan; and a lucky few have since obtained visas to reside overseas.

In this they are not alone. Emigration was as much a by-product of Partition as urbanisation. Over the three decades immediately after 1947 an estimated two million South Asians, many of them already displaced by Partition, exited the subcontinent altogether. Better prospects and wages undoubtedly tempted them, but it was the push-factor of dislocation and enforced mobility that proved crucial. Thanks to Partition, what might have been a modest trickle of economic migrants turned into that flood of expatriates, now over twenty million strong, known as ‘the South Asian diaspora’.

Applying the term ‘diaspora’ to the South Asian exodus remains controversial, although reasonable enough. South Asia’s Partition and the Nazi Holocaust have also been bracketed together, with comparisons being drawn between the apparently chaotic and unpremeditated nature of the one and the systematic, state-directed nature of the other. But more to the point, just as in some unspeakable way the Holocaust made the need for a Jewish homeland manifest and thus reversed one diaspora, just so did Partition yank at those bonds of kinship, locality and community, and unleash another great exodus of peoples.

At the time, the 1950s and ’60s, few In India or Pakistan considered the spectacle of mass emigration as grounds for congratulation. Plucked from villages in unfancied districts like Sylhet (east Pakistan), Mirpur (Azad Kashmir) and Jalandhar (India), then penned, tagged and bussed to an international airport, the huddles of all-male migrants hunkered down beside the check-in desks seemed a sad commentary on the lofty hopes of Independence. Their minders brandished wads of tickets and newly minted documentation. For the passport-holders themselves, holding their passports was seldom an option; most could barely sign their name or pronounce their destination; their identities, like their paycheques, were in hock to their gang-masters.

In the 1960s these emigrants were destined principally for low-paid jobs in the UK and North America, thereafter and more substantially for the Gulf states. Others followed well-trodden trails to east and south Africa, the Caribbean, South-East Asia and the Pacific. These were the destinations to which bonded workers recruited for labouring elsewhere in the British Empire had traditionally been despatched. The new migrants looked no more go-getting or better prepared than their nineteenth-century antecedents. A hookah might be passed among them in the airport forecourt; betel-stained saliva betrayed their sojourn in the departure lounge. The white-shirted businessmen and briefcase-clutching bureaucrats brushed past with eyes averted.

Yet in retrospect this unpromising stream of exiles heralded a new respect for the region’s international profile and added an important new dimension to the fraught relationships between its post-Partition states. By the 1980s cash remittances sent home from places as far apart as Dubai and British Columbia were critical in sustaining the economies of all the South Asian states. They also transformed the built landscape in the emigrants’ Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani areas of origin. At about the same time, second-generation South Asians in the West were being joined by a second wave of emigrants from the subcontinent. Young and ambitious, both were more interested in professional qualifications and internships than hourly rates. History sanctioned their quest for advancement. Without exception, all the architects of Independence, from Gandhi to Nehru, Jinnah, Ambedkar and Patel, had acquired their lawyers’ training in Britain. Political freedom had come courtesy of diasporic passport-holders; economic betterment would follow suit.

For now it was US degrees, corporate experience, entrepreneurial skills and silicon technology that were the attractions. And unlike bus-conducting, curry-cookery or courtroom rhetoric, these were qualifications in high demand back in South Asia. The massive back-transfer of skills, and then investment, that resulted would dramatically empower the Republic of India and to a lesser extent its neighbours. From it sprang that great transnational community of South Asian origin that would be so ideally placed to prosper in a globalised century. The despised diaspora was metamorphosing itself into the most desirable of elites. In short, and by some delicious quirk of fate, peoples so keen to equate community with nation, nation with state, and to identify with a ‘bounded territory’, were proving the most adept at transcending such obstacles.

Regrettably, this also has a downside. Ensconced nowadays in the airport’s premium business lounges, the Asian knights of the global economy are not encouraged to transcend the febrile frontiers of South Asia itself. Once reviled as deserters by patriotic nationalists, those emigrants who return are now embraced and fêted. ‘Non-Resident Indian’ (NRI), from being a term of contempt, has become an accolade. New Delhi – and Islamabad and Dhaka in respect of their Pakistani and Bangladeshi equivalents – not only woos its NRIs but most emphatically claims them. Their US, Canadian and EU passports carry Delhi’s endorsement of their status as ‘Persons of Indian Origin’ (PIOs) or ‘Overseas Citizens of India’ (OCIs). Residential options, fiscal breaks and investment incentives await the prodigals; receptions and conferences are organised specifically for them; whole government ministries pander to their needs; homegrown CEOs and rupee billionaires flock to join them.

The diaspora’s inward investment has powered up domestic economies throughout South Asia. But the start-ups and the statistics are not the only things to benefit from diasporic largesse. Numerous non-governmental agencies and charities, among them organisations commonly blamed for the abiding level of communal strife, are also handsomely supported by this overseas citizenry. A classic example was provided by Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), otherwise known as the ‘Tamil Tigers’. For thirty years the LTTE obtained arms and training in India and found sanctuary there while being heavily bankrolled by the donations of Tamils and Tamil sympathisers resident in the West. Kashmiris, principally in Britain, funded the Jammu and Kashmir National Liberation Front; Sikhs, many in Canada, helped sustain the Khalistan movement for an independent Sikh state. Likewise, Saudi dinars are channelled through diasporic Muslims to the Islamist madrassahs of Pakistan; and US dollars raised by diasporic Hindus finance the temple-building and the social and educational programmes of extremist outfits like the Shiv Sena and the RSS. For longer than anyone can remember, Naga nationalists have been funding their open insurgency from overseas.

Where funds can be transferred, often undeclared and undetected, so can ideas. Through social networks, blogs and SMS, and through the distribution of CDs, DVDs and print, the diaspora exerts an influence on opinion in South Asia that is commensurate with its hefty financial donations. For the bonds of kinship and community, however attenuated, still apply. The status of diasporic families in the land of their settlement often depends on the approval of their caste or community back home; so do their chances of extending their family landholdings in South Asia and of securing suitable brides. By supporting communal interests and disseminating exclusionist views, the diaspora validates both itself and its affiliates in South Asia. Diasporic endorsement of, say, the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque emboldened the zealots responsible and lent a veneer of international respectability to the interminable debate that followed.