14.08.1997
A sundered subcontinent
British imperialism created India and Pakistan 50 years ago this week
Some critics of the Gandhi-led struggle by the Congress Party feel that the early 1940s mark the watershed and betrayal of independence for India as a whole, then comprising the present territories of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.
Congress launched the Quit India movement in 1942, in the middle of World War II, in opposition to the continued British imperial presence; the Muslim League, which made its historic call for the formation of Pakistan in 1940, gained support for a contrary view and supported the Allied side in World War II, leaving the independence question on the back burner. But while the Quit India movement met with stern opposition from the British rulers of India, it did not mobilise in a revolutionary fashion to make the most of their preoccupation with the war against the Axis powers. So fractured independence did not come for five more years, when the lack of full-blown revolutionary defeatism in the 1940s reaped its reward in division and futility.
Immediately post-war, with a new Labour government in Britain, imperialism’s representatives got busy thrashing out a plan that would combine the maximum perception of independence on the subcontinent with the minimum of disruption to imperialism’s hegemony there.
Since the Muslim League had proved itself a willing partner of British imperialism in wartime, it stood to reason that it could be relied on in an independence settlement, even one that would weaken any potential challenge to imperialism’s power in the area. And so it proved. Congress was outflanked and browbeaten into accepting partition of pre-independence India into two countries, becoming complicit in the consequences of its inability to convince the Muslim masses of its good intentions. India and Pakistan (East and West) came into being. Though Nehru and his cohort mounted a rearguard action over Muslim-majority Kashmir, whose main (Muslim) leaders supported Congress, their approach was flawed: it left out the people of Kashmir, who were never consulted. Neither country was formed on the basis of the rights to self-determination of any of their various peoples, nor do their constitutions admit of it to this day.
Implementation of partition saw the largest movement of people in history: fourteen million men, women, and children crossed the new Indo-Pakistani border amidst a wave of xenophobia and religious sectarianism inculcated by the very idea of division of peoples on the grounds of religion. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Muslims were murdered by their neighbours. India and Pakistan were born in this joint act of mass carnage whose effects still linger in the minds and politics of their citizens. Once started, subcontinental politicians of either country found it impossible to stop the juggernaut of religious hatreds that partition engendered. To this day, though, there are more Muslims in India than in either Pakistan or Bangladesh.
When in 1971 democratic struggle in East Pakistan was countered by the intense repression of the Pakistani military government, refugees streamed across the frontier with India into Bihar and West Bengal. Indira Gandhi’s government purported to support the democrats’ fightback by training and arming them. India then launched its own troops into an attack over the border into East Pakistan, motivated more by a desire to remove a Pakistani presence on one of its borders and establish itself as regional hegemon than its vaunted humanitarian concerns for the refugees, whose presence in India Mrs Gandhi did not want anyway. Pakistan and India went to war, but Pakistan was defeated after nine days, ushering in the state of Bangladesh.
Celebration of the golden jubilee will not be particularly jubilant among the mass of the working people or even the middle strata in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan, however. Indeed, in secular, mono-linguist Bangladesh black flags will mark the skyline on August 14 in commemoration of the 1975 assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the country’s fight against Islamabad, rather than 1947, when many felt the more populous East Pakistan had merely swapped its British rulers for West Pakistani ones. Of course, trampling of national rights in Bengal by Islamabad was inherent in the anti-democratic nature of partition, as imposed by the British. India too refuses to countenance the deep and constantly reiterated desire of Kashmiris for self-determination.
The demands of the IMF and other western investment arms are implemented by the comprador capitalist governments of all three countries. Sharif’s government in Pakistan grinds the faces of workers to revive its stagnant industry and stimulate export-led growth. Gujral’s coalition government in India, backed by Congress (without dirtying its hands as part of the coalition), continues the rationalisation process of preceding Congress governments.
Disparate symptoms of seriously fracturing societies facing crisis are rife. Sectarian violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims claimed 16 more lives last Saturday in Pakistani Punjab. As of last week, the fascist Shiv Sena and ultra-nationalist BJP coalition government in India’s important industrial state of Maharashtra faces a potentially violent political challenge from a Shiv Sena split headed by a Bombay mafia figure. Kashmiris continue to demand the right to self-determination; movements of dalits (‘untouchables’) and tribal peoples still place their unmet demands for basic democratic and social rights on a hostile Indian state.
Large communist parties operate in India - the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) - though both are thoroughly social democratised. The CPI is one of the many parties making up the government coalition, thus inevitably going along with and compromised by the anti-working class, anti-working people policies and actions of that government. The CPI(M) takes a more measured view, distancing itself from the coalition while still supporting most of what it does; it is the governing party itself in West Bengal. The Socialist Unity Centre is less well known, but it too has a mass following (though loyal to Stalin).
Working class organisation in India is however in advance of that in either Bangladesh or Pakistan, though class struggle permeates the whole subcontinent. While the contradictions imposed 50 years ago by partition have arguably had greater effects on the polity of Pakistan and Bangladesh, India’s rulers too are more than happy now to act as imperialism’s local representatives and present the mass of their people for super-exploitation. Bombay’s real estate prices, though faltering a little in the last month, are still higher than Hong Kong’s: a significant strata is clearly benefiting from the country’s capitalist development.
Each country’s bourgeoisie hangs on by whatever ideological lever or repressive machinery it can utilise, but the hundreds of millions of subcontinental workers are arguably more politicised than workers in many imperialist countries. Whether that politicisation translates into coherent action for revolution sooner rather than later is the question.
Tom Ball