An acclaimed Indian Muslim “secularist” recently lambasted Mohammad Ali Jinnah as “the man who single-handedly divided India in 1947”. That is not true. While Mr Jinnah certainly created Pakistan single-handedly, it was Mr Jawaharlal Nehru and Mr Vallabhbhai Patel who jointly presided over the division of India by compromising with the Hindu communalists within the Congress party and pushing Mr Jinnah out of their fold. The sad irony was that it was Mr Gandhi who had to pay the price of their folly with his own life by insisting on a secular ideal for India. That lesson remains lost on many Indians even today.
Since 1969, over 10,000 people have died in communal clashes in Ahmadabad, which fact bemoans the passing of Mr Gandhi’s dream into a sectarian nightmare. Last week, over 600 innocent Muslims died in Gujarat and at least 30,000 were rendered homeless. Nearly 30 mosques in Ahmadabad were razed to the ground. Ten years ago, Hindu militants ran amuck in Ayodhya and sparked communal riots which left over 2000 people dead.
Well meaning secular Indians rightly berate Pakistan for being an “ideological and authoritarian state”, proudly pointing to their own country’s “secular and democratic” moorings. Yet they overlook the frightening similarities between the fundamentalists of the two countries, those in Pakistan who have declared war on Hindu India and the infidel West and those in India who talk of protecting or strengthening the “Hindu nation”, those who wield the trident, stick and firetorch in India and those who carry automatic rifles and advocate an Islamic state for the “Muslim nation” in Pakistan. Both may be minorities within their faiths but both have powerful political supporters in the civil and military hierarchies of their own countries.
The impulse of Hindu-Muslim communalism is rooted in the politics of medieval Indian history. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism emanated from within the soul of ancient India and therefore didn’t lead to violent conflagration. But Islam arrived from outside India as a “conquering” force through the sword of the “temple breaking” Muslim hordes or on the back of “liberating” Muslim saints and mystics. Later the British imperialists aggravated religious tensions by politicizing the divide. The birth of Pakistan followed because Indian secularists couldn’t comprehend the nature of the communal challenge posed by the Hindus communalists within their fold rather than as a result of Muslim League belligerence in quest of a Muslim “nation”. But just as Pakistani Muslims should have stopped their search for a “Muslim nation” after the formation of their state in Pakistan in 1947 (as Mr Jinnah had advocated) but didn’t do so to their everlasting disarray, so too the Hindus should have stopped clamouring for a Hindu “nation” in India (as Mr Gandhi had pleaded) but didn’t do so to their recurrent dismay. Indeed, if many of Pakistan’s post-independence woes can be laid at the door of its “Muslim ideologues”, some of India’s problems have been accentuated by its Hindu revivalists who seek to define and enlarge Hinduism in the same erroneous manner of Islamism in Pakistan.
Of course, the rise of Islam as a “civilisational” force following the eruption of oil politics in the 1970s has hurt both countries. In Pakistan it fertilized the ground for the emergence of Ziaism and provided the impetus for the Saudi-American sponsorship of jihad in Afghanistan. In India, it laid the seeds of a counter-civilisational response in the form of Hindutva. The articulation of this “civilisational” behaviour was manifest in India by the advent of the “smiling Buddha” in 1974, a reference to India’s “peaceful nuclear explosions”, and in Pakistan by the launching of plans to build the “Islamic bomb” subsequently. Pakistan now came to be cast in the mould of an Islamic state while India began to shed its secular leanings in favour of a Hindu Rashtra. In Pakistan the process of Islamising the state was fed by the ambitions of the military while in India the BJP could not have scaled the heights of the state without the democratic votes and financial power of civil society. Over time, the failed authoritarianism of Pakistan and the successful democratization of India have led them to the same ideological cul-de-sac. In trying to disprove the political legitimacy of each other, both countries have mirrored the compulsions and concerns of the religious impulse in the other.
The most indelible memory of Partition is of railway carriages filled with mutilated corpses of Hindus and Muslims. Five decades later, the blood lust of both communities in India was fanned by exactly the kind of circumstances that fueled the slaughters in 1947, making India’s orgy of secular self-immolation look like some hoary fantasy. The irony is that it is General Pervez Musharraf who wants to liquidate fundamentalism and separate religion from politics in Pakistan today while India’s prime minister in waiting, Mr L K Advani, remains a staunch supporter of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad which seeks a “Hindu Rashtra”. The truth is that if India and Pakistan want to be stable and prosper together, they must be more like each other in secular outlook and less like each other in religious terms.