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If you were asked to imagine pre-Partition India, or British India, you would most likely picture in your head the combined maps of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
But British India was much smaller, about half the size of what the three countries put together on the map would look. The remaining half of the subcontinent was made up of princely States — 562 of them — whose rulers had accepted the British as their masters and, in return, been allowed to remain the masters of their respective States. These included Kashmir and Hyderabad, each almost as large as Great Britain. Then there was Goa, which belonged to Portugal, and the tiny French pockets in Bengal and in south India.
During the countdown to Partition, which essentially entailed the division of the two British provinces of Punjab and Bengal, the Viceroy Lord Mountbatten summoned the rulers and told them unequivocally that they had little choice other than joining either India or Pakistan. While most of the princely States complied, there were many who nursed ambitions of remaining independent after the departure of the British. Kashmir, a Muslim-majority State ruled by a Hindu, and Hyderabad, a Hindu-majority State ruled by a Muslim, were among them.
So when independent India was born in the early hours of 15 August 1947, it came into existence minus Kashmir, minus Hyderabad State and minus many others, including Tripura, Sikkim and Goa — something hard to imagine today, especially if you are unfamiliar with history.
The reluctant rulers began to accede from October 1947, starting with Hari Singh of Kashmir, and it wasn’t until April 1975, when Sikkim became part of India, that the map of India came to look pretty much what it looks like today. Meanwhile, East Pakistan had become Bangladesh.
Present-day Hindu nationalists must realise that each time they ask an Indian Muslim to go to Pakistan, it is they who are being anti-national and not the Muslim.
History tells you that cartographers have hardly had a leisurely moment. Borders change all the time. Just look at how the maps of Europe and Asia have changed in just the last 100 years — and a century is just a speck in the sandglass that has been measuring time ever since human beings organised themselves into nations. And they are still changing. All it takes is an idea or a thought to catch fire.
Who knew until August 16, 1946 — when Jinnah called for the first major strike to demand creation of Pakistan and thousands were killed in riots in Calcutta — that Pakistan would become a reality exactly a year later? And while it is true that Pakistan was born out of Jinnah’s firm belief that Muslims of India were “not a minority, but a nation”, it is also true that a sizeable number of Muslims did not support Jinnah or his idea of Partition and they stayed back because they had absolute faith in a secular India.
Present-day Hindu nationalists — who, buoyed by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s impressive victory in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, are trying to push India back to the dark days of 1946 — must recognise this truth. They must realise that each time they ask an Indian Muslim to go to Pakistan, it is they who are being anti-national and not the Muslim. If the Muslim deserved to be in Pakistan, he would have migrated long ago, but the fact that he prefers to live in a Hindu-dominated but secular India over an Islamic Pakistan makes him a greater nationalist.
It is no longer just Muslims who need to watch what they speak. Even Hindus who do not support the BJP are now branded as anti-nationals. Way back in 1974, the Congress politician D.K. Barooah had famously proclaimed, “India is Indira. Indira is India.” The BJP has now appropriated that slogan. Today, India is Modi and Modi is India: speaking against him makes you an anti-national.
If Modi were to win a decisive majority in 2019 as well, where would the ‘anti-nationals’ go? Pakistan would not accept them because it has a long list of its own problems to deal with. So would they be forced to demand the creation of a new nation within the boundaries of India? Who knows!
The idea may seem to be a joke today, but remember that even Jinnah’s demand for creation of Pakistan was dismissed as a petulant child’s whim until 16 August 1946 — and in precisely 363 days from that date he was sworn in as the governor-general of Pakistan.
Boundaries are highly malleable and you cannot make them permanent by merely erecting a concrete wall or a barbed fence. Look at what happened to the Berlin Wall — it came up in no time and came down in no time, all within a span of 45 years. But jingoists rarely read history because they are too mystified by their own ‘glorious past’.
I want to ask those who consider it their birth right to resort to violence in the name of Bharat Mata, or those who think that shouting ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ makes you a patriot: who exactly is your Bharat Mata?
At what point in the history of a nation do its borders begin to calcify, refusing to be permeable any more?
The one who allowed the construction of magnificent temples in Khajuraho and Konark many centuries ago? Or the one that was ruled for 350 years by the Mughals, who gave us, among other things, the Taj Mahal? Or the one that was ruled for nearly a century by the British, who stitched together warring kingdoms into a single political entity? Or the one that was born as independent India on August 15, 1947, without Kashmir and Hyderabad and countless other princely States falling in her jurisdiction? Or the one whose lap happens to be our home today, where a million mutinies are brewing because many of her children believe she has treated them unfairly, where caste comes first and country later — where a Dalit can still be hacked to death in public for marrying a woman outside his caste?
Boundaries change, nationalities change — it is always nationalists who get swept away by change. History has proven it time and again.
