Kashmir and Neighbors @ whatisindia.com

Although the minutiae of the past do not necessarily guide the solutions for the future, no debate on current affairs may go far enough without some references to them. In the case of Indo-Pakistani relations, the central event of partition still casts a long shadow over the politics of the Sub-continent. The combined efforts of the departing imperialist power and the Muslim aristocracy, which resented the loss of an empire to a European country and which chose to believe in the formation of nations-states on the basis of religion, brought about the partition of the Sub-continent. The British contributed their Machiavellian share to the sequel of the Lahore Resolution (1940). While the Muslim League positions showed similarities with the Hindutva ideologies, the votaries of the two-nations theory came to power in the newly-carved state of Pakistan, but their counterparts among the Hindus failed to create a similar structure in the rest of India. However, the institutions of both countries are now under stress and need renewal. The Quaid-e Azam’s wise forethought that the Muslims and the Hindus ought to cease to be so in the political sense as citizens of the state has been buried with him. While the centralizing drive of successive Indian governments since the 1970s marginalized some minorities and caused the eruption of religious or ethnic tensions, the question for Pakistan is whether nationhood may be built on religion alone. The recurring crises suggest, as in India, that the trend should be towards federalism. Both countries still seem to be going through the process of nation-building.

The year 1947, which marks the sunset of British colonialism, transmitted a legacy of ideas, practices and institutions to both India and Paki9stan. After partition and independence, India, where nationalism with secular over-tones triumphed, continued with a competitive and highly participatory parliamentary system and a clearly defined limited role for its military. Pakistan, with Islamic orientation, on the other hand, stifled secular nationalism, and allowed the military to dominate most of its political life. Not only the majority of the Muslims of the Indian Sub-continent stayed back, but Pakistan failed even to absorb the Mohajirs who came over, could not prevent the secession of the Muslim Bengalis, and declared (1974) the Ahmadis (Ahmadiyyas) as a non-Muslim minority. The struggle for liberation from foreign rule promoted both nationalism and communalism, and while entrenched Muslim communalism, now referred to as “Islamic fundamentalism”, in Pakistan overwhelmed democratic practice as well as secular hopes, India’s dominant democratic secular nationalism is under the siege of communalist forces. Although “fundamentalism” has been a recurring phenomenon in the Muslim world, it does not have a uniform pattern[1] because, in addition to the fact that the Sunni-Shi’a divide rules out agreement on some essentials, the fundamentalists do not share common objectives.[2] Apart from the dissimilarities in the function of religion in the two successor stats, civil-military relations are also different. The issues of confession of faith and the limits of the military may even be considered as interlinked when one remembers that one of the armed forces received an impetus of Islamization especially during the anti-Soviet struggle against Afghanistan. The Indian army is generally judged as an apolitical force, and Pakistan’s politics is largely dominated by the Punjabi military lobby.

The Beginning

From the very beginning, India and Pakistan tried to build their own diverse polities. Is spite of its shortcomings, India has been able to build some safeguards into its system, including constitutional and legal provisions covering federalism, secularism and social justice, participatory parliamentary democracy ordaining adult franchise, periodic elections, political parties and representative institutions, and an intellectual milieu embracing a free press. With twenty-five States and seven Union Territories, most of India’s federating state are bigger in size and population than about two-thirds of the sovereign entities in the world. Especially after the nation. There are eight major religious communities, the Hindus being the largest (82.7%), followed by the Muslims (11.8%), Christians (2.63%), Sikhs (2%), Buddhists (0.7%), Jains (0.4%), Zorostrians (0.3%) and Jews (0.1%). The Hindus constitute the majority or plurality everywhere except Kashmir and in some southers islands. Nevertheless, there are more Muslims in India than in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Syria put together. Problems concerning coexistence emerge among the Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians. While the lists of the total number of languages and dialects vary from one printed source to another, there are 15 major languages, led by Hindi (264.1 million), followed by Telugu (54.2m.), Bengali (51.5 m). Marathi (49.6 m.), etc.

Jawaharlal Nehru of India, reflecting the great systnesis, was a leader of national consensus on the values of democracy, secularism, federalism, social justice and independent foreign policy. Educated in those norms, he practiced, preached and moulded public opinion, first as one of the central figures of a progressive national movement for more than four decades (from the 1920s) and then as a nation-builder (1947-64). He was no longer alive when the first Indian Satellite was put into orbit around the Earth.[3] But when he was no more, modern complexes had transformed the face of ancient India, in a historically short period, placing it among the first ten industrially developed countries.

The circumstances under which Pakistan came into existence forced the country’s polity to link national with religious identity. Constituting only a minority in prepartition India, part of the leadership of the Indian Muslims chose to assert the Islamic identity and eventually politicize Islam, rather than keeping religion in the private sphere.[4] Those who propounded Muslim consolidation as a kind of supra-class unity eulogized an Islamic state as a panacea for social ills. Such an appraisal undermines the role of the Muslim landlords who saw in the separation of the Muslim community a means of protecting their own interests against Hindu and Sikh competition.[5] Nevertheless, Pakistan was the only modern state created exclusively in the name of Islam.[6] The demand for a separate homeland based on Islam was a unique event in contemporary history. On 14 August 1947, the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan, Jinnah assumed the office of Governor-General of Pakistan, and the cabinet was sworn in. One of the most populous Muslim states had come into existence. Only two days before, the Constituent Assembly resolved that he should be addressed as the Quaide-e Azam’ (the Great Founder).

It had always been known that partition would leave minorities on both sides. Curiously enough, the creator of Pakistan opted for a secular society. The Quaid-e Azam had stated in early 1941 at the Madras session of the Muslim League that no government would succeed without creating security confidence in the minorities if its policy is tyrannical over them.[7] His Presidential Address at the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 included the following thoughts: “You are free Togo to your temples… to your mosques or any other places of worship in the State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that that nothing to do with the business of the State…[W] e are all citizens and equal citizens of one State...[I]n course of time, Hindus would cease to be Hindus, and Muslims not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense, as citizens of the state”. [8] This was “ a ray of hope”.[9] Although such affirmations might have cause the eyebrows of some of the listeners to be raised, Jinnah meant to begin to work in that spirit and hoped that the alienations between the majority and the minority communities would vanish. A man who had fought for an Islamic state was impressing upon the members of the Constituent Assembly and the citizens the virtues of secularism.

But a great holocaust followed on both sides of the partition line. Had the original date for the transfer of power (1 June 1948) been allowed to stand, both governments could organize their administrative machinery for the maintenance of law and order better, and the terrible massacres, at least in the scale that they did assume, could have been avoided. H.S. Suhrawardy, who happened to be the Chief Minister of Bengal at the time of partition, accepted Gandhi’s invitation to resist discord in Calcuttam his stronghold, and left East Bengal to Khwaja Nazimudding, who came from Dacca. Thanks to the personalities, popular images and the efforts of these two ‘sons of the soil’, Bengal and Calcutta were spared the horrors of Punjab. When the holocaust was over, there were still minorities in Pakistan: the Hindus, the largest number outside India; Christians,[10] abound in Portuguese surnames; Parsis, the descendants of small bands of refugees who left Persia after the collapse of the Sassanid dynasty; and Buddhists, who constituted the majority in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (now in Bangladesh).[11]

All of Pakistan received 23% of the territory and 19% of the population of colonial India. [12] Pakistan was made up of two wings, the western part divided into Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The last three had relatively small populations, and the Hindu minority was numerically weak and scattered all over the provinces. But in Punjab, also in the west, and in Bengal in the east, the non-Muslims formed over 40% of the population. While the NWFP in the west was the smallest, the neighbouring Punjab Province, or its western part that fell to Pakistan, was the largest (205,000 sq. km.). The ethnic and cultural population fell roughly into these four geographical units. These provincial groups now spill over the borders so that there are more Pathans in Karachi than in Peshawar or more Baluchis in Sindh than in Baluchistan. Besides these four provinicial peoples, there was a fifth group, the Mohajirs or the refugees who came over from India in 1947. Arriving mostly from the Urdu-speaking Muslim areas of India such as Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar or from the Gujarati-speaking parts of Bombay and Kathiawar, the Mohajirs had “no provincial bias” and were “more devoted to the Pakistan ideology”.[13]

[1] Dilip Hiro, Islamic Fundamentalism, London, HarperCollins Publishers, Paladin Series, 1989. The author rightly observes that the manner in which the fundamental movement is conducted varies widely from country to country.

[2] Rafiq Zakariya, The Struggle within Islam: the Conflict between Religion and Politics, London, Penguin, 1988, The United States Government dug out the term “fundamentalism” from the history of Western nations as a sort of a “swear word” for the Khomeint revolution in Iran. It means adherence to the letter of the scripture, and denotes intolerance in the name of religion. It carries the danger of lapsing into violence and even terrorism.

[3] Turkkaya Ataov, “Nehru-A Profile”, A.U. Siyasal Bilgiler Fakultesi Dergisi, Ankara, XLIV/3-4 (Temmuz-Aralik 1989),

[4] Although a new Islamic state, Pakistan was, like its older neighbors, a product of historical processes. Hence, it included one of the great civilizations of Asia: R.E.M. Wheeler, Five Thousand Years of Pakistan, London, Royal India and Pakistan Society, 1950.

[5] Marietta T. Stepanyants, Pakistan: Philosophy and Sociology (Filosofiia I Sotsiologiia v Pakistane) Moscow, Nauka, 1971.

[6] Shirin Tahir-Kheli, “In Search of an Identity”, Islam in Foreign Policy, ed. Adeed Dawisha, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

[7] For Jinnah’s statements on the minorities: Government of Pakistan, Quotes from the Quaid, rev. ed., Islamabad, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1992, Also: Latif Ahmed Sherwani, “Quad-I-Azam and the Minorities”, Pakistan Journal of History and Culture, Islamabad, XII/1-2 (1991),

[8] Quotes from the Quaid,

[9] “Towards National Consolidation”, Secualr Democracy, New Delhi, XXIV/5 (August 1995)

[10] A genral description: Karl Heinz Pfefer, “Eine Sozio-ethno-religiose Minderheit: die Christen West-Pakistans”, Sociologus, 12/2(1962). The Goan Christians in Karachi in the 1970s: Raffat Khan Haward, “ Au Urban Minority: the Goan Christian Community in Karachi”, The City in South Asia: Premodern and Modern, eds., Kenneth Ballhatchet and John Harrison, London, Curzon Press; Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1980.

[11] Four chapters by S.K. Gupta, Anthony D’Souza, Maki Dhunjibhoy and Shachi N. Barua: Minorities in Pakistan, Karachi, Pakistan Publications, Robert H.S. Hutchinson, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Delhi, Vivek, 1978; The Adivasis of Bangladesh, London, Minority Rights Group, 1991.

[12] Yu. V. Gankovskii, L.R. Gordon-Polonskaya, Istoriya Pakistana, Moskva, Izdatel’s stvo Vostochony Literaturi, 1961.

[13] S.Amjad Ali, The Muslim World Today, Islamabad, National Hijira Council, 1985,

Home Page