British gave India freedom to hate. We are staring at Partition violence again – ThePrint

I have been in a decade-long debate with a German friend and historian at Cambridge University, and it remains visceral and all too timely. It concerns the grim theme of violence and its experience in our respective societies and histories. Germany seems to haunt certain Indian political fantasies. Only the other day, Haryana Chief Minister M.L. Khattar prophesised that like Germany, today, India too could be reunited with Pakistan and Bangladesh!

Unification or not, my German historian-friend remains staggered that a million Indians killed each other in a single year during Partition with basic and household weaponry and without State apparatus. Our debate is not simply about which violence is more inhuman the one carried out with kitchen knives by erstwhile neighbours or the other that was done in industrialised gas chambers, matched by brutal bureaucratic machinery of mass death. Though we also often argue about that.

As contemporaries, I am as far removed from the civil war that accompanied our Independence as my German friend is from the Holocaust, which remains the exceptional horror of human history. Our debate has no real winners given the topic is how two different societies manufactured and operationalised deadly hatred. What remains moot is the role of the State in managing antagonism and protecting the vulnerable against violence. I will come to that in a minute, as this is indeed critical to the state of peace in India today.

My friend and I only agree that our societies dealt with the aftermath of mass violence entirely differently with lasting consequences. He grew up being schooled in collective guilt and responsibility for the crimes of his forefathers with the aim to learn that hatred towards the other is not only inhuman but, above all, cannot and should not be repeated.

By contrast, in my Indian education, Partition violence came first into view for my generation via State television and the Doordarshan series Tamas. In this series and countless other accounts, Partition violence is still understood widely as emotional but collective suffering in which everyone was a victim of a moment of violent madness. Neither the State nor any people have taken responsibility for those mass killings. The lesson is that since there has been no responsibility or culpability for it, Indians, arguably, have been condemned to repeat a bad history.

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Recent Indian headlines only affirm the power of repetition that gives any traumatic history, and especially that of violence, its force.

Youd be forgiven if newspaper headlines seem to teleport you back into the 1920s. The themes are eerily similar. Confrontations over blasphemy: Check. Mob policing of inter-faith intimate relations between men and women: Check. Heated polemics over religious conversions: Check. Fear based on fiction or downright lies on demographic takeover by a religious minority: Check. Obsession with who is praying where in public: Check. Demolitions of homes or small shrines to create religiously segregated neighbourhoods: Check.

A century apart and the repeated pattern bears the same controversies. The violence that accompanies each of these controversies remains tightly bound to the social fabric of communities in India even today. To take one instance, in the 1924 case of Rangila Rasool, votaries and protagonists of that infamous blasphemy controversy and consequent violence appealed to the courts and the State to determine the truth of one religion and also to dispense justice between two hostile groups. But unlike then, when foreign masters tightly held the reins of the State, todays political institutions are entirely Indian but deploy a law designed by the British.

The violent hatred that has propelled recent religious controversies in India, however, is misidentified as debates about freedom of expression. Whether or not you are a free speech absolutist, a proper contextualisation of this clutch of laws is essential. British imperial imperatives deliberately miscast this relationship as one of freedom and with deadly consequences to date.

Also read: How Nehru added conditions apply to Article 19(1)(a) & India lost way to gates of freedom

Simply put and to cut a very complex and long history short, after the Rebellions of 1857, the British empire made a U-turn on its prevailing social policies and decided against any activism in Indian religious affairs. Consider the fact that prior to the rebellions/mutiny, intervention in religion the abolition of Sati (1829), followed by the Hindu Widows Remarriage Act of 1856 had formed the centrepieces of British imperial rule and law.

With the activating of the Indian Penal Code in 1861, the imperial State took a so-called neutral stance of intervening in religion only to maintain public peace. This had three major and enduring consequences. First, the domain of religion, as opposed to the political arena, afforded relative freedom to colonised Indians. Religion was thus easy to mobilise, especially by conservative politicians given to exclusivism such as Bal Gangadhar Tilak. By contrast, newspapers and pamphlets were heavily censored for political writings and especially any criticism of government policies. The Sedition Law (IPC 124A), further policed and ensured this. It was not that the State was entirely removed from religion or distant from it. But rather, it strongly defined its intervention in terms of maintaining peace between communities.

Second, and in so occupying the role of a neutral mediator, the colonial State set up Hindus and Muslims as legally competitive and antagonistic entities.

Finally, the law increasingly judged theological issues of religion but displaced and named them after freedom of expression. The colonial State went on to not only arrogate the power to judge the life of a prophet or doctrine but also significantly legalised religious competition and antagonism.

To say that this has been toxic would be an understatement. The postcolonial State and the much-celebrated Indian Constitution, while being radical in endowing individual rights, has failed to dismantle this colonial relationship of law and religion that has effectively set up a hostile competition between groups.

Also read: Pakistan-Bangladesh merger with India possible, like Germany unification, Khattar says

It is striking that Indias most spiritually inclined political leader, M. K. Gandhi, identified the law as the key obstacle to religious harmony. Even before he returned to India, in his manifesto Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi chastised both Hindus and Muslims for failing to see the law as a gladiatorial set-up that could only lead to vengeful hatred. As was his want and despite it being his own profession, Gandhi pointed out the moral bankruptcy of expecting justice through any commercial transactions between lawyers.

Above all, and unlike Tilak, Gandhi called out British legal neutrality as a (covert) call to violence. Gandhi would repeat and make the same arguments 40 years later. At the height of mass violence in 1947, Gandhi was the only leader who did not appeal for the imposition of martial law or any British intervention as Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had all demanded of the outgoing masters.

The Third Reich under Adolf Hitler had created a deathly State machinery of genocide. In India, though, 50-plus years of legal confrontations between religious communities created the critical context and led to the deadly civil war of 1947 as the colonial State feigned neutrality till its last standing day.

Gandhis answer to hatred was to seek and demand a politics of individual restraint and responsibility based neither on cowardice nor competition. Restraint was only possible by channelling and committing to the highest precept common to all religions non-violence. Each individual, thus, had to be true to only their own religion without seeking to convince the other. The laws capacity to then referee any hatred generated by the competition it had set up was sought to be depleted.The exit from State-ordained or legalised hostility was, in effect, an exit from hatred.

Indians may no longer be able to listen to, let alone be persuaded by, Gandhi. Indians, however, can and must learn to take collective responsibility for the violence of Partition and close this violent chapter. If nothing else, it will ensure that the history of hatred had a dnouement or endpoint in 1947. Rather than being its victims, Partition violence points to the history of violence as intimate. Crucially, it must be treated as finished, or else, it will continue to extract a price in the present. The lesson from Germany contra CM Khattar is not unification but a reparation for a collective history of violent hatred.

Without this closure on Partition and as a reckoning, no law or court will be able to guarantee the peace essential to Indias hard-won freedoms.

Shruti Kapila is Professor of Indian history and global political thought at the University of Cambridge. She tweets @shrutikapila. Views are personal.

(Edited by Humra Laeeq)

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British gave India freedom to hate. We are staring at Partition violence again - ThePrint