Analysis on Various Strategies of Partitioning Between India and Pakistan

The plan to partition India (into India and a regionally divided Pakistan) was announced on June 3, 1947. The movement of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to the other territory began in earnest in August and September, 1947. There followed a massive disruption as more than ten million people moved from one country to the other across the western border alone. Villages were abandoned, crops left to rot, and families separated by the new borders. The governments of India and Pakistan were completely unprepared for this. But more than this disruption, there was a genocide as members of one religion slaughtered and raped those of the other religions, Estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million, while about 75,000 women were abducted and raped by men of other religions and sometimes by men of their own religion. In particular, the humiliation of women was foremost, including raping and disfiguring women in front of their relatives, tattooing and branding them with ‘Pakistan, Zindabad’ or ‘Hindustan, Zindabad’ marking a halfmoon on their breasts or genitalia, and amputating their breasts. To prevent capture, torture and death at the hands of others or forced religious conversions, people murdered their own children, spouses, parents and other relatives. Some also committed suicide. Pennebaker (2000) mentions women who jumped into wells or set themselves on fire, sometimes individually, but on occasions all the women in a family together.

It had approached all political problems from a national point of view [insisting on its national character] and recognized no distinction between Hindus and Muslims on political issues. It could not agree to be an organization of Hindus alone. I therefore insisted that the Congress should have the freedom to nominate any Indian it liked regardless of whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim or a Parsee or a Sikh. Congress should participate on the basis of Indian nationhood or not participate at all" But Jinnah did not accept this and conveyed to Wavell that he was not going to tolerate the inclusion of Khizer Hayat Khan in the Council and once again repeated his stance to nominate all Muslims on the new Council [Khalid Shamsul Hasan,2005, Cheema,2000]. The chief secretary of the government of the United Provinces reported to the centre: 'while Muslims gladly undertook to arrange thanksgiving prayers, not one Hindu temple agreed to organize thanksgiving in any appropriate scale'. It was obvious that the British attitude of friendliness towards the Muslim League and Jinnah was responsible for the Muslim victory celebrations. On the other hand, the government hated the Indian National Congress and despised its leaders [Khalid Shamsul Hasan, 2005].

The partition of ethnically-diverse regions into homogeneous `homelands' has been often mooted as a solution to the most pressing convicts around the world. While there is some debate on whether partitions actually correlate with subsequent reductions in civil war in cross-country analyses [Pandey, G. 2001, Latif Ahmed Sherwani, 1986], the logic of simply separating ethnic groups across national boundaries continues to have appeal in both policy and academic circles. The Partition of India on religious grounds in August, 1947, looms large as a cautionary tale to advocates of partition as a means for peace. India's partition led to one of the largest forced migrations in world history, with an estimated 17.9 million people leaving their homes (Bharadwaj, Khwaja, and Mian 2008a, Aiyar 1998), Estimates of the dead during Partition-related violence between March 1947 and January 1948 range from one hundred and eighty thousand to one million. 3.4 million Members of religious minority groups {Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, and Muslims in independent India{ went \missing" by 1951 (Bharadwaj, Khwaja, and Mian 2008a). Areas which experienced the worst violence during the Partition of India continue to have tiny minority populations more than 50 years later (Census of India 2001). Pakistan acquired a subgroup of disproportionately literate immigrants who played an important role in its subsequent politics, while forced migration appears to have led India's immigrants to switch to non-agricultural professions that may have played a role in accelerating the process of its industrialization (Bharadwaj, Khwaja, and Mian 2008b). Was the catastrophe at the Partition of India inevitable? Could the most vulnerable areas and populations have been predicted more accurately? What lessons can we draw from India's experience for ethnically mixed regions elsewhere? This study seeks to address these questions using a newly assembled set of district-level data drawn from across undivided India. In particular, the study assesses the determinants of religious homogenization and minority outgo’s in Indian districts between 1931 and 1951, and highlights the role played by combat veterans in these outows. During the Second World War, united India mustered an army of 2.5 million that fought the Axis in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia. This was the largest volunteer army in the history of the world. While recruitment into this volunteer army was clearly not random, the study exploits the arbitrary nature of assignment of army units to different campaigns and periods of time at the frontline in World War II to instead examine the role of human capital gained in combat on ethnic cleansing during the subsequent Partition of India. A large and growing body of evidence has examined the relationships between ethnic diversity and civil there are two roughly equal sized groups, appear to experience more convict (Montalvo and Reynal-Querol 2005). Further, the degree of polarization may be more likely to result in convict when the winning group chooses \public" allocations that affect all, rather than when the contest is over private goods (Esteban and Ray 2009). In the context of Partition, two competing hypotheses for Partition ethnic cleansing can be examined: whether the ethnic cleansing was largely appropriative { to cleanse the minority to seize either their goods or to displace them from lucrative economic roles that would benefit private individuals{ or whether ethnic cleansing served a \public" purpose{ to reduce economic competition for a group or to ensure the majority's control of politics. We will provide evidence for the public nature of ethnic cleansing in India's partition, and the heightened role that combat experience played in more polarized districts.

In this paper we found that the nationalist colonial discourse the creation of Pakistan through the partition of India has often been subjected to rigorous political analysis keeping in view various ideological perspectives. In concrete terms it is argued that Pakistan was essentially a British creation [Bharadwaj, P., Khwaja, A., and Mian, 2008]. Some scholars and political analysts tend to agree with the simplistic and misleading formulation that the British consciously planned and astutely executed a political enterprise called the partition of India. Such a formulation ignores questions of identity in terms of the nation, region, religion, ethnicity, culture and language, which are now being addressed from different angles and viewpoints.

• Amarjit Singh, Jinnah and Punjab: Shamsul Hasan Collection and other Documents 1944-1947, New Delhi, 2007, 234.

• Bharadwaj, P., Khwaja, A., Mian, A. The Big March: Migratory Flows after Partition of British India. Economic and PoliticalWeekly Vol.43, No. 35 (2008).

• Cheema, P I. The Politics of the Punjab Boundary Award, Heidelberg Papers in South Asian and Comparative Politics,Working Paper (1), 2000.

• Khalid Shamsul Hasan, Punjab Muslim League and the Unionists, Karachi, 2005.

• Latif Ahmed Sherwani, The Partition of India and Mountbatten(Karachi: Council for Pakistan Studies, 1986)

 Pandey, G. (2001). Remembering partition. New York: Cambridge University Press.