[sacw] SACW #2 | 17 August 02

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire, Dispatch #2 | 17 August 2002

__________________________

#1. Wasting a big chance? (Praful Bidwai)
#2. Poetry, Power and Blood (Mahesh Rangarajan)
#3. Holy Cow a Myth? An Indian Finds the Kick Is Real (Emily Eakin)
#4. Book Review: The routes of Partition (Sukumar Muralidharan)

__________________________

#1.

The News International (Pakistan)
Saturday August 17, 2002-- Jamadi-us-Sani 07, 1423 A.H.

Wasting a big chance?

Praful Bidwai

The writer is one of India's most widely published columnists. 
Formerly a Senior Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, he 
is a winner of the Sean MacBride Prize for 2000 of the International 
Peace Bureau

After the respective Independence Day addresses by President Pervez 
Musharraf and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, India and Pakistan 
again seem to be lurching towards a confrontation over Kashmir. 
Musharraf declared the coming Jammu and Kashmir elections "farcical" 
and reaffirmed support to the Kashmiri "freedom struggle" as a 
"sacred trust". And Vajpayee was back harping on the "atoot ang" 
(inalienable part of India) theme, even while admitting past 
"mistakes" on India's part.

Following the sparring, how does the picture look from India? The one 
significant new -- and somewhat hopeful -- element is New Delhi's 
offer of "unconditional" talks to the All-Party Hurriyat Conference 
through the Kashmir Committee, an ad hoc NGO headed by former law 
minister Ram Jethmalani.

The Hurriyat has agreed to the talks -- with many disclaimers and 
qualifications. The most important: it will not participate in the 
elections, the talks must focus solely on the "future dispensation" 
of Kashmir, they must be "on a principle and for a cause", and they 
must soon involve Pakistan.

The Hurriyat is making much of the fact that it has only agreed to 
talk to an Indian non-governmental organisation, not an official 
body. But such distinctions are largely imaginary and reflect the 
Hurriyat's fear of being identified as "pro-India". The Kashmir 
Committee is very close to the hawkish home minister, LK Advani. 
Jethmalani himself announced last week that "Advani authorised and 
requested the Committee to declare publicly that he would welcome 
anyone ... who has any relevant issues to discuss with him ...".

In truth, this is the first time in 13 years that the Hurriyat has 
agreed to talk to an Indian NGO which has a line of communication to 
the government. So has Shabir Ahmed Shah. Earlier, the Hurriyat had 
refused to meet New Delhi's nominee, KC Pant. Significantly, neither 
group threatens to campaign for a boycott of the Assembly elections.

The move towards a dialogue is welcome in and of itself. But whether 
it is truly productive will be determined by the interplay of three 
factors. There is reason to be sceptical about these. Should they 
fail to reinforce one another positively, the post-September 11 
opportunity, which has opened up in Kashmir thanks to a realignment 
of the region's political-military forces, will be lost. The problem 
will fester.

The three factors are: the motives, compulsions and calculations of 
the Hurriyat; the Indian government's plans to seek legitimacy for 
the coming elections while hedging on a dialogue on Kashmir with 
Pakistan; and the attitude of the Pakistan establishment, in 
particular the agencies that shape the Kashmir policy, to the 
possibility of a relatively free and fair election in J&K.

It is clear that the Hurriyat opted for talks with Jethmalani largely 
out of pressure from the United States, Britain and the European 
Union (which last week sent a delegation to Srinagar explicitly 
asking for its electoral participation). The generally pro-Pakistan 
conglomerate looks more divided after the moderate Abdul Gani Lone's 
assassination. Its popularity has never been tested. But now it is 
called upon to show it believes in democratic processes and peaceful 
resolution of disputes.

A senior Hurriyat leader is quoted as saying it would have been 
"suicidal" to equate Jethmalani with Pant -- with his inflexible 
brief and his extraordinarily bureaucratic approach -- and to reject 
talks. But the Hurriyat is under equally strong pressure from jihadi 
militants and from sections of the Pakistan government to refuse 
reconciliation with New Delhi, especially through elections.

Many Hurriyat leaders are aware that Kashmiri popular sentiment has 
changed in recent weeks. According to numerous reports from the 
Valley, many more people favour inclusive and free elections than 
they did six years ago. An opinion poll by "The Week" says 54 percent 
feel the Hurriyat should contest the elections, although 73 percent 
think Pakistan "will try to disrupt them".

Few Hurriyat leaders are likely to stick their necks out, including 
some who want to return to "normal" electoral politics. The result of 
these contradictory pressures is the Hurriyat's latest, awkward, 
pro-talks decision. Its leadership cannot approach the talks from a 
position of strength in today's "anti-terrorist" global climate. It 
is unlikely to take them particularly seriously.

The Indian government has gone through many gyrations. Aware of 
international concerns, it recently replaced Pant with former RAW 
chief AS Dullat and sent him to open exploratory talks with Kashmir's 
non-parliamentary groups. But then, it arrested the JKLF's Yasin 
Malik and Jamat-i-Islami's Syed Ali Shah Geelani. This was a crude 
attempt to isolate Hurriyat "hardliners" from "moderates". The 
opposite happened.

A month ago, the government agreed to negotiate "autonomy" for 
Kashmir with Farooq Abdullah's National Conference as part of a deal 
on a spell of Governor's Rule in Kashmir just prior to the elections. 
Such a spell will be a welcome confidence-booster. It has already 
become the demand of most political parties, including the Congress.

In reality, the "autonomy" talks are a charade. They could at best 
help Abdullah claim the NC has not given up on its trademark demand. 
Abdullah does not trust New Delhi not to promote some ex-militants 
and even pro-separatist leaders at the NC's expense. He is unlikely 
to quit unless there is a dramatic breakthrough.

The elections won't be easy to rig. There is a tough, impartial and 
credible Chief Election Commissioner in James Lyngdoh, who has 
publicly warned the security forces against coercion. Besides, there 
will be some election observers from abroad. Indeed, there is a 
powerful case for a full-scale monitoring group, not limited to South 
Asians. This can only enhance the election's credibility.

But New Delhi bristles at and desperately resists the suggestion 
because it wrongly sees it as the thin end of the "external 
interference" wedge. It should know that Kashmir's 
internationalisation became inevitable after Pokharan-II with the 
highlighting of the issue's potential as a flashpoint for a nuclear 
catastrophe.

One major premise informing all recent Indian moves is the strategy 
of holding relatively free and fair elections in Kashmir, and 
negotiating with the winners, but refusing a dialogue with Pakistan. 
This may not be viable in the long run, but could work so long as the 
present balance of forces in the "anti-terrorism" campaign holds, 
favouring India.

Needless to say, this means squandering an opportunity for regaining 
the Kashmiri people's confidence and reaching reconciliation with a 
neighbour. The Pakistan government too faces a historic choice. It 
can agree to support the J&K elections, albeit with international 
observers, and seize the diplomatic initiative by inviting India to 
the negotiating table. Or it can opt for worn-out, clandestine 
military "solutions": disrupt elections, deny them legitimacy, and 
thus keep the Kashmir pot boiling.

It is the easiest thing in Kashmir to hire or recruit killers who 
will target candidates. But that strategy won't produce either 
goodwill for Pakistan or political energies which can take Kashmir 
out of the present morass, to which New Delhi has undoubtedly 
contributed. It will take wisdom and statesmanship to reject such 
short-sighted, counter-productive approaches. It is doubtful if 
either government has these. Without wisdom, they could make an even 
bigger mess of Kashmir--endangering their own security, and the lives 
of the Valley's beleaguered people.

_____

#2.

The Telegraph, Wednesday, 14 August 2002

Poetry, Power and Blood
Mahesh Rangarajan

It is interesting to reflect on how the race for power can be viewed 
through the lens of poetry. A Hindi poet once wrote, " To those who 
try to reach/ the throne of power/ over mounds of dead bodies of 
innocent children/Old women/Young men/I have a question/Did nothing 
bind them to those who died?"
It is no great secret who wrote these lines. It was a BJP Member of 
Parliament, who has, since 1998, been the head of government: Atal 
Bihari Vajpayee. The poem entitled 'Satta' or 'Power' prominently 
features in collections and has been reproduced with a translation in 
the book, 21 Poems translated and edited by noted civil servant and 
author, Pawan K Varma.
Neither the author nor the editor informs us about the context or 
moment when the lines were written but it is ironical how relevant 
they seem in the fracas around the timing of the Gujarat Assembly 
elections. The Central Election Commission has gone about its work 
with due diligence, including on-site visits first by its officials 
and then its members. Even before it has announced when it intends to 
hold the polls, the ruling party has decided to launch a full scale 
offensive.
Nobody knows what prompted former Cabinet minister and newly 
appointed General Secretary of the ruling party, Arun Jaitley to go 
on the offensive against the Central Election Commission. Perhaps, 
having banked on early polls following the dissolution of the State 
Assembly in Gujarat, the party was banking on easy polls to take 
advantage of the prevailing polarisation among the voters. The 
comments mark the beginning of a possible war of words between the 
Union government and the election authorities.
At stake is a major constitutional question: who has the right to 
decide when polls may be held? In support of the view that early 
polls will help provide a healing touch, many ideologies and 
spokesmen have quoted the precedents from other states.
Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab were states hit by insurgency and the 
holding of the polls was widely seen as essential to give a message 
to armed groups who were trying to inflict serious damage to the 
country's integrity and unity. Even here, and it is interesting how 
the fact is being brushed aside, the Jammu and Kashmir elections were 
not held in 1995, following on the spot inspection by the Election 
Commission. They were instead held as late as October 1996.
As for the Assam elections of 1983, certain simple facts are being 
ignored. One BJP Rajya Sabha MP who is a former journalist went so 
far as to say that poling was only of the order of 2 to 3 per cent. 
But the official record shows a turnout of 33 per cent: not healthy 
or large but over ten times the figure that has been claimed.
There is still a point here. India of 2002 has one fortunate legacy 
of a decade of political turmoil, a politically neutral and 
independent Central Election Commission. The change can be traced 
back tot the TN Seshan era but the tradition was further strengthened 
by his successor Dr MS Gill. Not so long ago, elections across north 
India were accompanied by open intimidation and booth capturing, 
while procedures laid down for verifying the identity of voters were 
openly flouted by powerful rural elites an their henchmen. The fact 
the body was earlier a weak kneed one is no excuse for it to go back 
to its supine past and let politicians dictate the rules at poll time.
It is a measure of the maturity of Indian democracy that all 
concerned admit that a strong and autonomous CEC is not only in 
keeping with the spirit and letter the Constitution but also a 
necessity in a state like Jammu and Kashmir. It is indeed myopic of a 
regime that has put so much store on free and fair polls in the state 
of Jammu and Kashmir to now question the Commission's actions in 
another state even before it has arrived at a decision on how to 
proceed further. Such attempts at browbeating a constitutional body 
do not bode well for democracy.
Gujarat's is a society that has been scarred by violence. Beyond that 
any comparison with other states bears little meaning. The reason is 
obvious. Even Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was constrained to 
remark on a visit to the camps that there was a need to conform to 
the principles of fair play in statecraft. The expression he used was 
an orthodox Sanskrit one, raj-dharma, and the idea that the ruler 
ought to be even handed, just and equable in his dealings with all 
sections.
Just how the Modi regime handled the issue can be seen in comparison 
with the firm policing of the state after the Dariapur riots under 
his predecessor. Keshumbhai Patel even publicly warned that no one 
was above the law, provoking a sharp retort from an ally, the Shiv 
Sena. Senior Sena ministers from the Union government even criticised 
his actions in arresting not only Muslim but also Hindu miscreants.
This is not to say that the state government was even-handed in every 
case, but there was a difference if only of degree. Unlike Keshubhai 
Patel who is a veteran in the State Assembly, having been a minister 
as early as 1974 in the Janata Front government, Modi is a new comer 
to electoral politics. He also spent over ten years away form the 
state as an office bearer at the national level.
The politics of polarisation was and is as much aimed at his rivals 
within his party as at the opposition. Lacking a rapport either with 
the Patels or the kshatriyas, the Godhra issue and its aftermath is 
means to project him as the sole leader of the new Gujarat. Hence, 
the unseemly haste with which he claimed normalcy had returned. 
Unless he makes haste, his own adversaries within will cut him to 
size.
This is not the only reason why the BJP is going hammer and tongs at 
all those who oppose early polls. There is a deeper reason. It is an 
open secret that the core ideological agenda of the party has been in 
cold storage for much of the last four years in office. After a 
string of electoral reverses and following a shuffle of personnel 
within the party, it is testing the waters in Gujarat. As long as the 
party stays within the bounds of the law, it is free to preach 
whatever ideology it wants.
The ruling party would do well to heed the message of the times and 
abide by the Election Commission's verdict, whatever it is. There are 
times a nation ranks first, and a party second.
The comments about how well the Modi regime handled the violence 
bring back memories. Rajiv Gandhi had remarked that, "The earth 
shakes when a big tree falls", made at a rally to commemorate his 
mother seemed deeply insensitive to Sikhs who were killed in 
massacres in Delhi. The image never quite left him, despite his 
reputation of being Mr Clean.
But why go so far back in history, when the poet who is Prime 
Minister put it so well himself. If his government does not watch its 
step, its own leader's verse will come back to haunt it.
Acts of violence against women and children can not be counted as 
'badges of patriotism' or 'certificates of culture'. And as for power 
acquired through the politics of hate, he writes, "A throne smeared 
with the blood of the innocent/ ranks lower than the dust of a 
cemetery."

_____

#3.

The New York Times
August 17, 2002 

Holy Cow a Myth? An Indian Finds the Kick Is Real
By EMILY EAKIN

oly Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions," is a dry work of 
historiography buttressed by a 24-page bibliography and hundreds of 
footnotes citing ancient Sanskrit texts. It's the sort of book, in 
other words, that typically is read by a handful of specialists and 
winds up forgotten on a library shelf.

But when its author, Dwijendra Narayan Jha, a historian at the 
University of Delhi, tried to publish the book in India a year ago, 
he unleashed a furor of a kind not seen there since 1989, when the 
release of "Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie's novel satirizing Islam, 
provoked rioting and earned him a fatwa from Ayatollah Ruhollah 
Khomeini.

As Mr. Jha's book was going to press last August, excerpts were 
posted on the Internet and picked up by newspapers. Within days the 
book had been canceled by Mr. Jha's academic publisher, burned 
outside his home by religious activists and - after a second 
publisher tried to print it - banned by a Hyderabad civil court. A 
spokesman for the World Hindu Council called it "sheer blasphemy." A 
former member of Parliament petitioned the government for Mr. Jha's 
arrest. Anonymous callers made death threats. And for 10 months Mr. 
Jha was obliged to travel to and from campus under police escort.

After months of legal wrangling, Mr. Jha's lawyers succeeded in 
having the ban lifted this spring. And now his book has been 
published in Britain and the United States by Verso, with a new 
preface and a more provocative title: "The Myth of the Holy Cow." But 
though copies have been shipped to India, few bookstores there are 
likely to stock it.

His offense? To say what scholars have long known to be true: early 
Hindus ate beef.

Mr. Jha says his book has become a casualty of the culture wars that 
have plagued India since the hard-line Hindu nationalist Bharatiya 
Janata Party took office five years ago. "The battle lines are drawn 
very clearly," he said. "On one side of the barricade are the ideas 
of cultural pluralism, rationality and democratic values. On the 
other side are Hindu fundamentalism and cultural nationalism."

Under this government, scholars and journalists say, history books 
have been rewritten and occasionally censored. Two years ago, for 
example, a multivolume project on the history of Indian independence 
sponsored by the Indian Council of Historical Research was scuttled 
by government officials who apparently deemed its scope too liberal.

In a telephone interview from his home in New Delhi, Mr. Jha said, 
"The prohibition on beef-eating has been made a mark of Hindu 
identity, but this is historically not true."

Anyone who has tried to navigate India's cow-choked streets knows the 
special status conferred on the beast by Hindus, who make up more 
than 80 percent of the population. Gandhi referred to the cow as "our 
mother," calling cattle protection "the central fact of Hinduism." 
And in several Indian states killing a cow is against the law.

But while cow veneration and vegetarianism may be the hallmarks of 
Hinduism today, Mr. Jha compiles copious evidence that this has 
hardly always been the case. Citing sources ranging from the ancient 
sacred scriptures, the Vedas (circa 1000 B.C.), to Sanskrit epics 
like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (200 B.C to A.D. 200) as well 
as data from archaeological digs, Mr. Jha contends that "the 
`holiness' of the cow is a myth and that its flesh was very much a 
part of the early Indian nonvegetarian food regimen and dietary 
traditions."

Not only were oxen and other animals offered as sacrifices to the 
Vedic gods, he writes, they were routinely eaten by mere mortals as 
well.

One religious text declares meat to be quite simply "the best kind of 
food," while another captures Yajnavalkya, a revered Vedic sage who 
lived around 500 B.C., confessing to a particular weakness for beef. 
"Some people do not eat cow meat," he is quoted as saying. "I do so, 
provided it's tender."

Meanwhile, the Mahabharata recounts the story of King Rantiveda, who 
earned his renown by slaughtering 2,000 cows a day in his royal 
kitchens and distributing beef along with grain to apparently 
grateful Brahmins, the Hindu priests.

Even the Buddha, on record as opposing animal killing for either food 
or sacrifice, was apparently not above the occasional carnivorous 
nibble. Mr. Jha cites passages from early Buddhist texts suggesting 
not only that the Buddha ate meat but that a meal of contaminated 
pork may ultimately have been what did him in. (Mr. Jha dismisses a 
dissenting interpretation that the offending food was not pork but 
mushroom.)

None of this, scholars say, is news. In a recent review in The Times 
Literary Supplement, Wendy Doniger, a professor of the history of 
religion at the University of Chicago, called Mr. Jha's book "a dry, 
straight academic survey . . . proving what every scholar of India 
has known for well over a century."

"This is not `Satanic Verses,' " Ms. Doniger added in a telephone 
interview. "This is just a relatively intelligent, academic book. It 
doesn't depict Hindus as horrible people."

Indeed, until the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, said Michael 
Witzel, a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, much of the 
history Mr. Jha records was taught in Indian schools.

"It's very much a reality of the culture here in India that scholars 
have to face harassment and intimidation," said Sukumar Muralidharan, 
the Delhi bureau chief for Frontline, a biweekly news magazine. "The 
Hindu nationalist lobby is trying to force a kind of polarization in 
terms of a singular cultural inheritance on one side and all the rest 
on the other side. And their idea of the inheritance is very much 
their own construct, not a full reading of history."

In this context, even food has become politicized as Hindu 
nationalists use their vegetarianism to distinguish themselves from 
the nation's beef-eating and implicitly immoral Muslim minority.

Mr. Jha's book, Ms. Doniger wrote in her review, "contradicts the 
party line, which is that we Hindus have always been here in India 
and have Never Eaten Cow; those Muslims have come in, and Kill and 
Eat Cows, and therefore must be destroyed."

>From a scholarly point of view, she said, what's shocking about 
ancient Indian history is not that some people ate meat but that some 
did not: "Since the human species is by nature carnivorous, what is 
surprising is that there ever were vegetarians."

Beginning around A.D. 500, Mr. Jha writes, killing cows became 
increasingly taboo - according to the religious texts, a sinful 
practice associated with the lowest social order, the untouchables. 
In part, he speculates, the change in official attitude may have 
coincided with the explosion of agriculture. The cow, on whose 
strength (for plowing), dung (for fuel) and milk the community 
depended, was just too valuable to slaughter.

Other scholars, however, say the taboo probably owed more to factors 
increasingly integral to Hindu, Buddhist and Jainist thought: the 
belief in reincarnation, which blurred the lines between humans and 
animals, and the doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence.

"The feeling that people have about killing animals and taking lives, 
that's the basis of it," Ms. Doniger said. "Obviously, people were 
feeling guilty. Anytime you eat beef, that meant someone had 
slaughtered a cow."

Mr. Witzel says that the word cow was frequently a metaphor in Vedic 
texts, most notably for the poetry composed by Brahmin priests. When 
one Vedic poet writes, "don't kill the innocent cow," he really means 
"don't make bad poetry," Mr. Witzel said. Ultimately, he speculated, 
both figurative and literal connotations may have contributed to the 
prohibition on cow slaughter. "As soon as you identify cow with 
poetry, you cannot do anything to that cow. Step by step, this 
becomes concretized."

Of course, these are just the kind of explanations likely to 
infuriate Hindus who are determined to have the cow's sacred status 
enshrined in Indian law.

"Only two days ago, I saw the news that they are trying to get the 
cow declared a national animal," lamented Mr. Jha, a Hindu who says 
he is a vegetarian purely for health reasons. "In Delhi, cows should 
best be treated as a safety hazard. You cannot drive safely for the 
cows that stray around."

_____

#4.

Frontline (Chennai, India)
Volume 19 - Issue 17, August 17 - 30, 2002

BOOKS

The routes of Partition

SUKUMAR MURALIDHARAN

Pangs of Partition, Volume I: The Parting of Ways and Volume II: The 
Human Dimension, edited by S. Settar and Indira B. Gupta; Manohar and 
the Indian Council of Historical Research, Delhi, 2002; Rs.700 (each 
volume), pages 368 & 358.

THE lapse of more than half a century has not rendered historical 
constructions of the partition of India any less contentious. The 
strain of Hindutva or "cultural nationalism", which purports to see a 
primordial Hindu identity as the basic cement of the Indian nation, 
has been active in recent times, establishing its dominance over a 
large swathe of political territory. In candid moments, as in recent 
depositions before the Commission of Inquiry into the demolition of 
the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, the leading lights of Hindutva are apt 
to suggest that Partition had pronounced a final verdict on the 
character of the Indian nation.

Hindutva spokesmen have with little subtlety argued that with the 
Muslims of South Asia having carved out a homeland for themselves, 
the population that remained behind in independent India had no 
justification to profess a faith that set them at variance with the 
majority. Partition has remained in this rendition an incomplete 
project, since the Islamic faith continues to exist in India and the 
followers of the faith continue to have a measure of political 
influence.

This rhetoric has eerie parallels across the border, where a 
programme of territorial acquisition in Kashmir is cast in terms of 
the "unfinished agenda" of Partition. Those who have been engaged in 
seeking a sane political response to rival variants of extremism have 
rightly sought to re-examine the historical record and identify the 
political fault-lines that led to the cataclysm of Partition. This 
has been an inescapable component of the effort to address 
contemporary political schisms and to assuage the wounds that 
continue to fester.

The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) commissioned this 
reappraisal of the historical record on Partition 50 years after the 
event. Their purpose, as the editors say in their introduction, was 
to "focus attention on a wide array of individual and collective 
experiences of migration, trauma and the intense nostalgia of the 
displaced for the undivided past". In reviewing "some of the 
established theories concerning Partition" from this avowedly 
humanistic perspective, the editors lay down crucial guidelines for 
the contributors: the purpose of these volumes is not to relive the 
rancour of those turbulent times, but to catalogue the political 
failures that contributed to an epic tragedy whose human costs have 
never really been reckoned.

This effort to transcend political (and religious) segmentation is 
evident in the opening essay by V.N. Datta, which focusses on the 
Radcliffe Award and the anomalous rulings it handed down on the 
Punjab boundary. Pakistan has never tired of ventilating its supposed 
grievance over the allotment of Gurdaspur district to India. In the 
construction that prevails across the border, the intent of the 
Gurdaspur award was fairly transparent: to ensure India a route of 
access to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. In tampering with the 
objective criteria that had been devised for determining the 
disposition of various tracts, Pakistan has held Lord Mountbatten, 
the last Viceroy of British India, singularly responsible.

The Indian response has been that the Gurdaspur award had little to 
do with the incipient dispute over Kashmir, and everything to do with 
Sikh religious sensibilities. It was all about ensuring that 
Amritsar, a city with deep emotional resonances for the Sikh 
community, was not transformed into a solitary abutment within 
hostile territory. Datta examines this rationale in the light of 
another of Radcliffe's decisions, on the allotment of Ferozepur 
district. He finds no consistency between the two decisions and 
little sustenance in the historical record for pleas that Mountbatten 
remained loftily unconcerned with the Boundary Commission's work.

B.R. Nanda and Chittabrata Palit provide subtle and sympathetic 
accounts of Mahatma Gandhi's role in the days leading to Partition. 
Palit in particular reconstructs with minute attention to the 
Mahatma's fluctuating public utterances, how the man who had worked 
through his life to bridge differences, was rendered virtually 
helpless in understanding the complexities of the transfer of power. 
He was unprepared for the rush of events following the proposals of 
the Cabinet Mission and he ended up a "political discard of the 
Congress" and in the perception of the Hindu extremists, as "the 
stepfather of Pakistan".

As high politics plunged towards a final parting of ways, key figures 
at the helm remained fairly oblivious of the manner in which the 
fabric of daily life was being ripped apart for millions of people in 
the communally sensitive regions. In her contribution on the Congress 
and Partition, Sucheta Mahajan points out how Sardar Patel was till 
as late as May 1947 insisting that he would "never be guilty of 
such... cowardly advice" as asking Hindus to migrate. And Jawaharlal 
Nehru was declaring in meetings with Mountbatten in June that he was 
"opposed to the principle of population transfers".

IT is impossible to dodge the inference that the leaders who were 
bargaining over the merits of the Cabinet Mission's plan relative to 
an outright partition, and debating how desirable a strong centre 
would be, were dealing in abstractions rather than concrete 
realities. The second volume in this set presents an evocative 
interview with the eminent Hindi literatteur Bhisham Sahni, who lived 
through the experience of Partition as a young man in Rawalpindi. 
Sahni tells Alok Bhalla, his interviewer, that even when the 
inevitability of Partition was beginning to bear in on all, 
politically innocent people such as his parents could never conceive 
of leaving the environs that they had spent their lives in. Even if 
"regimes changed", they imagined, "populations do not".

Sahni's father was not alone in this belief. And though aware of the 
turmoil that was brewing, the political leaders were unable to 
provide credible counsel. Sahni recalls that senior Congress leader 
Acharya Kripalani, who visited his troubled city on the eve of 
Independence, was in turns evasive and brusque in dealing with 
questions from ordinary people on what the advisable course would be 
for them.

Mahajan's analysis suggests that there was within the Congress a 
strain of opinion which believed that mass struggles could be 
initiated, uniting communities sundered by religion into a common 
endeavour. Such had indeed been the purpose of the Muslim mass 
contact programmes launched in earlier years. But curiously, as 
another contributor points out, the Congress' effort to recruit the 
Muslim masses to its cause only deepened suspicions. And in the 
atmosphere of estrangement and violence that prevailed following 
1946, no party could conceive of initiating a mass agitation.

WHERE did the roots of the estrangement lie? Khwaja A. Khalique 
provides the broad historical perspective on the combined and unequal 
development of the communities through the colonial period. Other 
authors focus on the shorter time span following 1946, when the 
orchestrated violence of Direct Act Day compelled the Congress to 
bring the Muslim League into a coalition government at the Centre. 
The hesitant embrace soon turned into mutual recoil, with the 
Congress seeing in Finance Minister Liaqat Ali Khan's budget 
proposals a deliberate design to impair the interests of its business 
constituencies.

Over a medium-term perspective, Salil Mishra takes up the question of 
the provincial government experiment that began in 1937. There is a 
fairly well entrenched view that the Congress intransigence in 
denying the Muslim League any role in the government of the United 
Provinces accelerated the momentum towards Partition. An 
accommodation between the two parties in this interpretation would 
have dampened the ardour for separation among the Muslim 
intelligentsia in the United Provinces and provided useful guideposts 
to a future power sharing arrangement at the Centre.

Mishra finds from an examination of the historical record that this 
picture is overly simplified. There were a variety of political 
tendencies in operation in the United Provinces, and the advocacy of 
a coalition arrangement remained a fairly isolated strain. Coalition 
formation was a strategic decision to be made by the leadership of 
the two parties in the context they found themselves in. Neither 
party could have foreseen then that their decisions would culminate 
in Partition a decade later. And the overwhelming majority on either 
side saw their strategic advantage in remaining distinct, rather than 
in seeking a mutual accommodation.

Other contributors to this volume look at the regional configuration 
of forces in the North-West Frontier Provinces, the princely states, 
the Oriya region and the Central Provinces and Berar. B.M. Pandey 
rounds off Volume I with a critique of British imperialist 
historiography on the Partition, clearing the way for an entry into 
Volume II, which in exploring the "human dimensions" illumines the 
terrain of literature and language, education, art and film.

In analysing how Partition figures in the school curricula, Krishna 
Kumar points out an oddity of the history textbook: unlike other 
subjects, it does not invite the student to acquire the tools of 
learning, but only to partake of what is ostensibly, already 
crystallised wisdom. There is also in India and Pakistan, he says, a 
peculiarly reverential attitude towards the textbook, typified in the 
approach of "prescribing" rather than "recommending" a textbook, 
which is then seen as embodying some variety of final truth, 
consecrated by the authority of the state. This diminishes their 
utility in an objective understanding of the event, rendering the 
curriculum a mere extension of reasons of state.

The cursory treatment of Partition in textbooks, Krishna Kumar 
argues, could also be understood in terms of the inability of modern 
historiography as a discipline to bring the concerns, needs and 
aspirations of ordinary people to the foreground of study. Anodyne 
shorthand references, such as "millions lost their homes and 
thousands were killed" - typical of textbook treatments of Partition 
- are symptomatic of this failure to represent the real pain and 
suffering of the uprooted. This makes it incumbent on the teaching 
process to go beyond history as a catalogue of facts crammed into 
textbooks, to a wider consideration of the literature of particular 
periods as a "source of support material" for the study of history in 
schools.

Mrinal Pande examines the broad canvas and life and literature on 
both sides of the divided sub-continent and finds a gross failure to 
internalise fully the lessons of the tragic event. Xenophobic 
right-wing groups, she points out, have sought to keep all the 
rancour alive as an ideological prop of their divisive politics. 
Neither country has chosen to erect a monument to the hundreds of 
thousands of people killed, in the manner that Germany has for the 
victims of the Holocaust or Japan has for those who perished in the 
nuclear bombing of two of its cities. This silence has been breached 
in recent times by scholars and activists working along diverse axes, 
as for example, in Urvashi Butalia's meticulous and compassionate 
documentation of the trauma of women uprooted by Partition.

The linguist R.K. Agnihotri suggests that among the many innocent 
victims of Partition was "the shared language and literature of the 
people of pre-Partition India". If the contention between rival 
interpretations of the country's linguistic and literary inheritance 
were to be considered, then says Agnihotri, Partition could be dated 
to several decades before 1947. Linguistic separatism continues to 
exert a baneful influence. Word stocks in the mass communication 
media on both sides of the border have been impoverished by a 
deliberate design to disregard popular usage and rely upon perceived 
classical forms. This "linguistic engineering" done by a "select 
elite trying to appropriate political power or to maintain the status 
quo", has been "disastrous both for mass participation in the process 
of social change and for literary excellence".

Satish Gujral provides a narrative of the horror and trauma of the 
days when he and his family had to leave Lahore, and in turn has his 
art dissected as historical documentation by Keshav Malik. Partha 
Chatterjee delves into the films of Ritwik Ghatak to shed light on a 
unique sensibility that drew creative sustenance from Partition but 
was yet, never quite at peace with itself afterwards. Other 
contributors analyse the landmark works of Partition fiction from 
Saadat Hasan Manto, Amrita Pritam, Khushwant Singh, K.S. Duggal and 
Attia Hossein, filling in the yawning gaps in historical memory, 
redressing the evasions of formal historiography. These two volumes 
represent a valuable addition to contemporary literature from the 
ICHR.

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