India And Asia

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This originally appeared in the Atlantic, but i dont have the URL

The Perils of Partition



Our author examines the political—and literary—legacy

of Britain's policy of "divide and quit"



by Christopher Hitchens



.....



The public, or "political," poems of W. H. Auden,

which stretch from his beautiful elegy for Spain and

his imperishable reflections on September 1939 and

conclude with a magnificent eight-line snarl about the

Soviet assault on Czechoslovakia in 1968, are usually

considered with only scant reference to his verses

about the shameful end of empire in 1947. Edward

Mendelson's otherwise meticulous and sensitive

biography allots one sentence to Auden's "Partition."

Unbiased at least he was

when he arrived on his mission,

Having never set eyes on this

land he was called to partition

Between two peoples fanatically

at odds,

With their different diets and

incompatible gods.

"Time," they had briefed him in

London, "is short. It's too late

For mutual reconciliation or

rational debate:

The only solution now lies in

separation ..." Dutifully pulling open my New York

Times one day last December, I saw that most of page

three was given over to an article on a possible

solution to the Cyprus "problem." The physical

division of this tiny Mediterranean island has become

a migraine simultaneously for the European Union

(which cannot well allow the abridgment of free

movement of people and capital within the borders of a

potential member state), for NATO (which would look

distinctly foolish if it underwent a huge expansion

only to see two of its early members, Greece and

Turkey, go to war), for the United Nations (whose own

blue-helmeted soldiery has "mediated" the Cyprus

dispute since 1964), and for the United States (which

is the senior partner and chief armorer of Greece and

Turkey, and which would prefer them to concentrate on

other, more pressing regional matters).



Flapping through the rest of the press that day, I

found the usual references to the Israeli-Palestinian

quarrel, to the state of near war between India and

Pakistan (and the state of actual if proxy war that

obtains between them in the province of Kashmir), and

to the febrile conditions that underlie the truce

between Loyalists and Republicans—or "Protestants" and

"Catholics" —in Northern Ireland. Casting aside the

papers and switching on my e-mail, I received further

bulletins from specialist Web sites that monitor the

precarious state of affairs along the border between

Iraq and Kuwait, between the hostile factions in Sri

Lanka, and even among the citizens of Hong Kong, who

were anxiously debating a further attempt by Beijing

to bring the former colony under closer control.



There wasn't much happening that day to call a

reader's attention to the Falkland Islands, to the

resentment between Guatemala and Belize, to the

internal quarrels and collapses in Somalia and

Eritrea, or to the parlous state of the kingdom of

Jordan. However, there was some news concerning the

defiance of the citizens of Gibraltar, who had

embarrassed their patron or parent British government

by in effect refusing the very idea of negotiations

with Spain on the future of their tiny and enclaved

territory. I have saved the word "British" for as long

as I decently can.



I n the modern world the "fault lines" and "flash

points" of journalistic shorthand are astonishingly

often the consequence of frontiers created ad hoc by

British imperialism. In her own 1959 poem Marya Mannes

wrote,

Borders are scratched across the

hearts of men

By strangers with a calm, judicial

pen,

And when the borders bleed we

watch with dread

The lines of ink across the map

turn red. Her somewhat trite sanguinary image is

considerably modified when one remembers that most of

the lines or gashes would not have been there if the

map hadn't been colored red in the first place. No

sooner had the wider world discovered the Pashtun

question, after September 11, 2001, than it became

both natural and urgent to inquire why the Pashtun

people appeared to live half in Afghanistan and half

in Pakistan. Sir Henry Mortimer Durand had decreed so

in 1893 with an imperious gesture, and his arbitrary

demarcation is still known as the Durand Line. Sir

Mark Sykes (with his French counterpart, Georges

Picot) in 1916 concocted an apportionment of the

Middle East that would separate Lebanon from Syria and

Palestine from Jordan. Sir Percy Cox in 1922 fatefully

determined that a portion of what had hitherto been

notionally Iraqi territory would henceforth be known

as Kuwait. The English half spy and half archaeologist

Gertrude Bell in her letters described walking through

the desert sands after World War I, tracing the new

boundary of Iraq and Saudi Arabia with her walking

stick. The congested, hypertense crossing point of the

River Jordan, between Jordan "proper" and the

Israeli-held West Bank, is to this day known as the

Allenby Bridge, after T. E. Lawrence's commander. And

it fell to Sir Cyril Radcliffe to fix the frontiers of

India and Pakistan—or, rather, to carve a Pakistani

state out of what had formerly been known as India.

Auden again:

"The Viceroy thinks, as you will

see from his letter,

That the less you are seen in his

company the better,

So we've arranged to provide you

with other accommodation.

We can give you four judges, two

Moslem and two Hindu,

To consult with, but the final

decision must rest with you." Probably the

best-known literary account of this grand historic

irony is Midnight's Children, the panoptic novel that

introduced Salman Rushdie to a global audience. One

should never employ the word "irony" cheaply. But the

Subcontinent attained self-government, and also

suffered a deep and lasting wound, at precisely the

moment that separated August 14 and 15 of 1947.

Rushdie's conceit—of a nation as a child

simultaneously born, disputed, and sundered—has

Solomonic roots. Parturition and partition become

almost synonymous. Was partition the price of

independence, or was independence the price of

partition?



It is this question, I believe, that lends the issue

its enduring and agonizing fascination. Many important

nations achieved their liberation, if we agree to use

the terminology of the post-Woodrow Wilson era (or

their statehood, to put it more neutrally), on what

one might call gunpoint conditions. Thus the Irish,

who were the first since 1776 to break out of the

British Empire, were told in 1921 that they could have

an independent state or a united state but not both. A

few years earlier Arthur Balfour had made a

declaration concerning Palestine that in effect

promised its territory to two competing nationalities.

In 1960 the British government informed the people of

Cyprus that they must accept a conditional

postcolonial independence or face an outright division

of their island between Greece and Turkey (not, it is

worth emphasizing, between the indigenous Greek and

Turkish Cypriots). They sullenly signed the treaty,

handing over a chunk of Cyprus to permanent and

sovereign British bases, which made it a potentially

tripartite partition but also inscribed all the future

intercommunal misery in one instrument: a treaty to

which no party had acceded in good faith.



But it seemed to be enough, at the time, to cover an

inglorious British retreat. And here another irony

forces itself upon us. The whole ostensible plan

behind empire was long-term, and centripetal. From the

eighteenth to the twentieth century the British sent

out lawyers, architects, designers, doctors, and civil

servants, not merely to help collect the revenues of

exploitation but to embark on nation-building. Yet at

the moment of crux it was suddenly remembered that the

proud and patient mother country had more-urgent

business at home. To complete the Auden version:

Shut up in a lonely mansion, with

police night and day

Patrolling the gardens to keep

the assassins away,

He got down to work, to the task

of settling the fate

Of millions. The maps at his

disposal were out of date

And the Census Returns almost

certainly incorrect,

But there was no time to check

them, no time to inspect. The true term for this is

"betrayal," as Auden so strongly suggests, because the

only thinkable justification for the occupation of

someone else's territory and the displacement of

someone else's culture is the testable, honorable

intention of applying an impartial justice, a

disinterested administration, and an even hand as

regards bandits and sectarians. In the absence of such

ambitions, or the resolve to complete them, the

British would have done better to stay on their

fog-girt island and not make such high-toned claims

for themselves. The peoples of India would have found

their own way, without tutelage and on a different

timetable. Yet Marx and Mill and Macaulay, in their

different fashions, felt that the encounter between

England and India was fertile and dynamic and

revolutionary, and now we have an entire Anglo-Indian

literature and cuisine and social fusion that seem to

testify to the point. (Rushdie prefers the phrase

"Indo-Anglian," to express the tremendous influence of

the English language on Indian authorship, and who

would want to argue? There may well be almost as many

adult speakers of English in India as there are in the

United Kingdom, and at the upper and even middle

levels they seem to speak and write it rather better.)



T he element of tragedy here is arguably implicit in

the whole imperial project. Ever since Rome conquered

and partitioned Gaul, the best-known colonial precept

has been divide et impera—"divide and rule." Yet after

the initial subjugation the name of the task soon

becomes the more soothing "civilizing mission," and a

high value is placed on lofty, balanced, unifying

administration. Later comes the point at which the

colonized outgrow the rule of the remote and chilly

exploiters, and then it will often be found convenient

for the governor or the district commissioner to play

upon the tribal or confessional differences among his

subjects. From proclaiming that withdrawal, let alone

partition, is the very last thing they will do, the

colonial authorities move to ensure that these are the

very last things they do do. The contradiction is

perfectly captured in the memoir of the marvelously

named Sir Penderel Moon, one of the last British

administrators in India, who mordantly titled his book

Divide and Quit.



The events he records occurred beyond half a century

ago. But in the more immediate past it was Lords

Carrington and Owen—both senior Graduates of the

British Foreign Office—who advanced the ethnic

cantonization of Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was Lord

Carrington who (just before Nelson Mandela was

released from prison) proposed that South Africa be

split into a white Afrikaner reservation, a Zulu area,

and a free-for-all among various other peoples. It was

Sir Anthony Eden who helpfully suggested in 1954 that

the United States might consider a division of Vietnam

into "North" and "South" at the close of the French

colonial fiasco. Cold War partitions or geopolitical

partitions, such as those imposed in Germany, Vietnam,

and Korea, are to be distinguished from those arising

from the preconditions of empire. But there is a

degree of overlap even here (especially in the case of

Vietnam and also, later, of Cyprus). As a general rule

it can be stated that all partitions except that of

Germany have led to war or another partition or both.

Or that they threaten to do so.



Pakistan had been an independent state for only a

quarter century when its restive Bengali "east wing"

broke away to become Bangladesh. And in the process of

that separation a Muslim army put a Muslim people to

the sword—rather discrediting and degrading the

original concept of a "faith-based" nationality.

Cyprus was attacked by Greece and invaded by Turkey

within fourteen years of its quasi-partitioned

independence, and a huge and costly international

effort is now under way to redraw the resulting

frontiers so that they bear some relation to local

ethnic proportions. Every day brings tidings of a

fresh effort to revise the 1947-1948 cease-fire lines

in Palestine (sometimes known as the 1967 borders),

which were originally the result of a clumsy partition

of the initial British Mandate. In Northern Ireland

the number of Catholic citizens now approaches the

number of Protestant ones, so that the terms

"minority" and "majority" will soon take on new

meaning. When that time arrives, we can be sure that

demands will be renewed for a redivision of the Six

Counties, roughly east and west of the Bann River. As

for Kashmir, where local politics have been almost

petrified since the arbitrary 1947 decision to become

India's only Muslim-majority state, it is openly

suggested that the outcome will be a three-way split

into the part of Kashmir already occupied by Pakistan,

the non-Muslim regions dominated by India, and the

central valley where most Kashmiris actually dwell. In

all the above cases there has been continuous strife,

often spreading to neighboring countries, of the sort

that partition was supposedly designed to prevent or

solve. Harry Coomer (Hari Kumar), the Anglo-Indian

protagonist of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, sees it all

coming when he writes to an English friend in 1940,

I think that there's no doubt that in the last twenty

years—whether intentionally or not—the English have

succeeded in dividing and ruling, and the kind of

conversation I hear ... makes me realise the extent to

which the English now seem to depend upon the

divisions in Indian political opinion perpetuating

their own rule at least until after the war, if not

for some time beyond it. They are saying openly that

it is "no good leaving the bloody country because

there's no Indian party representative to hand it over

to." They prefer Muslims to Hindus (because of the

closer affinity that exists between God and Allah than

exists between God and the Brahma), are

constitutionally predisposed to Indian princes,

emotionally affected by the thought of untouchables,

and mad keen about the peasants who look upon any Raj

as God ... This is the fictional equivalent of Anita

Inder Singh's diagnosis, in The Origins of the

Partition of India 1936-1947:

The Labour government's directive to the Cabinet

Mission in March 1946 stressed that power would only

be transferred to Indians if they agreed to a

settlement which would safeguard British military and

economic interests in India. But in February 1947, the

Labour government announced that it would wind up the

Raj by June 1948, even if no agreement had emerged.

Less than four months later, Lord Mountbatten

announced that the British would transfer power on 15

August 1947, suggesting that much happened before this

interval which persuaded the British to bring forward

the date for terminating the empire by almost one

year. Also, the British have often claimed that they

had to partition because the Indian parties failed to

agree. But until the early 1940s the differences

between them had been a pretext for the British to

reject the Congress demand for independence ... S

igmund Freud once wrote an essay concerning "the

narcissism of the minor differences." He pointed out

that the most vicious and irreconcilable quarrels

often arise between peoples who are to most outward

appearances nearly identical. In Sri Lanka the

distinction between Tamils and Sinhalese is barely

noticeable to the visitor. But the Sinhalese can tell

the difference, and the indigenous Tamils know as well

the difference between themselves and the Tamils later

imported from South India by the British to pick the

tea. It is precisely the intimacy and inwardness of

the partition impulse that makes it so tempting to

demagogues and opportunists. The 1921 partition of

Ireland was not just a division of the island but a

division of the northeastern province of Ulster.

Historically this province contained nine counties.

But only four—Antrim, Armagh, Derry, and Down—had

anything like a stable Protestant majority. Three

others—Monaghan, Cavan, and Donegal—were

overwhelmingly Catholic. The line of pro-British

partition attempted to annex the maximum amount of

territory with the minimum number of Catholic and

nationalist voters. Two largely Catholic counties,

Fermanagh and Tyrone, petitioned to be excluded from

the "Unionist" project. But a mere four counties were

thought to be incompatible with a separate state; so

the partition of Ireland, into twenty-six counties

versus six, was also the fracturing of Ulster.



In a similar manner, the partition of India involved

the subdivision of the ancient territories of Punjab

and Bengal. The peoples here spoke the same language,

shared the same ancestry, and had long inhabited the

same territory. But they were abruptly forced to

choose between one side of a frontier and the other,

on the basis of religion alone. And then, with this

durable scar of division fully established between

them, they could fall to quarreling further about

religion among themselves. The infinite and punishing

consequences of this can be seen to the present day,

through the secession of Bangladesh, the Sunni-Shia

fratricide in Pakistan, the intra-Pashtun rivalry, and

the sinister and dangerous recent attempt to define

India (which still has more Muslims on its soil than

Pakistan does) as a Hindu state. To say nothing of

Kashmir. This "solution," with its enormous military

wastage and potentially catastrophic nuclear

potential, must count as one of the great moral and

political failures in recent human history. One of

Paul Scott's most admirable minor characters is Lady

Ethel Manners, the widow of a former British governor,

who exclaims about the "midnight" of 1947,

The creation of Pakistan is our crowning failure. I

can't bear it ... Our only justification for two

hundred years of power was unification. But we've

divided one composite nation into two and everyone at

home goes round saying what a swell the new Viceroy is

for getting it sorted out so quickly. The year 1947

was obviously an unpropitious one for laying down your

"confessional state" or "post-colonial partition"

vintage. The Arabs of Palestine, who gave place to a

half-promised British-sponsored state for Jews at the

same time, are now subdivided into Israeli Arabs, West

Bankers, Gazans, Jerusalemites, Jordanians, and the

wider Palestinian-refugee diaspora. If at any moment a

settlement looks possible between any one of these

factions and the Israelis, the claims of another, more

afflicted faction promptly arise to neutralize or

negate the process. Anton Shammas and David Grossman

have both written lucidly, from Arab-Israeli and

Jewish-Israeli perspectives respectively, about this

balkanization of a society that was fissile enough to

begin with. And perhaps that splintering is why Osama

bin Laden's fantasy of a restored caliphate—an

undivided Muslim empire, organic and hierarchic and

centralized—now exerts its appeal (as did the

Nasserite and later the Baath Party dream of a single

Arab nation in which the old borders would be subsumed

by one glorious whole).



In the preface to his 1904 play John Bull's Other

Island, George Bernard Shaw made highly vivid use of

the metaphor of fracture or amputation.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality

as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a

nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but

getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer,

to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of

the Nationalist is granted. It will attend to no

business, however vital, except the business of

unification and liberation. This, mark you, was

seventeen years before the issue of Irish "liberation"

was forcibly counterposed to that of "unification."

"Unionist," in British terminology, means someone who

favors the "union" of the Six Counties of Northern

Ireland with the United Kingdom—in other words,

someone who favors the disunion of Ireland. Among

Greeks the word "unionist" is rendered as "enotist"

—someone who supports enosis, or union, between Greece

and John Bull's other European colony, Cyprus. (This

is why the Ulster Unionists in Parliament today are

among the staunchest supporters of the

ultra-nationalist Rauf Denktash's breakaway Turkish

colony on the island.) And Shaw might have done well

to add that preachers can indeed get attention for

their views, while the national question is being

debated, as long as they take decided and fervent

nationalist positions. Even he would have been

startled, if he visited any of these territories

today, to find how right he was—and how people discuss

their injuries as if they had been inflicted

yesterday.



I t is the admixture of religion with the national

question that has made the problem of partition so

toxic. Whether consciously or not, British colonial

authorities usually preferred to define and categorize

their subjects according to confession. The whole

concept of British dominion in Ireland was based on a

Protestant ascendancy. In the Subcontinent the empire

tended to classify people as Muslim or non-Muslim,

partly because the Muslims had been the last

conquerors of the region and also because—as Paul

Scott cleverly noticed—it found Islam to be at least

recognizable in Christian-missionary terms (as opposed

to the heathenish polytheism of the Hindus). In

Palestine and Cyprus, both of which it took over from

the Ottomans, London wrote similar categories into

law. As a partially intended consequence, any secular

or nonsectarian politician was at a peculiar

disadvantage. Many historians tend to forget that the

stoutest supporters of Irish independence, at least

after the rebellion of 1798, were Protestants or

agnostics, from Edward Fitzgerald and Wolfe Tone to

Charles Stewart Parnell and James Connolly. The

leadership of the Indian Congress Party was avowedly

nonconfessional, and a prominent part in the struggle

for independence was played by Marxist forces that

repudiated any definition of nationality by religion.

Likewise in Cyprus: the largest political party on the

island was Communist, with integrated trade unions and

municipalities, and most Turkish Cypriots were secular

in temper. The availability of a religious "wedge,"

added to the innate or latent appeal of chauvinism and

tribalism, was always a godsend to the masters of

divide and rule. Among other things, it allowed the

authorities to pose as overworked mediators between

irreconcilable passions.



Indeed, part of the trouble with partition is that it

relies for its implementation on local partitionists.

It may also rely on an unspoken symbiosis between

them—a covert handshake between apparent enemies. The

grand mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was in

many ways unrepresentative of the Palestinian

peasantry of the 1930s and 1940s (and it does not do

to forget that perhaps 20 percent of Palestinians are

Christian). But his clerical authority made him a

useful (if somewhat distasteful) "notable" from the

viewpoint of the colonial power, and his virulent

sectarianism was invaluable to the harder-line

Zionists, who needed only to reprint his speeches.

Many Indian Muslims refused their support to Mohammed

Ali Jinnah, but once Britain became bent on partition,

it automatically conferred authority on his Muslim

League as being the "realistic" expression of the

community. British policy also helped the emergence of

Rauf Denktash, whose violence was principally directed

at those Turkish Cypriots who did not want an

apartheid solution. More recently, in Bosnia, the West

(encouraged by Lords Carrington and Owen) made the

fatal error of assuming that the hardest-line

demagogues were the most authentic representatives of

their communities. Thus men who could never win a

truly democratic election—and have not won one

since—were given the immense prestige of being invited

as recognized delegates to the negotiating table.

Interviewing the Serbian Orthodox fanatics who had

proclaimed an artificial "Republica Srpska" on stolen

and cleansed Bosnian soil, John Burns of The New York

Times was surprised to find them citing the example of

Denktash's separate state in Cyprus as a precedent.

(The usual colloquial curse word for "Muslim," in Serb

circles, is "Turk." But there is such a thing as

brotherhood under the skin, and even xenophobes can

practice their own perverse form of internationalism.)

Most of these men are now either in prison or on the

run, but they lasted long enough to see

Bosnia-Herzegovina subjected to an almost terminal

experience of partition and subpartition, splitting

like an amoeba among Serb, Croat, and (in the Bihac

enclave) Muslim bandits. Now, under the paternal wing

of Lord Ashdown, the governorship of Bosnia is based

on centripetal rather than centrifugal principles. But

his stewardship as commissioner originates with the

European Union.



The straight capitalist and socialist rationality of

the EU—where "Union" means what it says and where

frontiers are bad for business as well as a reproach

to the old left-internationalist ideal—is in bizarre

contrast to the lived experience of partition. The

time-zone difference between India and Pakistan, for

example, is half an hour. That's a nicely irrational

and arbitrary slice out of daily life. In Cyprus, the

difference between the clocks in the Greek and Turkish

sectors is an hour—but it's the only in-country

north-south time change that I am aware of, and it

operates on two sides of the same capital city. In my

"time," I have traversed the border post at the old

Ledra Palace hotel in the center of Nicosia, where a

whole stretch of the city is frozen at the precise

moment of "cease-fire" in 1974, when everything went

into suspended animation. I have been frisked at the

Allenby Bridge and at the Gaza crossing between Israel

and the "Palestinian authority." I have looked at the

Korean DMZ from both sides, been ordered from a car by

British soldiers on the Donegal border of Northern

Ireland, been pushed around at Checkpoint Charlie on

the old Berlin Wall, and been held up for bribes by

soldiers at the Atari crossing on Kipling's old "Grand

Trunk Road" between Lahore and Amritsar—the only stage

at which the Indo-Pakistan frontier can be legally

negotiated on land. In no case was it possible to lose

a sense of the surreal, as if the border was actually

carved into the air rather than the roadway. Rushdie

succeeds in weaving magical realism out of this in

Midnight's Children: "Mr Kemal, who wanted nothing to

do with Partition, was fond of saying, 'Here's proof

of the folly of the scheme! Those [Muslim] Leaguers

plan to abscond with a whole thirty minutes! Time

Without Partitions,' Mr Kemal cried, 'That's the

ticket!'"



There is a good deal of easy analysis on offer these

days, to the effect that Islam was the big loser from

colonialism, and is entitled to a measure of self-pity

in consequence. The evidence doesn't quite bear this

out. In India the British were openly partial to the

Muslim side, and helped to midwife the first modern

state consecrated to Islam. In Cyprus they favored the

Turks. In the Middle East the Muslim Hashemite and

Saudi dynasties—rivals for the guardianship of the

holy places—benefited as much as anyone from the

imperial carve-up. Had there been a British partition

of Eritrea after 1945, as was proposed, the Muslims

would have been the beneficiaries of it. No, the

Muslim claim is better stated as resentment over the

loss of the Islamic empire: an entirely distinct

grievance. There were Muslim losers in Palestine and

elsewhere, mostly among the powerless and landless,

but the big losers were those of all creeds and of

none who believed in modernity and had transcended

tribalism.



The largely secular Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo were,

however, the main victims of the cave-in to partition

in the former Yugoslavia, and are now the chief

beneficiaries of that policy's reversal. They were

also among the first to test the improvised but

increasingly systematic world order, in which rescue

operations are undertaken from the developed world,

assisted by a nexus of nongovernmental organizations,

and then mutate into semi-permanent administrations.

"Empire" is the word employed by some hubristic

American intellectuals for this new dominion. A series

of uncovenanted mandates, for failed states or former

abattoir regimes, is more likely to be the real

picture. And the relevant boundaries still descend

from Sir Percy, Sir Henry, and Sir Cyril, who, as

Auden phrased it, "quickly forgot the case, as a good

lawyer must." However we confront this inheritance of

responsibility (should it be called the global man's

burden?), the British past is replete with lessons on

how not to discharge it.