India and the subcontinent were both in a state of flux in the 1940s. Partition loomed large, and it did eventually occur and directed the trajectory of India’s neighbourhood dynamics.
But was there an alternative to partition? Could there have been a different kind of partition? Put differently, was there an alternative to the kind of South Asia that emerged at decolonisation?
The answer at the level of ideas is a yes. There was plenty of out-of-the-box thinking on the form and shape of independent India and South Asia that remains unknown or neglected.
Had these ideas found favour, we could have had a very different neighbourhood geography and dynamics—whether it would have turned out better or worse is anyone’s guess.
Why did partition occur?
There are two explanations about why partition took place. One argues that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations, and their coexistence within a single country and political system was impossible, making partition inevitable. This is the ‘two-nation’ thesis. The other explanation is that partition was an attempt to address the Muslim fear of Hindu majoritarian rule – which was real and widespread in those areas of the subcontinent where Muslims were in a minority. It is obvious that partition has not turned out to be a solution to the problems indexed by either of the two explanations. But what about the other out-of-box ideas that were being proposed as alternatives to partition?
India as an ‘unnational’ state
One way out of the impasse created by the two-nation thesis was to reject the nation-state as a political form. If statehood was not based on nationhood, then the very rationale of partition was made irrelevant. It was this belief that led Rajendra Prasad to argue for the creation of an ‘unnational’ state in India. He argued that the kind of homogeneity in culture, language, religion and ideas that a nation presupposed were absent in India. India was ‘unnational’ in character.
This idea is found in Prasad’s book India Divided (1946). But Prasad was not alone. He built upon the ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. These thinkers believed that independent India could not or should not become a nation-state.
But why? A nation is a collection of people that believes it has a single and homogenous identity, which is so valuable that it needs to be protected by the powers of a state. Tagore and his comrades thought the nation was a narrow category and betrayed a narrow mindset. A society that identified as a nation could lose its diversity and the ability to transcend identity divisions based on religion or language. India was very diverse. And that diversity could not be hammered into a homogenous identity.
In the ecology of these ideas, the ideal political form for an independent—but undivided—India was not a nation-state with a strong central government embodying absolute sovereignty. It was a federation with a lean, functional central government, with the bulk of powers devolved to the constituent units.
It was hoped that such a federal state could allay Muslim anxieties about Hindu majoritarianism, which needed a strong central government to attain its interests. In a federal India, the central government had limited powers while autonomy rested with the provinces. And at the provincial level too, there were formulas available to offset majoritarianism.
India Re-imagined
But a federation was just one idea. There were also proposals for confederations, transitional arrangements and regionalisms.
At its Lahore session in March 1940, the Muslim League adopted what came to be called the ‘Pakistan’ resolution. The operative part of the resolution was deliberately vague. It wasn’t clear whether the League demanded one or two separate sovereign Muslim states or a loose confederation in which Muslim-majority provinces would be highly autonomous. But it forced those alarmed at the prospect of partition to think anew the question of the subcontinent’s political future.
One of the more interesting sets of reflections came from Babasaheb Ambedkar in his book Pakistan, or the Partition of India (1946). Ambedkar proposed a 10-year window to determine whether India must necessarily be partitioned. If Ambedkar’s plan were to work, ‘Pakistan’ would be conceded in principle, but a sovereign state would not be immediately established. Two interim entities, ‘Hindustan’ and ‘Pakistan,’ with effective domestic sovereignty, would work under a loose common arrangement, which he called the Council of India.
This Council was to look after common issues—railways, waterways and anything else that the two agreed to jointly govern. The two parties could revisit the arrangement after 10 years, and if ‘Pakistan’ did not see the point of uniting with ‘Hindustan,’ it was to be granted full sovereignty and allowed to separate.
Flexibility was key. Ambedkar noted that it was ‘wrong to say to the Musalmans if you want to remain as part of India then you can never go out, or if you want to go then you can never come back’. And he was not alone in this approach.
Consider C. Rajagopalachari, who argued in The Way Out (1944) that it was ‘better for the growth of freedom and democracy in this vast country that those who insist on a separate existence should be allowed to try it out.’ The Indian union could start with a grouping of a limited number of provinces, and if it did well, showed ‘patience and good-will,’ then the ‘law of political gravity’ would bring the others (read a future ‘Pakistan’) into its fold. Rajaji argued that Muslim-majority areas could separate to form Pakistan, but both India and Pakistan could establish terms for mutual assistance against foreign aggression or other common issues.
In both Ambedkar and Rajaji, one finds an openness towards political form. Independent India could be one country or two or more countries, and if the latter were to happen, parts of India would become its immediate neighbourhood. If Muslim-majority areas were to separate, the new state or states must closely cooperate with India—loss of unity did not mean that the gains of unity must be lost, too. Unity could not be coerced into existence, and everyone had to calm down.
One way out of the impasse created by the two-nation thesis was to reject the nation-state as a political form. If statehood was not based on nationhood, then the very rationale of partition was made irrelevant. It was this belief that led Rajendra Prasad to argue for the creation of an ‘unnational’ state in India. He argued that the kind of homogeneity in culture, language, religion and ideas that a nation presupposed were absent in India. India was ‘unnational’ in character.
Intuitions of regionalism
In international relations, regionalism refers to a rules-based arrangement for cooperation amongst sovereign states in any distinctive geography—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Southeast Asia, for instance. The ideas of Ambedkar and Rajaji were classical intuitions of regionalism. And if regionalism presupposes that countries prioritise economics over politics, then such ideas were present, too.
Before partition, the Oxford academic Reginald Coupland proposed a novel and hybrid architecture for South Asia. The common sense of the time was that the constituent units of a country are organised on the basis of language, religion or administrative convenience. Coupland’s India was radically different. Its constituents would be regions configured around the great rivers of South Asia—Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra etc. This polity was to be held together by an inter-regional centre, which would be responsible for only those issues required to keep India united—defence and foreign affairs, currency, transport and tariffs. This riverine union was ‘more than a Confederacy, but less than a normal Federation.’
It’s worth noting the difference: a confederacy is a union of sovereign states, whereas a federation is a sovereign union of autonomous provinces. Participating states in a confederation can opt-out without the risk of being attacked. A province seceding from a federation can trigger a civil war.
When partition came, many thought it would be temporary. Unity would be restored after the British left, tempers cooled, and economic and security costs of separation were realised. Hopes of India and Pakistan having a joint defence arrangement were frequently expressed, including by Gandhi, Jinnah and Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Bogra. In December 1947, in response to a question about the state of Muslims in India, Jinnah remarked—whether glibly or not, one cannot say—that if asked to provide leadership to them, he was ‘quite ready to leave Pakistan’.
When it appeared that partition was here to stay, ideas emerged that were similar to those which became the basis of the European Union. For example, the historian Radha Kumud Mukherjee’s proposal for a common economic system articulated in his The Fundamental Unity of India (1954), was not the only one. And they show that regionalist thinking emerged here much earlier than regionalism did.
This slice of the intellectual history of modern South Asia is not widely known but it gives us a flavour of the creative, innovative and open political thinking that draws a contrast with today’s unimaginative nationalism. But the attractiveness of these ideas should not make us underestimate the hard realities that would have threatened a loose Indian federation, a confederation or an early regionalism: the rise of China, the deep-seated intercommunal hostility between the Hindus and Muslims, and the heartland-periphery logic that marks Indian politics.
Maybe it is Delhi’s lot to manage a difficult neighbourhood.
