‘Not religion, property seizure spurred Partition violence’

Partition of India is one of the most disturbing, violent chapters in our history. Six decades after the dreadful event, there is still no clarity on why the people who lived together for generations developed so much hatred that they didn’t spare even women, the elderly and children from killing.

Contrary to popular belief, despite the fact that Jinnah’s two-nation theory was based on religious divide, Ayesha Jalal, Pakistani-American historian, has a different take. She asserted that it was important to understand what the violence was really about. In her opinion, it was not really about religion, it was about the acquisition of property from those without the power to stop it. In Pakistan, the Hindus were vastly outnumbered, whilst in India, it was the Muslims. Ms Jalal reminded the audience that it still had not been established whether this forcible property seizure had been state-sponsored or not.

Ms Jalal noted that “39 per cent of Pakistanis say that they were helped by a Hindu or a Sikh during the Partition”, yet these stories have not come into the mainstream narrative yet. She concluded that the key was to have multiple narratives to understand the complexity of the Partition.

Urvashi Butalia, the founder of the first feminist publishing house in India, Kali for Women, highlighted how patriarchal Indian society enabled violence. She suggested that since families were already violent towards their women, it was just the degree and the targets of violence that changed during the Partition. In the polarising context of war, the pre-existing patriarchal order allowed for the most extreme display of “masculine” brutality.

Historian Vazira Zamindar said that the Partition represented “the deep, dark side of modernity”, containing relevant issues for today, including genocide and minority rights. The disintegration caused as many as one million deaths.

Nisid Jahari observed that although the violence during the Partition had begun with a mob mentality, it had developed into an organised act. As such, the violence between the Hindus and Muslims that occurred could not be described as “spontaneous”.