144 Part III: South Asia
nah, the first prime minister, delivered a speech a few days earlier, urging for-
mation of a constitution in which each person is “first, second and last a citizen
of this State with equal rights.”
These were high-minded and inspiring words, as such occasions call for,
but they overlooked the “orgy of murder, rape, and plunder” that the Partition
of India into two separate states (and soon into a third) had actually endured.
The Partition had been along religious lines, an effort by the departing British
to hand Hindus and Muslims separate religion-based homelands, even though
Hindus and Muslims lived side by side in cities, towns, and villages across the
subcontinent, a distribution that could never be reified into nations with clear
borders. The attempt to create such borders set millions of people on the move,
Muslims into new Muslim-dominated territory, Hindus and Sikhs trying to
escape into safe Hindu areas. Seventeen million people fled one direction or
another, but that did not and could not create monoreligious nations. There
had been one hundred million Muslims in the British raj; sixty million ended
up in Pakistan,^1 leaving forty million Muslims in India. The effort was a con-
ceptual failure from the beginning; and before it was over, nearly two million
people had died, and the newly created nations were primed for religious intol-
erance that afflicts South Asia to this day.
Why did Britain organize the Partition on the way out of India? The details
were only worked out at the last minute in great haste, taking a mere 40 days to
draw the new map of South Asia. Not until two days after Nehru’s historic
midnight independence speech were the exact borders announced. Why the
rush? When Lord Louis Mountbatten arrived in India as the last viceroy with
the charge to organize the transfer of power, he moved the date up by 10
months, perhaps attempting to shock Indian leaders into serious negotiations.
But why Partition at all?
The answer does not have to do with any long-term Hindu–Muslim ani-
mosity; as we’ll see in chapter 5, a peaceful Indo-Islamic culture had been
forged over nearly a thousand years. People did not think of themselves fore-
most as Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh; they were more likely to think of themselves
in linguistic, ethnic, or regional terms, as Bengali or Punjabi or Gujarati. The
best explanation lies in the personalities and leadership strategies of the Indian
elite, especially Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, and
Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, leaders of the Congress Party. By
the 1940s, these leaders had come into severe disagreement over the shape of
postcolonial India, as Jinnah strove to achieve advantages and protections for
the hundred million Muslims in an India dominated by Hindus. He was not
himself a very devout or conservative Muslim. As Dalrymple describes him:
A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey, rarely went to a mosque, and was
clean-shaven and stylish, favoring beautifully cut Savile Row suits and silk
ties. Significantly, he chose to marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous
daughter of a Parsi businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris
and for once bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day. (2016)