The Great Partition by Yasmin Khan Page A

someone prayed or went to the temple; it transcended individual levels of piety. It was a strongly felt kinship with others of the same faith that was preserved and promoted through intermarrying (and the strict censure of those who dared to marry outside the group), shared histories and myths, and the instillation of customs, habits and superstitions from an early age. But it was pragmatic. It was not easy to hook together co-religionists in political allegiances across great expanses of territory; there was no such thing as one Muslim, Hindu or Sikh community in South Asia, as numerous demagogues found to their peril. For one thing, linguistic and cultural differences zigzagged across the country and for another, there was little common ground between people with such divergent incomes.
    On the eve of Partition, even in the places where there was a heightened sense of difference, there were many countervailing forces. Mercantile and manufacturing communities from sari weavers to tea planters depended on pragmatic co-operation for their livelihoods, while festivals and holidays were flamboyantly celebrated across the board. Class, as ever, acted as a social gel and rich Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims of the same social standing partied together in gilded hotels, irrespective of religion; university friends of various backgrounds attended the same classes; and poor agriculturalists relaxed together on
charpois
at the end of a day's work. Above all, it was a very long jump from a sense of difference, or lack of social cohesion, to mass slaughter and rape. There was nothing ‘inevitable’ about Partition and nobody could have predicted, at the end of the Second World War, that half a million people or more were going to die because of these differences.
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    Changing Regime
    On 14 June 1945, a little over a month after Germany surrendered to the Allies, Nehru and the other leading members of the Congress stepped out of jail. They were free men, released from prison for the final time.
    In the absence of the Congress leadership from national political life, however, the political tableaux in which they acted had changed drastically. As the party president at the time, A.K. Azad later claimed, in prison he had been ‘completely cut off from the outside world’, even denied his trusty portable radio, ‘and did not know what was happening outside’. On their release, the leadership was ‘thrown into a new world’. 1 Indians ecstatically greeted their pantheon of heroes but Nehru and the others had fallen out of step with the popular politics of the moment. Gandhi had been freed earlier in 1944 but seemed a figure from the past, removed from the mood of anti-European populism with its roots in labour protest and peasant radicalism. Now, there was little popular regard for the ideology of non-violence and Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian National Army chief was the hero of the hour. Even more importantly, the Muslim League had been able to exploit the gaps in public leadership exposed by the removal of Congressmen from the limelight, building up a vast groundswell of support that was fatally underestimated by the Congress leadership when it returned to the negotiating table. The Congress message had become more muted in the interim years. It was not clear that the Congress leadership would be able to lead and control popular outbursts as it had done in the past.
    By this point, the Congress Party was a bulky organisation, much changed since its heyday of mass public protest against British rule in the 1920s and 1930s. It was a victim of its own success, as it had become a gargantuan umbrella party, housing all manner of political thinkers, politicians, idealists and unscrupulous opportunists. Gandhi famously suggested that the Congress should be disbanded after Independence, as it would have exhausted its stated purpose since 1929 of delivering
purna swaraj
, or full independence, from British rule, but his suggestion was