The Nation as Mother by Sugata Bose

Author:Sugata Bose
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789386815323
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2017-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

During the modern age it has been a constant struggle not to allow universalist aspirations of the colonized to degenerate into universalist boasts and cosmopolitanism to be replaced by bigotry. The tussle goes on in new postcolonial settings. The outcome is yet uncertain, but the ethical choice before us seems clear enough.

UNITY OR PARTITION: MAHATMA GANDHI’S LAST STAND, 1945–48*

‘My dear Sarat,’ Mahatma Gandhi wrote from Haridwar on 21 June 1947, to Subhas Chandra Bose’s elder brother, ‘I have a moment to myself here. I use it for writing two or three overdue letters. This is one to acknowledge yours of the 14th inst. The way to work for unity I have pointed out when the geographical [sic] is broken. Hoping you are all well. Love, Bapu.’1

Louis Mountbatten’s partition plan announced on 3 June had shattered Gandhi’s lifelong dream of a united and independent India. He did not agree with the Congress Working Committee’s decision to accept it. He had ‘done his best to get people to stand by’ the Cabinet Mission plan for a federal India, but ‘had failed’. He confessed on 8 June that he had been ‘taken to task’ for supporting Sarat Bose’s scheme for a united sovereign Bengal, while acknowledging that Sarat was ‘undoubtedly his friend’ and they were in correspondence with each other. His erstwhile lieutenants now considered him ‘a back number’. He asserted on 11 June that he was ‘as much of Pakistan, as of Hindustan’. Having stated his difference with Congress leaders, he nevertheless asked the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at its meeting on 14 and 15 June to swallow the unpalatable decision to partition. The AICC did, by 153 votes to 29.2

Even at the moment of his biggest political defeat, the indefatigable Mahatma would neither cede the moral high ground nor stop showing the way to work for unity. Already on 6 June he had urged the Union of India and Pakistan to vie with each other in doing well. ‘If Pakistan did better,’ he said, ‘then the whole of India would be Pakistan, in which there would be neither majority nor minority, and all would be equal.’ On 12 June he wondered if ‘the readjustment of the geography of India’ meant two nations. He admitted that the territorial division made the challenge of unity difficult. Yet he urged the soon-to-be citizens of free India to ‘rise to the occasion and by their character and bravery, incorruptibility and toleration prove to the Muslims of Pakistan that in the Union there is no discrimination whatsoever on the ground of religion, caste or colour and that the only test is merit which every industrious citizen of the Union will have ample opportunity to acquire’. The ‘real unity of India’ depended on whether the shrines of Islam and Muslim seats of learning were honoured equally with the others, and Hindustani, ‘a compatible mixture of Hindi and Urdu’, had a future.3

The Partition of 1947 was not a tragedy foretold. As the Second World War drew to a close in 1945, efforts were under way to share power equitably once the British quit India.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.