Post by lordroel on Jan 27, 2017 10:04:44 GMT
What if: India hadn't been partitioned in 1947?
India has witnessed many religious riots and conflicts since 1947. What would happen if Pakistan and Bangladesh were still United with India, here are some answers and their question related to a United India.
Question: It was an Indian who proposed Partition of India into two i.e. India & Pakistan and Britisher facilitated us.
Asked By: Muhammad Ali Jinnah and V. P. Menon.
Facilitator: The last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Mr. Menon was the political advisor of the last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. It was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who motivated Menon to table the idea to Mountbatten. Menon was not sure about the idea because he was laughed off by the British Advisers.
"When the interim Government had collapsed due to the rivalry between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, Menon had proposed to Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian leaders, the Muslim League's plan to partition India into two independent nations - India and Pakistan."
If the partition of India and Pakistan had not taken place
This is the typical 'What if?' It is counterfactual because now we can never know what would have happened if India had not been partitioned. But we can speculate about the possibilities and try and construct plausible scenarios for purposes of understanding and discussion.
Lord Wavell, the governor-general, told the Indian people in a radio address on May 17, 1946, "that this is the greatest and most momentous experiment in government in the whole history of the world—a new Constitution to control the destiny of 400 million people." The decision being made, for or against the Partition of India, would, in 58 years, control the lives of the billion and a quarter people of South Asia and for the foreseeable future.
Unpartitioned India would be the word’s largest country (1.4 billion people), the world’s largest Muslim country (500 million) and… the world’s poorest country (over 600 million hungry).
Undivided India need not have been the world’s poorest country. The resources, attention and energy that have gone into the continued hostility since Partition could have been channeled into development. (See the cost of conflict estimated by the Strategic Foresight Group, Mumbai). The huge market and the complementarities of arbitrarily divided ecosystems could have yielded great benefits. Huge investments went into making up for the division of the Indus water system, for example.
In undivided India, religion would have dominated political debate, as it did in the 30s and 40s, and consensus on reform would be hard to build internally. All energy would be sucked into keeping the country together. Undivided India would have separate electorates, the irreducible demand of the Muslim League and the one that Nehru stood against. A democracy with separate electorates is no democracy at all.
A democracy need not be a mechanical and rigid system. Malaysia, with three, not two, hostile communities found a way to adjust its system of governance to suit its constraints. South Africa, with its bitter history of apartheid, found a way in its constitution to work around the hostilities. There was no reason India could not have found a similarly workable formula.
Hindus would never have been able to rule Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan or the Frontier.
There is no reason to think in terms of one community ruling the other. Indeed, that is a framework that is incompatible with democratic governance. The fact is that almost right up to Partition, the Punjab’s Unionist Party had found a mechanism to govern with a coalition of the major communities.
Without Partition there would have been no Nizam-e-Mustafa.
Even after Partition there is no Nizam-e-Mustafa. The fact that a large number of Hindus in India today want the Kingdom of Ram does not mean that their demand needs to lead to a redefinition of India. These kinds of demands need to be resolved in the political arena.
The fault line of national politics in undivided India would have remained Hindu versus Muslim. Jinnah alone understood that from the start. Nehru and Patel understood it much later, agreeing to Partition. Gandhi never understood it; if he did, he never accepted it.
Jinnah did not feel from the start that the fault-line in undivided India would have remained Hindus versus Muslims. In fact, Jinnah was the advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity because he believed it was possible. The management of any fault line is up to the leadership as shown by the examples of Malaysia and South Africa mentioned earlier. Ireland is another example.
Three parts of undivided India had a Muslim majority. The west became Pakistan, the east became Bangladesh. Sooner or later, the north will become something else: the Muslims of Kashmir do not want to be India. But Indians do not understand that.
Three parts of undivided India had a Muslim majority but the demand for Pakistan did not originate in these areas. In fact the Muslim majority areas of the west were the last to sign on and even then very reluctantly. The Muslims of Kashmir seemed quite satisfied with the situation under the Farooq Abdullah government. Their attitude is more a function of India’s mismanagement (and post-partition Pakistan’s incitements) than of some innate hatred of Hindus. There is no cure for mismanagement. Even the Muslim west and east could not coexist in the face of political folly.
How would a united India look like
If India was not partitioned, it would look like this:
That means that Pakistan and Bangladesh would be a part of India. Is this a problem? Perhaps. See, the majority of this land has a Hindu population while the majority of Pakistan has a Muslim majority.
Now this would mean that Hindus would have the majority say in government - This was essentially the reason for the creation of Pakistan, so that Muslims would not be overruled by a Hindu majority.
India has witnessed many religious riots and conflicts since 1947. What would happen if Pakistan and Bangladesh were still United with India, here are some answers and their question related to a United India.
Question: It was an Indian who proposed Partition of India into two i.e. India & Pakistan and Britisher facilitated us.
Asked By: Muhammad Ali Jinnah and V. P. Menon.
Facilitator: The last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Mr. Menon was the political advisor of the last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten. It was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who motivated Menon to table the idea to Mountbatten. Menon was not sure about the idea because he was laughed off by the British Advisers.
"When the interim Government had collapsed due to the rivalry between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, Menon had proposed to Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the Indian leaders, the Muslim League's plan to partition India into two independent nations - India and Pakistan."
If the partition of India and Pakistan had not taken place
This is the typical 'What if?' It is counterfactual because now we can never know what would have happened if India had not been partitioned. But we can speculate about the possibilities and try and construct plausible scenarios for purposes of understanding and discussion.
Lord Wavell, the governor-general, told the Indian people in a radio address on May 17, 1946, "that this is the greatest and most momentous experiment in government in the whole history of the world—a new Constitution to control the destiny of 400 million people." The decision being made, for or against the Partition of India, would, in 58 years, control the lives of the billion and a quarter people of South Asia and for the foreseeable future.
Unpartitioned India would be the word’s largest country (1.4 billion people), the world’s largest Muslim country (500 million) and… the world’s poorest country (over 600 million hungry).
Undivided India need not have been the world’s poorest country. The resources, attention and energy that have gone into the continued hostility since Partition could have been channeled into development. (See the cost of conflict estimated by the Strategic Foresight Group, Mumbai). The huge market and the complementarities of arbitrarily divided ecosystems could have yielded great benefits. Huge investments went into making up for the division of the Indus water system, for example.
In undivided India, religion would have dominated political debate, as it did in the 30s and 40s, and consensus on reform would be hard to build internally. All energy would be sucked into keeping the country together. Undivided India would have separate electorates, the irreducible demand of the Muslim League and the one that Nehru stood against. A democracy with separate electorates is no democracy at all.
A democracy need not be a mechanical and rigid system. Malaysia, with three, not two, hostile communities found a way to adjust its system of governance to suit its constraints. South Africa, with its bitter history of apartheid, found a way in its constitution to work around the hostilities. There was no reason India could not have found a similarly workable formula.
Hindus would never have been able to rule Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan or the Frontier.
There is no reason to think in terms of one community ruling the other. Indeed, that is a framework that is incompatible with democratic governance. The fact is that almost right up to Partition, the Punjab’s Unionist Party had found a mechanism to govern with a coalition of the major communities.
Without Partition there would have been no Nizam-e-Mustafa.
Even after Partition there is no Nizam-e-Mustafa. The fact that a large number of Hindus in India today want the Kingdom of Ram does not mean that their demand needs to lead to a redefinition of India. These kinds of demands need to be resolved in the political arena.
The fault line of national politics in undivided India would have remained Hindu versus Muslim. Jinnah alone understood that from the start. Nehru and Patel understood it much later, agreeing to Partition. Gandhi never understood it; if he did, he never accepted it.
Jinnah did not feel from the start that the fault-line in undivided India would have remained Hindus versus Muslims. In fact, Jinnah was the advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity because he believed it was possible. The management of any fault line is up to the leadership as shown by the examples of Malaysia and South Africa mentioned earlier. Ireland is another example.
Three parts of undivided India had a Muslim majority. The west became Pakistan, the east became Bangladesh. Sooner or later, the north will become something else: the Muslims of Kashmir do not want to be India. But Indians do not understand that.
Three parts of undivided India had a Muslim majority but the demand for Pakistan did not originate in these areas. In fact the Muslim majority areas of the west were the last to sign on and even then very reluctantly. The Muslims of Kashmir seemed quite satisfied with the situation under the Farooq Abdullah government. Their attitude is more a function of India’s mismanagement (and post-partition Pakistan’s incitements) than of some innate hatred of Hindus. There is no cure for mismanagement. Even the Muslim west and east could not coexist in the face of political folly.
How would a united India look like
If India was not partitioned, it would look like this:
That means that Pakistan and Bangladesh would be a part of India. Is this a problem? Perhaps. See, the majority of this land has a Hindu population while the majority of Pakistan has a Muslim majority.
Now this would mean that Hindus would have the majority say in government - This was essentially the reason for the creation of Pakistan, so that Muslims would not be overruled by a Hindu majority.