india after 70 years इंडिया आफ्टर 70 ईयर्स आफ इंडिपेंडेंस
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India has undoubtedly achieved much since breaking free of the British. But it has still not fulfilled its essential duty of uniting its citizens.
Celebrations of India’s independence are always laced thickly with sorrow, but especially so this year. The struggle that won India its freedom from the British on August 15, 1947, was conducted in the name of non-violence, the central pillar of Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy. And yet, when freedom arrived, it did so awash with blood.
More than a million people died in Hindu-Muslim violence, as the subcontinent was split into the states of India and Pakistan. The year 2017, the 70th anniversary of India’s independence, has witnessed a revival of the religious ruptures of that Partition, serving as a reminder that the fault-lines had never closed—and that, worryingly, they are perhaps being forced further apart now.
The question of whether Partition was ever avoidable is still hotly debated by historians. Over centuries of British rule, some scholars contend, Indians had been divided and ruled, forced to define themselves by their religious identities. When political power was vested in their hands, therefore, they were bound to wield it with these identities in mind. This is how empire works, the historian Yasmin Khan wrote in her book “The Great Partition”: it “distorts historical trajectories and forces violent state formation from societies that would otherwise have taken different—and unknowable—paths.”
But another line of thought argues that India was driven towards Partition by the frictions amongst its own leaders: Gandhi; Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the Congress Party. Gandhi and Nehru wanted a free India to remain whole, but they were unable to convince Jinnah that Muslims would be an integral part of this new nation, that they would not be sidelined or powerless within a predominantly Hindu population.
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