THE COMMUNAL CATACLYSM
BASUDHA
CHAKRAVARTY
Communal
upheavals in
The
theory of repercussions comes handy for explanation of the chain. But a close
look reveals it more as a pretext than a real cause. It is actually a theory of
retaliation on the members of the minority community
of one country for crimes committed by the major community of the other country
because the latter is the same religious community as the former. This theory
is, on the face of it, absurd; yet the common masses of men seem to take its
truth for granted. In view of the apparent irrationality of the theory,
attempts have been made to give it some sort of plausibility. It is indeed in
that context that recent events have imparted to the communal problem in
It
must be made clear, however, that the theory of retaliation of which a clever
synonym is “repercussion”, would not pass muster even if the plausibility
claimed for it is admitted for consideration. For, retaliation must invite
counter-retaliation, and the knowledge of that sure possibility is implied in
the very cycle communal disturbances. If retaliation is really for wrongs done to
the minority community in the other country which is of the same religious
persuasion as the majority community in the retaliator’s own country, the
aforesaid knowledge should act as a positive deterrent on him. But apparently
it does not so act. It seems to be neutralized by a self-righteous inclination
to minimize one’s own crime. The fact emerges that sympathy for one’s own
co-religionists of the other country is not the governing factor in communal
riots for, had it been that, the possibility of reprisals would itself have
acted as a check. Really, the theory of repercussions acts as a cover for
communal trouble in the other country being used as an occasion for release of
communal hatred in one’s own. If and when such an occasion offers itself or can
be created within the country, there is no need to invoke the theory of
repercussion. Such occasions were worked up at
No
longer explicable by the facile and in any case absurd theory of repercussions,
this phase of the riots in the two countries has revealed a qualitative
development in what has so far been a quantitative problem. Coming as it has
done after a gap of fourteen years (the last major simultaneous riots in the
two countries occurred in 1950) and being in its depth and
intensity unprecedented, it seems to have raised what was so long a communal
problem into an intensely political one–almost a war between the races carried
on, as according to their present situations, as a cowardly war on the
minorities.
This
frightful increase in the dimension of the communal problem amounting to
suggestion of a thorough change in its character, is
the result of recent communal events whose impact is thus shown to have been
epochal. Yet it is not difficult to detect in it an utter lack of sense of
proportion caused, sure enough, by wilful
exaggeration of communal strains residually lingering from the fierce phase of
our national history that resulted in creation, by secession from
Hindu communalism can
afford to put on a non-communal garb because, on the strength of the
overwhelming numerical superiority of the Hindus it can have its way without
resort to communal self-assertion. It consists in refusal to acknowledge any
special consideration for non-Hindu minorities whom it expects to follow the
Hindu outlook on affairs that it would feign consider synonymous with the
Indian outlook. It amounts, as Mahatma Gandhi said, to imposition of the will
of the majority community on the minorities. But it has also a historical
background.
The
rule we had, prior to the advent of the British, was monarchic. Hindu rule was
succeeded by Pathan rule; Moghul rule followed.
Regional Hindu and Muslim rulers sometimes combined in mutual interest against
a contemporary Muslim or Hindu prince. But generally the victory of a Hindu
prince was regarded as a Hindu victory. When a Muslim prince prevailed, his was
hailed as a Muslim gain. British rule supported one prince against another or others
until it could and did engulf all. Its withdrawal nearly two centuries later
posed the problem of reconciling Hindu and Muslim complexes persisting within
the nation and even carefully fostered by the foreign ruler. The two-nation
theory appeared and won recognition to the extent of separation of Muslim
majority areas into the separate State of Pakistan. That, it was claimed, would
liquidate communal consciousness but really amounted to elevation of
communalism into nationalism and, if anything, was projected into relations
between India and the new State. For India, then, the problem
arose of neutralizing the persisting communal complex or of, to put it in
practical political terms, securing in a democracy the neighbourly
existence of communities which had through the ages lived under monarchies. Not
that they had not lived peacefully whatever the communal complexion of a
particular monarchy in a particular region. But now the Muslims smarted under
memories of the empire they had lost to the British, and found that nobody was
to have an empire in India, and that they would be a permanent minority in the
parliamentary democracy that was in the offing. Also a schism had grown between
them and the majority community owing to the lag in political development caused
by their delayed acceptance of English education, owing also to religio-communal slant in aspects of the anti-imperialist
nationalism grown by the majority community, and the communal consciousness
attaching to the political awakening of the Muslims themselves. They had, as a
result, worked out Pakistan for themselves but that only aggravated the problem
of accommodation of the Muslims of residual India to the independent democracy
of that country. Secular nationalism was this country’s firm answer to the
problem. Its genesis was the synthetic trend in Indian history reinforced by
contact with western civilization of which the political influences are
nationalism and democracy. It was the target of attack of the religio-communal forces which, basing their claim on Aryan
heritage, would mould India in their own image. They tried to derive additional
justification from Muslim communal nationalism which had forced the partition
of the country. They took the life of Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest apostle of non-violent
nationalism, in the hope of creating a vacuum with a view to seize power. That,
however, acted as a boomerang on themselves because the Mahatma’s martyrdom had
the dialectical effect of immensely strengthening his ideal. They lay dormant
for a time but did not abandon their aim. Pakistan and the communal character
of its state acted as a permanent catapult to the communal forces in India. The
Muslims of this country were willy-nilly prone to look to Pakistan, and that
circumstance had its ramifications not only in the comparative lack of cohesion
in their allegiance to this country, but in possibilities of the other country
seeking and getting here allies who might be of such service to her as
circumstances might advise. Of course such allies, agents, spies or
fifth-column, as according to the context they might be called need
not be and have been proved to be not of any particular community. On top of
that, the non-Muslims of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan are ipso facto and
even de jure second class citizens of that
State. The climate thus exists for communal riots in both countries and, if and
when they could be passed off as repercussions, they occur with additional
facility. Communalism thus perpetually bedevils politics and what is more serious,
national life. Its latent force has revealed itself in recent events as a
cataclysm–all the more shocking because preceded by a period of comparative
lull and at the particular point of time, quite unexpected. Its ferocity could
be determined from the horrid fact of attempts on lives of Kazi
Nazrul Islam, the highly popular and revolutionary
Bengali poet who has long been mentally sick and of Ali Akbar
Khan, the maestro who has added lustre to his
country’s name in the whole world. This elemental outburst is proof that the
problem is no longer merely communal as it has been believed to be ever since
it appeared. It is racially directed and politically oriented. Its origin is
not confined to the communal nature of a section of the people. It claims its justification
in politics, in need for one’s fight for existence against one whom it
identifies with the Pakistani, alienized by secession
from this country.
Not
wholly unreasonably either, but still, perversely. The Muslim minority in India
has not outgrown the mentality of acting as a community. It has not dispersed
itself in the body politic as individuals. So we are told at one time that it
is largely veering towards the communists, again that it tends to support some
leftist party, still again that it has at last found its lot cast with the
Congress. But the responsibility for the Muslim community behaving largely as a
community apart, wherefore it is branded as thinking and acting in communal
terms, must lie squarely on the shoulders of the forces in the majority
community who do expect and ask the Muslims to act en masse in a manner
prescribed by them. Thus leftists of all brands call for the support of the
minority community against assurances of safeguarding their interests which,
they would have the minority believe, are unsafe in the hands of the ruling
party. The ruling party naturally makes the most of the constitutional and
administrative assurances for minority interests. Not unoften
is an element of threat, open or implied, present in approaches to the minority
community by both the ruling and the opposition parties.
Presumed failure of the community to support a particular candidate or party is
often, absurdly enough, dubbed as betrayal. Protection of the minority
community is impliedly conditional on political support of the latter which is
thus put on sufferance. Not that such an attitude is universally operative and
if it were that, similar attitudes of the several parties would cancel one
another. But the very fact of existence of such an attitude inspires tendencies
in the minority community to block voting, with a view to influence the shape
of things in the direction they might at the moment consider favourable to themselves. There is no denying the
possibility of overt Pakistani inspiration behind such block operations. But
the internal stresses are too great and the stakes too big to permit
unquestioning acceptance of outside inspiration. Those whose permanent homes
lie in India have to adapt themselves to the political image of the country.
They know that the task of consolidating themselves in the country’s life is
their own, and outside inspiration would hardly help that; nay, must positively
hinder. Secular democracy as enshrined in the Constitution is their
sheet-anchor and the sooner they put all their stakes on it, the better for
themselves. But the lag in secular nationalism as obtaining at present and
affecting them in a practical manner, leads a section of opinion among them to
lose faith in the reality of secularism and adopt an adverse, self-centred outlook. This section of opinion must needs be
distinguished from the school of minority thought which took and continues to
take things at a stride depending on the basic secularism of the country to
secure in due course triumph over all discordant forces. It does not ipso
facto become anti-national but develops mental reservations that hamper
integration. Occasionally it provides a channel for fifth-column activities
supplying grist to the mill of communal forces in the majority community. It
accounts for the mental affinity to Pakistan which lingers in certain Muslim
circles and extends to a wish for pakistan’s
advantages at India’s expense. This traitorous fringe even wished and worked
for the Chinese invasion resulting in such advantage but is not to be compared
in dimension or effectiveness with the ideological groups which did all but
openly side with the invader. The genesis of communal disturbances lies in the
complex dialectics of the operation of communal consciousness.
India
owes it to herself to rise above that consciousness and so to conduct herself
as to compel all her constituent units to purge themselves of it. Let there be
no mistake: water finds its own level and if we are unable to sustain ourselves
on the secular democratic level, we shall maim and thwart and stultify
ourselves. Not except by a positive effort shall we keep forces of communalism
and provincialism at bay, and not except by so keeping them shall we realize
full possibilities of national development and expression with which individual
development and expression are inextricably bound. The chauvinistic attempt to
equate Indian culture and civilization with the age-old culture of the majority
community into which many aberrations, as Swami Vivekananda
among others vehemently pointed out, had crept, amounts to an attempt to put
the clock back. We pay the price of communalism in the shrinkage of our
personality just as the individual circumscribed within communal and even
national bounds, must fall short of the possibilities of development of his
mental and even material being. Secular, democratic, nationalism is thus to the
inalienable interest of India and all Indians, and could fulfil
itself in and through liberal democracy. It rules out suggested recipes for the
communal problem such as exchange of population between India and Pakistan on a
communal basis. Such proposals amounting, as they do, to expulsion of a class
of Indians who have as much right to the country as anyone else, are per se unconstitutional
and of course totally immoral. Yet the very fact that such proposals could be
made, bespeak a regrettable aspect of the mind of the majority community–the
lack of feeling for fellow-countrymen belonging to the other community. That is
however reciprocal so far as it goes: for members of the minority community in
either country are not known to have any particular sympathy for members of the
minority community in the other country who are in a predicament similar to the
one they are in. Rather they are ready targets of each other’s wrath. Yet the
age-old temple in a forest in Eastern Pakistan whose lights do no longer burn
and whose bell has ceased to jingle, bespeaks the same fate of the minority
community of a country as the charred remains of a burnt-out musjid in a corner of Calcutta indicate the dire straits of
the minority community of another country, both being visual evidence of the
grim, tortuous course of their interconnected history. That would seem to lend
some plausibility to pleas for mutual exchange of communities. Yet history does
neither limit nor end itself there. The dismal situation really exposes the imperfection
of Indian nationalism and the unreality of Pakistan’s claim to be giving her
minorities equal treatment with her Muslim citizens. The plea for
exchange of population–meaning exchange of minorities–is sometimes given a
humanitarian colour as meant to
salvage them from the shadow of death in which they have perpetually
to move, their Government and fellow-countrymen in either country having been
proved unable even at this late hour to assure them their due honour and security. This is however easily countered by
the inhumanity of compulsorily uprooting millions of people implying a shameful
admission of the inability of either country to ensure safe lives for its own
citizens. It may be hoped even now that neither Government would stoop so low
as to make such an admission. Apart from everything else the sheer stupendousness and complication of the task would prevent
its being at all considered. The propaganda carried on by certain circles in
India for so called exchange of population has already done much harm. To the
Muslim minority in Eastern India it has added insult to injury and the way in
which certain quarters have tried not only to evade responsibility for the
communal onslaught but to shift it to the minority itself calling the latter
practically wholesale agents of Pakistan, has been a source of great spiritual
torment for the conscious elements of the Muslim intelligentia
who, besides being subjected to the actual terror of the riots, are being made
to feel themselves stateless. The result is that they feel their relations with
the Hindu intelligentia with whom they have a mental
and cultural outlook very much in common, subjected to mental and even external
strain. It has to be remembered that not only the major strata of the Muslim intelligentia are now partners in the country’s life but a
generation has grown up whose connections with Pakistan are nominal and who
have nothing in Pakistan to look for unlike their immediate predecessors who
had close connections with Pakistan and who could rightfully seek accommodation
in that country. So any self-righteous superiority we in India might feel in
respect of the communal attitude is negatived by the
horrid realities of the suffering of the minority community in riots and the
sort of permanent regard of them as aliens. In Pakistan of course that position
is constitutionally enshrined. Too often in either country leaders of the majority
community, in the Government or outside, issue appeals for peace and hopes of
brotherly living in the future, after riots have taken a heavy toll of lives,
property and honour. Announcements of return of
peace, regain of control over the situation and restoration of normal condition
are made over the dead and maimed bodies and burnt-out houses of hundreds of
people. But it should be a matter of shame for any country to permit such
happenings at all and the existence within itself of people capable of
perpetrating such outrages and of others sympathizing with and supporting them.
For India with her claim to a heritage as old as civilization, to a national
being enriched by centuries of struggle and endeavour,
and to a destiny of rich promise in the counsels of the world, the task of
integrating all her nationals in a final triumph of nationalism over
communalism brooks no delay at all.
But
then the question must be answered: what to do about the minority community in
Pakistan (such a community really exists only in Eastern Pakistan) to whom
India, having agreed to the formation of a mono-communal State by secession
from herself, owes a moral and political obligation? There can certainly be
no refusal to accommodate in this country such members of that
community as find it necessary to seek refuge here. It should be remembered
that the obligation officially existed up to July, 1959. Partition occurred in
August, 1947 and twelve years were considered sufficient for the Hindus of
Eastern Pakistan to decide whether they could continue to live in Pakistan or
felt themselves called upon to cross over. Even at the end of that period,
however, the obligation to admit bonafide refugees
from Eastern Pakistan must be regarded as continuing because of
lack of stabilization of conditions in Eastern Pakistan
permitting a secure, even if not fully honourable
life for the minority community there. The need for assurance regarding the bonafides of the refugees has impressed itself on all who
have come in contact with them particularly in the current phase of
immigration. Incitement to disturbances in refugee camps and propaganda asking
them to desert the same ostensibly on account of unsatisfactory conditions
there have been traced to agents-provocateur who took advantage of the free
flow of migrants to come over to try to create chaos in this country presumably
in pursuance of manoeuvrings by a party which has
always had underground links between East and West Bengal and now works in
collusion with China. Some of the old refugees mixed themselves up with the new
migrants with the same purpose. Refugees, old or new, deserve every sympathy
but there is little reason for their idealization. It was in any case too much
for Pakistan to expect loyalty from the Hindus of East Bengal who are second
class citizens of the Islamic Republic and there are no grounds
to expect them to develop overnight loyalty to this country either. Basically
they have no political principles to go by. Too many of the refugees have too
long lent themselves to disruptionist politics
forming for the so-called opposition parties a political reserve. Some of them
have of course been seasoned into useful citizens of the country of their
refuge. Refugees throughout history have been, in the very nature of their
situation, in a state of moral and psychological tension. Every sympathy and
imagination must be brought to bear on the task of their early and compulsory
rehabilitation. Else they remain an unsettled and unsettling factor, adding, by
reason of their very background, to the potential for communal tension.
Fundamentally, however, they are victims of a dire fate which they had done
nothing to deserve. They have been made to pay for the sins of a whole people,
and succor, when they need it, is the least that is their due.
Yet,
in spite of everything that has happened, it is not yet called for to
contemplate anything like come-over of the minority population of Eastern
Pakistan en masse. For, howsoever big the volume and seriousness of the
recent communal riots there and though not only Hindus but other minorities
have been affected, these have been limited to parts of three districts out of
the seventeen of which Eastern Pakistan is composed. Minorities in the
non-affected areas have felt the shock: yet that has not been so great as to
impel them to seek wholesale migration to India. There are decided
countervailing factors too. The opposition parties in Pakistan which are waging
against the present regime of that country a fight for the restoration of democratic
rights, have it to their political interest to carry the non-Muslim minorities
with them. So they ask for joint electorates which would objectively break
through the non-communal character of their State. They ask the minorities not
to leave the country and assure them equal rights going so far as to disown the
official description of the minorities as a sacred trust of the Islamic
country, for the outlook behind that description militates against equality.
Individually, however, many among the majority community are disposed to
advise their friends in the minority community to assure themselves a haven in
India, for they are not in a position to offer them permanent guarantees of
security. Such advice on the individual plane has dialectically the same
quality of goodwill as finds expression through the collective will, expressed
through democratic opinion, for continued stay of non-Muslims in Pakistan. That
will has been sanctified by the sacrifice of a number of Pakistani lives in
efforts to save members of the minority community in peril. No comparative
sacrifice appears on records of communal orgies in India where, of course, the
State owns direct responsibility for its citizens belonging to all communities.
Involved as the minorities in India and Pakistan are, by reason of their
immediate historical background, with their respective fellow-communities in
the respective other countries, they tend to think and act as in a mass and so
to preserve a sort of separate entity. The non-Muslim minority of Pakistan
being comparatively small and left increasingly devoid of organization and
leadership, has little operative identity of its own. India’s vast Muslim
minority has assured, if a little undecided, leadership and representation in
the constitutional counsels of the country. Its proclivity to
communal-compartmental living and thinking gives offence to and raises
suspicions in sections of the majority community. But it is the latter’s regard
and treatment of them as near-aliens that compels the minority community to
live and think apart from the national community. Integration of the minority
community is promoted by the State’s active secularism but is hampered by
communalism rampant at Governmental and social agencies. On the other hand
integration operates in Pakistan, despite constitutional and political
obstruction by the State, at the bottom through the democratic channels, in
politics, sports and culture, of popular expression.
So
in spite of the new dimension the communal schism appears to have recently
acquired, history does not provide it with means to raise itself to the status
of a war of the races. It is at best a backwash of the politico-communal
convulsion that wrought partition of the sub-continent. It is at the worst a
last ditch fight by medieval forces to take possession of the national being.
It is being objectively resolved by the working of the forces of modern science
in the various aspects of our national developments. Already in our plants and
factories forces of national integration are irrevocably, irresistibly, at
work. They are the expression of the synthetic trend of our national history
into which western culture has effectively found its place. The syncretic strand in our national life runs through the ages
wherein lay Jawaharlal Nehru’s quest of the discovery of India. The era of
national self-reclamation which reached its consummation in Mahatma Gandhi,
reached out to the Nehru era of ever-increasing self-development and
expression. Its essence lies in the humanist synthesis of which past expression
is embedded in our arts and architecture and which waits to be fulfilled in all
fields of our national endeavour. Symbolic of it was
the reaction of the poor Muslim who had plied a hackney-carriage in Calcutta
for half a century and on the afternoon of Shri
Nehru’s departure from earth announced to his family that he would take no food
that night and settled down to reading the Holy Quoran.
Jawaharlal Nehru would have regarded that behaviour
of religious significance to be the best recognition of life-stream which he
saw running through the Ganga, of the people of the
country he loved so well. He spoke to us in accents which were compulsive in
the reality of his knowledge and vision. His requirements were exacting; it was
for most of us a perpetual strain to try to live up to them. Not all of us
succeeded in making the attempt. Many failed and their inferiority complex
found expression in puerile attempts at denigrating the leader who had given
independent India a stable Government with an all-round perspective and an
effective voice in the counsels of nations. Communal riots are exactly the kind
of event in which our unsublimated selves find
uninhibited expression under a garb of political justification. Also contact
with communalism and counter-communalism often corrodes our good sense with the
result of gradual self-abandon to communalism. Personal suffering from
communalism has its natural reaction. It is to be hoped that the terrific
lessons of recent riots have brought home to all concerned the need to exert
themselves to end communalism in both countries so as to enable their peoples
to live in peace and seek well-ordered avenues of self-realization.
Self-examination, self-criticism and self-reclamation are the least
requirements of personal responsibility for national integrity.