Thoughts on "Indian Summer"

My history book club met last night to discuss Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann. It is the story of the partition of India in 1947. Everyone agreed it was a good book, well written, reading like a novel, telling us the story of events we ought to remember but too often don't, and doing so through the lives of five principals: Ghandhi, Nehru, Jenna and Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten.

The book left me with a great deal of confusion about Gandhi. It seems that his unswerving committment to doing right as he saw it enabled him to build a national consensus among a diverse collection of peoples but prevented him from developing the compromises that would be necessary to create a viable state in 1947. It seems likely that one can not understand Gandha without understanding the Hindu religion well, and I clearly don't.

How did the people of the subcontinent come to frame the issue of independence in terms of religion, and thus divide India and Pakistan? Why were they willing to partition the Punjab and Bengal, areas with great cultures and common languages? Would it not have been more natural to have divided India into a number of culturally defined states, for example? Of course, there was a history of Muslim conquest and rule prior to the English, and of course the Muslim League focused on the religious issue. It was suggested that the English may have helped promote the religious framing during their rule and during the process of relinquishing that rule. One of the members of the group suggested, and I found it a likely suggestion, that once a community begins to frame divisions, that process becomes self-reinforcing, else how would one explain the riots between the "blues" and the "greens" in Byzantium, or between the Blancos and the Colorados in Colombia.

The normal way to think of what happened in 1947 is that British India was partitioned into India and Pakistan, which later was partitioned into Pakistan and Bangladesh. It might have been seen as rather a consolidation. After all there were more than 500 principalities before the departure of the British, and they were folded into the larger nations, their Rajas deprived of their power, their armies disbanded, and large economic units created.

The potential for ethnic cleansing was radically under estimated, the new states were radically underprepared for what happened, and as a result there was unimaginable suffering and maybe a million deaths. It occurs to me that this was especially strange since the key decision makers had immediate experience of World War II and the ethnic cleansing that had come with the changes in power during and after the war.

Which brings me to Iraq, and the possible lesson of the Indian Summer. The Coalition forces are withdrawing soon, and they better be prepared for the possibilty of a return to ethnic cleasing, tribal warfare and the rest. It should be possible to prevent the worst abuses and to help the people affected, but only through preparation for the worst.