August 15, it would appear, is an occasion for ritual self-flagellation for maudlin memoirists retelling their golden childhoods in the pleasure gardens of Lahore and the chowks of Karachi. How and why it occurred is rarely the subject of honest discussion and analysis; instead the public is treated syrupy tales of happy clappy times which for some unaccountable reason turned to tragedy and loss. So it was at the time. The bloodletting and manic communal violence do have a place in collective memory and should be an occasion for honest reflection.
The flannelled young Muhammed Ali Jinnah in Bombay earning his keep as a successful lawyer, happily married to a stunningly beautiful Parsi woman, preaching Hindu-Muslim unity is a story told and retold with frequency of the Arabian Nights and not nearly as riveting. More relevant for the historical record was the riper Jinnah who energized vast crowds of Muslims across the Subcontinent calling for the creation of a homeland for the faithful, to be called Pakistan [Land of the Pure].
His fleeting declaration that the religion and the state were to kept separate was a public relations gesture, a genuflection he chose to relegate to trivia.
Mullahs and mobs carried the day, hence his greatest political debt was to them and their deeds of derring-do on riotous streets when he called for ‘Direction Action Day’ on August 16, 1946. The communal holocaust began in Calcutta that day under the auspices of Bengal’s Muslim League Ministry, spreading eventually to Punjab where it reached its dire apotheosis.
While the mainstream nationalist leadership waffled, two outstanding leaders read the runes with extraordinary precision. They were Chakravarti Rajagopalachari and Babasaheb Rao Ambedkar who understood from the start that the demand for Pakistan commanded vast support from the large Muslim community too numerous to ignore unless one preferred unending civil strife. A united India was thus unfeasible, and it was best this way for an India minus Pakistan to move forward and engage creatively with the future. The core of Ambedkar’s argument was that the concept of Pakistan was rooted in Islamic tradition and history.
Jinnah told the American journalist Margaret Bourke-White that ‘America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America,’ that ‘Pakistan is the pivot of the world,’ because of its geographical location. During his tour of the Middle East in late 1946, he claimed that without a future Pakistan ‘there will be a great a menace of Hindu imperialist Raj spreading its tentacles right across the Middle East.’ This would ‘mean the end of Islam in India and even other Muslim countries,’ Jinnah said he was not averse to sending Pakistani troops to Palestine to fight the Jews and was receptive to the creation of Turc-Arab bloc comprising Turkey, Iran, North Africa, Afghanistan, and various Arab states.’ Pakistan would be prepared to go to war with India in defence of the Muslim minority there. During the Kashmir crisis, Jinnah appealed to Pakistanis to cultivate the true spirit of the Mujahids. Readers would do well to consult Venkat Dhulipala’s path-breaking study, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial India,’ which is magnificently researched from English and Urdu sources, altering the received mainstream discourse on Partition.
The BBC and Western broadcasters, not to speak of the Qatari-based Al Jazeera, neutered history to suit the purposes of partisan politics. There was the usual moral and political equivalence of India and Pakistan on display, much condescension with no reference to the Pakistan-sponsored jihadi attacks on Mumbai in March 1993 and November 2008. In scale and losses of life they dwarf anything that has occurred in continental Europe and Britain combined. No mention was made of the Pakistani dimension in the 9/11 jihadi assault on New York and Washington, nether was mention made of Osama bin Laden’s covert refuge in Pakistan with the connivance of the Pakistan military.
The irony is the distancing by the BBC, and print media Western broadcasters from jihadi bombers and killers on their respective doorsteps: London, Paris, Brussels, Madrid and Barcelona, the scene of the latest outrage, where 14 innocent citizens were killed. Germany’s English language TV channel referred with contrived alarm to India and Pakistan as nuclear weapon states. But so surely are China, the UK, France and, now, North Korea. Many neutral observers may wonder what German troops are doing on Russia’s borders. No threat to peace? That is something the German people should ponder seriously.
Boris Johnson on Indian footprint in UK
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson was in rousing form during an Indian Independence dinner celebration. Never short of humour and the pointed observation, he told how, on a recent visit to India, he saw a Bollywood starlet in the back of a Tata luxury Jaguar car manufactured in Castle Bromwich and exported to India ‘in ever growing numbers’; that the Jaguar is testament to ‘modern India, not only the biggest democracy on earth, but in less than 30 years time it will be the second, if not the richest country in the world’ – an over generous tribute verging on the hyperbolic. One of the richest dozen would be praise enough.
The good and great had turned out in force for the occasion. Mr Johnson said Winston Churchill was ‘spectacularly wrong’ when he prophesied after Indian self-rule. That he assuredly was, as he himself was to recognize during his second term as prime minister in 1951-55, when he came into close contact with India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to whom Churchill wrote: ‘I hope you will of the phrase “The Light of Asia”. It seems to me that you might do what no other human being could in giving India the lead, at least in the realm of thought, throughout Asia, with the freedom of the dignity of the individual as the ideal rather than the Communist Party drill book.’
Returning to Boris Johnson, he said Britain was open to talent, and hence welcomed Indian students to British universities; he called for a greater opening up of the Indian market to facilitate bilateral trade and investment.
The Foreign Secretary was in his element with a truly hilarious account of a visit to Ahmedabad, with its prohibition laws. He had to register as an alcoholic to get a drink and landed up at an all-night chemist at 3 am, holding a booklet and pleading for a lager and Jameson whisky and was offered a bottle of ethanol!
Picture to savour
A photograph from the archives of the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata of almost a century ago is one surely to savour. It shows a group of young Bengali scientists, still at College, clad in traditional dhoti and chhadar (shawl) with the patriarch Jagadish Chandra Bose in the centre, already an international luminary.
Barely recognizable were the youthful Satyen Bose, whose glory days as a particle physicist still lay in the future and his contemporary and friend Megnad Saha.
Saha died in 1956, aged 63, Satyen Bose in 1974, with J.C.Bose predeceasing them in 1938, aged around 80. Megnad Saha became an acclaimed astrophysicist for his ionization equation – the Saha Equation known to scientists. It receives generous mention at every session at any international astrophysics conference as a landmark in the subject. The iconic British astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington described Saha’s theory of thermal ionization as the twelfth most important landmark in the history of astronomy.
‘The Saha equation is not only relevant for the classification of stars in terms of the surface temperatures, but also for correctly predicting temperatures and mass loss mechanism in massive stars. Even with today’s fastest computers we have found that the state-of-the-gas is still in excellent agreement with the more approximate – but far more insightful – equation of Saha. This is truly extraordinary,’ says Jorick Vink, Vice President of the Commission on Massive Stars, International Astronomical Union, UK.
Nobel laureate S. Chandrasekhar, known for the Chandrasekhar limit, wrote: ‘Megnad Saha’s place in the history of astrophysics and in the history of modern science in India is unique.’ Saha was elected Fellow of the Royal Society way back in 1926.
While Saha’s work is world famous, the man is forgotten, especially in India, with no government doing anything to honour his memory.
