The political hijack of Indian unity

On August 15, 1947 India did not awake to life but to death. Its unity lay shattered in pieces, writes Yavar Abbas.

Hijacking has been the defining pastime of many of the politicians in the 20th century and is being carried forward into the 21st. In my life I remember four hijackings:
1. The hijack of India's unity
2. The Bolshevik hijack of the Russian Revolution
3. The Zionist hijack of the Jewish holocaust, and
4. The neo-Con hijack of 9/11

Let us take the first one first. Like all respectable hijackings, the Indian hijack was also planned meticulously over a number of years by politicians of all shades and beliefs, each with their own pet agendas that mutated into a common one: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, the Indian National Congress, the All India Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Akali Dal, the Communist Party of India, the British Labour and Conservative parties, they all conspired jointly and individually and finally succeeded in hijacking the unity of India.

It is ridiculous to give credit for the partition of India to one single man or to one single party. Partition could have been avoided many times over, right up to the very last moment, if the will was there. The two-nation theory should have been a non-starter. In fact it was declared to be just that by the very man who was to become its most persuasive advocate.

As late as 1933 when an obscure Indian student at Cambridge concocted a crazy scheme and gave it a preposterously arrogant acronym, Jinnah was suitably contemptuous of it when confronted with it at the time in London. And yet this truly secular man, having no time for religious clap-trap whether Muslim or Hindu, was driven to become the most articulate protagonist of the very idea that he had labelled, just a few years earlier, a Mickey Mouse notion from Walt Disney's Fairy Land.

Jinnah was a brilliant advocate and once he took up a case, he pursued it to the satisfaction of his client. The case he finally took up was of Muslims' rights in an independent India. Though utterly incorruptible he would have settled out of court if he had been given the necessary assurances. But they were not forthcoming and there was evidence of bad faith.