On the eve of Independence Day, the National Council for Educational Research and Training released two modules on Partition Horrors Remembrance Day which the Government of India has started observing on August 14 since last year. While claiming to present an unbiased version of history, these modules in fact fit in with the now familiar project of re-writing history from a ‘Hindutva’ point of view. Some of the issues taken up are who was responsible for the partition of India, was it inevitable, its timing and modality. We are publishing below a transcript of the speech by Professor Mridula Mukherjee at the Oxford Union Debate on March 1, 2018 in which she raised and answered many of these questions.§Motion: This House Regrets the Partition of IndiaMadam President and Ladies and Gentlemen of the House,Unlike your other speakers, I am not a lawyer or a Parliamentarian or even a professional debater, trained to argue a chosen brief. I am a humble practitioner of the historian’s craft, and my comfort zone is within the walls of archives, and it is that perspective that I bring to this debate.I oppose this proposition because Partition did indeed become unavoidable in 1947, and it is ahistorical to regret something to which there was no alternative.How did the alternative of a United India get ruled out in 1947? There were three parties to the decision to partition India in 1947. The Muslim League led by Jinnah, the British Government, and the national movement led by the Congress.One, Jinnah and the Muslim League were adamant on their demand for Pakistan. They had won a majority of Muslim seats in the provincial elections of 1945-46, and had also unleashed the Muslim National Guards on to the streets of Calcutta in August 1946 setting off a chain of communal violence which engulfed Bengal, Bihar and the Punjab, and threatened to spill over into a civil war.The British, who were the Imperial Power and still making the decisions, while making weak noises about United India, never took a firm stand against Partition. They had in fact since the Simla conference of 1945 given a virtual veto power to Jinnah, and had also turned a blind eye to the sectarian communal violence. Nor were they willing to hand over power to the leading party of the Indian national movement, the Congress, alone.The only one among the triad of the British, the League and the Congress who earnestly desired and had fought for a United India was the Congress. And even the Congress now was forced into a situation where it ultimately accepted Partition because there was little else it could do. The top leaders of the Congress, Kripalani, Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel told Mountbatten by early April 1947 that Partition was the only alternative as it was better than civil war or imposition of unity. In fact, Jawaharlal Nehru who had ruled out Pakistan in 1946, appealed a year later to his countrymen to accept Partition.On June 4, 1947, Gandhiji explained to the people why the Congress accepted Partition: “…We do not wish to force anyone. We tried hard. We tried to reason with them (the Muslim League) but they refused to come into the Constituent Assembly.” To his close associate, N.K. Bose, he said, pointing towards the prospect of civil war, “Don’t you realise that, as a result of one year of communal riots, the people of India have all become communal. They can see nothing beyond the communal question. They are tired and frightened. The Congress has only represented this feeling of the whole nation. How can I then oppose it?”IIThe second reason why I oppose the resolution is that if, in a civilised democratic framework, a section of the people of a country reach a point where they decide that they want to leave the Union, however mistakenly, they cannot be forced to stay with the barrel of a gun pointing at them. Events in Scotland and Catalonia are recent examples of this.The Congress had been consistent and clear on this point, no matter how much it disliked the idea of division. Since 1942, the Congress had said clearly that while they opposed the League’s demand for Pakistan, “if the Muslims wish to have Pakistan, it will not deny it to them”. Gandhiji himself in the Gandhi-Jinnah talks of 1944 had offered that if a plebiscite based on all adults in Muslim majority districts in the East and the West showed that the majority wanted Pakistan, he would be agreeable to it. On 1st May 1947, the Congress Working Committee, accepted Partition on the basis of “the principle of self-determination as applied to definitely ascertained areas”. Given this stand of the Congress that “no part of India could be co-erced into accepting a constitution against its will”, when Jinnah remained adamant, and the British were unwilling to push him harder, they had no option but to accept Partition.Also read: ‘Main Tum Hoon, Tum Main Ho’: Revisiting Partition Horrors Through Hindi LiteratureIIIWhat is to be regretted is not Partition but the long-term British colonial policies which led to a situation where a people who had lived together for centuries got divided politically on the basis of their religion.It is often forgotten that Christianity and Islam came to India shortly after they were founded, and Christians and Muslims, and later Parsis, who were Zorastrian exiles from Iran where their religion was persecuted, had lived in different regions, taking on the local language and culture, with no threat to their religious identity.So Partition was not inevitable, as the British ideologues would often have us believe, because Hindus and Muslims had always been at each other’s throats, or because of Muslim tyrrany over Hindus in the medieval period as British Historians told us. or because Hindus and Muslims had been separate nations since time immemorial as Savarkar and Jinnah told us.Since the second half of the 19th century, increasingly the ideological justification for colonialism (the raison d’etre for their continued existence) shifted from the notion of the White man’s burden, of training or modernising the barbarians or the child people of the colonies (some of whom, by the way, had settled agriculture and state formation centuries before their current rulers) to their presence being necessary for keeping the peace among the divided colonial people and protect the minorities from majoritarian oppression.Partition became unavoidable in 1947 because in order to save and perpetuate their rule, the British fostered and nurtured divisions among Indians along religious lines. They were masters of the art of Divide Et Impera or Divide and Rule, they had played the game for long. From its inception in 1906, the Muslim League was a command performance with the sole purpose of acting as a counterweight to the anti-imperialist or nationalist demands of the Indian National Congress. Various policy measures were used to form the Muslims into a separate political bloc, the most pernicious being the instrument of separate electorates introduced in the Minto-Morley reforms of 1909. Under these, for example, both voters and candidates could only be Muslim. The assumption being that only Muslims could represent Muslims.This is what led to a divided polity and ultimately to Partition. The seeds of Partition, a fractured polity, were sown well and deep.Nor can it be said that, despite all the weight of the past, the British tried their best to make amends and leave behind a united India. True to pattern, even before the Muslim League could take its own demand for Pakistan seriously, the British Government incorporated the idea of Pakistan in their very next constitutional proposal, known as the Cripps’ offer, in 1942. Linlithgow, who was Viceroy till 1943, suppressed the Congress, which was the pro-Unity force, brutally in 1942, and did everything to encourage the Muslim League. His successor, Wavell, continued to be very anti-Congress and pro-League. On April 3, 1946, he referred to Gandhiji as this “malevolent old politician”. Mountbatten, who ostensibly came to India inclined towards Unity, also gave his famous Mountbatten Award in favour of Partition.Divide and Rule could not with the sleight of a hand be converted into Unite and Quit. Its logic was Divide and Quit.Also read: Sylhet Referendum Anniversary: A Time to Remember Partition Wasn’t Only About a Hindu-Muslim BinaryShashi Tharoor spoke eloquently from this platform some years ago about the exploitation to which Britain subjected India over two centuries of her rule. But the unholy hurry in the desire to save one’s skin and run that characterised the last phase of withdrawal and partition hit a new low in the annals of the British Empire. In February 1947, the date for leaving India had been announced as June 1948. Mountbatten, on 3rd June 1947, advanced it by ten months, to 15 August 1947, a grievous error, for which the people of India and Pakistan paid heavily. Can it be denied that a large part of the responsibility for the carnage, the loss of lives, the devastated women and children, lies at the door of the British rulers because they decided to dismantle in 72 days the edifice of an empire that took almost two centuries to build, and effect division of the country, all at a time when communal violence was spreading. The result was a predictable mess, with most British officials wanting to leave quickly, rather than dig in and help control the situation. Districts were found without any one incharge, and army detachments without commanders. An orderly withdrawal and partition may well have mitigated the horrors that characterised the Partition.However, I want to emphasise that it is not my argument that the only thing wrong about the partition was that it was implemented badly. That the British ruled well but left badly. No, they remain guilty of unleashing the forces that led to Partition, not taking a stand against Partition when they could, and of making weak noises when it was too late, and then doing a botched up job of putting it into effect. And that is what this house needs to regret, and not the Partition.IVThe instruments used by the British to divide the Indian people were religious identity-based political formations, which remained loyal to the British and played a critical role in weakening the Indian national movement and ultimately making Partition inevitable. It was not only the Muslim League which played this role, but also organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. When Congressmen were in jail for having launched a movement asking the British to Quit India, Hindu Mahasabha members joined provincial ministries and the RSS did not support the nationalists. Yet ironically it is their descendants who are the loudest today in “regretting” Partition, and in blaming, not the British, but the one party that did the most to oppose the divisive politics which led to Partition , the Congress, and its leader Nehru, as was done very recently in the Indian Parliament at the highest levels of political leadership. Another legislator from the ruling party asked Muslims to go to Pakistan or Bangladesh, since they had asked for Partition. They still talk of Akhand Bharat or undivided India as their goal.This translates very easily into de-legitimising Pakistan and continuing to harbour feelings of hostility towards it.Implicit in their approach is that Partition should have been prevented by any means possible, including the use of force to suppress minorities. For me, that is a strong reason for opposing the proposition as it can play into the hands of the very forces who furthered the divisive politics which led to Partition.Also read: Memories, Pain, Remorse: A Partition Portrait GalleryGandhiji, as always, in his wisdom, had seen this danger very clearly, and that is why he did not oppose Partition in the end. “There is nothing in common between me and those (the Hindu majoritarian forces) who want me to oppose Pakistan except that we are both opposed to the division of the country. There is a fundamental difference between their opposition and mine. How can love and enmity go together?”This house, therefore, cannot regret the Partition of India. What it needs to do is condemn all those who promote division and hatred along lines of religion identity, and warn of its dangerous consequences, which include ethnic cleansing, suppression of minority identities, and even Partition, with all its dislocation, as happened in the case of India, and also Ireland, and Palestine. It must do so not only to come to terms with the past, but because this pernicious legacy continues to play havoc with our present and threatens the future of our children.To paraphrase Gandhiji for our purposes, expression of regret is a noble sentiment if it promotes love. But not if it promotes enmity, between Hindu and Muslim, between India and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. Can we regret their birth, and hope to be friends?Mridula Mukherjee taught history at JNU for over four decades. She was also Chairperson of the Centre for Historical Studies and Dean, School of Social Sciences, JNU. She was also Director of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.