The Partition of India – Part 2: Two Blind Eyes
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell.

You are listening to part two of a multi-part series on the partition of India. Now, if you haven't listened to part one yet, I'd suggest you hit the pause button and go ahead and check out that first episode. We covered some very important events and met some very important characters. And you might rob yourself of some critical context.

if you skip it. But if you have listened to Part 1, End of Empire, you are in the right place. However, before we dive into the next stage of our story, let's take a quick moment to refresh ourselves on what we've covered thus far. When we left off last time, the year was 1930, when the all-powerful British Raj had been dealt a symbolic blow by a 61-year-old man in a loincloth, armed with a handful of sodium chloride.

The climax of our first episode was Mohandas Gandhi's historic salt march, in which he and his followers walked 241 miles to the coast to collect contraband salt, throwing a punk rock middle finger to the British government in the process. It was the culmination of a long journey, not only for Gandhi himself, but for India as a whole. Last time, we spent a pretty decent chunk of time discussing how the British came to rule over India in the first place.

We talked about the corporate predations of the infamous British East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries, how they embedded themselves into India like a tapeworm, siphoning off wealth in the form of rubies and spices and making England fabulously rich in the process.

It was a colonial game of just the tip that escalated into a full-on takeover. Like a desperate junkie, the more the company tasted, the more they wanted. And soon India was falling like dominoes under the boots of their private armies. The once magnificent Mughal empire had rotted from within.

and the English were able to push it down like a very large, but very dead tree. But in 1858, after a nasty rebellion, the directors of the East India Company were forced to hand over administrative control of India directly to the British Crown. Private enterprise became imperial possession, and the result was an effective but brutal political infrastructure we call the British Raj. But the Raj was not built to last.

In fact, it would endure for fewer than 100 years. And that limited lifespan was due, in part, to some of the characters we met in Part 1. We learned about Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, and his revolutionary concept of peaceful non-cooperation. He called it Satyagraha or Truth Force.

But to the British, it might as well have been kryptonite. They could crack as many skulls and snap as many bones as they wanted, but Gandhi's incorruptible moral example ignited a mass movement, hell-bent on self-rule and eventually full independence. As Gandhi phrased his challenge to the Raj, quote, No matter what you do, no matter how you repress us, we shall one day wring reluctant repentance from you.

End quote. And one of the people inspired by Gandhi's non-violent example was another key member of our cast, the rich kid turned radical, the future prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.

We met Nehru as a young man, boiling with rage over the notorious Amritsar Massacre, in which British troops methodically murdered 379 men, women, and children in a public garden. Under the wing of the Mahatma, Nehru's righteous anger eventually hardened into idealistic conviction, and he would go on to become Gandhi's political heir apparent.

According to the writer Shashi Thraror, Nehru was, quote, the glamorous face of Indian nationalism, just as Gandhi was its otherworldly deity, end quote. But Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi are only one side of a very complex equation. As we attempt to understand the churning political currents that would influence the partition of 1947, we need to turn our attention to a different character, a different community, and a different perspective.

Gandhi and Nehru may have visualized a future of peace, love, and harmony, but they were dismissive, even blind, to ancient anxieties festering in the body politic of India.

An old virus was lying dormant in the cells of India's diverse communities. A tension, a strain, a resentment that would be agitated, exploited, and eventually weaponized to the death and detriment of millions of people. The sectarian violence that bubbled up in the summer of 1947 was waged primarily along religious lines, although rarely for religious reasons.

Faith became a political identity, pitting neighbors against neighbors. And through a rapid process of polarization, the religious communities of India learned, or perhaps relearned, how to hate one another. The result was a, quote, man-made sea of blood. According to historian Ayesha Jalal, Hindus killing Muslims, Muslims killing Hindus.

Sikhs killing Muslims, Muslims killing Sikhs. Of course, it is very important to emphasize, and I will continue to emphasize it throughout this series, that no one religious group is solely to blame for what happened during partition. It was equal opportunity atrocity. As Hajari Naseed writes, "...the story features no easy villains and few heroes."

End quote. But the lingering mystery at the heart of Partition, one that has confounded historians for decades, is why people who lived side by side for so long in relative peace, different in creed but similar in culture, butchered each other so callously in 1947. And you can sense the frustration in a large portion of the historiography, the feeling that it doesn't quite make sense, that it shouldn't have happened this way.

And yet it did. As historian Joya Chatterjee writes, it is the, quote, gaping void at the heart of the subject. We simply do not know why people who had lived cheek by jowl for so long fell upon each other in 1947 and its aftermath with a ferocity that has few parallels in history. End quote. Historian Yasmin Khan agrees, writing, quote,

No single answer can explain the series of events in 1947, and there is no smoking gun in the archive. End quote. And it's true. Clean, tidy narratives rarely exist in the pages of history, and try as we might, those who study it are never entirely free from their own internal biases. As historian Will Durant famously said, quote, History is mostly guessing. The rest is prejudice.

End quote. In today's episode, we will examine the historical relationship between India's main religious communities, and that history will serve as a backdrop for the rise of a new character, one who will become as important to our story as Gandhi or Nehru, the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. So, now that we've refreshed ourselves on where we've been and sketched out where we're going, let's get started. Welcome to The Partition of India, Part 2.

Two Blind Eyes. It's 2017, 70 years after the partition of India. We're in the UK, in a small suburban town west of London.

It's Thursday evening, but not just any Thursday evening. Tonight is Pizza Thursday at the local community center. As the pizza boxes are delivered and brought inside, a small crowd of elderly men and women start to congregate inside the community center. They are members of the East African Asian Senior Citizens Association, a local support group of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians.

And every Thursday, rain or shine, they meet here in the local center. And they spend that time reading poetry, watching films, talking, catching up, and of course, eating pizza. And one of these people is an 86-year-old man named Swaran Singh Raiyat.

"Swaran is a small man, he wears a crisp suit and a delicate pair of glasses. His beard is snow white, the same color as the turban wrapped tightly around his head. Swaran is a practicing Sikh, and as such he observes the commandment to never cut his hair, a "symbol of respect for the perfection of God's creation," as journalist Kavita Puri describes.

The turban itself is a symbol of self-respect and dedication. And every Thursday, Suarán comes to see his friends at the community center. Outside of these events, his daily routine is simple and unremarkable. He wakes up at 4 a.m., says his prayers, and listens to the radio. Later in the day, he takes the bus to the local Sikh temple. The next day, he wakes up at 4 a.m. and does it all over again.

To anyone sitting on the bus across from Soiran, he looks like just another polite old man. He talks about the weather, or his faith, or his family, but there is something that Soiran does not talk about. And that is what happened to him seven decades ago, on the other side of the world, when he was just a 15-year-old boy.

It was the summer of 1947. Swaran lived in a small village in the Punjab region of northwestern India. Now, just a quick note on geography, if you think of India as looking like a big shark's tooth pointing down into the Indian Ocean, Punjab is up in the gums at the top left. That's Punjab, a very important area to mentally earmark for future reference. Anyway, after

At the time, that part of India was incredibly diverse, a melting pot of many different cultures and religions, primarily Sikhs, Muslims, and Hindus. And Swaran's village was no different. In some ways, it was a microcosm of the Punjab at large. There was a Sikh side of town and a Muslim side of town.

And the two communities lived together side by side. They traded with one another, celebrated holidays together, and let their kids play together. Case in point, 15-year-old Suharan. His best friend was a Muslim kid from the other side of town, a boy named Ghulam.

Swaran and Ghulam did everything together. They went to the same school, they visited each other's houses, they knew each other's parents. There were of course differences though. Sikhs and Hindus alike were forbidden from sharing food with Muslims or eating food prepared by Muslims. Swaran and Ghulam, as close as they were, could never cook a meal together. But that was just the way it was. In every other respect, they were as tight as brothers. But as they got older, things began to change.

There was chatter around the village. Rumors that the British masters were leaving India for good after centuries of colonization. But unfortunately, the India they were leaving behind would not be a united one. At the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947, the Punjab, with its mix of different peoples and religions, would be split or partitioned. One side would belong to India. The other would go to a new country, Pakistan.

And to Swaran and his friend, the million-dollar question was, which side of the dividing line would their village be on? And in late August of 1947, they got their answer. When the maps were revealed to the public, a jagged line ran through the Punjab. Swaran's village, to his relief, was to remain in India. But to Muslims like his best friend Ghulam, partition brought anything but comfort.

Already, there were rumors of acts of violence against Muslims on the Indian side of the border. Militant gangs of Sikhs and Hindus were prowling East Punjab, kicking Muslims out of their homes, hurting them, killing them, forcing them to migrate to quote-unquote where they belonged, the new Islamic-majority country of Pakistan. Of course, on the other side of the border, in West Punjab, the

the same exact thing was happening to Hindus and Sikhs. It seemed as if Punjab was like a glass of oil and water, temporarily stirred and incorporated, but now slowly separating, molecule by molecule into distinct halves. Swaran said goodbye to his best friend Gulam in the middle of the night. It was

It wasn't safe for Muslims here in the village anymore, so Ghulam had to flee for Pakistan. As they hugged each other, the two friends realized they would probably never see each other again. Suwaran remembered the heartache of it seven decades later, quote, "...we were very disturbed. We had all been living together for hundreds of years."

But the real trauma of partition would arrive at Swaran's doorstep shortly after. As the weeks passed, the violence in the Punjab began to intensify. Long columns of refugees clogged the roads, pursued by gangs of killers and nationalist death squads. A wheel of reciprocal violence was beginning to turn. One day, there was a knock on Swaran's door.

Outside, a large group of armed men was forming. The elders of the village had decreed that one man from every Sikh household must participate in an attack on a nearby Muslim village. The Muslims, they said, had killed Sikhs, had hurt, abducted, even raped Sikh women, and they must be punished.

and so with little choice and much hesitation fifteen-year-old soiran found himself marching alongside a posse of men from his village carrying a sword in his hand and even after seventy years the memories of that day are razor sharp in soiran's mind

He says he remembers walking for over an hour, and as they passed other Sikh villages, the raiding party got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it would have been easy to see from a distance the blades of dozens if not hundreds of men winking in the summer sun. Finally, they arrived at their destination, and without words or talk or reticence, the

The Sikhs threw themselves upon the Muslim villagers. 15-year-old Suwaran could only stand trembling, paralyzed, the sword shaking in his hand, as they began hacking the Muslim villagers to death. Journalist Kavita Puri describes what happened next. Quote,

When they arrived, there was panic. The Muslim villagers tried to escape. One of the adults Soiran was with, a heavily built man, tried to behead a Muslim. But his sword was damaged in the act. He shouted to Soiran, who was just 10 yards away from him, to hand over his sword. Soiran said the man was much older than him, and he had no choice but to give it to him. The young man watched as his sword was used to murder a Muslim, not far from where he was standing. The day of killing...

will never leave swaran he can still visualize how the older sikh villager took a cloth to wipe the fresh blood off the murderous blade and then handed the sword back to him the scene was one of chaos there was frenzied killing blood in the street bodies on the ground quote maybe 50 to 100 people they killed in that village swaran insists that he did not harm anyone that he had no choice but to go along with the other men

End quote. The walk back to his village had to be one of the longest hours of Soiran's life. Droplets of someone else's blood were still clinging to his sword, and if his thoughts wandered to his friend Gulam, he kept that to himself. It could have easily been Gulam's head under those blades.

All Swaran could hope was that his friend had safely made it to Pakistan and been able to avoid the kill squads like the one he'd just been recruited into. After partition, Swaran eventually immigrated to England. But even at the age of 86, riding that bus in London, the memories of the murderous raid are still crystal clear in his mind. As he told journalist Kavita Puri, quote, I was a student. I did not want to kill people. But I have seen this.

End quote. Over the years, Swaran tried many times to track down Gulam, but he never did find out what happened to his friend. Swaran Singh Riot's story is one of thousands, if not tens of thousands, just like it. Even at the age of 86, he did not understand why India was partitioned. He placed ultimate blame on the British for leaving, for turning their back on the subcontinent as it descended into bloody violence.

His confusion and resentment is common among partition survivors. Yet the fact that Soiran was willing to share his story to anyone is a minor miracle. Most witnesses to partition violence refuse to talk about it at all. It is simply too painful. As one elderly woman named Azra Huck told a journalist, "...I'd rather not talk about what I saw. I'm sorry, I cannot repeat those things. I cannot bring them to life again."

I don't want to remember them.

End quote. But another common theme you'll hear a lot in partition narratives is a kind of wistful utopianism, a rose-tinted nostalgia suggesting that everything was entirely copacetic between India's religious communities before partition, that everybody lived in peace and harmony, that there were no tensions, no drama, no baggage, as if when the clock struck midnight on August 15th, 1947, everyone just suddenly lost their minds. The truth, of course, is more multifaceted.

Harmony in India, writes academic Ahmed Akbar, was, quote, part imagined, part real. The seeds of the conflict had always been there, ticking time bombs with very long fuses, snaking back through the centuries. And like old bombs, some are inert, harmless, duds.

but others are primed to explode at the slightest touch. And to even begin to understand why seemingly peaceful villages and communities could suddenly rupture into open genocide, we need to turn our eyes back to the distant past, before partition, before the Raj, even before the East India Company landed on the subcontinent's shores. In 1947, India's population was composed of three main religious communities –

Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Hindus were the majority by a huge margin. They constituted about three quarters of the population. Muslims were the largest minority, constituting slightly less than a quarter of the population, and the Sikhs were a very distant third, only about 2% of the population.

And if you were to walk up to an average Hindu or Muslim or Sikh on the streets of Delhi or Lahore in 1947 and ask for a history lesson about India, you would have gotten three wildly different responses. Three very different and somewhat contradictory interpretations of the same set of facts.

like a Rashomon-style set of flashbacks, similar but with some crucial deviation or differentiating detail. The Sikhs are a very important group in our story, but for now, just for the sake of simplicity, we're going to focus on the historical relationship between the two largest religious groups in India, Hindus and Muslims. For Hindus, the story of India was one of paradise lost.

of a glorious heyday, a resplendent heritage stretching back into antiquity until it was corrupted and defiled by invading armies and bloodthirsty usurpers. First, the Muslims.

Then, the British, twice colonized and forever shamed. For Muslims, the story of India was of paradise found, a new home, a new land, and the proud empire that flourished within it. They were a regional superpower, the epicenter of the civilized world, until they lost it all to infighting, sabotage, and the eventual predations of European colonizers. Superiority squandered, legacies lost.

Both communities had and continue to have their own entrenched narratives, and both were desperate to recapture old glories. Both groups pined for the, quote, good old days. They just disagreed on what those good old days were. As M.J. Akbar writes, quote, both Hindus and Muslims were tempted by an imagined past.

End quote. But when, oh when, did this complicated relationship begin? Well, in the 8th century, almost a thousand years before English sales appeared on the horizon, a different kind of invasion swept into India. At the time, the subcontinent was a land of many gods, with many names and many faces. But these incoming outsiders only worshipped one god. And this god, Hathor.

had no face. In fact, it was forbidden to even depict him in art or sculpture. He was all-powerful, all-knowing, and when he revealed himself to a prophet in a cave far away in the Arabian desert, a new religion was born. Islam sprung to life in the 7th century AD, and within 100 years it covered vast swaths of the earth.

From the meadows of Spain to the mountains of Afghanistan, followers of the Prophet Muhammad pressed their foreheads to the earth in supplication to Allah. One of the most remarkable things about Islam in those early days was its ability to expand at a very rapid pace, to catch like wildfire in the hearts and minds of common people. And not long after the Prophet died, his teachings found their way to a new land.

a place the Persians called Hindu or India. The long-time religious residents of India, the Hindus, did not take kindly to these outsiders. The two belief systems could not have been more diametrically opposed.

Hindus saw the face of God in all things. The divine spark came in many forms and many shades. But these Muslims believed in only one deity. He was remote, unknowable, and suffered no rivals. Then there was the matter of society. Hindus lived within a system of rigid social hierarchy, the famous caste system, which, as Ahmed Akbar puts it, "...determined their status, wealth, and marriage simply by accident of birth."

Islam, on the other hand, emphasized the equality of all things and all people in the eyes of God. Textually, it was egalitarian. No one was inherently better or worse than the other, but they all owed surrender to a single deity.

Even food was a hot-button issue. The Hindus, of course, venerated the cow as a sacred, life-giving avatar of Mother India. To kill a cow, this symbol of all that was good and plentiful in life, was unforgivable. The Muslims, on the other hand, saw no issue at all with killing cows and eating their meat, provided it was properly prepared. Needless to say, the two faiths started off on the wrong foot.

First contact between the two belief systems unfolded predictably and violently. Muslim raids and invasions nipped and pricked at the peripheries of the subcontinent for a very long time, but it was in the 16th century that Islam truly established its forever foothold in India.

Under a series of refined yet ruthless leaders, the Islamic Mughal Empire rose to prominence, beginning in northern India and eventually stretching its fingers southward. The Mughals never did achieve complete control over India, but the power dynamic had undeniably flipped.

By the 16th century, Muslims, not Hindus, were running the show in India. The Prophet Muhammad had worn little more than patchy robes but these Mughal princes were dripping with rubies and sapphires. The precious stones, after all, came from Allah's earth. Why not clothe oneself in spectacular proof of the Creator? Hindus, meanwhile, felt that they were being robbed blind.

both of their material wealth and their cultural autonomy. The attitude, even to this day, can be extremely bitter. As one man confided to a historian, quote,

polluted our sacred places." From the Hindu viewpoint, the Muslim invasions were incredibly disruptive and borderline apocalyptic. Ahmed Akbar paints the perspective, "Muslims arriving from the outside, threatening their temples, sacred animals, their very identity, reordering the world around their notion of a monotheistic god, a defined truth, clear-cut rituals, thereby challenging the very hierarchy that sustained the caste system.

End quote. But there were many Hindus who did not bristle at the monotheism these invaders brought with them. To the lower castes, Islam offered an enticing alternative. As Barney Whitespunner writes, quote,

End quote.

By the time of partition, it was said that at least 75% of India's Muslims could trace their roots back to converted Hindus. But even though the two belief systems graded on a fundamental level, from the very beginning, an intimacy and interdependency developed between the two faiths. After all, when people work, struggle, laugh, and exist alongside each other, even as invader and the invaded,

They mingle, they mix, they marry, they become part of each other. The lines between them start to blur. They start to become one people, not two. As Ahmed Akbar writes, quote,

On the surface, no two more dissimilar systems could have evolved side by side: Islam believing in one God; Hinduism in many forms of the divine; Islam denouncing social hierarchy; Hinduism steeped in caste; Islam sharply and simply defined in its beliefs and attitudes;

End quote.

Yes, the destinies of Hindus and Muslims in India were now irrevocably intertwined, like two threads wrapping tighter and tighter around each other over the centuries. Islam and Hinduism were part of the same fabric, the same culture, the same language. Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal expounds, "...the blood of both have changed, the color of both have become similar, we mixed with each other so much that we produced a new language, Urdu, which was neither our language nor theirs."

End quote. And over time, culture clash softened into coexistence.

As a 20th century Muslim Indian politician named Abul Kalam Asad put it, "It was India's historic destiny that its soil should become the destination of many different caravans of race, cultures, and religion. This vast and hospitable land welcomed them all and took them into her bosom." The last of these caravans was that of the followers of Islam, who came in the footsteps of their many predecessors and settled down here. This was the meeting point of two different currents of culture.

and for a time they flowed along their separate courses, but nature's immutable law brought them together into a confluence. This fusion was a notable historic event.

Since then, destiny, in her own secret ways, began to fashion a new India to take place of the old. We had brought our treasures with us to this land, which was rich with its own great cultural heritage. We handed our wealth to her, and she unlocked for us the door of her own riches. We presented her with something she needed urgently, the most precious gift in Islam's treasury, its message of democracy, human equality, and brotherhood.

End quote. An Indian Muslim philosopher named Syed Ahmed Khan put it slightly more poetically. Quote, End quote.

But the two eyes of India were in for quite a shock when they peered towards the horizon and saw English ships heading towards their shore in the early 17th century. Now, we've already covered at length England's slow-motion subjugation of India, but it's important to understand how it impacted the dynamic between India's religious communities. When the first Englishmen landed on the subcontinent, Muslims were the ruling elite, small in number but extremely powerful. The East India Company changed all of that.

The English slowly dismantled the Mughal hold over India, transforming them from proud rulers to just another religious minority in the land of 100 million Hindus. As Ahmed Akbar writes, The history of India was no longer the history of Muslim princes, poets, saints, and warriors. Muslims now became invisible, marginal characters. For Kipling, the Muslim is a horse trader. For Tagore, a

a money lender. The final brutal termination of the Mughals by the British left the Muslims bitter and confused. The dynasty which had emerged from Central Asia and ruled India for over three centuries carrying with pride the name of the invincible warrior Timur, bursting with energy and vitality, now disintegrated. Overnight, the Muslim ruling elite was neither ruling nor elite.

End quote. And it only got worse from there. As their power receded, Muslims in India became increasingly anxious about their position in society. By 1857, the last vestiges of Mughal rule were stamped out. Extinction, Akbar writes, after centuries of glorious rule.

To drive the point home with a bit of political theater, the British instructed ordinary soldiers to sit on the Mughal throne so that everybody would know, quote, that the lowest in British hierarchy was equal to the highest in India.

End quote. And Akbar goes on, quote, End quote. For Muslims, India seemed to be a land where the future had died, writes historian Abraham Ehrlich. But less than a hundred years later, in the early 20th century, Islam would discover a new future. And its name was Pakistan.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

It's 1938, nine years before partition. We're at Aligarh Muslim University in northern India, and a huge crowd of students is forming on campus. One person remembered it feeling like, quote, a swarm. Thousands of eyes are glued to an empty podium on an empty stage, waiting to hear a highly anticipated speech from a highly respected man. Conversation is hushed and pregnant with excitement.

The mood is electric with anticipation and soon, any minute now, the man of the hour will step out onto the stage. The speaker the students are waiting to hear is a celebrity, a political powerhouse. His name was known from the halls of parliament to the alcoves of Calcutta, and his message had given hope and pride to millions of Indians restoring their dignity, reviving their history, and stiffening their resolve. For many, he was the face of the Indian independence movement.

And his name was not Mohandas Gandhi. And it was not Jawaharlal Nehru. To people in this crowd, those men were clowns, play actors, pernicious instruments that were

No, no, the man they were waiting to hear speak was named Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and he was the most powerful Muslim leader in India. The students at the university had been waiting hours to see him, to catch a glimpse, just staring at an empty stage, breathless with anticipation. And then, finally, they see him. As one student remembered, quote,

Suddenly, there was a lot of commotion and a burst of slogans from thousands of throats, and the whole crowd was on its feet. Amongst this uproar and shouts of Allahu Akbar, a tall and elegant figure appeared from behind the dais and ascended the improvised steps from the rear of the raised platform. He was none other than Mr. Jinnah, the great leader, my leader, our leader, everybody's leader. The public gave him a standing ovation, shouting slogans of welcome.

And I was overwhelmed, and I made myself hoarse shouting victory slogans. End quote. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to both the literal and figurative stage the final addition to our main cast, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. That is J-I-N-N-A-H Jinnah. We've met the Mountbatten's, we've met Gandhi, we've met Nehru, and now I want you to commit this final name to memory. Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

When most Westerners hear the name Muhammad Ali, they think of the boxer. Hulking, healthy, muscled, and lightning fast. A perfect athletic specimen. But the Muhammad Ali in our story, Mr. Jinnah, is on the exact opposite end of the physical spectrum. Picture in your mind's eye a very tall, very old, very thin man. At 6'1", Jinnah towered over most people, yet he was barely 140 pounds.

emaciated and skeletal, quote, lean as a rapier, according to M.J. Akbar. His face was a collection of sharp angles with cheekbones that, quote, jutted out like the edges of a diamond, according to Hajari Naseed. And if you need a quick image in your mind, one journalist compared him to the actor Christopher Lee. And Jenna's physical appearance is always, always mentioned in the history books about partition, but I think Alex von Tunzelman has my favorite description of the man, quote,

End quote. End quote.

In modern India and Pakistan, the name Jinnah is a loaded gun. He is an incredibly controversial and somewhat enigmatic figure. In India today, he is a devil, an antagonist for the ages, the quote, man who broke up India, as one publication put it. In Pakistan, he is the founding father, the savior, quote, Washington, Lenin, and Gandhi all rolled into one, according to one historian.

But neither interpretation is entirely accurate, as the Pakistani lawyer Yasir Latif Hamdani writes, "...in India he is universally demonized for having destroyed the unity and for having laid the foundation of a perpetual communal conflict."

In Pakistan, at least according to the official version, Jinnah is revered as the great savior of Islam who created Pakistan and thus saved the Muslims from perpetual slavery to a Hindu majority. Jinnah's own life and long political career do not sit well with either view. End quote. Muhammad Ali Jinnah is important to our story because he, more than any one man, united India's Muslims and championed the creation of a new nation.

Pakistan. When India was eventually partitioned in 47, Jinnah was named the leader of that new nation. To Indian Muslims, Jinnah was nothing short of a messiah, a leader of leaders, a long-awaited deliverance from their humiliation under British rule and irrelevance under Hindu ubiquity. To them, he was a superstar, like Elvis, Michael Jackson, and all four Beatles combined.

A woman named Almas Chinoy remembered shaking Jinnah's hand in Karachi when she was a little girl and then refusing to wash the hand for almost a week. A man named Zinat Rashid recalled, quote, He was like God. Although we Muslims can't say God, he was on a pedestal. He was our salvation.

And yet, on paper, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the most unlikely representative Indian Muslims could have ever had. As he looked out on the adoring crowd that day at Aligarh University and croaked out his speech in a smoker's rasp, the irony of it all must have been apparent to him, at least subconsciously, because Jinnah was a uniquely secular savior. As Yasser Latif Hamdani observes, quote, Other than Jinnah's name, there was hardly anything Muslim about him.

End quote. Jinnah was raised in a Muslim household, but for most of his adult life, he looked at Islam and felt… nothing. He didn't resent his religious heritage, he didn't actively reject it, he just didn't care. Like our old friend Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah was a secularist, with little time for prayers or piety. For Jinnah, the real world was not buried in old books, in the words of dead prophets and forgotten caliphs. The real world was here and now.

flesh and blood, brick and mortar, actions and deeds. Technically, he identified as a Muslim, but in everyday life he was just a man. No ancient text or sanctimonious mullah was going to stop him from enjoying a ham sandwich or a nice glass of wine. He didn't fast during Ramadan, he didn't get up early for prayers, and he couldn't quote the Quran to save his life. As a young man, Jinnah only had one god, and that god was his profession.

Thirty years before he stepped out onto the stage, cheered by adoring crowds of Muslim nationalists and hailed as the great leader, the Qaidi Assam, Jinnah was one of the hottest lawyers in Bombay, whining and dining his way through life at the height of the British Raj. While Mohandas Gandhi was getting beaten up by police in South Africa, Jinnah was living a high-on-the-hog existence filled with fast cars, strong wine, and a lot of money.

and expensive clothes. Gandhi wore homespun cloth, but Jinnah wore the finest threads. A quick peek into his wardrobe would have revealed an astonishing collection of over 200

hundred hand-tailored suits, which he sometimes changed two to three times a day. The New York Times called him, quote, undoubtedly one of the best-dressed men in the British Empire, end quote. Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah loved being a lawyer. He was good at it, too, and he knew it. When clients complained about his exorbitant fees, Jinnah would respond, quote, to drive a Rolls-Royce, you need to pay for a Rolls-Royce, end

By almost every metric, Jinnah was more of an Englishman than an Indian. He read Shakespeare at the end of the day to relax. He preferred bland British food to spicy curries. He, quote, spoke and thought in English rather than his native Urdu, according to one historian. As Ahmed Akbar explains, quote, his mimicry of the upper-class Englishman in India was so accurate it made the English uncomfortable. He was that most dangerous of natives.

the credible mimic. The British could only respond in two ways. They could hate him or admire him, but they could not ignore him." But although Jinnah was a great lover of British culture, a true Anglophile if ever there was one, he did not love the British Raj or its stranglehold over India. Far, far from it, in fact. On the surface, Jinnah appeared frivolous, indulgent, arrogant, but he was a deeply committed advocate for Indian independence.

Like Nehru and Gandhi, Jinnah wanted the British gone. They just disagreed on how to do it. When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in 1915, Jinnah was 39 years old. He paid the bills for his suits, cars, and wine with his legal practice, but he devoted a huge portion of his time working in political activism, writing, speaking, and pleading the case for a free and united India.

Jinnah looked at the British Raj and saw the exact same thing Gandhi and Nehru did. A parasite, a cage, a handbrake on the true potential of India. But whereas Gandhi and his acolytes insisted on a mass mobilization of the common people, Jinnah saw a dangerous flirtation with what he called, quote, mob hysteria. How?

How, he wondered, could Gandhi actually expect his followers to live up to his saintly example everywhere, every protest, every time? How could he expect normal people to just sit there and not react when policemen broke their bones, their friends' bones, their wives' bones? Humans, after all, are emotional creatures, violent by nature, and when they are in pain, they will lash out. They get angry, they hurt, they kill. Gandhi's non-violent movement, his so-called truth force,

was naive, wishful thinking. It was an open door to chaos and anarchy. All Gandhi and Nehru seemed capable of accomplishing was a cyclical pattern of jail time. As Jinnah sniffed, quote, I do not believe in starting a movement for the sake of jail-going. End quote. No, only through patient reasoning and surgical legal analysis could Indians ever hope to unlatch the British from the subcontinent.

You cannot just pull a tick straight out of a cow's skin. You have to slowly and precisely remove it. Convincing the British Raj to leave India was not the job of toothless farmers and illiterate fishermen. As Jenna put it, quote, politics is a gentleman's game, end quote.

His worst fears were confirmed in 1919, when British troops under the command of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer murdered 379 people in the Amritsar Massacre, which we discussed back in Part 1. When news of the massacre reached him, Jinnah was furious, not only at the British, but at Gandhi, who had been calling for mass protests against British laws.

See, Jinnah said, see, this is what happens. This is the only reward we will get from agitating in this way. As Yasser Latif Hamdani writes, quote, For Jinnah, Amritsar was a confirmation of what he had feared all along, that any resort to protest marches could turn violent.

violent, giving the government an excuse to resort to brute force and also to stop any constitutional progress by citing disorder. Gandhi's mass movement was vexing enough, but Jinnah also objected to the Mahatma's insistence on injecting religious imagery into everything. Jawaharlal Nehru, also an avowed secularist, was able to see past Gandhi's fixation on religion. But Jinnah was

was not. As he later said, quote, I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. End quote. Religion, mob hysteria, mass movements, Jinnah saw a toxic brew curdling in the politics of India. The

The stirring of a hornet's nest. Could no one else recognize the peril of this path? Foreign admirers swooned over Gandhi's peaceful philosophy, but it was just a candy coating, a false veneer. The Mahatma, Jinnah believed, was playing with fire. Underneath all the sunshine and rainbows were some very uncomfortable questions.

When and if the British finally left, who would be in charge? Who would govern? Already, fringe elements were looking at the looming vacuum and licking their chops. On the edges of Indian politics, extremist groups were looking to remake India in their own image.

Hard-core Hindu supremacists and Islamic militias were envisioning a future where the two communities would finally settle old scores, once and for all. Hindus and Muslims had co-existed under the Raj for almost a century, but the British had been very, very careful to keep the communities from getting too cozy with

As the first Viceroy of India, a Lord Canning, wrote, "...as we must rule 150 million people by a handful of Englishmen, let us do it in a manner best calculated to leave them divided, and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power, and with the least possible suspicion..."

of our motives. We have maintained our power in India by playing off one party against the other, and we must continue to do so. Do all you can, therefore, to prevent all having a "common feeling."

The friction between Hindus and Muslims was already very real. All the British had to do was keep picking at that scab, keep that fissure from healing. As M.J. Akbar writes, The British did not invent fantasy. Muslims and Hindus were quite capable of deluding themselves, but

but history became a frontline weapon in the armory of colonial power. The politics of Hindu, Muslim, and British relations rubbed salt into old wounds. The British did not need to invent the past, merely to embellish it. End quote.

The Raj did not want the religious communities of India to feel kinship with each other, lest the nightmarish uprising of 1857 be repeated. Hindus and Muslims being hand in glove was a British nightmare come to life. So partly out of fear, but mostly out of ignorance, they put each community aside.

in a box. They compartmentalized and divided the vast, permeable tapestry of Indian people into neat little political identities. And one of the most decisive measures came in 1909, when the Raj codified separate electorates for Muslims and Hindus.

As journalist Lewis Fisher explains, quote, The British had introduced separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims. In consequence, and as long as the British Raj remained in India, a Muslim could only vote for a Muslim candidate, and a Hindu only for a Hindu. The mischief produced by this institution was incalculable because it made religious differences the deciding factor in every political contest. It

It was as though Catholics in England, the United States, and France could only vote for Catholic candidates to Parliament and other offices, and Protestants for only Protestant candidates, and Jews for only Jews. The central problem for Gandhi and Nehru was to bridge the gulf between Hindus and Muslims and thereby make India a nation. But separate electorates, by closing the door to political intermingling, destroyed the bridge and widened the gulf.

End quote. The dismemberment of India's people into separate electorates virtually guaranteed that Hindus and Muslims would never feel like they were on the same team. India was such a diverse and complex place, it was never as simple as just Muslim versus Hindu. But the British helped make it simple. As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote,

A Sunni Muslim from the Punjab might have more in common with a Sikh than he did with a Shia Muslim from Bengal. A Shia might regard a Sufi Muslim as a heretic. A Sufi might get on better with a Brahmin Hindu than with a Wahhabi Muslim. A Brahmin might feel more at ease with the European than he would with another Hindu who was an outcast.

When the British started to define communities based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. At the same time, Indian politicians began to focus on religion as a central part of their policies, defining themselves by what they were, and even more, by what they were not.

Muslims and Hindus began to see their own political objectives as divergent and irreconcilable. History became a whetstone that sharpened the old animosities and polarized communities. As Akbar writes, While the Muslims looked to the past, the British and the Hindus looked to the future. Muslims wished to regain lost glory.

The British wished to preserve and consolidate their rule, and the Hindus waited for a day when they would be in command, once again, of their land. Three peoples, three sets of history, three parallel destinies, sometimes overlapping, sometimes clashing, but ultimately separate.

Both Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mohandas Gandhi were quick to recognize the danger there, and they both urged religious unity at every turn. Only together, they said, could Indians take charge of their own destiny and truly earn the right to rule themselves. As Jinnah implored, quote,

Gandhi did his best to, taking aim at a particular point of contention, cows.

Cows, of course, were sacred for Hindus but food for Muslims, and violence often erupted over this point. But Gandhi put a spotlight on the hypocritical outrage of it all. Quote, Though I regard cow protection as a central fact of Hinduism, I have never been able to understand the antipathy towards the Muslims on that score. We say nothing about the slaughter that daily takes place on behalf of Englishmen, but our anger becomes red-hot when a Muslim slaughters a cow.

All the riots that have taken place in the name of the cow have been an insane waste of effort.

The cows find their necks under the butcher's knife because the Hindus sell them. I am convinced that the masses do not want to fight, if the leaders do not. And I agree with Mr. Jinnah that Hindu-Muslim unity means swaraj, self-rule." Privately, though, Gandhi was deeply concerned that the wedge being driven between the two communities, created by history and exacerbated by the British, was becoming borderline insurmountable. Quote,

I feel the wave of violence coming. And as for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, he would sit in his study, wreathed in minarets of smoke, thinking, thinking, thinking. And the more he thought, the more seeds of doubt began to worm their way into his core convictions. For years, he had believed that Hindu-Muslim unity was the only path to a free India. But maybe it wasn't.

Maybe there was another road to take. And so Jinnah sipped his wine and surrendered himself to this seductive line of thinking. If Hindus and Muslims could not reconcile their differences before the British left, it was only a matter of time before Jinnah and Muslims like him were sidelined, marginalized, and

and shouted down. Gandhi claimed to speak for all religions, but at the end of the day, he was a Hindu, and in a Hindu-dominated post-colonial India, Hindu interests would come first. Muslims would be second-class citizens, gnawing at table scraps, rather than the proud inheritors of their Mughal legacy. But perhaps more selfishly, Jinnah understood that as Muslim influence waned,

so too would his political career. When the British eventually departed, it would be Gandhi's India, Nehru's India, and there would be no place for a politician like Muhammad Ali Jinnah. He had never defined himself by his religious identity, but in an India dominated by Hindu majority rule, it would define him whether he liked it or not. And so, Jinnah

hatched a strategy. The Mahatma and his errand boy Nehru had ridden a wave of populism to prominence. They had stood on the shoulders of the masses, bathed in their adulation, and promised them the world. Well, Jena thought, two can play at that game.

In November of 1937, ten years before partition, a scathing editorial was published in the Indian publication Modern Review. It wasn't a long piece, just over 1,500 words, but the rhetoric within it was heated and emotional. It used words like fascist, dictator, and Caesar. In political circles all across India, the article turned heads and ignited debate. The

The piece was titled The Rashtrapati, which means the head of state in Sanskrit. And the subject of its disapproval was one of the most powerful politicians in India, none other than our old friend...

Javah-Hurlal Nehru. By 1937, young Nehru had become middle-aged Nehru. At 48 years old, he was no longer the spry radical who we met back in Episode 1, that angry young man who had traced his fingers over the bullet holes in the wall at Amritsar.

It had been almost 20 years since the spark of activism had caught fire in his conscience and in those two decades, between stints in jail of course, Nehru had flown on rocket-powered wings to the highest echelons of Indian politics. The haters whispered that he'd done little more than ride Gandhi's coattails, but once he seized the reins of power within India's Congress Party, Nehru proved himself a shrewd politician and a brilliant orator, a hard bargainer with a soft touch.

In 1937, he was easily one of the most powerful figures in India. Mohandas Gandhi had no real interest in power or public office, so Jawaharlal Nehru became the poster boy of Indian independence. But in November of that year, Nehru's allies and aides were blindsided by an article written anonymously that took aim at the beloved leader of India's largest political party, the Congress Party.

It specifically and emphatically targeted Nehru, expressing a concern that a politician as popular as Jawaharlal Nehru in such an unstable and revolutionary time as the twilight of the British Raj might fall prey to autocratic tendencies.

Quote, Men like Jawaharlal, with all their capacity for great and good work, are unsafe in democracy. He calls himself a democrat and a socialist and no doubt he does so in all earnestness. But every psychologist knows that the mind is ultimately a slave to the heart and logic can always be made to fit in with the desires and irrepressible urges of a person. A little twist and

and Jawaharlal might turn a dictator, sweeping aside the paraphernalia of a slow-moving democracy. He might still use the language and slogans of democracy and socialism, but we all know how fascism has fattened on this language and then cast it away as useless lumber. He has all the makings of a dictator in him, vast popularity, a strong will directed to a well-defined purpose –

energy, pride, organizational capacity, ability, hardness, and, with all his love of the crowd, an intolerance of others and a certain contempt for the weak and the inefficient. His flashes of temper are well known, and even when they are controlled, the

the curling of the lips betrays him. His overmastering desire to get things done, to sweep away what he dislikes and build anew, will hardly brook for long the slow processes of democracy. He may keep the husk, but he will see to it that it bends to his will. In normal times, he would be just an efficient and successful executive. But in this revolutionary epoch,

Caesarism is always at the door, and is it not possible that Jawaharlal might fancy himself as a Caesar? In spite of all his brave talk, Jawaharlal is obviously tired and stale and he will progressively deteriorate if he continues as president.

He cannot rest, for he who rides a tiger cannot dismount. But we can at least prevent him from going astray and from mental deterioration under too heavy burdens and responsibilities. We have the right to expect good work from him in the future. Let us not spoil that and spoil him by too much adulation and praise. His conceit is already formidable. It must be checked. We want no Caesars.

End quote. Naturally, speculation swirled about who could have written this withering piece. Was it some British civil servant masquerading as a concerned Indian? Or maybe it was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who had never approved of Nehru, his mentor Gandhi, or their populist platform. Hell, maybe it was a jilted lover. Nehru was known to have more than a few of those. But

But only a handful of people in the world knew the actual identity of the mystery writer. And as it turned out, the author of the piece was none other than Jawaharlal Nehru himself.

Nehru had written the piece in secret, under a pseudonym, as a very public exercise in self-reflection. It didn't help his political career, if anything it provided ammo for his critics, but at that time in his life, Nehru felt the need to throw a little cold water on his own popularity. This was, after all, the late 1930s.

the heyday of strongmen and cults of personality, people like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini. Jawaharlal Nehru was as democratic and progressive as they came, but he recognized that power brought with it extreme temptation. We want no Caesars, he said, and it was as much a reminder to himself as to his own.

as to his supporters. And it's hard to imagine any modern politician writing so eloquently at their own expense. As von Tunzelman comments, quote, in Nehru's writing, there is no piece more telling of his personality than the Rashtrapati. Introspection, honesty, wit, and mischief. Few other politicians in history could have written such a lucid essay in self-deconstruction. End quote. But

But as insightful as he could be when it came to his own shortcomings, Nehru had a massive blind spot, one that would stop him from seeing the cancerous divisions growing in India's religious communities until it was too late.

As we discussed in Part 1, Jawaharlal Nehru was not religious whatsoever. He grudgingly acknowledged faith as an important thread in India's social fabric, but God had no real place in his life. Nor did it, he insisted, have any place in political life.

Nehru envisioned post-colonial India as a secular, pluralistic democracy. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, and agnostics all living together as Indians.

As Hajari Naseed writes, quote, End quote.

And Nehru would have heartily agreed with the words of the contemporary thinker Abul Kalam Azad, quote, End quote.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as the Indian independence movement gathered steam and the British Raj began to wobble, Nehru repeatedly ignored the alarm bells that were ringing in India's villages and meeting halls. The growing anger fueled by separate electorates, the feeling of historical resentment, the mutual discrimination between communities. Nehru believed, needed to believe, that they were above all of that.

As Hajari Naseed writes, "...Neru remained convinced that the supposed Hindu-Muslim divide was nothing but a nuisance, that both communities would soon realize they were being exploited equally by the British and Indian upper classes." "...Neru rolled his eyes at talk of a return to a Hindu golden age or the reawakening of a Mughal empire."

Am I to insult my intelligence by talking baby talk of an age gone by? End quote. India's future was right there, right in front of them. All they had to do was keep the pressure on the British, keep winning concessions, little by little, incremental change. And then the dam would break. They were so close.

The Raj was the enemy, wasting time and bickering over which god you worshipped was counterproductive at best and destructive at worst. The two eyes of India had to keep looking forward. But it's important to acknowledge that, well, of course Nehru felt that way. Religion meant nothing to him, but he had failed to grasp something crucial.

Religion was not just religion anymore. It was a political identity. Black or white, red or blue, shirts or skins. Nehru mistakenly thought that religion didn't matter. But in reality, it was the only thing that mattered. And that lack of awareness came back to haunt him in the form of a most unlikely political rival, a well-dressed, highly intelligent, six-foot cobra named Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

On paper, Jinnah and Nehru were so, so alike, both secular in disposition, cosmopolitan in style, and absolutely committed to the idea of Hindu-Muslim unity, to a free, pluralistic India. At least, that's the man who Jinnah was in the early 1900s.

But along the way, something had changed. He had experienced a kind of transformation, a reawakening, a complete ideological reversal that would have been shocking if it hadn't happened so gradually. Jinnah had never been buddy-buddy with Gandhi and Nehru, but back in the 1910s, they at least agreed on the fundamentals. The British Raj had to go, and it would leave behind a free, united India.

keyword, united. But over the years, Jinnah had grown increasingly alienated from the mainstream of Indian politics. At the time, there were two main political parties in India. The Congress Party, led by Nehru and Gandhi, which claimed to represent all Indians, and the other party was something called the Muslim League, which obviously claimed to represent India's Muslims.

Well, Muhammad Ali Jinnah became a mover and a shaker in the Muslim League, and by the late 1930s he was calling the shots. It was, of course, ironic that a man who couldn't quote the Quran and enjoyed the more than occasional whiskey would claim to speak for all of India's 100 million Muslims. It was a testament to his intelligence, tenacity, and genuine talent that

that he had managed to do so. Jinnah had seized on something that Nehru could not understand. Like it or not, faith was identity in

in India. Jinnah recognized that by uniting all the Muslims under a single banner, they could become a potent political force, a necessary check, a safeguard against what he felt were the Hindu-leaning, anti-Muslim attitudes of the majority Congress party. And those fears were not born out of thin air. On the fringes of the Congress party, Hindu supremacy was on the rise, stoking demographic fears of a "great replacement."

One publication called Bengali published an article called, quote, Hindus, a dying race, which warned that, quote, within a very precise 420 years, Hindus will be driven to insignificance because of demographic decline as compared to Muslims and Christians. End

And there were other perceived alarm bells too. Cultural microaggressions that became flashpoints in a festering culture war. Children in some schools were expected to sing Hindu religious songs. The Congress Party flag was often flown at schools and business events. And some politicians had proposed a national ban on cow slaughter in accordance with Hindu custom. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was afraid.

afraid of what might happen to people like him in a Hindu-majority India. He was also angry, angry at Gandhi for stirring up the hornet's nest, ignoring his calls to caution, and shunning his lawyerly approach to independence.

He was also angry at Jawaharlal Nehru for keeping the Muslim League at arm's length, patronizing their appeals and dismissing their demands. And so, in an astonishing reversal, Muhammad Ali Jinnah threw his Unitarian roots aside like a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and he began stoking the very tensions he had once sought to heal. Hindus and Muslims, he rasped, were "different beings."

End quote. And he expounded upon that idea in another interview, quote, End quote.

Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literatures. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilizations, which are based mainly on conflicting ideas,

and conceptions. Their aspects on life and of life are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Muslims derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics. Their heroes are different. Very often the hero of one is the foe of the other. And likewise, their victories and defeats

overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.

In other words, we cannot live together. We are too different. We're incompatible. And no one was more unsettled or confused by Jinnah's heel turn than Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma. It was like Jinnah had turned into a completely different person. As Gandhi wrote in a letter directly to his old colleague, quote, Are you still the same Jinnah?

Jawaharlal Nehru was predictably less reserved than his old mentor when it came to the subject of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The incandescent anger, the temper that had always threatened to get the better of him, leapt out when he spoke on the subject of Jinnah. Quote, "'Blatant, vulgar, offensive, egotistical, vague. What a man!'

And what a misfortune for India and for the Muslims that he should have so much influence. It is opportunism raised to the nth degree, total incomprehension of the events and forces that are shaping the world. End quote. Nehru looked at Jinnah's newfound worldview and saw nothing but rank hypocrisy. This charlatan, whose only Muslim quality seemed to be his name, was trying to cut the Achilles tendon out.

of the Indian independence movement. And to what end? Nehru was not religious, but to use religion as a path to power offended him on his most basic moral level. Quote,

To exploit the name of God and religion in an election contest is an extraordinary thing even for a humble canvasser. For Mr. Jinnah to do so is inexplicable. It means rousing religious and communal passions and political matters. It means working for the dark age of India. Does Mr. Jinnah not realize where this kind of communalism will lead us to? End quote. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was unmoved by Nehru's childish anger calling him, quote,

Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. And so, as the 1930s came to a close and the 1940s arrived, people in India began to wonder, what was Jinnah even trying to accomplish? What was his endgame? And in time, it became perfectly clear. As historian Ayesha Jalal writes, quote,

What Muslims needed above all was to overcome the limitations of being a minority. And one way to resolve that dilemma was to assert that Muslims were not a minority, but a nation, entitled to being treated on par with the Hindus.

End quote. If Hindus and Muslims could not live together, then they needed to live in separate nations entirely. The Hindus could have some patchwork India, but where would the subcontinent's Muslims live? It was, of course, a huge question. After all, India's Muslims made up one third of the world's Muslims.

of the entire world's Muslim population? The answer to this question, oddly enough, came in the form of an obscure and often mocked geopolitical theory cooked up by a few university students. In 1930, the same year Gandhi embarked on his famous salt march, a handful of students at Cambridge University began discussing the idea of a homeland for India's Muslims.

a confederation of provinces in the northwestern corner of the subcontinent that historically had high concentrations of Muslims. They called it Pakistan. Prior to 1930, the word Pakistan had not even existed.

It was an acronym, each letter standing for a key region in the theoretical nation. The P stood for the Punjab, the A stood for Afghanistan, the K stood for Kashmir, S for Sindh, and Baluchistan supplied the Stan. It was either a happy accident or a clever entendre that in Urdu, Pakistan means "land of the pure." And Muhammad Ali Jinnah latched onto this idea like a dog with a bone.

Only through Pakistan, he believed, could India's Muslims find a safe space to thrive once the British left India. As M.J. Akbar writes, quote, End quote.

And so, an idea that had barely existed for 10 years became the key plank in Jinnah and the Muslim League's political platform. It caught like a brush fire in the hearts and minds of Muslims throughout India. As one student organization passionately put it, "We declare that we are a nation, not a minority. A nation of a hundred million. Pakistan is our only demand. History justifies it. Numbers confirm it.

Justice claims it. Destiny demands it. Posterity awaits it. And by God, we will have it. Muslims unite. You have a world to gain. Muslims unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.

It was admittedly a powerful idea, as M.J. Akbar writes, And the promise of Pakistan turbocharged Jinnah's already stratospheric popularity among Muslims. They started calling him Qaid-e-Assam, the great leader.

The Muslims had not felt like this for a long time, writes Ahmed Akbar. And one man named Bashir Mann, who was just a kid at the time, remembered, quote,

In Pakistan, we could. It was a Muslim country, a separate independent country. And that was the idea of the Muslim League. I thought that Pakistan would be created and everyone would be living here peacefully. The others would be living in India peacefully. We never thought how it would end up.

Every mainstream Congress politician, meanwhile, from pacifist Gandhi to fiery Nehru, condemned the Pakistan concept as suicidal. Nehru was particularly incensed. Years, decades, they had worked for a free and independent India, and now Jinnah was trying to break it all up, to, as Nehru saw it, pervert their noble struggle with petty, divisive identity politics. Nehru felt that Pakistan was, quote,

Mad and foolish and fantastic and criminal and a huge barrier to all progress." But for the time being, Nehru could sleep peacefully at night knowing that Jinnah, as powerful as he was, simply didn't have the numbers to will Pakistan into existence out of thin air. The Muslim League was a vocal minority but still just a minority. The great leader, the Qaidi Assam, didn't have the clout to force the issue.

At least, not yet. But all that would change when a second world war exploded onto the global stage. Sensing a chance to win India's independence for good, Nehru and Gandhi would make a grave miscalculation. One that Jinnah would masterfully exploit, simultaneously using the dream of Pakistan as a threat against his rivals and a promise to his supporters. But as they say, be careful what you wish for.

Mr. Jinnah would end up getting far, far more than he ever bargained for. Pakistan and partition were closer than anyone could have imagined. It's 1946, one year before partition. We're on a crowded street in the East Indian city of Calcutta. It's a bright summer day, and like most summer days in India, it is brutally hot.

As one British man recalled, quote,

And night brings no relief from the obsessive heat." But as hot as it was, no amount of blistering weather was going to stop a young woman named Pamela Dowley Wise from going on a bike ride. Pamela was 19 years old, a young English girl from a wealthy English family. But she wasn't a tourist or a civil servant. Pamela had been born here in Calcutta.

Her father had been born here. The Dowley-Wise family had deep roots in the subcontinent, stretching back into the earliest days of the British Raj. Growing up, Pamela lived the charmed life of an aristocrat. She grew up riding horses, playing tennis, and spending summers in jungle villas.

As a child, she remembered seeing leopard footprints in the flower beds below her bedroom window. And like most English girls in India, Pamela had very little contact with any actual Indians, at least not the kind who didn't make her bed or prepare her meals. As she recalled, quote, "...when you spoke to them, you did not carry on conversations with them at all. You just asked them to bring you something or take something."

But as she got older, Pamela ventured out into the city of Calcutta more and more. She was an independent teenager and she enjoyed cycling down the roads, dodging traffic and pedestrians. And as a young white woman cocooned in the prestige and power of the Raj, she felt completely at ease. As she remembered, quote,

But one afternoon, on a hot summer day in 1946, Pamela's bike ride was rudely interrupted. She was pedaling blissfully along when she was suddenly shoved off her bike into the middle of the street. She went down hard, sustaining several cuts and bruises, and as she fell she heard a single phrase, quote, QUIT INDIA.

To her surprise, an Indian man had pushed her down, quote, out of the blue. It was a sobering moment for a privileged young aristocrat and a clear indication that the British Raj was coming to an end. And it wasn't the first time Pamela had heard those words the man had said to her, quit India. Ironically, the phrase had been coined by someone who would have completely disapproved of the shove that accompanied it. The

The Quit India movement was a last-ditch attempt by Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the majority Congress party to shake the British Empire out of their stubborn ownership over India. In the darkest years of World War II, when Britain was fighting for its life against the Nazis, the empire's most important colonial asset was less of a jewel in its crown and more of a rock in its shoe. As von Tunzelman writes, quote,

Quit India. The slogan was not only catchy, but accurate. The British administration was to be harried, disobeyed, and besieged until it simply upped and left.

War or no war, economy or no economy, responsibility or no responsibility. Gandhi's rationale for launching the Quit India movement at such a seemingly inopportune moment was simple and straightforward. How could Great Britain claim to be fighting for freedom and democracy in Europe and yet at the same time continue to subjugate 400 million people in India?

Winston Churchill, helming the British government at the time, saw Gandhi's movement as little more than open treason. As he sneered, quote, End quote.

Gandhi, always the moral absolutist, didn't help his case when he urged his British brethren to adopt non-violent methods against the Axis powers and allow Hitler and Mussolini to, quote, take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all of these, but neither your souls nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman, and child to be slaughtered.

but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them." Even then, Gandhi's shtick was beginning to feel outdated. Jawaharlal Nehru, despite his resentment towards the British Raj, wholeheartedly approved of their war, believing the Axis powers had to be stopped by any means necessary, violence included. "'Hitler and Japan must go to hell. I shall fight them to the end, and this is my policy.'"

Yes, once again, mentor and student found themselves at odds. Gandhi, Nehru believed, was letting high-minded moral abstractions cloud his sense of reality.

As Nehru snapped at his mentor, quote, "...you can't stop Japan by non-violent non-cooperation. The Japanese armies will make India a battleground and go to Iraq, Persia, and throttle China and make the Russian situation more difficult. The British will refuse our demand to quit for military reasons. Apart from others, they cannot allow India to be used by Japan against them. They will treat India as an enemy country and reduce it to dust and ashes."

But eventually Nehru came around, and the Quit India movement, a massive call for Satyagraha resistance, went forward. On August 7th, 1942, the Congress Party drafted a resolution formally demanding that the British leave India immediately. Anything was better than one more second of colonial tyranny. As Gandhi put it, quote, "...leave India to God, and if that is too much, then leave her to anarchy."

The British response was swift and harsh. 36 hours later, they were all arrested and thrown into prison. Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, hundreds of leaders of the Congress Party were locked up with little more than a show trial. To some, it seemed like a brave act of political defiance. But hindsight has clarified the Quit India movement as a regrettable, self-inflicted wound on the dream of a united India.

As Alex von Tunzelman writes, quote, Quit India damaged the chances of a united India at least as much as any single act of the British administration ever had. End quote. The only thing Gandhi and Nehru managed to accomplish with their poorly timed campaign was to sideline themselves, to take themselves off the playing field. And in their absence, without guidance, without leadership, protests quickly turned violent. The

The British Raj cracked down with its trademark brutality, as Hajari Naseed writes, quote, Many Britons, even liberal ones, believed that they were facing a well-planned, traitorous attempt by the Congress to overthrow the Raj. When authorities responded with brutal force, using tactics that one British governor later admitted, quote, dragged out in the cold light of day, nobody could defend, end

Many simply looked away. British troops opened fire on demonstrators repeatedly. In the Midnapore district of Bengal, police were accused of gang-raping 73 women to terrorize the rebels. Prisoners were forced to lie naked on blocks of ice until they passed out. The viceroy authorized the strafing of villagers from the air. Churchill saw no reason to treat the Congress as anything but war criminals.

The absence of Gandhi, Nehru, and the rest of the party leadership left a vacuum, an opportunity, one that would be skillfully exploited by our old friend, the Qaidi Assam, the leader of the Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. While Gandhi and Nehru sat huddled in cramped cells or house arrest, eating stale bread and scribbling down their memoirs to pass the time, Jinnah's influence was on the rise.

Instead of agitating and angering the British in their darkest hour, Jinnah urged cooperation and loyalty during World War II. The British naturally appreciated this and they left the Muslim League to its own devices. And that breathing room became a gust of wind in Jinnah's sails.

The Qa'idi Assam suddenly found himself on a chessboard where all his opponent's pieces were frozen still. The Muslim League grew from 100,000 members in 1941 to 2 million by 1944. In Muslim communities all over India, flags emblazoned with the green color of Islam were hanging in the street.

and cries of Pakistan Zindabad, long live Pakistan, were being taken up from Punjab to Bengal. Jinnah's power was absolute, his influence unchallenged, his supporters innumerable. As one writer put it, quote, his hundred million Muslims will march to the left, to the right, to the front, to the rear, at his bidding, and at nobody else's. End quote.

By the time Gandhi, Nehru, and the rest of the Congress Party were released from prison at the end of World War II, Jinnah had transformed himself from a thorn in their side to a dagger in their guts. It seemed more and more likely that when and if the British finally left, the subcontinent would be split, if only to keep the peace. Pakistan, barely more than a fanciful acronym a decade earlier, had become a wedge issue between Hindus and Muslims.

As Yasmin Khan writes, quote, Neutrality or political indifference was fast becoming an unrealistic and untenable option in the face of this activity, and the killings hardened the nationalist lines as other older and overlapping ideas about identity were stripped back to more simplistic badges of allegiance to either the Hindu or the Muslim cause. End quote. The temperature was rising and rising again.

As people were forced to pick sides, the rhetoric became more and more hostile on both poles of the political spectrum. As Hajar Inassid writes, quote, Anonymous leaflets appeared in several cities, showing a caricature of Jinnah brandishing a sword as he warned unbelievers, quote, Your doom is not far, and the general massacre will come.

One Muslim student remembered, quote, all my friends were Hindu. They went to school with me. They went to university with me. You had established such good relationships with them, and then suddenly you see them as enemies, as a people who have to be killed. It was a terrible situation, end quote. A Muslim newspaper warned that under a Hindu Raj, they faced the same fate as the Jews in Nazi Germany, quote, the

End quote.

In return, Hindu ethno-nationalists fanned the flame of hate and fear as well, as one politician told a crowd of his supporters, quote, Oh yes, they say, the Muslims are a nation, just as much as we are, but we don't propose to grant them anywhere to live. Oh yes, they are in India, and unfortunately there are 100 million of them, heretics and outcasts to a man. But India is ours, and we intend to

to keep it. Oh yes, it is true that they were the dominant power for many centuries and that they were the only people apart from the British who ever gave India even the semblance of unity. But all that happened in the past and we have no intention of allowing it to happen again. We are 3 to 1 in numbers and 20 to 1 in cash. And when the British have gone, we shall be even more top dog.

End quote. Many people, both at home and abroad, were concerned that India was teetering on the brink of an outright civil war. The pot was ready to boil over. And eventually it did, in the summer of 1946. It was August. For weeks, the Congress Party, led by Nehru, and the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, had been trying to hammer out a deal for the future of India. They talked and talked and talked, but no agreement could be reached.

From Jinnah's perspective, the arrogant Nehru was trying to repress Muslims and deny their desire for a homeland. To Nehru, the intractable Jinnah was willing to break up the subcontinent for the sake of a cynical power grab. At the end of the meetings, the two men parted, and both went straight to find the nearest microphone

to air their grievances against each other. But it was Jinnah's words that would prove the most consequential and deadly that summer. He called for a day of mass protest and public agitation. Direct action, he called it. When questioned by reporters about what direct action meant, he replied in his raspy smoker's voice, quote, "'Do you expect me to sit with folded hands? "'I also am going to make trouble.'"

End quote. August 16th, 1946 was designated as Direct Action Day by the Muslim League. It was supposed to be a nationwide non-violent display of civil disobedience. And 20 years prior, it might have been just that. But this was not the Salt March or the early Satyagraha campaigns where Hindus and Muslims had stood shoulder to shoulder, calmly weathering a hailstorm of British batons.

Too much had changed. Too much hate and anger and resentment and rage had been kicked up. Political polarization, ceaseless propaganda, identity politics and an ever-escalating culture war had sealed the subcontinent's fate. As Barney White Spunner puts it, each side saw the other as a quote, "...species that must go."

When Direct Action Day finally came, the Raj held its breath. And it did not take long for everyone's worst fears to come to life. The first spark was lit in the city of Calcutta,

a very large, very old, and very poor city in eastern India. Communal violence had been on the uptick for years, but what happened in Calcutta in 1946 would turn stomachs from London to Lahore. That morning, Muslims opened newspapers to find inflammatory advertisements urging direct action, but not specifying what direct action meant. Quote,

End quote.

Across the city, Muslim shops and businesses closed as thousands of protesters converged for mass demonstrations. Muhammad Ali Jinnah had emphatically urged his followers to be peaceful, but the subtext of the rhetoric on the ground...

hinted otherwise. The threat of violence hung in the air like humidity, and after the speeches were done and the protests dispersed, some people were not ready to go home just yet. Whipped up into a froth of anger and fear, Jinnah's faithful supporters took direct action in whatever way they saw fit. Hindu and Sikh-owned shops were looted and burned. Ordinary citizens were cornered and kicked and cut and beaten and stabbed.

and the body count began to rise quickly. But it wasn't just the Muslim League who was prepared for violence that day in Calcutta. As the shops went up in flames and the summer sun burned higher in the sky, Hindu militias were forming up, distributing weapons, and preparing to retaliate. One of these gangs was led by a former wrestler and local gangster named Gopal Mukundan.

Mukherjee. His small army of 800 young Hindu nationalists called him Gopal the Goat on account of the fact that his family owned a butcher shop in town. As Gopal remembered, quote, "...it was a very critical time for the country. We thought if the whole area became Pakistan, there would be more torture and repression. So I called all my boys together and said it was time to retaliate. If you come to know that one murder has taken place, you commit ten murders."

Over the next three days, fighting raged between organized gangs of Hindus and Muslims, but the contagion of hatred quickly spread to regular people. As Hajari Naseed writes, Ordinary citizens joined the ranks of the Gundah mobs.

gunda means gangster which bloomed in all corners of the city they went about their work with an almost casual murderousness one horrified briton recounted how his butcher had sliced up his order before calmly striding across the street and using the same knife to slit the throat of a hindu passer-by

And the mechanical killing soon curdled into outright sadism. One resident named Nirad Chowdhury remembered watching a man being tied up before his attackers drilled a small hole into his skull so, quote, he might bleed to death as slowly as possible.

And it was that methodical, calculated cruelty that haunted survivors on both sides years later. One Hindu professor named Partha Mitter told a story about how a mob had broken into his grandfather's home. They didn't hurt the family, but they did destroy or loot every single possession he owned. But the one that hurt the most was, quote,

The books. They destroyed all the books. My grandfather's great library, his collection of English, French, and Bengali books, my mother's collections of poetry. They were all mostly destroyed. And when they realized that they didn't have enough time to tear or set fire to all the books, they filled the bathtubs with water and immersed them.

For local law enforcement, a ruined library was the least of their worries. Faced with the ubiquity and scale of the slaughter, police in the city could do little more than watch. As Hajari Naseed writes, "...armored cars could not pursue the marauders into the warren-like slums, and on foot, small patrols would have been quickly overwhelmed. Police shouldered their batons uneasily and watched as flames licked the night sky."

The scale of the slaughter only became apparent in the daylight. Hundreds of corpses littered the streets on Saturday morning, 17th of August, tossed out like refuse overnight. In photographs, they looked like gruesome mannequins, near naked and beginning to bloat, their limbs tangled like rope.

Units from the British Army, quickly dispatched to keep the peace, also failed to curb the violence. Again from Nassid, Whenever troops managed to concentrate their firepower enough to subdue one neighborhood, trouble broke out in another. The gangs put spotters on rooftops to alert them with flags and flashing signal lights as patrols drew near. Rioters would scatter into alleys, only to coalesce again once the danger had passed. A

A flood of emergency calls overwhelmed the authorities. Some were legitimate, others were false alarms meant to draw troops and police away from intended targets. Whole swaths of the city became no-go zones. Makeshift barricades sprung up, dividing faith from faith, neighborhood from neighborhood.

Three days later, 45,000 Raj troops had entered the city and had managed to restore some order. But the aftermath of the Great Calcutta Killing, as it came to be known, was legitimately jaw-dropping. One American photojournalist named Margaret Burke White said it reminded her of a Nazi concentration camp, which she had seen with her own eyes at Buchenwald. The

The British governor of Bengal, Sir Frederick Burroughs, said it reminded him of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, which he had fought in. And another journalist named Phillips Talbot described the devastation that he saw, quote, quote,

Occasionally, the sweeping headlights picked up the bare walls of a corner shop, obviously stripped clean. Finally, someone, sensing what we had all been sensing, muttered, quote, There's one. Visible momentarily in the beam of the headlights, avoided by a slight swerve, the body was again swallowed up by the darkness. Four on this side, someone else said, endowed.

And in a moment, we were in the thick of them, weaving to miss the ghoulish forms which flashed into view and as quickly merged into the night behind us. In street after street, tenements and business buildings were burnt out, and their unconsumed innards strewn over the pavements. Smashed furniture cluttered the roads, along with concrete blocks, brick, glass, iron rods, fountains gushed from broken water mains.

Burnt-out automobiles stood across traffic lanes, a pall of smoke hung over many blocks, and buzzards sailed in great leisurely circles.

Another journalist in Calcutta named Ian Stevens remembered that when he visited the city's morgue, the stench was so suffocating that he had to wear a respirator. And when the guns finally went silent and the flames guttered out, the death toll was calculated.

As Hajari Naseed writes, quote, And Naseed continues later, quote,

Ultimately, it is not possible to assign blame entirely to one side or the other. What exploded so suddenly in Calcutta in August 1946 were the pent-up fears of communities convinced that they faced imminent subjugation by the other. Riot no longer sufficed as a description. The statesmen grasped for a better label, quote, "...it needs a word found in medieval history, a fury."

Something had fundamentally broken in Calcutta. To a Hindu, every Muslim now looked like a potential killer, and vice versa. End quote. As the news of what happened in Calcutta spread across India, no one was more crestfallen than Mohandas Gandhi.

As one writer described, quote,

had not penetrated more than skin deep. End quote. When Muhammad Ali Jinnah heard about what happened in Calcutta as a result of his call for direct action, he could only manage to frame it in divisive terms. The bloodbath in Calcutta was, quote, what treatment the Muslims should expect from the Hindu majority if they exist as a minority in undivided India. End quote. And as terrible as the great Calcutta killings were, they were only...

a taste of what partition would eventually unleash. But August 1946 is a clear turning point in the partition story. It represents a Rubicon that once crossed could never be uncrossed. As Shashi Tharoor explains, "...the carnage and hatred had ripped apart something indefinable in the national psyche. Reconciliation now seemed impossible." End quote.

On the other side of the continent, in the coastal city of Bombay, Muhammad Ali Jinnah sat in his study, adding dead cigarettes to the growing heap in his ashtray. And if he were to catch his reflection in a window or a mirror, he would have seen a very old man looking back at him. In 1946, Jinnah was 70 years old. His cheeks were hollow, his frame was skeletal, and his eyes were ringed with stress-induced shadows.

Still, he had accomplished so much in his long life. In his view, he had united India's Muslims, given them back their identity, their sense of pride, but most importantly, he had given them a goal, a light at the end of the tunnel. Their own nation, their own home.

Pakistan. But it was not real yet. In 1946, Pakistan was still just an idea, an abstraction, a doodle on a map. Jinnah realized he had to make it real. And he had to do it fast. Time was running out. Not only for Pakistan, but for Jinnah himself. Because the great leader, the Qaidi Asim, had a secret. A tragic truth that he kept hidden from his colleagues, his supporters, even his friends.

even his closest friends. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was dying. And if he didn't manage to bring Pakistan into the world now, right now, it would die along with him.

Well, folks, that is a wrap for this episode. We covered a lot of ground this time, so I appreciate you sticking with me. These first two episodes were really about establishing the backstory, the partition, the characters involved, the history between them, and the political dynamics at work. We needed to get to know these people. Nehru, Jinnah, and Gandhi, we needed to understand their motivations, their worldviews, their contradictions, and their biases.

Because these three men, as well as the Mountbatten's whom we met in part one, are going to make decisions that will shape the fortunes of an entire subcontinent and in many ways, the whole world. It is a small cast with big consequences. As Yasmin Khan writes, 1947 was a perfect storm of hope and disaster, leadership and blunder. Not even a dozen people made momentous decisions affecting 400 million.

So, in part three, we're going to finally arrive at the actual partition of India. And in a story like this, the build-up is as fascinating as the boom, and we'll spend a lot of time wading into the complex human drama and interpersonal relationships that affected the actual decision-making process. Partition, after all, is more than just a line. It's a web. A web of competing interests, clashing egos, and dangerous liaisons.

Next time, we will pick our way through that web so that when partition finally pops off, we understand with crystal clarity why it had to happen. Or didn't have to. So with all that said, goodbye for now. As always, thank you for spending a couple hours of your very valuable time with me, and I hope you have an awesome day. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

Hey podcast listeners, I'm Paul Brandes introducing my podcast Countdown to Dallas. It's a fascinating in-depth look at the seemingly unconnected events that led to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It's based on my book of the same title. In that book and in this podcast, I go all the way back to 1939 when Lee Harvey Oswald was born into a troubled and dysfunctional family.

I'll follow his transient and often violent teenage years and young adulthood, painting a fuller picture of the man who would later become Kennedy's killer. I also take a look at events unfolding in that era like Cuba and Vietnam, and I'll unpack the conspiracy theories too, not one of which has ever been conclusively proven. Subscribe to Countdown to Dallas at evergreenpodcasts.com.

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