The Partition of India

There is not an inch of the soil of India which our forefathers did not once purchase with their blood. We cannot be false to the blood of our fathers. India the whole of it is therefore our heritage and it must be reconquered for Islam … Our ultimate ideal should be the unification of India, spiritually as well as politically under the banner of Islam. The final political salvation of India is not otherwise possible.

—Author F. K. Khan Durrani1

However painful it may be, the fact is that it is impossible to observe Islam faithfully and still be a good citizen of India.

—Indian diplomat M.R.A. Baig2

Muslims should have ruled India after the departure of the British, and not the Hindus. Population growth helped Muslims to annex a large part of India for creating a separate Islamic State of Pakistan. Such efforts on the part of the Muslims should be continued to gradually convert the rest of India into Dar-ul-Islam.

—Indian ex-MP Syed Shahabuddin3

With God as witness, we Hindus, and Mahomedans declare that we shall behave towards one another as children of the same parents, that we shall have no differences, that the sorrows of each shall be the sorrows of the other and that each shall help the other in removing them. We shall respect each other’s religion and religious feelings and shall not stand in the way of our respective religious practices. We shall always refrain from violence to each other in the name of religion.

—Mahatma Gandhi4

At the dawn of the British rule of India, as the nation was emerging from the remains of the decaying Islamic Mughal Empire, the old Islamic elite suddenly found themselves without their former power and privileges in society. No longer were the Muslim elite masters of the fate of the Hindu majority. No more could they rely on military conquests, Hindu slave labor, or crippling taxation of “infidels.” For the first time in more than a millennium, they had to work for a living. During their long years of royal parasitism, the Muslim elite had not acquired skills aside from soldiery or political administration.

During Islamic rule, Indian society was feudal. Most members of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities were desperately poor. Then in the 19th century the nation found itself under the rule of a very different colonial power—one infinitely more secular and just than the Islamic elite had been. The Muslim elite found themselves unemployed and unemployable. The days of royal violence and hedonism in the Mughal court were gone. Hindus were no longer afraid of being Hindus.

Under British rule, the majority Hindu community found itself to be more energetic, quicker to adopt European ways, and quicker to learn the official language of English, which replaced the Persian spoken by the Mughal court. The British would govern the Indian subcontinent for another hundred years.

During this period, the Islamic community became more withdrawn, deeply suspicious of the Hindu majority and their new colonial masters, the British. For centuries, the Islamic ruling class had enjoyed social elevation based on a system of taxation, imperial conquest, and mass slavery. Under the British, that was no longer possible. Hindus became more willing to work within the British system while Muslim society withdrew and became more introverted.

Under the British system, the old feudal ways were no longer viable and the Hindus were free from genocidal wars carried out by the likes of Aurangzeb. Muslims who were unable to adapt to the new system soon became destitute, while Hindus who could were able to build a name and even a fortune for themselves. In time, enough Hindus had done so to constitute a class of capable administrators under their British colonial masters.

When the Indian National Congress formed in the 1880s, its leading figures were Hindus looking for an increased say in the government and administration of their country. Members gathered to discuss issues of civil rights and opportunities in government for well- educated natives. By 1900 the Congress had emerged as an all-India political organization. By and large, Muslims were not represented in the Congress.

Over the course of the early 20th century the relationship between Britain and India began to shift significantly. World War I represented a major inflection point. India contributed significantly to the British war effort in terms of men and resources and hoped for compensation in the form of greater political independence. The Government of India Act in 1919 handed control of many affairs to India, though matters of finance, taxation, and the maintenance of law and order remained under British control.

Beginning in this era, one figure looms large in the story of Indian independence— Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He returned to India in 1915 after a long period in South Africa, where he had emerged as a major political leader in the large Indian community there. Upon his return, Gandhi brought along strategies of nonviolent civil disobedience and an idea of complete political independence.

Gandhi’s strategy was based on an ideal of nonviolence and non-cooperation, whereby anyone working to keep India going could participate simply by refusing to do his job. This approach allowed the movement to become broadly popular. Whereas before it had been mainly elite members of Indian society agitating for political freedom, Gandhi’s approach brought in people from all walks of life. The ideal of nonviolence added a dimension of religious appeal. Led by Gandhi, the drive for independence became a mass movement in India.

Efforts at using civil disobedience enjoyed some success, and the British continued to make efforts to conciliate between their political governance and Indian desires for independence. One last effort in this direction came in the Government of India Act of 1935. This Act granted a certain political autonomy to the Indian provinces. Although the Muslim League attempted to position itself as the sole party representing Muslim interests in British India, it suffered disaster at the polls in the 1937 elections stemming from the Act. The Indian National Congress became the dominant political party.

A watershed moment came with the outset of World War II in 1939. India’s Viceroy Lord Linlithgow brought India into the war without consulting Indian leaders—an action which deeply offended Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. In response, the INC asked all its representatives to resign in protest. Led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League took advantage of this opening and persuaded its members to adopt the Lahore Resolution in 1940, which called for a partition of India into two separate sovereign states. As the INC position weakened, the notion of political separatism along religious lines took hold.

In 1942, Gandhi launched another civil disobedience movement, the Quit India movement. The idea was to force the British to the negotiating table over the issue of Indian independence by threatening a civil strike during wartime. The British responded bitterly to this. Tens of thousands of INC leaders, including Gandhi and all the main national and provincial figures, were arrested and thrown in jail. Several leaders, including Gandhi, were not released until 1944.

Again, Jinnah and the Muslim League took full advantage of the sudden vacuum in leadership among the Hindus. The League offered its support to the British and saw its membership and stature increase dramatically. When Lord Mountbatten became the last British Governor-General of India, the Muslim League’s interest in a sectarian division of the country had fully taken root. The new Labour Party government in England was eager to resolve the India Question as soon as possible. In June 1947 Mountbatten announced that India would be partitioned. In August 1947, following the passing of the Indian Independence Act in the British parliament, Pakistan and India were created as separate nations.

As India divided, violent clashes between Hindus (and Sikhs) and Muslims followed. As many as one million were killed as enormous numbers of people migrated to one side or the other of the new national boundaries. Between 1947 and 1951, about 14.5 million in the subcontinent left their home for another part of India, with most of the movement happening on the western border between India and West Pakistan.5 It was one of the largest mass-migrations in human history. At the same time, in defiance of the “two-nation theory” which lay behind the partition in the first place (that is, the belief that religion alone made Hindus and Muslims constitute separate nations), millions of Muslims stayed put in the newly-created nation of India. In East Pakistan, millions of Hindus remained as well.

Gandhi enjoyed only a pyrrhic victory with India’s independence. His vision came to failure in three respects. He had been adamantly opposed to the partition of India, but it took place anyway. He had hoped for Indian independence to come without violence, but more than a million people were killed—mostly Hindus and Sikhs at the hands of Muslims. He had believed in Hindu-Muslim brotherhood, yet today, after seven decades, there is still no peace between India and Pakistan. In a sense, Gandhi was living under self- deception and delusion, thinking the whole world was like him.

One thing is certain: Gandhi’s tactics of non-cooperation, nonviolence, and civil protests worked only because his opponents, the British, were very civilized. Such tactics could not have succeeded against Mao, or Aurangzeb, or Muhammad. He would simply have been beheaded and his followers killed or scattered. And as history since 1947 has shown, the Islamic state of Pakistan has no intention of peaceful coexistence with secular India.

JIHAD CONTINUES IN KASHMIR

During the years of the Raj, not all parts of British India were ruled directly by the British crown. There were hundreds of so-called Princely States under the direct control of local rulers. The rulers of the Princely States were given the choice of aligning with India or Pakistan after independence. One of these states was the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Pakistan claims Kashmir belongs to it because the majority of its population is Muslim. This claim is pure chutzpah. Kashmir has been part of India since the region was inhabited. Before Islam came to Kashmir, it had been a stronghold of ancient Vedic Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Shaivism for 5,000 years. In the pre-Islamic philosophical milieu of Kashmir, the only strife came from debates between the different religious-philosophical systems. The ancient culture of Kashmir was renowned for being “open-minded, liberal and humane … culturally advanced, intellectually alert and aesthetically conscious.”6

All that changed with the arrival of Islam. Between 1389-1413, the Muslim ruler Sikandar earned the name of “Butshikan” (meaning idol-breaker) for his persecution of non-Muslims in Kashmir. Several historians have recorded the destruction of many temples, shrines, hermitages, and holy places of Hindus and Buddhists throughout Kashmir. A Muslim chronicler named Hasan observed that Sikandar laid out a city named after himself on the ruins of the destroyed Hindu temples, and forcibly converted Hindus to Islam—or massacred those who refused to convert.7 He imposed sharia law upon all inhabitants, levied an enormously high jizya tax, and banned all non-Islamic activities, including music and dancing. He even prevented Hindus and Buddhists from cremating their dead according to ancient custom. In one place, so many Hindus were killed and tossed into Dal Lake that the region “is still known as ‘Bata Mazar’, grave-yard of Hindus.”8 Due to Sikandar’s reign of butchery, many Hindus were killed or fled in fear. This is how Islam was spread to Kashmir.

As it had elsewhere in India, the jizya tax became the major cause of a demographic revolution. The tax was heavy and regressive and therefore affected the poor the hardest. This is the purpose of the tax, in fact—to induce conversions in some while degrading and diminishing the rest.9 A mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus around the time of Sikandar and the forced conversion of many who remained behind became the foundation of a major demographic change. By the 15th century, a peace-loving and gentle society had been transformed into a brutal and parochial society of Islamic believers.

For Pakistan to claim that Kashmir was a “Muslim” province is completely ahistorical. Such a claim shows that the kind of demographic conquest Kashmir endured is the most permanent form of conquest. When India was partitioned in 1947, Kashmir was still governed by a Hindu maharajah. Pakistan was not satisfied with allowing the political process to move forward, but instead sent in agitators to stir up the people of Kashmir to force the maharajah’s hand. This meddling worked against them in one sense, as the ruler signed an Instrument of Accession granting sovereignty to India. But in another sense, they were successful. By moving in forces Pakistan created a potentially explosive situation that prevented the province from moving to Indian control as it should have. Instead, a zone of control was created, dividing Kashmir into Indian and Pakistani controlled zones. Since 1947, Pakistan and India have fought three wars over Kashmir, and the region remains a volatile flashpoint for terror activity.

Islamic jihad has been 100 percent successful in Afghanistan and Pakistan and perhaps 90 percent successful in Kashmir. Jihadists are feverishly working to finish the job, after which they will turn their attention back to the entire Indian subcontinent. Since they are unlikely to achieve this victory by military campaigns (having failed on several occasions already), the Islamic supremacists have resorted to other means. The way to final victory that was so successful in Afghanistan and Pakistan—and also in Bangladesh and Indonesia—is demographic conquest. By means of demographic conquest Islam has spread itself across the Middle East, North Africa, and into the Balkans. The jihadists hope to do the same to all of India.

THE NIZAM OF HYDERABAD

Of the Princely States, the story of Hyderabad best illustrates the effect of Islamic rule on India. The last Nizam (Muslim king) of Hyderabad was a notorious miser who may have been the richest man in the world in the 1930s, with personal wealth totaling about two billion dollars.10 The wealth of his state was provided almost entirely by the 16 million Hindus (out of a total population of 18 million) who actually performed the productive work. As Time Magazine put it in 1970:

While the peasants lived in abject poverty, the princes had grown rich on land taxes and the sale of mineral rights. They indulged in lavish whims—concubines, opulent palaces, bejeweled elephants, retinues of servants, strings of polo ponies, sumptuous celebrations. The Nizam of Hyderabad, who was the richest of all with wealth estimated at $2 billion, collected mountains of pearls.11

Much of the Nizam’s life was taken up with his four legal wives and his harem containing hundreds of women.12

Hyderabad was incorporated into India in 1948 by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nizam had refused to disband his private Muslim army of about 22,000 men and refused to hand over his territory. The Nizam and his ancestors had been notoriously brutal rulers over their majority-Hindu portion of India, and he wasn’t interested in giving up his privileged position without a fight—so long as others did the actual fighting.13 The Indian General involved promised no harm would come to anyone who did not resist, including the Hyderabad army. In the end, over a period of four days Hyderabad’s 15th century fortresses capitulated without serious engagement and his army surrendered. The cost to satisfy the Nizam’s demand for resistance was several hundred killed. His vanity appeased, the Nizam settled in to enjoy his enormous fortune.14

As a ruler, the Nizam had generally appointed Muslims to look over his people. By custom, he never met with any of his subjects, no matter their wealth, unless the subject appeared with “a cash present for His Exalted Highness.”15 On the occasion of his Silver Jubilee in 1937, the Nizam reportedly received somewhere around one million dollars in cash gifts from his subjects. The richest man in the world wasn’t above taking handouts from poor Indians.16 But it was not to last. The Nizam’s grandson and final successor famously squandered much of the family wealth on failed investments such as sheep farms in Australia.17

Nizami rule relied heavily on the complicity of the Deshmukh (landed gentry) class, which served as tax collectors and administrators. For two centuries the Deshmukhs received large landed estates as a reward for running the Nizam’s feudal administration. Their ranks included many Hindus—notably the Reddys and Velamas, two castes and classes of Hindus. The wealthiest among these groups lived like dukes and barons. Without this class of venal collaborators, the oppressive and exploitative rule of the Nizami would have been difficult.

ONGOING JIHAD: ISLAM’S CLAIM ON INDIA

One of the most difficult concepts for non-Muslims to accept is the jihadist notion that all lands conquered by Islam are considered to belong to it for all time. This means that India, in the eyes of jihadists, belongs to Islam by right. Just as Islamic terrorists would not be satisfied even if Israel were destroyed and a Palestinian state established on its ruin, they would not be satisfied if Kashmir were given to Pakistan, either. Scholar Walid Phares explains this remarkable dictum:

In the eyes of the Salafists, India was subdued by the advancing forces of the caliphate and was ruled under a legitimate Islamic state, and thereby became part of the dar al-salaam or dar al-Islam. Inescapably, it should return to the caliphate.18

Once under the dominion of Islam, forever under the dominion of Islam: this is the civilization-destroying logic that continues to point a dagger at the heart of India.

This logic explains the otherwise inexplicable anti-India diatribes we find in the mouths of the world’s most famous jihadists. Osama bin Laden and his successor Zawahiri both vented about “Crusader-Zionist-Hindu” plots against Muslims.19 It is also why jihadists conducted widespread massacres against Indian civilians in 2003, 2006, and 2008. The ultimate goal of such attacks, as Phares summarizes, is “a Talibanization inside India… to devastate the country’s rising economy and eventually to hit its military, including (worrisomely) its nuclear weapons.”20

Although they get little attention outside India, there are two dangerous jihadist organizations based in the Indian heartlands: the Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and the Indian Mujahideen (IM). SIMI was founded in 1977 as an offspring of Jamaat-i-Islami, the group founded by jihad’s ideological godfather Maulana Maududi. Following Islamic precepts expounded by Maududi, SIMI rejects cooperation with or tolerance of a non-Muslim state in India. They regard the establishment of a caliphate as a basic religious duty. Even fellow Muslims who are happy to live in peace with Hindus are regarded as backsliders who have earned a place in hell, in SIMI’s eyes.21

The Indian Mujahideen (IM) is a front group for Pakistan-based terror group Lashkar- e-Taiba. Since 1993, this group has been behind a number of high-profile terror attacks in India. Attacks for which IM has claimed responsibility include: nine marketplace bombings in May 2008 that killed more than 60 people in Jaipur; 16 synchronized explosions in the city of Ahmadabad that killed 38 people in July 2008; and a September 2008 atrocity in which five bombs in crowded New Delhi locations murdered 30. In another attack in 2007, IM targeted lawyers in three Uttar Pradesh cities with simultaneously detonated bombs because the lawyers had refused to take on the cases of suspected terrorists.22

Members of the IM working with terrorists from Jaish-e-Mohammed were also responsible for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. 12 people were killed in this attack, which also led to a dangerous standoff between Pakistan and India in 2001-2. IM was responsible for the Mumbai train bombings of 2006 that killed 209 and injured more than 700 people. Again, the ISI was accused of involvement in this attack for its role in planning the bombings. IM was also responsible for a coordinated marketplace bombing in May 2008 that killed 60 people as well as a series of synchronized explosions in Ahmadabad that killed 38 people that same year.23

In 2008, members of Lashkar-e-Taiba trained in Pakistan captured an Indian fishing boat and rode it into Mumbai where they carried out a four-day series of gun attacks and bombings that killed 164 and injured more than 600. All but one of the ten terrorists involved were killed during the attack. Although Pakistan initially denied involvement, it was later proved that several of the terrorists were Pakistani nationals and the whole team had received extensive training at a mountain camp in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir.

The threat seems to be intensifying, and India—which has already borne the brunt of jihad for longer than almost anyone—may become the locus of still more jihadist activity. Interrogations of two high-level IM personnel in October 2013 suggest that the organization has grown considerably and established links with both the Taliban and al- Qaeda. Future suicide attacks against prominent government officials and more mass murder bombings are almost certainly in the plans for the future. One captive IM member made it clear that nothing short of complete Islamization of India is his group’s goal.24

In 2014, the Islamic jihad against India that began with Muhammad bin Qasim in 712 is still going strong. Mohandas Gandhi’s dream of Hindu-Muslim unity has failed. India and Pakistan were partitioned, yet the religious conflict continues. After one thousand years of continued residence in India, Muslims have not been peaceably assimilated into the fabric of Indian life. After 1,300 years, Islam has no interest in merging with India or engaging in dialogue—it wants to finish the job by destroying Indian civilization completely as it has done in Pakistan and has nearly done in Kashmir.