Highjacking has been the defining pastime of many of the politicians in the twentieth century and is being carried forward into the twenty-first. In my own lifetime there have been four memorable highjackings:
- The Great Indian Highjack of India’s Unity
- The Bolshevik Highjack of The Russian Revolution
- The Zionist Highjack of The Jewish Holocaust, and the most recent
- The Neo-Con Highjack of Nine Eleven
But let us take the first one first. Like all respectable highjackings, the Great Indian Highjack was also planned meticulously over a number of years by politicians of all shades and beliefs, each with their own pet agendas that mutated into a common one: Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, the Indian National Congress, the All India Muslim League, the Hindu Mahasabha, the Akali Dal, the Communist Party of India, the British Labour and Conservative parties, they all conspired, jointly and individually and finally succeeded in highjacking the unity of India.
It is ridiculous to give credit for the partition of India to one single man or to one single party. Partition could have been avoided many times over, right up to the very last moment, if the will was there. The two-nation theory should have been a non-starter. In fact it was declared to be just that by the very man who was to become its most persuasive advocate.
As late as 1933 when an obscure Indian student at Cambridge concocted a crazy scheme and gave it a preposterously arrogant acronym, Jinnah was suitably contemptuous of it when confronted with it at the time in London. And yet this truly secular man, having no time for religious clap-trap whether Muslim or Hindu, was driven to become the most articulate protagonist of the very idea that he had labelled, just a few years earlier, a Mickey Mouse notion from Walt Disney’s Fairy Land.
Jinnah was no fighter for any cause except the one without the letter “u” in it. He was a brilliant advocate and once he took up a “case”, he pursued it to the satisfaction of his client. And the “case” he finally took up was of Muslims’ rights in an independent India. Though utterly incorruptible he would have settled out of court, if he had been given the necessary assurances. But they were not forthcoming and there was evidence of bad faith.
As a result, on the 15th. of August 1947, at the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world slept India did not awake to life and freedom but to death and destruction. The predominant colours in the rainbow that appeared on that fateful sunset were the colours of blood and fire as India’s unity lay shattered in pieces.
A broken hearted and frail old man tried to pick up the pieces to mend the break, and for a brief moment it seemed that he might just succeed. But it was not to be. He was left unguarded to become the easiest target any assassin ever had to aim at.
Gandhi’s death makes assassins of all of us. We killed him. We arranged the killing. The assassin only fired the shots. No amount of crocodile tears we shed afterwards can wash away the shame. We put out the light and then put out the light, and we cried that the light had gone out of our lives.
The only way, it seems to me, that we can hope to make amends for this grave sin is to be honest with ourselves and admit that we are in error, that a mistake is a mistake and can never become a right, that if we admit that we made a mistake, then it is madness to perpetuate that mistake. There will never be real peace and progress on the sub-continent until that “mistake” is rectified. And it can be rectified. It must be rectified.
We are not two nations, for goodness sake! The two-nation theory has been blown open into a three-nation farce. We are, in fact many nations. We are Punjabis, Bengalis, Sindhis, Baluchis, Pakhtuns, Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Kashmiris, Tamils,…. I could go on. But we are all, from time immemorial, INDIAN, bordered by the Himalayas in the North to the oceans in the South, the East and the West. It is our geography that makes us a nation, within which geography we make our history. Our differences of caste, creed and colour can make that history a happy or an unhappy one, as we choose. We have tried the unhappy alternative. Let us now celebrate our diversity and strive for the happy alternative. Recognition of our error is half the battle won. The struggle to correct the error will be a worthwhile one, until the battle against prejudice and ignorance is finally won.
I have a dream.
-Yavar Abbas
Date: 18th September, 2004