A migrant from Pakistan sees striking parallels between the 1947 Partition of British India and the current political schism in the United States. Is America repeating the same “divide and rule” history that fractured the subcontinent?
Commentary
By Ali Azad / Sapan News
The Partition of British India in 1947, which created India and Pakistan, is often remembered as a singular, closed chapter of history, a catastrophic geopolitical surgery that displaced fifteen million people and left over a million dead.
But I look at it differently. Partition wasn’t just an event. It is also a process. One that hasn’t stopped. The physical violence of 1947 transmuted into a permanent psychological schism that holds the potential for a nuclear war. The two countries continue to fear and hate each other, and the “other” within.
Neither did Partition begin in 1947. It started in the 1800s with the arrival of the British. When the shared, syncretic civilization of India, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others, began to divide into distinct religious identities. The seeds of distrust had always been there. But they germinated under the right conditions, thanks, partly, to the British Divide-and-Rule policy. Over the course of the century, a culture that once produced the world’s greatest philosophies of oneness, from the Advaita Vedanta of the Hindus to the Sufi mysticism of Bulleh Shah and the poetry of Ghalib, traded its heritage of pluralism, tolerance, and love for the politics of fear, anger, and hate.
Personal reality
For me, Partition is not abstract history; it is a deeply personal, ongoing reality that has dictated the course of my adult life. I immigrated to the West in my early twenties to escape a dysfunctional state, a dysfunction born from the paranoia of Partition. Uprooted from my family and my homeland, I spent a decade building a new life in exile, a pain sharpened by the post-9/11 rise of violent extremism in Pakistan that nearly killed members of my family. I continue to worry about my loved ones back home. It’s why I publish under a pseudonym today.
My affection for Pakistan has not lessened, even as my love for my new home, America, has grown, I’m also a proud Canadian where I first immigrated after leaving Pakistan. Its people, economy, and dynamism have given me a new life, as did Canada. America is where I met my wife, where we started a family, made new friends, and found a new community. How can I not love this land that’s given so much?
There are many frames through which one can understand America’s current political dysfunction. The one that I can’t stop thinking about, and that sometimes keeps me up at night, is that Americans are gripped by the same forces of fear, anger, and hate that ripped apart the Indian civilization, why I left Pakistan. I feel I am watching the same horror movie, so to speak, only now it’s set in America. I call it the American Partition. The parallels are striking, informative, and worrying.
The news media is fanning the flames of hate in America as it did in India. In 1924, Asaf Ali, a friend of freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi’s, wrote to Gandhi deploring the “disgraceful outburst of distrust and passion which has engulfed us in the North”. He blamed partisan vernacular newspapers and tabloids, which cropped up like mushrooms and sold like hotcakes, like today’s rage-bait videos, websites and news outlets. In an excerpt from the letter, he said:
“[…] every street brawl is a communal fight, and every worthless delinquent who bears a Hindu or Muslim name is held up as a type of the civilization which each name is supposed to represent.”
When the contemporary liberal establishment looks at U.S. President Donald Trump, they see an ego-driven force who ripped the country apart to build a cult of personality. In the mainstream Hindu consciousness, both historically and today, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the man who led the Pakistan movement, is often seen the same way: a power-hungry demagogue who willfully shattered the unity of India. For Muslims, of course, he was a saviour, like Trump is for Republicans. Among the factions that Jinnah led to create Pakistan, there was even a MAGA-like force: the mullahs. They feared cultural erasure and longed to Make Muslims Great Again, like white evangelicals who are motivated by the same fears as evidenced by the Great Replacement Theory.
Elite disconnect
The parallels go deeper still. Today’s secular, cosmopolitan liberals play the role of the pre-Partition Hindu elite — not in theology, but in the political psychology of a dominant group that mistakes its own specific values for universal truths, haughtily dismissing the concerns of other groups as uninformed or biased. Here, “liberal” describes the consensus that ruled American politics for decades, championing neoliberal economics, climate action, and diversity, equity, and inclusion as objective moral goods rather than partisan platforms.
In the 1930s and ’40s, the Indian National Congress (INC) sincerely believed it was the sole legitimate voice for the subcontinent. When Jinnah and the Muslim League accused INC of being an oppressive “Hindu body,” leaders like Nehru were baffled. How can we be oppressive? We are fighting for the freedom of all Indians from the Imperialists! We are secular and socialist.
Where INC and today’s liberals failed (among other things) was in their inability to persuade others of their well-intentioned and well-reasoned ideas, choosing instead to thrust their agenda onto their opposition with a perceived indifference and arrogance that created a backlash. INC’s backlash was the rise of Jinnah, the loss of Muslim support, and the division of India into two nations. The liberal backlash is against Donald Trump and the rise of right-wing populism globally.
My analogy is far from perfect. There are many ways in which American politics today is unlike that of the subcontinent. Americans vote and parties take turns ruling. Democracy is deeply ingrained in the culture. We may yet find a path to peaceful coexistence. But that path requires Americans to stop fearing and hating fellow Americans. The cycle must break. There are organizations like the Braver Angels that are dedicated to this cause.
I hope I am wrong. I hope America is not fracturing. I hope my children never read textbooks engineered to brainwash them against their erstwhile compatriots, and that their government never weaponizes nationalism into bigotry and hate to hold onto power. I hope they never experience the horror of neighbor turning against neighbor, never having to flee in the middle of the night, fearing for their lives, escaping the same tectonic lava of violent rage that displaced my grandparents and tore the subcontinent in two.
I hope they never experience the American Partition.
Ali Azad is a Pakistani writer living in California. He writes on Substack at https://realaliazad.substack.com/
Lead Image: The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France in 1865. Assembled in New York harbor and officially dedicated to the U.S. in October 1886. Photo via Canva.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.
Note on Southasia as one word: We use ‘Southasia’ as one word, “seeking to restore some of the historical unity of our common living space, without wishing any violence on the existing nation states” – Himal Southasian
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