Broken Threads

It helped me to understand the issues between India and Pakistan.

I purchased this book in the certain knowledge that I would find within its pages much that would be relevant to the story of my own life. I was born in 1949 to parents who were citizens of the Empire when they were born, but who, after its dissolution, found themselves being forced to migrate from …

I purchased this book in the certain knowledge that I would find within its pages much that would be relevant to the story of my own life. I was born in 1949 to parents who were citizens of the Empire when they were born, but who, after its dissolution, found themselves being forced to migrate from Calcutta to Dacca in 1950 after the local police told them that they could no longer guarantee the safety of any remaining Muslims. So they put a padlock on the front door and took a taxi to the airport. During the ride, the taxi driver had to brake hard at an intersection to avoid colliding with another car which (deliberately?) cut across our path. Apparently, I lurched forward, banged my head against the seat in front, and howled in pain. That’s how my parents described the incident. My father was a physician and my mother was a teacher and I grew up hearing their first-hand accounts of the Calcutta riots of 1946, and many other events of that time. The “broken threads” of the book’s title were certainly evident in my own family, since we had relatives who, for a whole variety of reasons, stayed on the other side of the border. Mishal Husain tells lots of interesting stories about her relatives and about the political leaders of those times. She does a reasonable job of describing the events surrounding Partition, and especially the skullduggery of the last Viceroy, but of course this book is not meant to be a political book, so a lot of detail has been left out. The bibliography includes many of the standard books but all the same I am puzzled as to why she does not refer to a book entitled Pakistan: Old Country, New Nation (Pelican Books, 1964) by Ian Stephens. Mr. Stephens lived and worked in India from 1930 to 1950 and became the editor of The Statesman, which at the time of Partition was the leading English-language daily newspaper in the subcontinent, published simultaneously in Delhi and Calcutta. It was British-owned but was independent of the Colonial administration. Importantly, Mr. Stephens was not unwelcome in the Viceroy’s office and even enjoyed access to the Viceroy himself. He was therefore an authoritative chronicler of the events surrounding Partition. Ms Husain does cite another book by Ian Stephens (Horned Moon, which incidentally features the author’s grandparents Shahid and Tahirah) but it is a pity that the 1964 book is not cited. In Chapter 7 of his underrated book, Mr. Stephens describes the Cabinet Mission Plan that was announced on 16 May, 1946, which “set forth methods for creating an ingenious three-tiered constitutional structure for a united India, which nevertheless did not totally prevent the eventual emergence of something like Pakistan if that was really desired.” The Muslim League under Mr. Jinnah “on 6 June unequivocally accepted the proposals.” By contrast, the Congress Party’s response, not forthcoming until 25 June, “was clad in such involved language that the average person might well be excused for thinking it lacked any meaning….to the eye of common sense, the party’s resolution amounted to a rejection.” The subsequent words and actions of Congress leaders have been described by another contemporary observer (Penderel Moon) as follows: “They passionately desired to preserve the unity of India; they consistently acted so as to make its partition certain.” In short, Partition need not have happened had Congress been prepared to be just a bit more reasonable. Indeed, this is also the gist of what Tahirah says in Husain’s book (p. 276): had the majority community accepted the minority community’s pleas, which were the kind of requests that minority communities everywhere are entitled to ask for, there might not have been any “broken threads.”