After over 50 years of independence, it is surely time to admit openly that for all the divide and rule gleefully practised by the British, the India they left behind was a good deal more united than the India they had found in the 18th Century ... Another awkward graph from history ...suggests that every step forward in the struggle for  independence also turned out to be a step in the direction of Partition.

Not that those who sought independence also sought division. Far from it. Most of them went ahead firmly convinced that Indian divisions were a British import, and that Indian unity would flow from independence and from struggles for it. But our overview of the India of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries has indicated that there was always some Indian section or another that feared the end of British rule, and placed greater trust in the British than in a dominant Indian group.

If the British were to go, more than one Indian section desired a separate state or status for itself and was reluctant to be part of a united or centralised India. A subcontinent of mistrust had invited alien rule. A continuance of mistrust divided the independent subcontinent, politically into India and Pakistan, and emotionally into several religious, sectarian, caste, ethnic or linguistic groupings in both countries.

There were three ways in which the 1947 Partition might have been avoided. One, by Gandhiji and Congress winning the trust and allaying the fears, justified or unjustified, of the Muslim League. But we have seen that Gandhiji's attempts were unsuccessful, and also that his closest colleagues blocked his last-minute proposal of a Jinnah ministry for saving Indian unity. Two, by a British willingness to hand over power to India's largest party, Congress, regardless of the League's views, but this was lacking.not only in Churchill but also in post-war Britain's Labour government. Three, by Congress coercing Muslim-majority areas to remain with India, but for this Congress had neither the desire nor the capacity.

Some of Gandhiji's Hindu critics demanded to know why he had not fasted to prevent 'Pakistan, especially since he had said in 1940, "Vivisect me before you vivisect India". (Harijan, 22.9.40) He who had always stood for the unity of India and for the sanctity of one's word, why was he not fasting unto death for One India?

When Partition stared him in the face, Gandhiji was agonised enough to think of a fast. On June 5, 1947, he said, "I feel as if I [have been] thrown into a fire-pit and my heart is burning". Yet he felt that to die by self-immolation "in order to prove that I alone was right" would be "mad".

That a journey towards independence that did not also set Muslim anxieties at rest was bound to lead to Partition is not as yet a respected or popular explanation. Other theories seem more in fashion. One is that Partition and the carnage that accompanied it derived from "religion" and in particular from Gandhiji's "introduction of religion into politics".

... Thus Ainslee Embree has argued that Gandhiji's "use of a religious vocabulary" - "inevitably Hindu in origin" damaged the prospects of Indian unity ... Gandhiji was well aware of the hazards of religious politics, and noted his 1903 comment on the 1857 Rebellion, in which he had referred pejoratively to the "appeal ... made to the worst superstitions of the people of India" and to the fact that "religion was greatly brought into play".

But was it possible to imagine an India, even a political India, that evicted religion? Even if Gandhiji did not invite Ram, others would. If not Ram, they would invite someone else. Indeed, India's political air was thick with religion when Gandhiji returned to India in 1915.

Tilak had invoked Ganpati in the late 1890s, and Aurobindo Ghose had solicited Durga just thereafter. Religious metaphors flew like missiles in the skies of Bengal when, in 1905, the presidency was partitioned into Muslim- majority and Hindu-majority parts, and again in 1911, when Bengal was reunified. Appealing to the Raj in the name of religion, the Muslim League had secured separate electorates for Muslims in 1909.

The apparent verdict of history that India's advance towards independence was at the same time a move towards Partition does not show that the cry for independence was "wrong" ...

As far back as in 1921, Rabindranath Tagore, trouble by the Non- cooperation Movement, had warned Gandhiji of nationalism's negative consequences. Admitting that he was "ply (ing his) boat where the current is against me,"Țagore said he desired "a true meeting of the East and the West". He disapproved, he added, of "the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others". Claiming that nationalism was a Western rather than an Indian idea, Tagore went on: We, the famished, ragged ragamuffins of the East, are to win freedom for all Humanity. (Modern Review, May 1921).

Replying to Tagore, Gandhiji said that a negative was often necessary - "weeding was as important as sowing" - and added. Nor need the Poet fear that non-cooperation is meant to create a Chinese wall between India and the West. On the contrary, non- cooperation is intended to pave the way to real, honourable and voluntary cooperation. (Young India, 1.6.21).

After 1947, a new spirit was needed for new times, a spirit willing to look at hurts inflicted, now and in the past, by Indians on fellow Indians, or, as Tagore might have said, by humans on fellow-humans, rather than the hurts Indians received from their European masters, a spirit exploring reconciliation among Indians with different and often conflicting interests, perceptions and versions of history. Yet lingering nationalism resented any sustained focus on Indian weakness, wanting always to link those to the evil of colonialism ... Though civil wars, massacres and cruel dictatorships have scarred many an independent country in the second half of the 20th Century, no nation so far has asked the United Nations or an outside power to manage its affairs.

This unwillingness we can honour, but we cannot celebrate the failure in reconciliation, which, among other things, is also a failure to acknowledge that the portion of Asia or Africa that a European colonising power conquered was not necessarily at peace with itself at the time, and has not always been at peace following the foreigner's exit. (Source: The Hindu, 17 October, 1999)