India, Pakistan theatre of nationalist war

The Partition's wound has been reopened as the rulers of the two countries resort to violence for their own ends

- Vashna Jagarnath

A tentative ceasefire has been declared between India and Pakistan after one of the most intense cross-border escalations in recent years, with both sides claiming victory and the underlying tensions far from resolved. Those tensions run deep into the region's history back to the very moment of India's birth as an independent postcolonial state, when the British drew borders not to liberate but to exit, quickly and violently.

In 1947, the partition of British India tore through Punjab and Bengal, slicing apart villages, families and centuries of shared life. Cyril Radcliffe, the man assigned to divide the land, had never set foot on the subcontinent. He drew the new boundaries in just five weeks, with no knowledge of the people they would divide.

The Punjab partition on both sides was particularly brutal: more than a million people were killed in pogroms, reprisal attacks and mass forced displacements. Trains arrived full of corpses. Families were severed. Children went missing. Entire villages were razed. The violence was not spontaneous; it was a political catastrophe born of imperial haste and communal mobilisation.

Partition was not simply the creation of two states. It was the violent birth of religious nationalism in South Asia. The demand for Pakistan, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, had initially emerged as a response to the Congress's failure to accommodate Muslim political identity in a united India. But what was tactical soon became existential. New majoritarian identities were forged on both sides of the new border.

The very idea of India as a secular republic came under attack not only from the Muslim right but from its Hindu counterpart, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) the organisation from which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would later emerge.