August 17, 2007
Winston Churchill and Islamic Nationalism Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:40 AM EST On August 15, Fred Smoler noted the anniversaries of V-J Day and the partition of India and Pakistan. He linked to a New York Times piece “noting India had begun teaching some of its own political controversies in its schools and suggesting that this is a sign of India’s new wealth, confidence, and political maturity.” He added that readers who “may be newly accustomed to hearing that non-Western societies do not value democracy when it can possibly be suspected of having been imposed on them by another culture” might look to India for a more complex example of democratic development. I couldn’t agree more. I recently read another, similarly substantial reflection on the partition of India and Pakistan in The New Yorker. As is the frequent custom of publications like The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Pankaj Mishra’s essay considers the legacy of partition through a review of current literature on the subject. Mishra describes some of the contours of contemporary scholarly thought, not least interestingly of thought on Winston Churchill’s destructive role in the history of the Asian subcontinent. Read the article for the full details, but there’s one argument that struck me as especially noteworthy. “As late as 1940, Winston Churchill hoped that Hindu-Muslim antagonism would remain ‘a bulwark of British rule in India,’“ Mishra writes. In his desire to keep India a possession of the crown, Churchill supported the Muslim separatist factions at odds with independence advocates like Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. This was, history has shown, a risky maneuver. The consequence, according to Mishra and the historian Alex von Tunzelmann, was that Churchill was “instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state.” At a moment when Churchill is an inspirational icon for the most enthusiastic proponents of a literal war on radical Islam, this is a historical irony worth noting. Mishra observes that it might be unfair to tar Churchill with the sins of the current state of Pakistan, especially since the founders of Pakistan were hardly Al Qaeda–style Islamists. It would be quite a stretch to blame Churchill for the terrorist refuge that northern Pakistan has become. But it wouldn’t be contrived at all to take this as a lesson in the unpredictable and contingent nature of international history. A dear friend of mine once had a history professor shout, at her seminar: “It’s all about contingency, you ----heads!” Mishra puts the point more elegantly, but in a manner no harder to understand. It’s not as easy to plan the future of men and states as some would like to believe, and the history of India and Pakistan is a good reminder of that.
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