LAHORE: Pakistan and India have been involved in a proxy war in Afghanistan for the last 70 years, during which both countries supported militant groups there and got embroiled in a nuclear arsenal race, said Nisid Hajari, the author of award-winning book Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition, “It is dangerous for the whole world... It is not a rivalry you want continued.”

However, the strained relations between the countries cannot end through a top-down bargain, he continued, it will have to be built ground up. It were the people of both countries who would have to decide whether they wanted peace or war, he added.

The session titled, Midnight’s Furies: The Partition of British India, held on the first day of the Afkare Taza ThinkFest at the Alhamra Arts Council featured Dr Muhammad Iqbal Chawla, dean of faculty of arts & humanities at the Punjab University, and Mr Hajari of Bloomberg View.

Opening the session, Newal Osman, a faculty member at IBA Karachi, explained that the discussion on the Partition would be divided into three phases: the run up to Partition (1943-46), the Partition years (1946-47), and legacies of the Partition (post 1947).

Responding to a question about political conditions in the lead up to Partition, Dr Chawala discussed the situation in India at the time of World War II and the major political players involved in deciding the fate of millions of Indians at the time. Dr Chawala, whose seminal work is on viceroy Wavell, discussed the similarities and differences between viceroys Wavell and Mountbatten – both of them having a major impact on how the Partition played out. Neither of them wanted to partition India, so they tried to make the proposition extremely unattractive to the Muslim League, he said.

In this context, Mr Hajari discussed the roles of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Jawaharlal Nehru, who were at the helm of taking important decisions that would lead to the Partition of India. Once allies, the two politicians, both foreign-educated secular lawyers, developed differences due to personality frictions that would end up with them taking terrible decisions that created a psychological divide between the people of India and Pakistan, which lasted over 70 years. “I started out asking why the Partition had gone so badly...why the two countries remain implacably divided even after 75 years,” he said.

Later, while discussing possibilities of peace between Pakistan and India, Mr Hajari stressed the need to increase people-to-people contact and commercial ties to bridge this psychological gap between Indians and Pakistanis. Then the people will force their leaders to make peace, not war, he concluded.

Published in Dawn, January 14th, 2018