Search for Historical Truth:Partition of India and Palestine

Editor's Notes: This charter known as the Indian Independence Act, 1947, is a declaration by a King to create Pakistan as a separate independent nation-state by the fiat of royal power:

“An Act to make provision for the setting up in India of two independent Dominions, to substitute other provisions for certain provisions of the Government of India Act, 1935, which supply outside those Dominions, and to provide for other matters consequential on or connected with the setting up of those Dominions. [18th July 1947.]

Be it enacted by the King’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows: -

1. As from the fifteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, two independent Dominions shall be set up in India, to be known respectively as India and Pakistan.”

It is not a declaration of independence by the indigenous peoples like the Declaration of American Independence by “We, the People”. There is no “We, the people” in the very foundational Act of the King of England which created Pakistan! As the subsequent Objectives Resolution of 1949 proclaimed, the creation of Pakistan was by divine sanction (by the divine right of kings it would appear if one reads this Act carefully, rather than by Will of Muslims' Almighty God). Most Pakistanis have never been introduced to this foundational document which carved Pakistan out of India by the royal proclamation of the British Empire. See Zahir Ebrahim's analysis of Sir Allama Iqbal's role in serving the British imperial interests for which the poet of the British Empire was awarded knighthood of its Dominions. No knighthoods were awarded for the founding of the United States of America to the signers of its Declaration of Independence. In fact, many of its founders were hounded to death by the British empire. Why was the British Empire so agreeable on dividing the Indo-subcontinent. That land wasn't theirs to divide to begin with! They were the brute-force occupiers for two hundred years as the colonial raping and ravaging empire who ruled by deception, by conniving, by divide and conquer. And they maintained their legacy even in their reluctant departure.

The British acted in exactly the same manner in Palestine as well, after acquiring the temporary mandate on the heels of the Balfour Declaration. Once again, Palestine was not their land to partition, and in a much greater travesty that they gratuitously gave it away to European Jewry. Palestine was a war booty along with the rest of the Middle East for the victors of World War I, and the British were only its temporary custodians without any right to play the divine right of kings. In both cases, what was not theirs to divide, the British Empire brought this cataclysm upon the indigenous peoples of these lands. Clearly, the British empire during their retrenchment on the heels of imperial losses in two world wars, foresaw to safeguard their own economic, military, and security interests, as well as the interests of the international bankers in whose name the Balfour Declaration was issued by the British Empire, in both these partitions. To think otherwise, that the British as the great benefactors of the conquered peoples, generously gave in to popular sentiments emanating from among the natives that led to both partitions of such monumental cataclysm as to rival the something that was revealed on the Sinai, is to be most naïve of international power on the grand chessboard. Ordinary public play minimal if any role in international politics except as putty to engineer consent in order to continue the illusion of popular mandate in democratic modernity's conception of state power.

The dividing of India along religion lines was the watershed event of the twentieth century. It lay the international precedent for the subsequent division of Palestine --- for now the racial Jews-only Jewish State could easily claim the Muslim precedent of a “religion only” basis for the separation of a people from their land in the blood-soaked creation of Pakistan that preceded the partition of Palestine by exactly 9 months, August 15, 1947 and May 15, 1948. Uncannily the same duration as the gestation period for the human race.

Consent was engineered for this orchestration among the Muslims of India and to this day, Pakistanis, patricians and plebeians alike, continue to fool themselves with a distorted view of how they came into being. It is taboo in Pakistan to question the official version of state-sanctioned history of the creation of Pakistan --- not much differently as it is among the Jews to question the officially sanctioned version of their HolocaustTM. A careful read of this document leaves no room for speculation that the British engineered the policy of partition independent of the indigenous Muslim public's demand in accordance with their own imperial calculus. The popular sentiment among the Muslims was an exercise in demand creation using the British empire trained assets. It was a top-down demand sown by the patricians and not an organic demand which was seeded naturally among the plebeian people. The demand was fertilized with riots and bloodshed to engineer consent for the imperial project. It is perhaps only a remarkable coincidence that it is difficult to identify a single key founder of Pakistan among the Muslim League leadership in the ten years preceding the creation of Pakistan, who spent any time in a British jail for actively opposing the British empire. Unlike those Indian nationalist leaders who were principally engaged in the Quit India Movement and fearlessly gave up their freedom to the British jailers to keep get rid of the colonial masters in a united India. It is of course only attributed to the genius of the Muslim League leadership that they did not forsake their freedom, as the famous American biographer Stanley Wolpert of UCLA asserts in his book: Jinnah of Pakistan (1984). (This fact is noted from memory as I read this work decades ago.)

It is also difficult to identity any prominent Muslim separatist leadership who at any time loudly condemned the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (also known as the Amritsar massacre), which took place in the Jallianwala Bagh public garden in the northern Indian city of Amritsar on 13 April 1919, unlike among the Hindu nationalists. Their most famous poet laureate, Rabindranath Tagore, immediately repudiated his knighthood in protest after that episode, while the most famous poet laureate who is called the intellectual father of Pakistan for calling for a separate nation for Muslims, Sir Allama Muhammad Iqbal, evidently did not bat an eyelid, steadfastly holding on to the British knighthood until his death.

These same British trained assets who never actively opposed any British cruelty wrecked upon the Muslims beginning with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, became the first Government of Pakistan after the partition. It is also just a coincidence of course that from the very inception of the Government of Pakistan on August 15, 1947, the pre-partition feudal power class in the Indian subcontinent which was cultivated and coddled by the British Empire, was retained in Pakistan by these British assets – unlike by the Indian nationalists who came to power in post-partition India! That feudal power class created by the British empire to serve their imperial interests, still flourishes in Pakistan, even into its 65th year of existence. It has continually been augmented by other feudals spanning the gamut from the military praetorian guard class which has come to own most of Pakistan's economy and its real-estate to the industrialist class many of whom have British titles. This includes Mr. Syed Babar Ali, head of Nestle Corporation Pakistan supplying water to the foreign occupation troops in Afghanistan, who was appointment to the Order of the British Empire, OBE.

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