Mar Yousuf K.

At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, two nations emerged from the carcass of British India: Pakistan, conceived as a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims, forged through political struggle and colonial betrayal; and India, which prided itself on being secular and inherited the lion’s share of power and territory. It goes without saying that the Partition was no clean break but a tearing apart of land, families, faiths, and futures. British colonialism orchestrated this schism, and its legacy still pulsates through the subcontinent – in riots, border fences, bulldozers, and the ashes of homes burned in the name of God or nation. 

How Fear Birthed A Nation 

The demand for Pakistan didn’t erupt out of thin air, nor did it stem from some deep-rooted theological dogma. It was the result of a decades-long political anxiety – a fear that, in a post-British democratic India dominated by a Hindu majority, Muslims, particularly the North Indian elite who had once been courtiers of empire, would be politically, culturally, and economically marginalised. This anxiety was not entirely unfounded. After the decline of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British Raj, Muslim power structures had eroded, and the Hindi–Urdu controversy of the late 19th century, along with the growing assertiveness of Hindu nationalist groups, contributed to a sense of alienation. The Indian National Congress, while officially secular, was often seen as insufficiently representative of Muslim political concerns. 

Enter the All-India Muslim League, which, under Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s leadership, positioned itself as the guardian of Muslim political identity. Jinnah, a secular constitutionalist turned reluctant separatist, presented the idea of Muslims and Hindus as “two nations” in his 1940 Lahore Resolution – not because he believed in religious supremacism, but because he believed coexistence had become politically unviable. 

But the problem was this: once Islam was introduced as a political identity – as a reason for statehood, it became difficult to control how that identity would be interpreted, policed, or enforced. The League’s campaign distilled centuries of diverse Islamic practice, culture, and tradition into a single banner. It flattened differences, ignored regional complexities, and offered no coherent vision for what an “Islamic state” would look like, only that it had to exist. 

Iqbal (often mischaracterised as the father of the Pakistan idea) never envisioned this. His speeches and writings called not for a theocracy, but for a spiritually awakened, socially just Muslim polity rooted in Qur’anic ethics. His concept of khudi (selfhood) emphasised dignity, autonomy, and a pan-Islamic unity that transcended borders. Even in his correspondence with Jinnah, he was clear: Pakistan, if it was to exist, had to serve as a means to moral regeneration, not just a political refuge.

“I have never demanded a separate nation. I want the unification of the Muslim Ummah. Pakistan is not the end; it is a means to an end.” 

— Allama Iqbal, letters to Jinnah 

But that moral end was never realised. Pakistan’s creation became an end in itself, and Islam, the vast, lived tradition, was reduced to a rhetorical slogan to legitimise power. 

Lines That Bled: Empire’s Last Act of Violence 

What made the violence of Partition so complete, so rapid, and so irredeemable was not just the clash of communities or the failure of leadership. It was an empire in decline, in retreat, and denial. For decades, the British had cultivated division. The 1905 Partition of Bengal was a calculated attempt to split Hindus and Muslims by region. The 1909 Morley-Minto Reforms introduced separate electorates, institutionalising communal identity as a political category. The 1932 Communal Award further expanded this logic. Every act of colonial reform was designed not to decolonise but to control, to fragment resistance and preserve the illusion of governance. 

By the mid-1940s, Britain was exhausted. World War II had drained its treasury and moral authority. Mountbatten, sent as the last Viceroy in 1947, was instructed to expedite the process. His decision to advance the date of British withdrawal by ten months gave little time for negotiation, contingency planning, or civilian protection. 

The task of drawing the border (between India and the new Pakistan) was handed to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer with no prior knowledge of South Asia, its languages, its cultures, or its fault lines. He was given five weeks, and what he produced was not a border; it was a wound, slicing through Panjab and Bengal, dividing not just districts but homes, villages, rivers, even graveyards. 

And so the British left – clean, detached, and unburdened, as if they hadn’t just created the conditions for carnage. 

Partition: A Cartography of Corpses 

The Partition displaced over 14 million people. Between 1 and 2 million were killed, though exact numbers remain impossible to determine. The violence was not evenly spread, but it was everywhere: Punjab became a slaughterhouse, Bengal a site of hidden horrors, Delhi a city of mobs and mass hysteria. Women were abducted, raped, forcibly converted, or abandoned by their families in acts of “honour” killings. Children orphaned and disappeared. The elderly were butchered. Neighbours who had shared meals for generations turned on each other with axes and fire. Homes burned to cinders. India and Pakistan were born not in parliament halls but in the screams of trains arriving full of corpses. 

What made it worse was the vacuum of responsibility. British troops, still stationed in large numbers, were ordered not to intervene. Indian and Pakistani governments were too new and too fragile to respond meaningfully. The violence was seen not as a policy failure but as collateral damage.

Pakistan: a Moral Community That Never Came 

The vision that animated Pakistan’s creation, of a safe, just, and spiritually grounded Muslim society, was betrayed almost immediately. Jinnah died in 1948, just a year after the country’s establishment. The nation he left behind had no constitution, no agreed-upon Islamic framework, and no roadmap. In 1949, the Objectives Resolution declared that sovereignty belonged to Allah, but in practice, power rested in the hands of bureaucrats, generals, and feudal landlords. 

Pakistan was meant to be a moral community, not just a political territory. But no revolution came. The state retained the very colonial structures it had supposedly escaped. The civil service, judiciary, and police — all were carbon copies of their British predecessors. The zamindars remained, and the class divide widened. 

As Iqbal feared: 

“Nations are born in the hearts of poets; they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.” 

Instead of becoming an incubator for Islamic ethics, Pakistan became a security state locked in permanent crisis. Islam was invoked but never implemented. Its use became cynical, a tool for legitimacy rather than justice. 

“Indeed, Allah commands you to render trusts to whom they are due and when you judge between people to judge with justice.” – Qur’ān 4:58 

Justice (not slogans, not symbols) is the divine condition, the divine prerequisite for moral leadership. And it was absent at the inception. 

In 1958, General Ayub Khan led the first military coup, formalising the army’s role in politics. Under successive regimes – especially General Zia-ul-Haq’s in the 1980s, Islam was invoked as a tool of state control. Zia’s so-called “Islamisation” project introduced the Hudood Ordinances and expanded the blasphemy laws, leading to a culture of fear, state-sanctioned misogyny, and sectarian division. 

Pakistan became what Iqbal had feared: a state without a soul, invoking Islam but refusing to implement its core ethos – justice, accountability, compassion. 

And nowhere is this more visible than in the state’s relationship with women. Despite being founded in the name of a religion that gave women unprecedented dignity and protection in the 7th century, Pakistan, under its veneer of Islamic rhetoric, has repeatedly failed to protect women from the violence inflicted on them in the name of “honour.” 

Every year, hundreds of women in Pakistan are murdered by fathers, brothers, husbands – men who claim that their family’s “honour” has been violated. The reasons vary: marrying someone of their choosing, seeking divorce, posting a picture, laughing too loudly, or refusing a proposal. The logic is always the same: that a woman’s body is not her own, but a vessel for male pride. For decades, the law sided with the murderer. Under the Qisas and Diyat laws, passed in the 1990s, families could forgive the killer – a loophole easily exploited in cases where the perpetrator and the “forgiver” were from the same household. A brother could kill his sister and walk free after being pardoned by their father. And the courts would call it closure. 

The state did not just allow this; it facilitated it. Clerics stayed silent, politicians offered condolences instead of reform, and the media called these killings “crimes of passion” rather than acts of gendered terror. Even now, after partial legal reforms, enforcement is weak, convictions are rare, and the culture of impunity remains intact, especially in rural areas where tribal codes carry more weight than constitutional ones. There is no moral community where women are murdered and forgotten. There is no Islamic republic where justice is negotiable. 

Pakistan dressed the state in religious vocabulary. But it inherited the soul of empire – hierarchy, violence, and control. 

India: Secularism With a Nationalist Shadow 

India emerged from the same womb of violence, claiming to be the secular antidote to Pakistan’s religious identity. And for a time, it upheld that vision: a constitution that protected minority rights, a leadership committed to pluralism, and institutions that sought to buffer majoritarian impulses. 

However, that secularism was always fragile, built on an elite consensus rather than grassroots conviction. 

The Hindu right, though marginal in 1947, fed on post-partition resentment. Muslims who remained were cast as suspect citizens – burdened with guilt by association. Today, that suspicion has metastasised into policy: lynch mobs, discriminatory laws, and open calls for genocide. India’s claim to be a secular democracy is cracking under the weight of its contradictions. 

The RSS, which had once been banned after Gandhi’s assassination, rebuilt itself slowly and steadily. By the 1990s, its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), began making electoral gains. In 1992, the demolition of the Babri Masjid shattered any illusion that secularism was inviolable. The 2002 Gujarat pogrom, under the watch of then-Chief Minister Narendra Modi, marked a new era. 

Today, under Modi’s leadership, India has embraced a muscular, openly hostile Hindu nationalism. Muslims are lynched over beef rumours, stripped of citizenship through discriminatory laws, and brutalised in open daylight. Kashmir’s special status was revoked in 2019, solidifying the occupied region into a militarised garrison. Students, journalists, and activists who speak out are jailed or silenced. India’s secular spine has been snapped. Partition did not solve the Hindu-Muslim question. It became the fuel for new cycles of hate, scattering it across multiple battlefields. 

Shared Ghosts, Separate Graves 

The subcontinent is not just a graveyard of history. It is a graveyard of truth. 

And nowhere is that clearer than in Kashmir – the unfinished wound of Partition, the promise never kept, the homeland choked between two flags. In the official narratives of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is a symbol; a possession, a claim. In reality, it is people whose voices have been silenced, whose futures have been hijacked, and whose suffering has been instrumentalised by both sides of a border they never drew. 

India’s occupation is more explicit: Armed, visible in every street of Srinagar, every school turned bunker, every checkpoint. Since 1947 – and especially after 1989, when armed resistance escalated- India has governed Kashmir not through democracy, but through domination. Hundreds of thousands of troops, laws like AFSPA that grant soldiers the right to kill with impunity, mass graves, rape as a weapon, enforced disappearances, the systematic crushing of dissent; and in 2019, the final insult: the unilateral abrogation of Article 370, stripping Kashmir of even its nominal autonomy, and beginning a settler-colonial project that aims to dilute its demography under the language of “integration.” 

But Pakistan’s occupation is quieter, dressed in the language of brotherhood but just as hollow. Pakistan calls it Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir), but it’s anything but. Gilgit-Baltistan remains politically marginalised, denied provincial status or constitutional rights. “Azad” Kashmir is ruled by proxy, not through the will of its people, but through the control of the Pakistani army and intelligence agencies. Those who call for genuine independence, those who say “no” to both India and Pakistan, are harassed, jailed, and disappeared. The region’s economic underdevelopment is not accidental; it’s strategic. Poverty makes resistance harder to sustain. 

Both states, in their ways, have betrayed Kashmir; one with the barrel of a gun, the other with the muzzle of soft imperialism. Neither wants to hear what most Kashmiris wish to, which is not accession to either, but azadi in the truest sense: the right to live, speak, worship, mourn, and build without subjugation. 

Meanwhile, the trauma of 1947 still breathes. There are other ghosts, too. In Panjab, in the memory of women who never returned, in the stories survivors never told their children, in the silence of school curricula that treat Partition like a side note instead of the foundational trauma that shaped everything that followed. 

“Aj aakhaan Waris Shah nu…” 

“Today, I call out to Waris Shah.” 

— Amrita Pritam 

Amrita here is referring to the violent fracturing of Panjab during Partition, when blood flowed in the land of the five rivers. It’s not just a lament, it’s a summoning of the dead to make sense of a living nightmare. A cry across time asking if the poet who once chronicled love can now record the death of a culture, the screams of women, the tearing of land and souls. 

We have never answered her because to do so would force us to reckon, it would require confronting not just what was lost in 1947 – but what continues to be stolen now, every day, every hour, under both flags.

To Bury or To Remember? 

Iqbal once dreamed of a Muslim world that transcended borders, that rooted itself in ethical action and divine accountability:

“Be aware of your own worth; use all of your power to achieve it. Create an ocean from a dewdrop. Do not beg for light from the moon; obtain it from the spark within you.” 

But Pakistan and India alike have become beggars – not of light, but of vengeance, validation, and victory. Both have failed their promises. Every August, flags are raised, speeches are made, and borders are policed. But what exactly are they commemorating? 

Pakistan, 77 years later, is trapped between militarism and messianism, invoking Islam while abandoning its moral architecture. India, meanwhile, has become a secular republic in name only, increasingly consumed by majoritarian rule. And the British? They left behind medals, memoirs, and museums, but no apology, no reparations, no recognition of the fire they lit and then walked away from. 

“Do not mix the truth with falsehood, or conceal the truth while you know it.” — Qur’ān 2:42 

The truth is this: The British engineered this cataclysm, Pakistan never truly became the moral community it promised, and India’s secularism is cracking under the weight of its own demons. For those who call this subcontinent, the wounds of 1947 are not relics – they are living, festering, and still bleeding. To honour Pakistan Day or mourn Partition without speaking these truths is selective amnesia, and the question is not whether to move on; it is whether we will ever remember rightly and, if we do, whether we will have the courage to change what that memory demands of us.

Mar Yousuf K. is a writer exploring how politics and faith shape life in Occupied Kashmir and beyond, with contributions to local publications and community platforms.