NATIONALISM AND INDEPENDANCE OF INDIA

While the British moved gradually to expand local self-rule along federal lines, British power was increasingly challenged by the rise of indigenous movements advocating a faster pace. A modern Indian nationalism began to grow as a result of the influence of groups like the Arya Samaj, in the last century, of Western culture and education among the elite, and of the Indian National Congress (INC). Founded as an Anglophile debating society in 1885, the INC grew into a movement leading agitation for greater self-rule in the first 30 years of this century. Under the leadership of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (called the Mahatma, or Great Soul) and other nationalist leaders, such as Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, the INC began to attract mass support in the 1930s with the success of its noncooperation campaigns and its advocacy of education, cottage industries, selfhelp, an end to the caste system, and nonviolent struggle. But Muslims had also been politicized, beginning with the abortive partition of Bengal during the period 1905–12. And despite the INC leadership’s commitment to secularism, as the movement evolved under Gandhi, its leadership style appeared—to Muslims—uniquely Hindu, leading Indian Muslims to look to the protection of their interests in the formation of their own organization, the All-India Muslim League (ML). National and provincial elections in the mid-1930s persuaded many Muslims that the power the majority Hindu population could exercise at the ballot box, however secular the INC’s outlook, could leave them as a permanent electoral minority in any single democratic polity that would follow British rule. Sentiment in the Muslim League began to coalesce around the “two nation” theory propounded by the poet Iqbal, who argued that Muslims and Hindus were separate nations and that Muslims required creation of an independent Islamic state for their protection and fulfillment. A prominent Mumbai (formerly Bombay) attorney, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who came to be known as “Quaid-i-Azam” (Great Leader), led the fight for a separate Muslim state to be known as Pakistan, a goal formally endorsed by the ML in Lahore in 1940. Mahatma Gandhi, meanwhile, had broadened his demand in 1929 from self-rule to independence in 1929; in the 1930s, his campaigns of nonviolent noncooperation and civil disobedience electrified the countryside. In 1942, with British fortunes at a new low and the Japanese successful everywhere in Asia, Gandhi rejected a British appeal to postpone further talks on Indian selfrule until the end of World War II. Declining to support the British (and Allied) war effort and demanding immediate British withdrawal from India, he launched a “Quit India” campaign. In retaliation, Gandhi and most of India’s nationalist leaders were jailed. The end of World War II and the British Labor Party’s victory at the polls in 1945 led to renewed negotiations on independence between Britain and the Hindu and Muslim leaders. Jawaharlal Nehru and the INC leadership pressed anew for a single, secular nation in which the rights of all would be guarded by constitutional guarantees and democratic practice. But Jinnah and the Muslim League persevered in their campaign for Pakistan. In mid-August 1947, with Hindu-Muslim tensions rising, British India was divided into the two self-governing dominions of India and Pakistan, the latter created by combining contiguous, Muslim-majority districts in British India, the former consisting of the remainder. Partition occasioned a mass movement of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs who found themselves on the “wrong” side of new international boundaries; as many as 20 million people moved, and up to three million of these were killed in bloodletting on both sides of the new international frontier. Gandhi, who opposed the partition and worked unceasingly for Hindu-Muslim amity, became himself a casualty of heightened communal feeling; he was assassinated by a Hindu extremist five months after Partition. Among the unresolved legacies of Partition was that it did not address the more than 500 princely states with which the British Crown had treaty ties. Most princely rulers chose one or the other dominion on grounds of geography, but the state of Jammu and Kashmir, bordering both new nations, had a real option. A Muslim-majority state with a Hindu maharaja, Kashmir opted first for neither but then chose to join the Indian Union when invaded in 1948 by tribesmen from Pakistan. Quickly, Indian and Pakistani armed forces were engaged in fighting that cut to the heart of the “two-nation” theory and brought the dispute to the fledgling United Nations. A UN cease-fire in 1949 left the state divided, one-third with Pakistan and the rest, including the prized Vale of Kashmir, under Indian control. An agreement to hold an impartial plebiscite broke down when the antagonists could not agree on the terms under which it would be held. While Pakistan administers its portion of the former princely state as Azad (“free”) Kashmir and as the Northern Areas, under a legal fiction that they are separate from Pakistan, the Indian portion is governed as Jammu and Kashmir, a state in the Indian Union. Periodic statewide elections have been held in Jammu and Kashmir, but no plebiscite has been held on the state’s future. In July 2002, the United States announced that it did not support Pakistan’s persistent demand for a plebiscite in Kashmir, a statement welcome to India. The issue has defied all efforts at solution, including two spasms of warfare in 1965 and 1971. In the late 1980s, India’s cancellation of election results and dismissal of the state government led to the start of an armed insurrection by Muslim militants. Indian repression and Pakistan’s tacit support of the militants have threatened to spark renewed warfare and keeps the issue festering. India and China have been at odds about their Himalayan border since the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, leading to clashes between Indian and Chinese troops at a number of locations along the disputed Himalayan border, including remote areas of Ladakh. In 1962, Chinese troops invaded—then withdrew from—Chinese claimed areas along the border, defeating India’s under-equipped and badly led forces. The border dispute with China remains unresolved, although tensions have been eased by a standstill accord signed by the two countries in September 1993.