British India was not a Nation-State

I am just briefly highlighting Calvin’s excellent comment on BB’s thread.

Calvin writes:

Also there was no country or state called British India, it was a part of the British Empire like British Australia or British Kenya. Resting a lot of the system the British developed does not make us a continuation.

Over the last year, I have consistently made the point that there was no nation-state of “India” prior to August 15, 1947. Thus, the Indian and Pakistani nation-states were created at the exact same time.  The argument that India was always there while Pakistan is a made-up entity is a common Indian nationalist trope and is basically just a way of de-legitimizing Pakistan.

This position has gotten me in a lot of trouble on this forum but I stand by it intellectually.  Presumably, now that this same argument has been made by a non-Pakistani and a non-Muslim, it will get a fairer hearing.

Of course, the fact that there was no such thing as an Indian nation-state doesn’t mean there was no sense of a geographic entity called “India”. That has never been my argument.  Prior to British India, there was the Mughal Empire etc.  Most of these geographical entities included what is now Pakistan. It is just a fact that for most of history the land that is now Pakistan has been part of Delhi-based empires. As a Pakistani, I’m absolutely fine with that.   However, it is also true that it was the British who created the borders that are commonly taken to be the natural borders of India.  For example, the Mughals never ruled the Northeast or the very southern bits of India.

I have no problem with BB arguing that the Republic of India is the successor state  of British India.  The arguments about the UN seat etc cannot be argued with. I would simply add that, in some ways, Pakistan is also a successor state of British India. For example, Pakistan inherited the Durand Line–the legal border between British India and Afghanistan.

On a related note: I came across this article about South Korea yesterday which discusses how the South is debating what to officially call the North.

The article notes:

South Korea’s constitution declares in Article 3 that “the territory of the Republic of Korea shall consist of the Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands”, while Article 4 enshrines a duty of “peaceful unification”. Critics argue that using the North’s official name contradicts both.

While the obvious difference in the India-Pakistan case is that India accepted the Partition and does not claim Pakistan as part of its territory–other than what it refers to as “Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir”–  the comparison is still instructive since one can argue that Koreans are the same people divided by an artificial line.  Similarly until the fall of the Berlin Wall, East and West Germans were the same people divided by an artificial line.

It is important to note that East and West Germans share the same religion.  As far as I know, North and South Koreans also share the same religion.  In the India-Pakistan case, the problems are compounded by the fact that India is a Hindu-majority state while Pakistan is a Muslim-majority one.  There is certainly no desire on the part of 250 million Pakistanis to be ruled from Delhi.

Lastly, I will note that British India also included Burma.  It is interesting to note that there is no angst about Burma being separated from India. In his book, SD referred to the fact that Burma was not seen as part of the sacred land of “Bharat” while Pakistan obviously was.  There also seems to be comparatively little angst about the fact that Bangladesh exists as a separate entity and didn’t merge with West Bengal in 1971.  So clearly the angst is Pakistan specific.  The “Saffroniate” should introspect about why that is.