Where funds can be transferred, often undeclared and undetected, so can ideas. Through social networks, blogs and SMS, and through the distribution of CDs, DVDs and print, the diaspora exerts an influence on opinion in South Asia that is commensurate with its hefty financial donations. For the bonds of kinship and community, however attenuated, still apply. The status of diasporic families in the land of their settlement often depends on the approval of their caste or community back home; so do their chances of extending their family landholdings in South Asia and of securing suitable brides. By supporting communal interests and disseminating exclusionist views, the diaspora validates both itself and its affiliates in South Asia. Diasporic endorsement of, say, the 1992 demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque emboldened the zealots responsible and lent a veneer of international respectability to the interminable debate that followed.
Activists sustained by diasporic support are carried along on the ebb and flow of migration. A.Z. Phizo, for many years the charismatic leader of the Naga National Council, directed operations almost entirely from the safety of a UK residence. So did, and do, the leaderships of the MQM (representing the voluble muhajir community in southern Pakistan), of the Sikh separatist Khalistan movement, the Kashmir ‘government-in-exile’ and the Baloch separatists of Pakistan’s western extremity. They are in good company. At one time or another sanctuary in the West has been the choice of many of Pakistan’s and Bangladesh’s political leaders, including several Bhuttos. A host of lesser dissidents at odds with the regimes of South Asia also avails itself of the immunity of exile. And in the opposite direction come diasporic ‘tourists’, sometimes with misguided convictions and terrorist assignments.
The globalisation of protest is not a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon. Worldwide, the first to blow up a jumbo jet in mid-flight were not Palestinian activists but members of a Sikh separatist group; they then took the life of an Indian prime minister. Tamils took the life of the next prime minister, and made suicide bombing their speciality. Earlier it had been a Hindu supremacist who gunned down Mahatma Gandhi. More recently Indian Maoist (‘Naxalite’) revolutionaries have blown up nearly as many policemen as the Pakistan Taliban.
In what follows, the notice taken of the influence and agency of the diaspora may seem disproportionate. It can, for instance, hardly compare with the death and dislocation that were directly occasioned by Partition, nor with the decades of mutual hostility and misery inflicted by the unending strife over Kashmir. The story of post-colonial South Asia is seldom inspirational. Among Midnight’s Descendants the body count of those who have succumbed to wars, civil strife, natural disasters and unalleviated poverty has yet to be exceeded by the number of those so enriched as to qualify as ‘middle-class’.
Other regional commonalities are more striking. For the first decade and a half after Partition, both India and Pakistan concentrated on nation-building. Constitutions were drafted, dissent confronted and sovereignty asserted. India absorbed its princely states, snapped up the colonial enclaves of Pondicherry and Goa, ‘smashed and grabbed’ the kingdom of Sikkim and received a bloody nose from the Chinese in the Himalayas. In like manner Pakistan cowed its separatists in Balochistan, wrestled with dissent in East Bengal and in the North-West Frontier Province’s Tribal Areas, and snapped up what it could of Jammu and Kashmir state.
This nation-building phase was followed in the 1970s by a wave of rank populism. Indira Gandhi in India, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan and Mujibur Rahman in Bangladesh chalked up massive electoral victories. With the exception of Nepal, all of South Asia basked under democratic rule. But it was short-lived. Economic woes and popular adulation tempted all three leaders into autocratic ways, which were then emphatically rejected. Mrs Gandhi was toppled by the electorate that had empowered her, Bhutto and Mujib were overthrown and eliminated by the military. A people-powered era subsided into one of edgy accommodation in which confessional values thrived.
The 1980s marked the rise of the religious right. Pakistan and Bangladesh, each under a General Zia, warmed to their Islamic brethren in the Gulf and conciliated Islamic opinion at home. For Pakistan, ‘liberating’ Kashmir still topped the agenda, but the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ensured sympathy, support and a steady militarisation of Islamic sentiment. In India, on the other hand, it was among ‘right-wing’ Hindu and Sikh parties that zealotry prospered. A series of devotional spectaculars saw the ‘Hindu nationalist’ Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) garnering ever more support. To meet this long-term challenge, the Nehru–Gandhi Congress tarnished its own secular credentials and paid a heavy price. Sikhs, Assamese, Sri Lankans and Kashmiris were fatally antagonised. Two Gandhis were assassinated.
On this fraught scenario dawned the era of globalisation in the 1990s. India, and to a lesser extent all the other countries of South Asia, have undoubtedly benefited. Democracy has been given a second chance in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. Pluralist politics and coalition governments have become the norm in India. Despite glaring examples of neglect in educational and health provision, living standards are rising. But these economic and political dividends have been offset by a challenging level of expectation, appalling examples of corruption and little in the way of normalised state-to-state relations. The globalisation of protest, militancy and criminality has yet to be successfully addressed by any South Asian state.
There are, of course, other ways of periodising the post-Partition era. It could, for instance, be characterised in international terms. The first generation of Midnight’s Descendants were born in awe of British rule. The second looked to Moscow or Washington (or both), and the third looks increasingly to Beijing. In varying degrees Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bangladesh now see China as their best safeguard against India’s perceived ‘bullying’, otherwise its regional hegemonism. India is more ambivalent. Respect for the post-Mao achievements of the People’s Republic is there tempered with suspicion of China’s authoritarianism and apprehension over its intentions along the Himalayan frontier and in the Indian Ocean.
To many Indians, China is the superpower that India might have become but for Partition. When in the late 1940s South Asians were opting for the division of their subcontinent, China’s leadership brusquely demolished the divisions within its own subcontinent. Manchuria and Tibet were reclaimed, central Asian borders reaffirmed, Hong Kong put on notice and Taiwan’s defection vigorously contested. The indivisible nature of the People’s Republic has since come to be seen as one of its strengths, while the fissiparous nature of South Asia’s republics remains their greatest weakness. Yet Partition, by sundering the region and dictating so much of what followed, lends to their story an essential cohesion of its own. United in ferment, Midnight’s Descendants have no difficulty with such contradictions. And of all these paradoxes, not the least – and a good place to begin – is surely the most easily forgotten: that given cooler heads and a bit more time, Partition might well have been avoided altogether.
In the early afternoon of 24 March 1946 three members of the British Cabinet, plus their staff, were driven from Delhi’s makeshift airport to the monumental residence built for the Viceroy of what was still British