How Ethnic Conflict Shaped The Capital Of India

You wouldn’t know it from visiting contemporary Delhi, but not all that long ago, the city was a seething cauldron of interconfessional conflict.

Indeed, during a short trip to the magnificent city a few years ago, we toured the Qutub Minar, Lotus Temple, and Akshardham Mandir in a single day, followed shortly thereafter by Gurudwara Bangla Sahib, thus covering majestic religious sites of extraordinary importance to, respectively, the Muslim, Baha’i, Hindu, and Sikh faiths, all within a short distance of one another. Peace and coexistence appeared to reign supreme among so-called dilliwalas.

But it wasn’t always thus. In “Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital,” Hebrew University’s Rotem Geva supplies a concise, perceptive history of “how the twin events of partition and independence remade Delhi.” It’s a city that has always straddled the fault line of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh civilizations that shuddered horrifically as religious violence convulsed its mosques, temples, and bazaars both before and after the cataclysmic events of 1947.

Geva critically reexamines the regnant accounts of the origins of Delhi’s denominational strife, ultimately identifying various confounding factors that hadn’t previously been fully considered. He sets out to trace “how two nation-states — India and Pakistan — became increasingly territorialized in the imagination and practice of Delhi’s residents, how violence and displacement were central to this process, and how tensions over belonging and citizenship lingered in the city and the nation.”

“Delhi Reborn” also plumbs the depths of the aftermath of independence, aiming to chronicle “the post-1947 struggle, between the urge to democratize political life in the new republic and the authoritarian legacy of colonial rule, augmented by the imperative to maintain law and order in the face of the partition crisis.”

A key driver of the 1947 violence can be found in the mismatch between communal expectations and hard reality, especially when it came to establishing the Muslim territory that would one day become Pakistan.

The Lahore Resolution, enacted by the All India Muslim League in 1940, demanded that:

geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.

However, the resolution nowhere used the terms “partition” or even “Pakistan,” nor did it delineate specific territorial boundaries or explicate the nature of autonomous “states” within a common country. As Geva puts it, the various proposals “convey a fluid, flexible, and open-ended political-territorial imagination rather than a rigid model of a nation-state with full sovereignty” or any kind of “precise overlap between religious-ethnic composition and territory.”

Indeed, geographic continuity for a would-be Muslim entity was all but impossible, given the vast distance between the mostly-Muslim lands in the west and those in Bengal (this gap would later become embodied by West and East Pakistan, which, following a brutal