The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State TAHIR HASNAIN NAQVI 1 Abstract This article examines how official representations of the violence and displacement of Partition organized the sovereign power of the post-independence Pakistani state. It addresses how Partition’s chain of violence and displacement engendered the state as an entity capable of wielding the sovereign power to decide on life and death. Crucial to this process were practices of knowledge and power in which the refugee was produced ambivalently, as a figure of right and a biopolitical problem in need of resolution. Focusing on Pakistan’s official response to the “refugee problem”, I analyze how the management of the potential and actual movement of populations relied upon, and informed implicit logics of official com- mensuration with the communal violence of the mass. ***** As long as the state of exception and the normal situation are kept in separate space and time, as is usually the case, both remain opaque, though they secretly institute each other. But as soon as they show their complicity, as happens more often today, they illuminate each other, so to speak, from the inside. – Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz Introduction The Partition of India occurred at the cusp of the great interwar refugee movements in Europe. It initiated the era of decolonization but mired the independence of India and Pakistan in the ether of communal genocide and mass displacement. In the months pre- ceding independence, political elites and party workers from the All India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress prepared their constituencies for the eventual division of the provinces Punjab and Bengal. However, as the scale of communal violence took on genocidal proportions nationalist leaders in both countries assumed the tenuous position of neutral official arbiter by insisting the persecution of communal minorities was out of step with the ideological and moral purpose of nationalism. Judging from official reports and statements, it appears the leadership of the All India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress did not anticipate 2 the scale of Partition’s genocidal chain of violence (Brass 2003). One may argue that despite their history of antagonism, as agents of the “post-partition national order” (Zamindar 2003), the League and Congress shared a per- Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 20 No. 1/2 March/June 2007 ISSN 0952-1909 © 2007 The Author. Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.