Gandhi’s old adversary B.R. Ambedkar had also entered the debate. In an interview with the Associated Press, Ambedkar claimed that ‘the Minorities’ problem will never be solved unless Mr Gandhi and the Congress give up their egoistic and insolent attitude towards persons and parties outside the Congress. Patriotism is not a monopoly of the Congressmen…’ Ambedkar hoped that ‘wisdom and statesmanship will dawn on the Congress in time to prevent India being divided into two parts and Scheduled Classes merging themselves with a powerful and influential Minority’. This was a veiled (or perhaps not so veiled) threat that if his criticisms were not heeded, Ambedkar would enter into a compact with the Muslim League.23
The Muslim League had charged the Congress with oppressing the Muslims in the provinces where they had ruled. Their grievances, real or imaginary, accurate or embellished, had been articulated in a report they had commissioned. Now, in a brilliant tactical move, Jinnah decided to celebrate the resignation of the Congress ministries as a ‘Deliverance Day’ for Muslims. The terminology was intriguing; for, after the Congress demitted office, the powers reverted entirely to the British governor and his senior officials, almost all also British. In Jinnah’s mind, the Muslims of India were far better off being governed by the British than by the Congress.
Jinnah chose to mark 22 December 1939 as ‘Deliverance Day’. It was a Friday, the day Muslims went to pray at the mosque, the day of the week when they would be most likely to come out and support their community.
On 21 December, the viceroy wrote a long letter to the secretary of state. Linlithgow suggested that in the dispute between the Congress and the Muslim League, the government should side with the League. He meaningfully noted that Muslims ‘have made the largest actual and are capable of making one of the largest additional contributions to the war’. The Punjab in particular had provided tens of thousands of Muslim soldiers. Furthermore, after the resignation of their ministries, the prestige and the morale of the Congress was low. Conceding their demand for a Constituent Assembly would, said the viceroy, now ‘immeasurably strengthen’ the Congress, while Muslims would think the British were ‘undependable allies’.
Linlithgow also feared a Constituent Assembly because it might, under the influence of Nehru and even Gandhi, ask for independence rather than Dominion Status. As the viceroy wrote to his superior in London: ‘After all, we framed the constitution as it stands in the Act of 1935 because we thought that was the best way—given the political situation in both countries—of maintaining British influence in India. It is no part of our policy, I take it, to expedite in India constitutional changes for their own sake, or gratuitously to hurry the handing over of controls to Indian hands at any pace faster than that which we regard as best calculated, on a long view, to hold India to the Empire.’24
Linlithgow was clearly delighted that the influence of the Congress seemed to be on the wane. He was an old-fashioned imperialist, determined to concede as little as possible, and this as slowly as possible, to the rising tide of nationalist opinion. Whatever the public proclamations made by British politicians in London, their man in New Delhi was determined to retain the imperial position in India.
The day after the viceroy’s letter was posted to London, the Muslim League celebrated its ‘deliverance’ from Congress rule in the provinces. With the Ali Brothers no longer alive (Mohammad Ali having died in 1931 and Shaukat Ali in 1938), Jinnah was now the unchallenged leader of the Muslim League, and, in his view, of all Muslims in India. Through this countrywide mobilization of Muslims against Congress (mis)rule, Jinnah sought to demonstrate that his claim had substantial foundation.
On ‘Deliverance Day’, Jinnah himself was the lead speaker at a great gathering of Muslims in Bombay’s Mohammed Ali Road. On the podium with Jinnah were his father-in-law the Parsi magnate Sir Dinshaw Petit, and B.R. Ambedkar, whose presence was a coup for the League and its leader. In his speech, Jinnah boasted that for the first time in the history of the Muslim League, all the minorities had gathered on the same platform.
Similar meetings were held in Delhi, Lahore, Lucknow, Shillong, Sylhet, Madras, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Jabalpur, Peshawar and Rangoon—some in mosques, others in parks and gardens. One of the largest gatherings was in Calcutta, where after jumma prayers in mosques a massive crowd gathered in front of the Ochterlony Monument, to hear speeches condemning Congress governments for their ‘tyranny’, ‘oppression’ and ‘failure to safeguard the rights and interests of Moslems and other minorities’.25
Jinnah’s propaganda had a substantial effect. The size of the meetings held on 22 December and their geographical range was impressive—and unprecedented. This, from Gandhi’s point of view, was worrying enough. And there were further complications; as the observance of ‘Deliverance Day’ showed, the League preferred the British rulers to the Congress; and as Linlithgow’s letter to London demonstrated, the British had chosen to side with the League against the Congress.
Watching the developments closely was the Liberal leader V.S. Srinivasa Sastri. Once a great believer in British justice, who had long thought that Dominion Status was preferable to full independence since it would keep the British connection intact, Sastri was now deeply disenchanted with the rulers. He wrote to a British friend that the viceroy and his government were cold-bloodedly aiding ‘the intransigence of the Muslims’. ‘Britain must now placate the Muslims,’ he remarked. ‘The Muslims must therefore put forward impossible claims in order to get some of them recognised and to get the maximum out of the others.’26
VI
Gandhi spent the first weeks of 1940 in Segaon. He read in the papers that Jinnah had met Ambedkar again, had begun talks with the non-Brahmin Justice Party of South India, and might even be meeting V.D. Savarkar, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha. Writing in Harijan, he said he regarded these developments
as thoroughly healthy. Nothing can be better than we should have in the country mainly two parties—Congress or anti-Congress, if the latter expression is preferred. Jinnah Saheb is giving the word ‘minority’ a new and good content. The Congress majority is made up of a combination of caste Hindus, non-caste Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsis and Jews. Therefore it is a majority drawn from all classes, representing a particular body of opinion; and the proposed combination becomes a minority representing another body of opinion. This may any day become a majority by commending itself to the electorate. Such an alignment of parties is a consummation devoutly to be wished. If the Quaid-e-Azam can bring about the combination, not only I but the whole of India will shout with one acclamation: ‘Long Live Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah’. For he will have brought about permanent and living unity for which I am sure the whole nation is thirsting.
Gandhi sent an advance copy of his piece to Jinnah, addressing him (for the first time) as ‘Dear Quaid-e-Azam’ (the Great Leader), since he had heard that he was ‘always called’ that ‘in League circles’. He praised Jinnah’s ‘plan to amalgamate all the parties opposed to the Congress [which] at once gives your movement a national character’. If he succeeded, Gandhi told Jinnah, ‘you will free the country from [the] communal incubus and, in my humble opinion, give a lead to the Muslims and others for which you will deserve the gratitude not only of the Muslims but of all the other communities. I hope that my interpretation is correct. If I am mistaken, you will please correct me.’27
Gandhi was urging Jinnah to focus on the politics of numbers rather than the politics of community. He had in mind Western models of democratic politics, where two national parties competed for office. Labour and Conservative in Britain, or Democratic and Republican in the United States, were parties based on policies and ideologies, not on religion or caste.
Gandhi saw the Congress as being a non-denominational party too. It had, as he was never tired of proclaiming, Muslim and Christian members as well as Hindu ones; Muslim and Parsi presidents as well as Hindu ones. Congressmen who were themselves Hind
us came from different castes. From varied social backgrounds, the members of the Congress were bound together by their party’s manifesto. In Gandhi’s famous formulation of the 1920s, the Congress was a sturdy bed with four legs: those of inter-religious harmony, inter-caste equality, economic self-reliance and non-violence.
Gandhi welcomed the move to build a broad coalition of forces opposed to the Congress. If Jinnah did that, he could construct a non- or trans-denominational alliance, that, at the national level, could challenge (and one day defeat) the non- or trans-denominational Congress, thus bringing India closer to the standard norm of democratic politics in other parts of the world.
Gandhi’s suggestion was well meant. But Jinnah rejected it outright. Replying to Gandhi, he said his talks with Parsis, Scheduled Castes leaders and non-Congress Hindus were ‘partly a case of “adversity bringing strange bedfellows together”, and partly because a common interest may lead Muslims and [other] minorities to combine’. Jinnah stuck to the position that ‘India is not a nation, nor a country. It is a sub-continent composed of nationalities, Hindus and Muslims being the two major nations.’
Gandhi was keen to see Jinnah as more than a Muslim leader. Jinnah, on the other hand, was determined to see Gandhi as a Hindu leader alone. ‘More than any one else,’ he wrote, ‘you happen to be the man today who commands the confidence of Hindu India and are in a position to deliver the goods on their behalf. Is it too much to hope and expect that you might play your legitimate role and abandon your chase after a mirage?’ Gandhi, in Jinnah’s eyes, was the leader exclusively of the Hindus; in which capacity he could, if he so wished, meet and negotiate with Jinnah himself, the leader of the Muslims.28
Jinnah released his letter to the press. Gandhi did likewise with his reply, where he said that the response of the League’s leader ‘dashes to the ground all hope of unity if he represents the Muslim mind’. Jinnah’s ‘picture of India as a continent containing nations according to their religions’, remarked Gandhi, ‘if it is realized, would undo the effort the Congress has been making for over half a century’. Muslims in India, he pointed out, were largely converts from Hinduism or descendants of converts. Just as Englishmen who converted to Islam did not lose their nationality, ‘Muslims of the different provinces [of India] can never cut themselves away from their Hindu or Christian brethren’.29
VII
In the first week of February 1940, Gandhi travelled to Delhi to meet the viceroy. The talks were cordial, but the British were in no mood to make any commitment to Indian independence during or after the Second World War. There was vague talk of granting Dominion Status at some unspecified time, but, as Gandhi pointed out afterwards, the existing dominions such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa were part of an imperial system that privileged one race over others. He thus insisted that ‘India cannot be one of the many Dominions, i.e., partner in the exploitation of the non-European races of the earth….If India is not to be co-sharer in the exploitation of the Africans and the degradation of our own countrymen in the Dominions, she must have her own independent status.’30
From Delhi, Gandhi took a train to Calcutta. His close friend Charlie Andrews was ailing, and the man who brought them together, Rabindranath Tagore, was getting on in years too. From the station, he went straight to the hospital where Andrews was lying, and after a few hours of intense, emotional conversation, carried on to Santiniketan. Approaching his eightieth birthday, Tagore was acutely aware of his own mortality, and Gandhi (who was eight years younger) also sensed that this might be their last meeting.
Gandhi returned to his ashram on 3 March. The name of the village where he had made his home had now changed. It would henceforth be called Sevagram, not Segaon. This was because there was another village named Shegaon, some 130 miles west of Wardha, and the post office wanted to avoid confusion. The new name pleased Gandhi, for it meant the ‘Village of Service’.
On 13 March, at a meeting of the East India Association in London, a Punjabi youth named Udham Singh shot dead Sir Michael O’Dwyer, who had been lieutenant governor of the Punjab during the troubles of 1919. Several other Englishmen were injured, among them Lord Zetland, the secretary of state for India. Hearing the news, Gandhi called it ‘an act of insanity’. Noting that such acts of violence ‘have been proved to be injurious to the causes for which they are committed’, he hoped the murder of O’Dwyer would ‘not be allowed to affect political judgment’, by which he meant the attitude of Britons to India and of India to Britons.31
Gandhi heard of Udham Singh’s murder of O’Dwyer in Ramgarh, in Bihar, where that year’s Congress was being held. In a meeting of the working committee, he said the Constituent Assembly the Congress had asked for would be elected on the widest possible franchise. If this assembly was constituted, ‘we will lay down no conditions for the British Government. The army will remain and so will their administrative machinery.’32 This was a concession to his party, the majority of whose members were not as dogmatically committed to non-violence as he was. What the Congress wanted was concrete steps towards self-government, while recognizing that self-government itself would come only after the war had ended.
Since the early 1930s, after the mass arrests during the Salt March, the Congress session was held in spring rather than in December. This year, 1940, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad had been elected Congress president, in recognition of his services to the party over the decades, but perhaps also as a tactical move to quell the charge—made most consistently by Jinnah—that the Congress was in essence a Hindu party. It had rained heavily the night before the Congress began, and the open-air venue was dense with slush. Volunteers worked hard to restore a semblance of order and cleanliness.
Azad began his presidential address by referring to the weather. The fight for freedom, he said, must continue ‘through rain, flood and storm’. He then referred to the world crisis. ‘India cannot endure the prospect of Nazism and Fascism,’ said Azad, ‘but she is even more tired of British imperialism.’
Britain had refused to recognize India’s claims for independence and justice. Worse, Britain had chosen a cynical policy of divide and rule, seeking to exploit and further Hindu–Muslim differences. Himself a considerable scholar of Islamic texts and theories, Azad saw no contradiction between being both Indian and Muslim at the same time. As he said in Ramgarh:
It was India’s historic destiny that many human races and cultures and religions should flow to her, finding a home in her hospitable soil, and that many a caravan should find rest here….One of the last of these caravans, following the footsteps of its predecessors, was that of the followers of Islam. This came here and settled here for good.
…Full eleven centuries have passed by since then. Islam has now as great a claim on the soil of India as Hinduism….Just as a Hindu can say with pride that he is an Indian and follows Hinduism, so also we can say with equal pride that we are Indians and follow Islam. I shall enlarge this orbit still further. The Indian Christian is equally entitled to say with pride that he is an Indian and is following a religion of India, namely Christianity.
Eleven hundred years of common history have enriched India with our common achievement. Our languages, our poetry, our literature, our culture, our art, our dress, our manners and customs, the innumerable happenings of our daily life, everything bears the stamp of our joint endeavour….
This joint wealth is the heritage of our common nationality, and we do not want to leave it and go back to the times when this joint life had not begun. If there are any Hindus amongst us who desire to bring back the Hindu life of a thousand years ago and more, they dream, and such dreams are vain fantasies. So also if there are any Muslims who wish to revive their past civilization and culture, which they brought a thousand years ago from Iran and Central Asia, they dream also, and the sooner they wake up the better.33
Here was stated, in stirring prose, the thesis of a composite cultu
re, the theory, or belief, that by living together for so long and in such proximity, Hindus and Muslims in the Indian subcontinent had forged bonds so close that manipulative politicians (on either side) could not entirely tear them apart.
Azad’s view of Hindu–Muslim relations was broadly Gandhi’s too. This was a compelling thesis, here outlined in lyrical language. But it would not go unchallenged.
VIII
In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Congress and the Muslim League had met in back-to-back sessions at the same venue. At that time, League members often were Congressmen too. By 1940, however, the two organizations had drifted wide apart. They now usually met in the same month, but in different towns.
In recent years, the Muslim League had steadily grown in strength. Once dominated by nobles and large landlords, under Jinnah’s leadership it had attracted many doctors, lawyers, teachers and traders into its fold. In 1931, when the League held its annual session in Delhi, this was described as ‘a languid and attenuated House of scarcely 120 people in all’. But by the end of the decade, these sessions were attracting tens of thousands of eager and enthusiastic participants.34
The Congress session in Ramgarh ended on 20 March 1940. Two days later, the Muslim League started its annual session in Lahore, the capital of the Punjab. The two sessions were separated marginally by time, more substantially by space—Lahore is some seven hundred miles north-west of Ramgarh—and, most radically, by political agenda.
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