Meanwhile, the Muslim League had awoken from a long slumber. After years of inactivity crowned by political success (since the British government tended to grant the League’s princely leaders everything they asked for, and in the Communal Award actually exceeded the League’s own requests) the party’s grandees began to take note with concern of the mass mobilization led by the Congress. In response, they invited Jinnah back from his long self-exile in London and made him “permanent president” of the League in April 1936.
The British government was not averse to this development. As early as 1888, the Congress’s founder, Allan Octavian Hume, felt obliged to denounce British attempts to promote Hindu-Muslim division by fostering “the devil’s doctrine of discord and disunion.” The strategy was hardly surprising for an imperial power. “Divide et impera was the old Roman motto,” wrote Lord
Elphinstone after the 1857 Mutiny, “and it should be ours.” Promoting communal discord became conscious British policy. In December 1887 — at a time when the Congress’s first Muslim president, Badruddin Tyabji, was striving to unite Hindus and Muslims in a common cause — the pro-British judge and Muslim educationist Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was arguing in a speech in Lucknow that the departure of the British would inevitably lead to civil war. The numerical advantage of Hindus over Muslims, he argued, would give them unfair advantage in a democratic India; imperial rule by the Christian British, fellow “people of the book,” was therefore preferable. In 1906, a deputation of Muslim notables led by the Aga Khan and seeking separate privileges for Muslims was received by the British viceroy, and the Muslim League was born.
But in its thirty years of existence, the League had failed to become a potent force in national politics. Jinnah formulated an effective strategy to raise the League to political prominence as the “third party” in a struggle involving the British and the Congress. He argued that he too was an Indian nationalist who sought greater rights from the British, but he aimed to achieve these by constitutional means, while protecting the interests of the Muslim community. In his public speeches he portrayed the Congress as a Hindu-dominated party whose triumph would threaten the religious identity of Indian Muslims and displace their preferred language, Urdu. More privately, he was not averse to suggesting to the League’s affluent patrons that Jawaharlal Nehru’s dangerous socialism was a threat to the economic interests of the Muslim landed and commercial elites. Nehru bridled at what he saw as Jinnah’s pretensions, challenging the representativeness of the League’s leadership: “I come into greater touch with the Muslim masses,” he declared acidly, “than most of the members of the Muslim League.” Asserting the Congress’s claim to speak for all Indians of whatever faith, he rejected the notion that the League (a “drawing-room party”) had any valid place: “There are only two forces in the country, the Congress and the Government. Those who are standing midway shall have to choose between the two.”
Jawaharlal’s contempt was based both on his distaste for communal bigotry (he often condemned the Hindu Mahasabha, the principal political vehicle of Hindu chauvinism, in the same breath) and his political judgment. The latter was borne out by the 1937 election results. Under the British provisions for separate communal electorates, 7,319,445 votes were cast by Muslim voters for Muslim candidates; only 4.4 percent of these, 321,772, went to the Muslim League. In other words, the League had been overwhelmingly repudiated by the very community in whose name it claimed to speak. Instead Muslim voters had voted for a wide variety of other parties, from the landholding Unionists in the Punjab to a peasants and tenants’ party in Bengal, and even for the Congress, which foolishly had run very few Muslim candidates (it put up 58 candidates in the 482 seats reserved for Muslims and won 26 of those races). Victorious Muslim politicians were more interested in securing power in their provinces than in supporting Jinnah’s advocacy of a pan-Indian Muslim identity.
In mid-1937, therefore, the League was not a serious threat to Congress ascendancy. Defeated in his wish to keep his party out of British-supervised ministerial office (under a Constitution that did not even grant Dominion status, let alone independence), Jawaharlal stayed president of the Congress but went into the political equivalent of a sulk. He was in fact away on a tour of Burma and Malaya when the decision to accept office was taken by his colleagues. He refused to serve on the Congress Parliamentary Board which was set up to give party guidance to the provincial ministries. Yet he became caught up in one of the most controversial episodes of his political career — the failure of the Congress to accept the offer of the Muslim League to form a coalition government in Jawaharlal’s own province, U.P.
The League had won twenty-seven of the sixty-four Muslim seats in the U.P. legislature; the Congress, which had only run nine Muslim candidates, had won none, but it had enjoyed overwhelming success in the “general” seats (those not reserved for any particular community) and, with a majority in the legislature as a whole, was in a position to form a ministry on its own. As party president, Nehru initiated a “mass contact” program for Congress workers with the Muslim population, in order to bring more of them into the nationalist movement. The League saw this as a threat; its political success depended on its being able to credibly claim that it was the sole spokesman for India’s Muslims. The two visions were clearly incompatible, yet the League began negotiating with the Congress to form a joint government in which the League would nominate two Muslim ministers. The lead Congress negotiator was a Muslim, Maulana Azad; the lead League negotiator was Chaudhuri Khaliquzzaman, formerly a close friend of Jawaharlal’s who had often enjoyed his hospitality, staying at Anand Bhavan whenever he visited Allahabad. The two negotiators came close to an agreement. The League was even willing to merge its identity in the provincial legislature with that of the Congress, but the deal finally foundered on the League’s insistence that its legislators would be free to vote differently on “communal issues.”
This could never be acceptable to Nehru. Jawaharlal saw the communal card as rank political opportunism. In a passionate letter to his old friend Khaliquzzaman, he asked: “Why should I accept it [the League] as the representatives of the Muslims of India when I know it represents [only] the handful of Muslims at the top who deliberately seek refuge in the name of religion to avoid discussing mass problems?” The Congress of Jawaharlal Nehru was committed to land reform; the League was in thrall to big Muslim landowners. Jawaharlal was also conscious that, as his Muslim colleague Abdul Walli wrote to him, “once the Congress enters into a pact with the Muslim League it loses the right to ask the Muslims to join it.” Jawaharlal believed at the very core of his being that the nationalist movement had to be a movement of the masses, animated by political and economic considerations, not religious ones. In his Autobiography, he had already written of being “troubled … at the growth of this religious element in our politics, both on the Hindu and Muslim side”:
I did not like it at all. Much that Moulvies and Maulanas and Swamis and the like said in their public addresses seemed to me unfortunate. Their history and sociology and economics appeared to me all wrong, and the religious twist that was given to everything prevented all clear thinking. Even some of Gandhiji’s phrases sometimes jarred upon me — thus his frequent reference to Ram Raj as a golden age which was to return.
It is telling that Jawaharlal denounced the use of religious imagery in politics quite impartially, even reproaching the Mahatma for evoking Hindu mythology in painting a vision of post-British India. To Jinnah’s communal politics Jawaharlal opposed his secular and rationalist beliefs; there would be no question of allowing the Congress to become the party of any one community. From such a perspective, giving the Muslim League the respectability of holding ministerial office in U.P. as the representative of the province’s Muslims stuck in Jawaharlal’s craw.
Some — most notably Maulana Azad himself, in his posthumous memoir — have suggested that Jawaharlal’s implacable opposition scuttled a possible deal and set the seal on the wid
ening divergence between the parties that would ultimately culminate in the partition of India. There is no doubt that Jawaharlal was not in favor of a deal with the Muslim League, but the negotiations appear to have collapsed because of the intractability of the conditions posed by both sides, rather than solely because of his opposition to them. In any case, other political developments at the time do not suggest that this episode deserves to be given quite so much weight in the history of the freedom struggle. Strikingly, a Muslim League legislator in U.P., Hafiz Ibrahim, resigned from his party and ran again for his own seat as a Congress candidate. Despite virulent opposition from the League, Ibrahim was elected, giving the Congress an elected “Muslim” seat in the provincial assembly. The Congress also formed the government in the overwhelmingly Muslim North-West Frontier Province, where the “Frontier Gandhi,” Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, had led his red-shirted nonviolent Khudai Khidmatgars (“Servants of God”) into the party. At that stage Jawaharlal’s (and the Congress’s) claim to speak for Indians of all communities, and his refusal to concede the Muslims of India to the League, remained entirely tenable.
In July 1937 Jinnah issued a statement deploring the Congress’s “mass contact” policy with Muslims: “There is plenty of scope for Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to improve his own people, the Hindus,” he declared. Nehru replied immediately: “Not being religiously or communally inclined, I venture to think of my people as the Indian people as a whole.” Two months earlier he had confessed to the press: “Personally I find it difficult to think of any question on communal lines. I think on political and economic lines.” In those fundamentally irreconcilable attitudes lay the seeds of a divide that would, over the next decade, tear the country apart.
6
“In the Name of God, Go!”:
1937–1945
To the surprise of both their supporters and their critics, the Congress ministries in the provinces conducted themselves as able stewards of the governmental system of the British Raj. For the most part they did little to dismantle oppressive British laws, and in some cases proved as zealous in arresting radicals as the British themselves had been. The delighted governor of Madras, Lord Erskine, commented privately that his Congress chief minister, the conservative C. Rajagopalachari, was “even too much of a Tory for me.” In the exuberance of their first crack at governance, some Congress ministries failed to pay sufficient heed to Muslim sensibilities in their appointments, regulations, or promotion of nationalist (often Hindu) symbols. Jawaharlal observed all this with dismay; having already objected to his party’s assumption of office, he was distressed by his colleagues’ willingness to serve the colonial system in a manner that was antithetical to the Congress’s declared policies and principles. Yet, typically, he put party loyalty above private conviction (“we cannot agitate against ourselves”) and spoke in defense of the Congress ministries in public, leading his radical supporters to write him off as a “parlor socialist” incapable of leading genuine revolutionary change. His presidency ended in the proverbial whimper, with his rival Subhas Chandra Bose’s election to office for 1938.
Increasingly disenchanted with the compromises he saw his party making domestically, Jawaharlal — pausing only to establish a pro-Congress newspaper in Lucknow, the National Herald — turned his attention to world affairs, in particular the civil wars then raging in Spain and China, as well as the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. He organized demonstrations against Mussolini, a boycott of Japanese goods (over that country’s conduct in China), a China relief fund, and a medical unit to serve there. When his mother passed away, after a long illness, in January 1938, and since his daughter, Indira, was studying at Oxford, Jawaharlal decided to travel to Europe. This time there were no government-imposed restrictions on his activities, and he pursued an openly political agenda, meeting with Egyptian nationalists in Alexandria before traveling overland to Spain as a guest of the Republican government. He spent five days in Barcelona, braving Franco’s air raids, and felt strongly tempted to join the International Brigades battling fascism there.6 He tried to arrange for the settlement of European Jewish refugees in India, despite stringent conditions imposed by the British authorities. In England, buoyed by the increased stature that had followed the success of his Autobiography, he addressed public meetings at Trafalgar Square and at the Royal Albert Hall, lunched with editors, journalists, and members of Parliament, and even met the new viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, who had succeeded Willingdon in 1936 and was then on holiday in Britain. At this meeting he declared to the nonplussed viceroy that he “gave England at the outside ten years before India [became] independent.”
The same spirit revealed itself in a fiery address to an international conference in Paris on the bombing of civilians, followed by two days in Munich (where he refused to meet with Nazi officials despite the German government’s entreaties) and an emotional visit to Czechoslovakia on the verge of its surrender to German might and Anglo-French complicity. Nehru was in Geneva when the League of Nations met to discuss the Czech crisis, then in London again at the height of the appeasement drama (where amid the general panic he was outfitted with a gas mask). His views were clear and uncompromising; he was hostile both to British imperialism and to European fascism, and he would place India firmly on the side of democracy in the inevitable conflict, provided the British proved their democratic credentials by granting freedom to India first. Sickened by Chamberlain’s sellout at Munich and unable to obtain a Russian visa for a planned overland return home through Central Asia, Jawaharlal arrived home at the end of 1938, ready again for domestic politics.
The situation at home was hardly more encouraging than the dire circumstances abroad. Jinnah had proved a skilled leader of the League, making up for its defeat in the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal by in effect co-opting the victorious leaders there onto the League platform. The Congress itself was riven by infighting. Its acceptance of office had both alienated its left wing and made it vulnerable to wholly specious charges of imposing “Hindu majority rule” on the Muslim minority. Subhas Bose had not proved a successful leader as president; more to the point, he fell out with Mahatma Gandhi. When Bose ran for reelection in early 1939, Gandhi openly encouraged a more conservative candidate to challenge him. Bose’s subsequent victory was seen by the Mahatma himself as Gandhi’s defeat. But the ambitious and hotheaded Bose went further, trying to force the old guard out and assert his dominance over the party. The Mahatma, who was as shrewd as he was saintly, orchestrated a revolt against Bose in the Working Committee that forced Bose’s resignation from the presidency.
Jawaharlal had little patience for Bose and his ways, but could not bring himself to approve of the defenestration of the party’s elected president. As a result he came across as ambivalent on the divisions within the party, with Bose in particular accusing him of betrayal and of siding with the conservatives. Jawaharlal’s sympathies were hardly with the Congress’s right wing, but he was swayed by his admiration for Gandhi and his distaste for what he saw as Bose’s dangerous flirtations with fascism and his political inconsistencies. Nor did he appreciate Bose’s provoking the party into a split when the international situation called for unity at home. So, though he did not join the organized revolt against Bose, he separately resigned from Bose’s Working Committee. Some cynics saw him as merely seeking to emerge on the winning side; and his rupture with Bose over the episode was to be permanent. (“Quite a remarkable feat,” Jawaharlal mused, “to displease almost everybody concerned.”)
As war clouds gathered over Europe in 1939, Jawaharlal Nehru’s focus at home was on two domestic issues: the battle for civil liberties in the “princely states” (ruled nominally by maharajahs and nawabs under British tutelage, but therefore out of the reach of normal Indian politics) and the task of long-term national economic planning. He served as president of the All-India States People’s Conference and as chairman of the National Planning Committee set up by ministers of industry of the Congress-ruled p
rovinces. In both cases his contributions were vital: he hammered the first nails into the coffin of monarchical rule in India (whose collapse was made inevitable by Nehru’s efforts to organize resistance in what was called the “States’ Congress”) and the first pegs into the wall on which the trappings of Indian socialism would eventually be hung.
Meanwhile, the shadow of what would be known as the Second World War was looming. As early as 1927, in moving a resolution on the international situation at the Madras Congress, Jawaharlal had foreseen the prospect of another major war in Europe. His view was that India should stay out of any such conflict until she had obtained her freedom from the imperialists who would seek to exploit her. But his abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly lead a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and not imposed upon them by the British. When Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest — precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years. Yet it would have found allies in the anti-Fascist Congress governments in the provinces and among Congress legislators in the Central Assembly. Gandhi and Rajagopalachari were effusive in their immediate professions of support to Britain in her hour of peril. Lord Linlithgow, however, did not so much as make a pretense of consulting India’s elected leaders before declaring war on Germany on behalf of India.
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