The Longest August

by Dilip Hiro

Yet Sir Samuel showed sufficient sensitivity toward Gandhi’s sartorial appearance. When King George V and Queen Mary decided to invite all Conference delegates to a tea party at Buckingham Palace, the king said to Sir Samuel, “What? This little man to be in the Palace without proper clothes on, and bare knees!” Summoning his best diplomatic manner, Sir Samuel persuaded the king not to mention dress restrictions on the invitation cards. After the event, when a journalist asked Gandhi if he had had enough clothes on, he replied, “The King had enough on for both of us.”8

  Joking aside, neither Gandhi nor Jinnah was surprised that the conference failed to resolve the communal issue. MacDonald disbanded the assemblage on December 1, saying that the Indian representatives’ failure to reach a communal settlement left his government no option but to make a unilateral decision.

  After Gandhi returned to India empty-handed in late December, the CWC decided to renew the civil disobedience struggle. Over the next few months Gandhi and other party leaders were jailed.

  On August 16, 1932, MacDonald announced the Communal Award. It granted separate electoral rolls and seats to Muslims, Sikhs, Untouchables, Christians, Anglo-Indians, and Europeans. From a communal perspective, Punjab and Bengal mattered most. In Punjab, Sikhs were a substantial minority, and in Bengal, the miniscule European settler community, dating back to the days of the East India Company (1600–1874), loomed large in British eyes. The government in London proved iniquitous in its allocation of communal representation. In Punjab, it gave Muslims, forming 56 percent of the population, 51 percent of the legislative seats; Hindus, including the Untouchables, 30 percent; and Sikhs 19 percent. In Bengal, it awarded Muslims, constituting 54 percent of the population, 48 percent of the seats; Hindus 32 percent, down 12 percent on their actual proportion; and Europeans, forming a puny 1 percent of the total, beefed up tenfold.9

  Congress rejected the Communal Award outright. The Muslim League grumbled, prevaricated, and in January 1935 accepted it “until a substitute is agreed upon by the various communities concerned.”10

  The third Round Table Conference, which opened in London on November 17, 1932, was boycotted by the Congress Party. Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, known popularly as the Aga Khan—the official protégé of the British charged with selecting the Muslim delegates—excluded Jinnah from his list. The attendees were down to forty-six. After scrutinizing and summarizing several reports, they disbanded on Christmas Eve. Their recommendations were incorporated in a white paper published in March 1933. Between then and April 1, 1936, when the Government of India Act 1935 promulgated on August 2 was enforced, there was a succession of momentous events that led to a growing divergence between majority Hindus and minority Muslims.

  Now or Never

  As an accomplished barrister and fabulously rich man in London, Jinnah was admired by Indian expatriates, especially Muslims. In early 1933 he was one of the honored guests at a black-tie dinner party given by the Aga Khan at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in London. At the predinner reception he found himself accosted by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, who pressed on him a pamphlet titled “Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?11 The document included a letter dated January 28, 1933, and addressed to “My Lord,” for his opinion on “the proposed solution of this great Indian problem as explained herein.”

  The author was Rahmat Ali, a tall, powerfully built, thirty-five-year-old bachelor. After graduating from Islamia Madrassa in Lahore and teaching at the prestigious Aitchison College, he had obtained a law degree from Punjab University before moving to Britain in 1930. The next year he enrolled at Emmanuel College in Cambridge.

  In his 2,350-word essay, described as an appeal on behalf of “our 30 million Muslim brethren who live in “PAKSTAN—by which we mean the five Northern units of India, viz.: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan” for “your sympathy and support in our grim and fateful struggle against political crucifixion and complete annihilation.” It excoriated the Muslim delegates at the Round Table Conferences for agreeing to a constitution “based on the principle of an All-India Federation,” which amounted to “nothing less than signing the death-warrant of Islam and its future in India.” Like Muhammad Iqbal, a fellow Punjabi, Rahmat Ali focused on the northwestern zone of India, overlooking the Muslim-majority Bengal in the east.

  Jinnah responded coolly toward Rahmat Ali and his pamphlet. When Ali and his three cosignatories contrived to meet him to gain his backing for “PAKSTAN,” Jinnah replied: “My dear boys, don’t be in a hurry; let the waters flow and they will find their own level.”12

  Nonetheless, a decade later, Jinnah, then called Quaid-i-Azam (Urdu: Great Leader) by his admirers, referred to “some young fellows” in a speech to the Muslim League session of April 1943.

  What is the origin of the word Pakistan? It was not Muslim League or Quaid-i-Azam who coined it. Some young fellows in London, who wanted a particular part of north-west to be separated from the rest of India, coined a name in 1932–1933, started the idea and called the zone Pakistan. . . . A name was coined. Thus, whatever may have been the meaning of this word at the time it is obvious that language of every civilized country invents new words. The word Pakistan has come to mean the [1940] Lahore resolution [of the League].13

  While Jinnah thrived financially and socially in London, Gandhi languished in His Majesty’s Yerwada High Security Jail in Poona (now Pune). On May 1, 1933, troubled by the continuing stories of caste Hindus’ atrocities against the Untouchables, he announced that he would start a twenty-one-day fast a week later as a “heart prayer to God for the purification of myself and my associates for our work to improve the lot of India’s untouchable caste.”14 Despite appeals from his worldwide well-wishers to drop the idea, he stuck to his plan. For him, this was a “Now or Never” moment.

  Nervous about the consequences of his death in one of its jails, the government released him on the second day of his hunger strike. To the relief of his followers and admirers, he survived the fast, during which he continued to edit the Harijan, a weekly he had established a year earlier.

  Following a period of suspension, the civil disobedience campaign came to an official end on April 7, 1934—the year Gandhi discontinued his formal membership of the Congress Party and decided to focus on eradicating untouchability. After touring the country for almost a year to uplift the status of the Untouchables, he settled down in a new ashram at Sevagram (Hindi: Village of Service) near the central Indian town of Wardha. From here he mounted his constructive work designed to turn villages into self-reliant settlements, with small-scale, labor-intensive industries such as handlooms. Given his propensity to advertise the latest of his many fads, he used the Harijan to hold forth on the virtues of a diet of milk and bananas, his experiments with eating uncooked foods, and the ill effects of machine-polished rice.

  Just as Gandhi took a voluntary holiday from active politics, Jinnah was persuaded to reenter the political arena in his homeland.

  Return of the Edwardian Dandy

  During his absence from India, the Muslim League, a weak organization lacking a mass base, had atrophied. Muhammad Ali Jauhar, a pillar of the League, died in 1931. Though its titular head, Jinnah refused to sail to India to preside over its annual session in April 1933. In July thirty-seven-year-old Liaquat Ali Khan—a bespectacled, fair-skinned, Punjabi aristocrat, Oxford-educated lawyer with a prematurely receding hairline—called on Jinnah during his honeymoon in Europe. Both Khan and his wife, Raana, urged Jinnah to return home to save the League and the Muslims. Jinnah advised Khan to consult a sample of Muslim politicians. He did and got a positive response.

  In April 1934 the Muslim League session named Jinnah president for two years. In the October 1934 election to the Central Legislative Assembly (CLA)—when nationally only 1,415,892 voted, a fraction of the tiny enfranchised minority15—the Muslim voters of Bombay elected him to the chamber.

  In the 145-strong, par
tly nominated legislature, Jinnah became the leader of an independent group of 22, with all but 4 being Muslim. The house was evenly balanced between, on the one hand, Congressmen and their allies and, on the other, their pro-British opponents. This enabled Jinnah’s group to be the swing voters. He performed skillfully in the chamber and traveled up and down the country, shoring up the League.16

  In London, the fifty-nine-strong Joint Select Committee of British MPs, Indian CLA deputies, and nominated representatives of the princely states, chaired by Lord Linlithgow, produced a draft bill on constitutional reform in India in February 1935. After eight weeks of debate in the Parliament’s two chambers, it was passed as the Government of India Act 1935—shortened to GOI Act 1935—on August 2. It was the longest act the British parliament had adopted in its 676-year history.

  One of its major objectives—to establish an All India Federation of the British India Provinces and the Princely States—remained unfulfilled because of the ambiguities about safeguarding the princes’ privileges. The act divided the lawmaking powers between the provincial and the central legislatures. The bicameral central legislature was to consist of a partly elected and partly nominated Federal Legislative Assembly and Council of State.17

  The continuing diarchy in Delhi meant that important ministries such as defense and foreign affairs were run by the nominees of the viceroy, who remained accountable to the British government. He was authorized to dissolve legislatures and rule by decree. The provincial jurisdiction included police, provincial public service, health, and education. (The concurrent list consisted of matters over which both the federal and the provincial legislatures had competence to legislate.) Provincial cabinets were to be responsible to the popularly elected legislature. But provincial governors were given special powers to veto legislation and issue ordinances on law and order, interests of minorities, and the protection of British commerce. Separate electorates were to continue. And Muslims were given one-third representation in the central legislature. Most tellingly, there was no mention of the goal of dominion status for India.

  Jinnah was in London when the GOI Act 1935 was passed. On his return home two months later he described it as a law that was “forced upon us,” and called on fellow politicians to forge a common response. Things didn’t happen that way, partly because Gandhi had taken a backseat, and Jawaharlal Nehru, released from jail only in September 1935, had to rush to the bedside of his thirty-six-year-old, tuberculosis-afflicted wife, Kamala, in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland.

  It was only after her death on February 28, 1936, that a grief-stricken Nehru could focus on the latest law. Presiding over the Congress session in Lucknow on April 23, 1936, he declared that the party would combat the GOI Act inside and outside the legislature in order to kill it. This, he argued, could best be done by participating in those elections in which the executive was accountable to the fully elected legislature. Since this was the case with provincial assemblies, the party decided to contest elections in provinces. Behind the brave talk of undermining the 1935 Act, Congress leaders espied a golden opportunity to propagate their program legally among the electorate.

  A week earlier Lucknow had been the site of the annual Muslim League session. Though wary of the provision for the All India Federation, it noted approvingly the retention of separate electorates and one-third Muslim representation in the central legislature. “It is essential that the Muslims should organize themselves as one party, with an advanced and progressive program,” stated its leading resolution. “For this purpose the party appointed Mr. Jinnah to form a Central Election Board under his presidency . . . with powers to constitute affiliated Provincial Election Boards.”18 Jinnah did so in June. And the board also drafted the party manifesto.

  At the AICC session on December 27 in Faizpur, presided over by Nehru, the party drew a line between contesting elections and taking office in case of victory. The issue on forming ministries was to be settled by the CWC after the polls, taking into account the delegates’ bitter opposition to the provincial governor’s overriding powers.

  1937 Elections: A Benchmark

  Of the 30.1 million eligible voters, about half exercised their right in the eleven provincial assembly elections held in January and February 1937. Seventy percent of them favored the Congress, awarding it 707 seats out of 1,585. Of these, 617 were in “general”—that is, non-Muslim—constituencies.19 The triumph of the Congress was unexpected and striking. The most stunning was its victory in the populous United Provinces (UP). It bagged 133 of the 138 seats it contested, defeating the National Agriculturist Party, a powerful body of landlords, whose 98 candidates managed to eke out 18 seats.20 Overall, it garnered a clear majority in five provinces and a slim one in Bombay.21 In Assam, Bengal, and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) it emerged as the largest group.

  Its stellar performance was the result of three major factors. The adoration and affection in which the preponderant Hindu voters held Gandhi as the Mahatma rubbed off on the party. The grueling, whirlwind election campaign by Nehru, flying hundreds of miles, to lend his charismatic support to local candidates, was another salient element. And the superb organizing skills of the Bombay-based chair of the Congress parliamentary board, Vallabhbhai Patel, equally adept at raising funds from the captains of industry in Bombay and Ahmedabad, was the final factor in the winning formula.

  Of the 485 Muslim seats, the Muslim League won only 106. Yet its achievement outshone the Congress’s score of 25. Of these, 15 were in the predominantly Muslim province of the NWFP, leaving only 10 Muslims on Congress benches in ten provinces—an unmistakable index of its unpopularity among Muslims. This corresponded with the fact that of its 3.1 million members, only about 100,000 were Muslim, a little over 3 percent.22 The Muslim League did well in Bombay and UP, gaining 20 out of 29 seats in the former and 29 out of 69 in the latter.23

  Basking in their success, Congress leaders played hardball with the British. They insisted on an assurance that provincial governors would not use their overriding powers to veto a law or dismiss the council of ministers as a precondition to let their members form ministries where they constituted a majority.

  Protracted talks followed. The viceroy agreed to this condition verbally without amending the law. When Congress leaders approached Gandhi for advice, he told them to settle for a gentlemen’s agreement. It was early July when Congress legislators assumed office in six provinces and led coalition governments in two.

  In Punjab the 18 Congress members were a tiny fraction compared to the Unionist-led coalition of 110. It drew comfort from the fact that the Muslim League won only 2 seats, whereas the Muslim-dominated Unionist Party of landlords, also open to Hindus and Sikhs, gained 89.24 With only 3 seats to its credit in a chamber of 60 in Sindh, the Muslim League was a cipher there. In Bengal, despite winning 5 seats more than the 35 gained by the (Muslim) Krishak Praja Party (Bengali: “Peasants’ People”) of Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq, the League ceded the chief minister’s office to Huq. By securing the backing of the Europeans (25), and the independent Untouchables and caste Hindus (37), he isolated the 60-strong Congress group.

  Jinnah tried to make the most of the League’s gains in Bombay and UP. With Congress having a precarious majority in Bombay, he thought that its leader, Bal Gangadhar Kher, would be willing to form a coalition with his party. To achieve his aim, in his message to Gandhi through Kher, Jinnah invoked the cause of forging Hindu-Muslim unity in order to smooth the path to independence. He failed. “I wish I could do something, but I am utterly helpless,” wrote Gandhi to Jinnah. “My faith in Unity is bright as ever, only I see no light out of the impenetrable darkness, and in such distress I cry to God for light.”25

  A year earlier, though, God seemed to have guided Gandhi to lecture his eldest son, Harilal, that converting to Islam would mean breaching his dharma and would be equivalent to putting two swords in the same sheath.26 His admonition to Harilal provided a rare gl
impse of his inner­most view about Islam. He faced this situation because the Bombay-based, forty-eight-year-old widower Harilal had fallen in love with Gulab Vohra, a Muslim, and wanted to marry her. He ignored his father’s exhortation, converted to Islam, and, to the regret of the Mahatma, became Abdullah Gandhi.

  In the electoral arena, rebuffed by Gandhi, Jinnah lowered his sights and discussed a possible Congress-League partnership under Kher. But Patel ruled that League legislators would have to merge with the Congress before any of them could be appointed a minister. The same scenario repeated itself in UP, the main base of Nehru. Here, too, the talks between the two parties broke down in the face of Patel’s diktat. To respond to Jinnah’s offer to cooperate with the Congress with a demand that he liquidate his party was the height of arrogance on the part of Congress leadership.

  For its haughty behavior it would pay dearly a decade later. In that narrative, which ended with the partition of the subcontinent, its rebuffing of the League’s friendly gesture in July 1937 would be seen as the second landmark, the earlier one dating back to December 1928 at the Calcutta session of the Congress, which rebuffed Jinnah.

  The haughty behavior of the Congress in Bombay and UP toward the League made even neutral Muslim leaders suspicious of its real intentions toward their community. (The example of the sparsely populated NWFP along the Afghan border, governed by the Congress and its allies, was irrelevant to the vast bulk of the Muslim population in the subcontinent.) “When the Congress formed a government with almost all of the Muslim MLAs [members of the legislative assembly] sitting on the Opposition benches, non-Congress Muslims were suddenly faced with this stark reality of near total political powerlessness,” wrote Jaswant Singh, a former minister in a Bharatiya Janata Party–led government, in his biography of Jinnah. “It was brought home to them, like a bolt of lightning, that even if the Congress did not win a single Muslim seat, as had happened now [in the 1937 election], as long as it won an absolute majority in the House on the strength of the general seats, it could and would form a government entirely on its own—unless Muslim politicians surrendered altogether their separate political identity, in which case they would hardly be elected in the first place.”27