by Kuldip Nayar
K.H. Khurshid, Jinnah’s private secretary, a Kashmiri who spoke fluent Punjabi, narrated to me years later an incident that occurred a few days after Partition. Jinnah was at the helm of affairs as Pakistan’s first governor general. Sitting for lunch in the palatial residence in Karachi were Jinnah, his sister Fatima, Khurshid, and a young naval officer attached to the governor general. The officer was very perturbed because he had heard that his parents had been killed in India as they were trying to get to Pakistan.
He asked Jinnah bluntly: ‘Sir, was creating Pakistan the right thing to do?’ There was an eerie silence in the room. Jinnah paused a while before replying: ‘I do not know young man. Only posterity will judge.’
Jinnah, it seems, had in mind some arrangement for free travel between the two countries. His reply to the Indian high commissioner in Karachi, Dr Sitaram, indicated as much. Jinnah had a sprawling house at Malabar Hill in Bombay (now Mumbai). Before declaring it to be evacuee property, Nehru wrote to Sitaram to find out from Jinnah what he wanted to do with the house. Jinnah’s reply at that point was that he would like to retain it because he proposed spending a few weeks a year in Bombay.
The house remained in his name for a long time until it was taken over by the government of India. Subsequently, Pakistan tried its best to convert it into a consulate but New Delhi hedged all pressure. At one time the government of India had decided to hand over the house to Islamabad and even conveyed its decision but in the end changed its mind. Jinnah’s daughter, Dina Wadia has raised her claim to it and the case is pending before the Bombay High Court.
The late Louis Heren, South Asia correspondent of the Times, London, who was stationed at Delhi in 1947–48 told me that Jinnah was not willing to accept the onus of Partition. I met Heren at his office in London in 1971 when I was collecting material for my book, Distant Neighbours (1972), a story of India–Pakistan relations. I asked him if he had ever met Jinnah after Partition. He said, ‘Yes’. Soon Heren was reminiscing about the past. He described an evening he had spent with Governor General Jinnah at Kohat, a cantonment in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Heren complained to him how unhappy he was over the division of the armed forces. To this Jinnah responded: ‘Do not blame me; blame Nehru.’
In a letter to me dated 3 October 1971, Heren wrote: ‘We [Jinnah and I] had a drink together one evening when, while acknowledging the creation of Pakistan and the political necessity for it, I regretted the partition of the Indian subcontinent. I can recall referring to the tragedy – for anybody who knew it in the past – of the division of the old Indian Army and the ICS. Strangely, he acknowledged all this and then went on to blame Nehru for Partition, as I said when we met in London.’
Heren recalled Jinnah’s words: ‘Had he [Nehru] agreed to the Muslim League joining the UP Congress government in 1937, there would have been no Pakistan.’ He went on to add: ‘Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a venerable old leader of the Congress, regretted that Nehru’s rejection gave the Muslim League a new lease of life.’ Jinnah’s allegation, according to Heren, suggested ‘that Nehru’s judgement was impaired by Purushottam Das Tandon, a Hindu nationalist who was a senior Congress leader in UP’. Azad said more or less the same thing in his book, India Wins Freedom (1988). He regretted that even Mahatma Gandhi did not intervene ‘as he should have done’.
I personally do not know whether the refusal of two seats to the Muslim League in the UP Congress government hurt the Muslim community so acutely that it went on to demand a country of its own. Nehru’s point of view came to be known many years later, in 1959. He maintained that Azad was wrong in his assessment. He was hurt by the Maulana’s description of him as ‘a vain person’, the words which were mentioned in the 30 pages withheld for 30 years in consonance with Azad’s wishes. The pages were released for publication in 1988, 24 years after Nehru’s death.
Humayun Kabir, Azad’s secretary, who gave the manuscript to the archives seven months after Azad’s sudden death, told me that Azad did not want to publicize his views at that time because he felt it might weaken Nehru. However, the pages, when finally released, did not even create a ripple. Azad’s judgement about Patel being pro-Hindu was well known. In the unreleased pages he said that the role Patel played was not always consistent with the ideals of the Congress. In fact, Azad’s comments on Krishna Menon, who later became defence minister, were more telling. Azad considered Menon ‘not trustworthy’ and wanted his actions as high commissioner of India to the UK be investigated before appointing him a minister. Azad felt so strongly about this that he sent in his resignation when Nehru first spoke of including Menon in the cabinet in 1954.
Khaliq-ul-Zaman, a leading Muslim leader, would have been a member of the UP cabinet had the League been given the two seats. He supported Azad. However, when I met him many years later in Karachi when he was suffering from protracted illness, I found him lamenting India’s division and nurturing a sense of guilt as if he had betrayed the Muslims he had left behind in his home state of UP. He was far from being the only top Muslim League leader who regretted the formation of Pakistan. The party’s treasurer, M.A.A. Nawab of Mehmoodabad, too shared the feeling that the division was a mistake. He wrote from London, where he had settled after Independence, to a well-known physician A. Faridi, a friend of his who lived in Lucknow, that ‘the experiment we made was wrong’.
Regardless of these afterthoughts (there were thousands of Indian Muslims who regretted Partition) 90 per cent of them had supported the demand. I was in Lahore where a resolution was passed on 23 March 1940, supporting the formation of a country for Muslims on the basis of religion. (Ironically, Israel is the only other country to have been founded on the basis of religion.) The name ‘Pakistan’ was not mentioned in the resolution, but it subsequently came to be known as the ‘Pakistan Resolution’. I was 16 years old then. The chief reporter of Tribune, A.N. Bali, a family friend, had taken me along to cover what proved to be a historic occasion.
I vividly recall that the pandal where the All India Muslim League session was being held, was metaphorically on fire with the radical idea of creating a new and independent Islamic country dividing the subcontinent. Thousands of people thronged the venue, traditionally used as an arena for wrestlers. What struck me was the mood. Those participating were defiant but disciplined, noisy but resolute, emotional but determined. This was no ordinary crowd but a multitude of people who had their eyes set on the stars. The Muslim League was not popular in Punjab in those days, although the party was taken more seriously than the other two formations: the authoritarian ‘Khaksar’ and the somewhat liberal ‘Ahrar’.
Volunteers in green shirts, the hallmark of the Khaksars, carried belchas (shovels) and unsheathed swords as they conducted the League’s president, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, thin and straight as a spindle, dressed in a tight-fitting black sherwani, to the dais amidst deafening slogans of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’. The other person who was accorded a similar unsheathed sword reception was the bulky Bengal premier Fazl-ul-Haq.
Lahore, a national centre of learning, was the capital of Punjab. Even so, its premier, Sir Sikander Hayat Khan, a known Jinnah supporter, was conspicuous by his absence at the inauguration. Hayat, head of the unionist party of zamindars, represented a viewpoint which favoured the integration of Muslim-majority provinces into a separate state with ‘some form’ of central government for the whole of India, and with at least a common defence policy. The army had a strange fascination for the British. Hayat, who was close to them, reflected their way of thinking. He visualized a series of autonomous states in India within the British Commonwealth. This was, indeed, the plan devised by Professor Reginald Coupland, a renowned constitutional expert, and adviser to the Cabinet Mission which came to India six years later. Hayat had declared earlier that he would have nothing to do with Pakistan if it meant Muslim rule in some states and Hindu raj in the rest of the country.
I must admit that I did not take the demand for Pakistan seriously at the time. How c
ould a mere resolution tear apart the Hindus and Muslims who had lived together for over a thousand years? They had shared a life which had over the years evolved into a unique subcontinental culture, with the communities retaining their identity and yet meshing into an ethos of coexistence. How could a mere piece of paper make them strangers, and how could my bosom friend Shafquat be alien to me? Both of us had studied together in the same school, the same Murray College, and lived in the same city, Sialkot, since childhood, like two members of a family. Still, the frenzy that I witnessed frightened me. Religious slogans like ‘Yah Ali’ were repeated time and time again, giving the entire atmosphere a religious tinge, suggesting that Pakistan would be a theocratic state.
In his address, Jinnah reiterated:
Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs, and literature. They neither intermarry nor inter-dine, and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations that are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built for the government of such a state.
A.K. Fazl-ul-Haq, the then chief minister of Bengal moved the Pakistan Resolution (also known as the Lahore Resolution), little realizing that the Muslim independent state he was endorsing would 31 years later split into two countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh). The resolution, passed by a show of hands, stated that no constitutional plan would be workable in the country or acceptable to the Muslims unless it was designed to follow certain basic principles. These were that geographically-contiguous units should be demarcated into regions with such territorial readjustments into areas where the Muslims were in a majority, as in the north-west and east, making up ‘independent states in which the constituent units would be autonomous and sovereign’.
My reading is that Jinnah intentionally selected Fazl-ul-Haq as the mover of the Pakistan Resolution, fearing that East Pakistan might one day try to secede from Pakistan and hoping that he, coming from Bengal, would block any such move. Similarly, the selection of Punjab as the launching pad for the demand for Pakistan was intentional. This province had only a paper-thin Muslim majority. Jinnah could, however, foresee that if and when Pakistan came into being, Punjab would be its mainstay.
The use of word ‘states’, implying more than one Muslim country, was not noticed until the following day when Jinnah clarified that the word was a typographical error and should have been ‘state’. Khaliq-ul-Zaman commented that the president on his own could not change the wording of the resolution. Years later, after the liberation of Bangladesh in 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the then president of Pakistan, quipped during an interview to me at Rawalpindi: ‘Quite a costly typing mistake. I must be careful about my stenographer.’
The use of the word ‘states’ might have been deliberate on the part of the top Muslim League leaders (not Jinnah) who drafted the resolution with the idea of constituting Muslim states on either side of the majority Hindu India. Many years later I found in the archives at London a document spelling out the same concept of two Muslim states: one in the north-west (Sind, Baluchistan, NWFP, and Punjab, together with Delhi after amalgamation with Punjab); the other in the Northeast (Assam and Bengal, excluding the districts of Bankura and Midnapur together with the district of Purnea from Bihar). The document was prepared by a Muslim League committee appointed soon after the adoption of the Pakistan Resolution. Surprisingly, the committee did not say a word about Kashmir, the state which subsequently drew India and Pakistan into three wars. This committee probably had in mind a federal structure in the subcontinent because its document suggested a central machinery concerned with external relations, defence, communications, customs, and safeguards for minorities.
It was in fact the unity of Muslims that the speakers underlined at the League’s session in Lahore. They shared Jinnah’s belief in the two-nation theory. Virtually all the speakers criticized Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, then the Congress party president, who they said, was opposed to a Muslim homeland although himself a Muslim. He was dubbed a ‘show boy of Hindus’. The remark surprised me because it reflected almost unbridgeable differences between the two communities.
In his presidential address at the Congress session held earlier, Azad had vehemently criticized the two-nation theory as it suggested religious separatism. He had exhorted Muslims to preserve a united India as both Hindus and Muslims were Indians who shared deep bonds of brotherhood and nationhood. He had said:
Islam has now as great a claim on the Indian soil as Hinduism. If Hinduism has been the religion of the people here for several thousands of years, Islam also has been their religion for a thousand years. Just as a Hindu can say with pride that he is an Indian and follows Hinduism, so also can we say with equal pride that we are Indians and follow Islam.
The idea of Pakistan was nothing new. I had heard of it earlier. The bulky and overbearing Mohammed Iqbal, an eminent Urdu poet from Sialkot, had proposed the amalgamation of Punjab, the NWFP, and Baluchistan into a single, free Muslim state. On the other hand, he wrote to the Punjab governor that he was not the author of the Pakistan idea, which came from Rahamat Ali, living in London. I wondered how the same person who had written ‘Sare Jahan Se Achha, Hindustan Hamara’ could also articulate a proposal for India’s division and subsequently write: ‘Muslim hain hum watan hai sara jahan hamara.’ Did Iqbal ride two horses at the same time or did he undergo a metamorphosis? Significantly, when meeting Jawaharlal Nehru in Lahore, Iqbal remarked: ‘What is common between you and Jinnah? You are a patriot and he is a politician.’ Iqbal embraced Nehru, hailing him in Punjabi: ‘Mera sher puttar [my lion son], mera dilare puttar [my courageous son].’ Iqbal’s point of pride was that Nehru’s ancestors, like his, came from Kashmir.
My friend Shafquat, who lived near Iqbal’s house, took me there once to meet the poet. Iqbal was sitting on a charpai which was touching the floor under the strain of his weight. He was hurling such vulgar abuses in chaste Punjabi that we literally fled from there.
The Pakistan Resolution became widely popular among Muslims, exceeding even Jinnah’s expectations. It was like an avalanche that swept away all other ideas and threw up the Muslim League as the most influential body among Muslims. Only the Pathans in the NWFP were unaffected. They had been grounded in pluralism by an austere, secular Muslim leader, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as ‘the Frontier Gandhi’. Baluchistan too remained distant, opposing the League. Punjab was interested in a general way, but there was no evident enthusiasm.
The Muslims who were truly dazzled by the demand for Pakistan were from the Urdu-speaking UP, Bihar, and Delhi, the areas which it was apparent would never form a part of Pakistan if ever it came into being. Their psyche was not difficult to understand. They considered themselves the ones who had ruled India for thousands of years, and could not reconcile themselves to the idea of a post-British dispensation where they would not enjoy superiority, either in numbers, power, or status. The dream of being rulers blinded them to the reality that in a democratic polity the majority would be at the helm of affairs.
Jinnah relentlessly kept elucidating his two-nation theory. Muslims and Hindus should have their own separate countries after the departure of the British. He would argue that Muslims didn’t want to live in a country where Hindus would be in a majority and hold the reins of government. Nehru, however, pointed out several times that when even a small village had Hindus and Muslims living together, how was it possible to separate them? The Pakistan idea, I found, was more captivating in cities, not in the countryside.
When Jinnah’s opponents questioned the economic viability of the proposed state, he would say: ‘Then leave us to our fate.’ When some spoke nostalgically about the composite culture of Hindus and Muslims, he would answer: ‘Our sense of values and objectives in life and politics differ greatly.’ When Hindus referred to the Pakistan dem
and as ‘vivisection of their motherland’, he said that for the Muslims it was ‘a struggle for survival’. The parting of ways had begun, I regretfully noted. Nastiness in discussions had also entered the political discourse.
Pakistan became ‘the promised land’ and Jinnah its Moses. As time passed, Muslims from different walks of life and from different age groups rallied behind him. They saw in Pakistan a realization of their dreams. Educationally and economically, Hindus were far ahead of the Muslims who were primarily tillers of the land or artisans; Hindus controlled industry and business. I recall that the Mall, Lahore’s posh shopping centre, had only one shop owned by a Muslim.
Economic backwardness apart, I saw Muslims coming around to believing that Islam itself would be in danger in India with a vast Hindu majority. Bengal, on the one hand, and UP, Bihar, and Delhi, on the other, would express such views openly. Little thought, I could see, was given to the fate of those Muslims who would remain in ‘Hindu Hindustan’ after Pakistan was created. Azad would warn in vain that the Muslims would ‘awake and discover overnight that they have become aliens and foreigners. Backward industrially, educationally, and economically, they will be left to the mercies of what would then become an unadulterated Hindu Raj.’ His warning touched many hearts.
Many years later, a central government minister, M.C. Chagla, Jinnah’s lawyer-friend from Bombay, told me that when he asked Jinnah what would happen to the Muslims left behind in India, his reply was that they would have nothing to be afraid of as ‘Hindus would be living in Pakistan just as Muslims in India’. This hostage theory advanced in the early 1940s frightened me. I thought Nehru had a point when he said that the division of India would not solve the problem of ‘two nations’ because both communities were spread throughout the country. Even so, I could sense the atmosphere getting polarized by the day.