by Kuldip Nayar
Some British experts warned that once broken into separate and independent entities, India would lapse into a welter of contending powers in which free institutions would be suppressed and in which no one element would be able to defend itself against an external attack. They thought a federation was a better solution.
I found that the Congress leaders did not oppose the idea of a federation. Their only condition was that the British should stay out. Even the Indian States’ Peoples’ Conference, a Congress-led body, agitating for people’s rule, did not outrightly reject the federation proposal. However, Jinnah told Lord Linlithgow, the then viceroy, that the League could not support any federal scheme which would ‘produce a Hindu majority’. I feel that India and Pakistan becoming a federation or a confederation did not fit in with the Muslims’ demand at that time. Pakistan had first to be created for these ideas to take shape. Such proposals came to be mooted in Pakistan many years later.
I don’t think that the opposition of the League or the Congress was material because the central player in this scheme of things was the comity of princely states. When they rejected the idea of a federation, the British put the proposal in cold storage.
Lord Mountbatten told me later when I met him in the UK that if the princes had not been so ‘foolish’ as to reject the federal idea, India would not have been partitioned. I met him after his retirement in his sprawling mansion, Broadlands near London. This assertion was strange because the princes had no entity of their own. They were marionettes in British hands. My experience told me that whenever the Congress intensified the Independence movement in the princely states, the British responded as if the Raj was under attack and bolstered their support to the rulers. I think London changed its mind about the idea of a federation because of Jinnah’s pressure.
In the 1940s, a change, more psychological than real, began manifesting itself in relations between Hindus and Muslims. The two began to feel more at home with members of their own community. Social contacts began wilting. Many Hindus still sent sweets to their Muslim friends on Diwali, as my mother did, and Muslims, in turn, sent us meat after a Muslim festival like Bakr-Id but many wondered whether the practice had outlived its utility.
However, the Muslims in the north had a different perspective from those in the south. The latter had got integrated with the Hindus and had developed a composite regional culture. Muslims in the north had a complex of superiority having once been rulers. Islam unified the Muslims in the north and south. Jinnah had sensed this and used religion to forge unity within the community and create a sense of a separate identity.
Surprisingly, public discussion on Pakistan was rare. The dialogue was between the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League. College students like us avoided the subject. Nonetheless, loyalty to the idea of Pakistan was expected from Muslims, just as opposition was assumed from Hindus. Some Muslims would themselves scoff at the whole idea, particularly the word ‘Pak’ which meant ‘pure’. My Persian professor at Forman Christian College, Lahore, opposed the concept on that ground alone. Azad told me after Independence that the very term of Pakistan went against its grain. It suggested some portions of the world were pure while others were impure.
Yet, fear impregnated the minds of Hindus; fear of the unknown. My family, peaceful in every way, thought of protecting itself. My father travelled by train to Multan to obtain a double-barreled gun through Nakul Sen, the deputy commissioner transferred from Sialkot. It was a hush-hush job and I never saw the gun. It remained hidden till my younger brother, Hardip, fired it in a room out of curiosity. It made such a loud bang that people gathered outside our home to find out what had happened. However, aware of my father’s Gandhian traits, no one suspected us of having a gun. The speculations, however, reached our ears and it became a problem to decide what to do with the weapon. Finally, we dumped it in a well in our premises.
Some Muslims questioned what Pakistan was supposed to achieve when more Muslims would be left behind in India. Jinnah did not spell out the concept of Pakistan because he wanted both London and the Congress to concede equality between the two communities.
I watched the demand for separation slowly becoming a rallying point for Muslims who saw in Pakistan a panacea for their economic, social, and political backwardness or what had been ‘denied’ to them. To blame only Jinnah for the differences that divided the Hindus and Muslims would be unfair. He merely gave shape to the latent estrangement between the two communities.
The hiatus between them had been visible, at least in the urban areas, for a long time. They lived in separate localities, had separate eating places, and separate places for social gatherings. Railway stations had separate water pitchers, with ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’ written in bold letters. A similar segregation was visible in government offices. There were no protests against the practice; no indignation. In hostels, the kitchens were separate. Whenever I wanted a better-tasting mutton curry, I would get food from the Muslim kitchen and Muslims would order vegetables from the Hindu kitchen.
The demand for Pakistan also evoked among Muslims a longing to find their roots. They would trace them to earlier Afghan and the Mughal regimes in India. Otherwise too, Muslims looked back to the days when they had ruled India for 600 years. They became conscious of how ‘different’ they were from ‘the polyglot, caste-ridden Hindus’. Urdu, a language born around Delhi, gave them a sense of superiority. The British, who exploited these differences, were shocked in 1857 when Muslims and Hindus united to fight a liberation struggle. The British crushed it brutally but were shaken by the solidarity between the two communities.
In 1909, when the British introduced separate electorates, with Hindus voting for Hindu candidates and Muslims for Muslim, along with reservations in the services on the basis of religion, the division between the two communities became institutionalized. From then on, they rapidly began drifting apart. Azad wished the Indian Muslims had led the national struggle for freedom. He said that Arab and Turk revolutionaries, with whom he was in touch in the 1920s, could not understand why Indian Muslims were mere camp followers of the British. The demand for Pakistan, some believed, covered up the stigma.
Being the idealist I was, I imagined that the differences between Hindus and Muslims would disappear once the British left. However, my five years in Lahore, two in Forman Christian College and three in Law College, convinced me that the mistrust between them was so deep that either they would sit across the table one day to thrash out their differences once and for all or they would continue to live in hostility.
Jinnah recognized the scenario much earlier than the Congress, which was totally absorbed in the struggle against the British. To begin with, Jinnah appealed to Hindus to accept the Muslims’ demand for separate electorates to win the confidence and trust of the community. Until then, the Congress had not formally accepted the proposal, whether for legislatures or the central assembly. Jinnah rationalized: Separate electorates were not a matter of policy but a necessity for Muslims who needed to be raised from the torpor into which they had sunk. The Congress slowly came around to accepting the proposal. This only gave a new edge to the two-nation theory and widened the chasm between Hindus and Muslims. Whenever we, the Hindus, discussed the separate electorates, we felt it would alienate Muslims from us.
There was a narrowing of the gap when Mahatma Gandhi brought about Hindu–Muslim unity in 1920 over the Khilafat movement, which supported a sectarian demand for a caliph among Muslims. The demand ended when Kamal Pasha of Turkey jettisoned the entire idea. Yet, the brief togetherness between the two communities was a welcome development.
Muslims stayed away from the Congress for numerous reasons. They feared that their historical and religious culture would be submerged in a Hindu-majority party.
A chasm was already growing between the Hindus, who had taken advantage of English-language education and Western thought to widen their horizons and improve their economic conditions, and the general run of Muslim
s who had not. Then there was the well-crafted policy of the British government to keep the Muslims down after the 1857 uprising where they had been in the forefront. Gandhi’s emphasis on the worship of cow, which the Muslims ate as part of their daily diet, did not help matters. A vast majority of Muslims considered Islam as much an ideology as a religion. Islam provided them with a system that was complete in itself.
Culture and religion were so fused in Hinduism that there was hardly any distinction between the two. Thus Indian nationalism had come to acquire a somewhat Hinduized character, and Muslims could not stomach this. Many years later, in 1938, when the Muslim League appointed Raja Sayed Mohammed Mehdi of Pirpur to examine the Congress governments’ performance, it was ‘proved’ that Muslims had been ‘maltreated’. This was an exaggeration but there was some truth in the allegation that the Congress rule in the states had given Hindus a sense of superiority. It was reflected in the governance. A few chief ministers of the Congress-run states had, indeed, behaved in a partisan manner.
Muslims saw in Pakistan an alternative to Congress rule. They were belatedly supported by the British who helped Muslim landlords and wealthy members of the community to form the All India Muslim League on 30 December 1906 as they had done in the case of the Indian National Congress on 28 December 1885 with A.O. Hume, a Britisher, as its leader. He was asked by the British rulers to create a forum to ventilate grievances. They believed such a step would take the wind out of sails of the aspiring nationalists who were still stuck on the glimmer of freedom that had flickered in the 1857 uprising.
The Muslim League had little impact or respect until Jinnah took over in 1916. He had left for London in disgust because he did not feel at home with most of his colleagues in the Congress party, who mixed religion with politics. His greatest grievance was against Gandhi who spoke of Ram Rajya and political emancipation in the same breath.
On his return from London Jinnah said his experience in the Congress party had taught him that Muslims had to fend for themselves. His terminology came from Islam as did his politics. He soon emerged as the Muslim’s Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), a title bequeathed by Gandhiji. I heard Nehru explaining at a meeting that Jinnah ‘had left the Congress, not because of any difference of opinion on the Hindu–Muslim question, but because of his failure to adapt ‘to the new and more advanced ideology, and even more so because he disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people, speaking in Hindustani, who filled the Congress’. Once hailed by Congress leader Sarojini Naidu as the best ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity, Jinnah was now considered an inveterate separatist. He, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that he was uniting the Muslims of India into one nation and giving them a platform and a voice.
Jinnah used the Pirpur report to highlight the differences between Hindus and Muslims, and made it appear as if the Congress governments had been wreaking vengeance on ‘the helpless Muslim minority’. On the other hand, he joined issue with Gandhi and Nehru, making it clear to them that he would plough a parochial furrow. When Gandhi wrote to Jinnah to inquire: ‘Are you still the same Mr Jinnah, the staunchest of nationalists and the hope of both Hindus and Muslims?’ he shot back, ‘Nationalism is not the monopoly of any single individual and in these days it is very difficult to define it’.
I think the personal rivalry between Jinnah and Nehru was not limited to issues, and this made the scene murkier. They were two very different personalities. Both were brilliant in their own way and had a magnetic appeal for the masses but ideologically they were poles apart. I feel one of the reasons Jinnah left the Congress was that there was not enough space for both him and Nehru. Gandhi was inclined towards Nehru and Jinnah realized that Nehru would inherit the Congress mantle.
Two letters exchanged between them, underlined the differences between Nehru and Jinnah. In reply to Nehru’s letter of 16 April 1938, contending that ‘the Muslim League is an important communal organization but the other organizations, even though they might be younger and smaller, cannot be ignored’, Jinnah said: ‘Your tone and language again display the same arrogance and militant spirit, as if the Congress is the sovereign power’. Unless the Congress recognized the Muslim League on an equal footing and was prepared to negotiate a Hindu–Muslim settlement, Jinnah said he would depend upon ‘our inherent strength’.
Jinnah also objected to the Congress using ‘Vande Mataram’ as the national anthem. This was odd because people were used to singing it at every meeting held to call for India’s Independence. Nehru argued that his party could not compel large numbers of people to abandon what they had come to associate with the freedom movement. The song was adapted from a Bengali novel, Anandamath, which personified the motherland as Goddess Durga. This was repugnant to Muslims who opposed idol worship. The first two stanzas of the song, which the Congress used, should not have caused any offence because there was no reference to the goddess, but that did not mollify Jinnah. I found it ominous that whatever he said would become normal vocabulary for the Muslims.
After Independence India adopted the song as an alternative national anthem. Humayun Kabir, subsequently appointed education minister in Nehru’s cabinet, once told me: ‘It was very unfair for a secular India to have adopted “Vande Mataram” because of its religious overtones.’ I was unable to understand why Muslims objected to the compromise of using only the first two stanzas which appealed to nationalist sentiments alone.
While Gandhi travelled from one civil disobedience meeting to another, Jinnah propagated his two-nation theory from one Muslim League platform to another. The latter repeatedly plugged the same line: Gandhi was fighting for the supremacy of Hindus and the submergence of Muslims within the Congress party. Gandhi posed a question: Did he become a different nation overnight if he embraced Islam; Jinnah did not respond.
However, the British were overjoyed with all these developments. It gave them a credible excuse for remaining on in India. They cited the growing distrust between the two communities as an argument to convince people abroad that British Raj had to stay. Hindus and Muslims were at daggers drawn and needed the overlord to maintain peace.
The Muslims who supported the Congress were known as nationalist Muslims but they became increasingly equivocal in their attitude towards the party because of Jinnah’s pre-eminence in the community. The distance between the Congress and nationalist Muslims would become more visible during the election. The latter constituted a unity board, thinking that this would have greater appeal for the Muslim electorate but the strategy annoyed Hindus, embarrassed the Congress, and evoked little support among Muslims. I felt helpless when the Indian press, largely owned by Hindus, was hard on nationalist Muslims whenever they tried to distance themselves from the Congress. Even their opposition to the demand for Pakistan was considered dubious. They suffered silently for their commitment to the Congress ideology and opposition to the creation of Pakistan.
Strangely, Jinnah did not shake hands with Azad while doing so with Nehru and Patel after a meeting. Azad was different. Many years later, when his plane was stuck at Karachi on its way to India, he went to Jinnah’s mausoleum to say prayers (Fateha).
My disappointment knew no bounds when I found the All India Students’ Federation, a left-of-centre group, supporting the demand for Pakistan. Even some leading Muslim communists joined the League. Subsequently, I learnt that this was at the instance of the Soviet Union, which by then had sided with the Allies in their war against Germany. Supporting the British in India was Moscow’s policy, and so was that of the communists. Only a few days before the Federation had labelled the demand for Pakistan ‘an imperialist ploy’ but it was now hailing it as ‘a genuine expression of Muslim identity’. Those who protested against the volte-face were denounced as votaries of vested interests. However, those who supported the demand for Pakistan, nawabs or zamindars, were hailed as progressive. It was a dialectical materialism of sorts.
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was labelled an agent of the capitalists because he oppose
d the demand for Pakistan. How could the comrades consider feudal lords in the Muslim League, such as the Nawab of Mamdot and Sir Feroze Khan Noon from Punjab, as progressive? I asked. The reply was that after the Soviet Union joined, the scenario had changed the Allies. True, it did not mean that the rich had become the proletarians but the League, unlike the Congress, did not oppose the British rulers for having pushed India into the war without consulting it.
I would proudly mention in public the names of Jayaprakash Narayan, Aruna Asaf Ali, and Achyut Patwardhan, the three left-of-centre leaders, who had kept alight the flame of defiance against the British through an underground movement following the wholesale arrest after Gandhi’s slogan of Quit India. I was, however, crestfallen when Patwardhan told me several years later that the Quit India Movement was ‘a waste of time and energy’. India, he said, would have achieved independence in any case after the war as the British were in no position to sustain the empire, and neither had the money or manpower required to suppress a turbulent India. Patwardhan’s words were: ‘We had many people killed and imprisoned unnecessarily.’
I admired the manner in which Aruna Asaf Ali infused life into the Quit India Movement while remaining underground. Her dodging the best security arrangements and flying the Congress flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan of Bombay on 9 August 1942, the Quit India Day, was a daring act. Millions admired her for it, especially at a time when they felt leaderless as Gandhi and other top Congressmen had been detained a day earlier.
Aruna was a picture of rebellion even when I met her many years later as the owner of Patriot, a daily newspaper, and Link, a weekly magazine. She was among the very few who disseminated the Left perspective in India which had adopted a mixed economy model under Nehru’s prime-ministership. She said she was proud of being associated with the Quit India Movement and recalled how she, along with her husband, Asaf Ali, had met Bhagat Singh in jail a few days before he was hanged. For her, he was a role model. She called me once when some of her staff were trying to take over her publications. I was of little help but she was able to retain ownership.