by John Keay
Compared to this contentious prospect, the other vista opened during the Round Table discussions and incorporated into the monumental Government of India Act of 1935 was comparatively uncontroversial. Yet because federation would never actually be implemented, it would be much the most significant part of the Act; and it would have a considerable bearing on the Partition of 1947 and on the different constitutions of the two states that resulted.
As a package of reforms which advanced the long-running process of Indianisation and democratisation in the provincial assemblies, this other component of the 1935 India Act looked unexciting. But in effect it made the provinces autonomous. The franchise, although still restricted by property and gender criteria, was increased from seven million to about thirty-five million, or one-sixth of the potential adult suffrage; the number of provinces was also increased, with Sind being separated from Bombay and Orissa from Bihar; and all the provincial assemblies were reorganised and their memberships greatly enlarged so that elected Indian representatives could command majorities and form governments. Many subjects remained the preserve of the central government, and some important powers of intervention and supersession remained reserved to the mostly British governors. But from 1937, when the first elections under this scheme were held, the provincial governments of British India were no longer necessarily run by the British. Swaraj, or self-rule, while being withheld in Delhi, was thus being conceded in Lucknow, Calcutta, Karachi, Bombay and the other provincial capitals. In effect the provinces, with their elected Indian assemblies, were being schooled as legitimate components in a federation and as contenders in any eventual transfer of British sovereignty. This had enormous implications. It served the British purpose of a gradualist retreat; nationalist energies would be dissipated, and nationalist opinion divided, in the free-for-all of provincial politics. But it also raised the spectre of provincial devolution, leading to the possible fragmentation of British India and its as yet unthinkable partition.
Nehru perceptively characterised the 1935 India Act as ‘a new charter of slavery’; it was, after all, a long way short of purna swaraj. He embraced the opportunity of the 1937 elections to show the strength of Congress but expected all those elected to resign as a protest. With much the best organisation Congress duly swept the polls, capturing 70 per cent of the popular vote and, despite the system of separate electorates, nearly half of all seats. Then, after much heart-searching, indeed a near-thrombosis, and in contravention of Nehru’s wishes, the party’s leaders reluctantly agreed to let its successful candidates participate in government.
The agreeable business of allocating ministries and rewarding supporters was readily embraced. In every province, elected Indian members now formed Indian governments, appointed Indian ministers, and legislated in Indian interests. ‘The province became the most important arena in political life,’ and, more than ever, provincial leadership and identity became entrenched components of national politics. In the run-up to Independence, and thereafter when the provinces became the component states of independent India and the constituent provinces of Pakistan, this would ‘affect profoundly the nature of all-India [and all-Pakistan] “national” leadership and power’.4 Against well-organised and intransigent provincial leaderships even a Congress-run national government would not be able to make much headway.
In 1937 seven of the now eleven provinces ended up with Congress governments. The outstanding exceptions were Bengal and the Panjab, both with slim Muslim majority populations and both future subjects of partition. But there the similarity ended. In Bengal a predominantly Muslim government was formed. For the first time Calcutta’s influential, English-speaking Hindu bhadralok, the landed ‘gentlemen’ or ‘babus’ who had made so much of the running in the early days of Congress, experienced the harsh realities of democracy and found themselves out in the cold. They condemned the system of separate minority electorates which had made their electoral chances even more hopeless, then they increasingly turned on those whom they saw as the main beneficiaries, the Muslims. Thus, ‘while the rest of nationalist India was rejecting the “autonomy” outlined in the Government’s White Paper as a sham, the Bengali bhadralok – Congress-men and non-Congress-men alike – were concerned only with its disregard of their own provincial political ambitions.’5 Having pilloried the system of separate electorates as a ‘shameless surrender to [Muslim] communalists’, they now shamelessly demanded just such a surrender to Hindu communalism by insisting that, as a minority, they too were entitled to electoral safeguards.
There was, though, another way: the political arithmetic could be revised by changing the units to which it applied. Curzon’s partition of Bengal, against which the bhadralok had fought so successfully in 1905, began to look less ‘utterly contemptuous of public opinion’.
In the Panjab, landed interests were also vocal but, instead of sundering the different communities, they actually cemented sectarian relations. Under the aegis of a Unionist Party, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all participated in government together. British dependence on the Panjab’s agricultural communities for three-fifths of its army recruitment, plus the availability and potential of newly irrigated land there, had created a markedly prosperous province in which the agriculturalist enjoyed a privileged position. Whether Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, his main interest was in protecting this position, particularly against the encroachment of urban money-leaders. The principal division was thus not between Muslim and Sikh or Hindu, but between landed interests and commercial interests. Legislation which afforded the landowner security against the alienation of his land and which ensured that the agricultural vote was maximised had ‘institutionalised the political division between the rural and urban populations’, and now provided the Unionist Party with its ideology.6
In 1937 the Unionist Party won well over half the seats in the Panjab, and neither Congress nor the Muslim League gained a significant foothold. In striking contrast to Bengal, the Panjab thus looked a most improbable candidate for sectarian partition, let alone for its later tripartite reincarnation as a hotbed of Hindu communalism (Haryana), a stronghold of Sikh separatism (Indian Panjab) and the cornerstone of an Islamic state (Pakistani Panjab).
Other ambiguities haunted the new constitutional set-up. The system of separate electorates for the minority communities was bitterly contested in principle by Congress and in its details by almost everyone. Gandhi had taken particular exception to Harijans being considered a non-Hindu community and embarked on a fast to get their agreement to the removal of this provision. He succeeded; separate Harijan electorates were abolished but more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members. The ‘Communal Awards’ which enumerated the seats reserved for the other separate electorates were decided by the British, no agreed scheme being forthcoming from Indian sources. Naturally this endeared the awards to no one. In Bengal the provincial Congress, representing the disillusioned Hindu bhadralok, very nearly split away from the national Congress as firebrands like Subhas Chandra Bose demanded direct action against the awards. This would have alienated the substantial Muslim support which Congress still enjoyed nationally, and was therefore unacceptable to the central leadership.
Far more serious was the fate of the federation. It was to have come into operation as soon as a majority of the princes had signed Instruments of Accession. But partly because of lobbying by diehard empire dinosaurs like Churchill, and partly thanks to the intense rivalries amongst the princes themselves, the process was delayed. In the interim the princes began to have second thoughts. Some were worried about the financial implications of federation, others about the continuation of paramountcy. But what made them dig in their heels most was Congress triumphalism following the 1937 elections.
Congress’s national leadership had hitherto discouraged the party’s involvement in the princely states. But its provincial leaders, many of them now in government, were not so particular. In arguments redolent of those used by Dalhousie to support British annexa
tions in the 1850s, they stigmatised princely rule as a corrupt anachronism. How could they remain deaf to the unenfranchised plight of close colleagues and neighbours who happened to live under such autocratic dispensations? Financial and organisational support was offered to populist movements in the states; activists and agitators were allowed to drift across state borders. Suddenly, unexpected demands for more accountable government and more popular representation brought disturbances in Kashmir, Hyderabad, Mysore and elsewhere. Where a Hindu prince ruled a predominantly Muslim state, as in Kashmir – or vice versa as in Hyderabad – the situation was exacerbated by sectarian tension. Not surprisingly nawabs and nizams, rajas and maharajas alike took fright. If provincial Congress governments could so threaten their prerogatives, what chance would they stand against a Congress-dominated federal government?
Congress-men saw it rather differently. Under a federation the two central chambers were to be indirectly elected, candidates being chosen by the provincial assemblies (in the case of British India) and by the princes (in the case of the states). Congress had done well enough in the 1937 elections to look forward to a substantial bloc of seats under this arrangement. It would, however, only be able to achieve a governing majority if it also commanded some of the seats allocated to the princes. This in turn would only be possible if some of the princes could be pressured into sending candidates who enjoyed a popular mandate. ‘Here, then, I would argue,’ writes Ian Copland in a detailed study of princely attitudes, ‘was the crux of [Congress’s] new strategy in the states: to pressure the princes into returning only popularly elected representatives … to the federal legislature.’7
If the princes were thus panicked out of their support for federation, so too were Muslims. The attitude of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League to the new constitution had at first been equivocal: as nationalists they condemned it as falling short of independence, while as a minority they were tempted by its apparent safeguards. But in 1938, as Congress pressure on the princely states mounted and as Congress governments in the provinces rejected Muslim overtures for power-sharing, Jinnah too foresaw the danger of a ‘Congress Raj’ at the federal centre. Accusations of Hindu discrimination against Muslims in the already Congress-run provinces were probably much exaggerated, but they received wide publicity. To the call of ‘Islam in Danger’ the League began a drive for the mass support which had hitherto eluded it. Bengal’s governing Muslim party joined the League, most of UP’s Muslims did likewise, and in the Panjab the first cracks began to appear in the Unionist Party consensus. The League’s claim to represent the majority of Muslims at last began to acquire some substance.
With the princes and the Muslims, supposedly the beneficiaries of federation, now backing off, the scheme was probably doomed; the outbreak of the Second World War merely gave it a plausible burial. As well as polarising communal opinion and leaving the princes in the constitutional wilderness, the federation débâcle had also left its mark on Congress. In accepting power in the provinces, Congress-men had soon found themselves having to compromise on some of their principles. Plans for agrarian reform were diluted and links with the trade unions were strained by loyalties to industrialists, like the Tata and Birla families, who had substantially funded Congress. The responsibility for law and order meant a more cautious approach to radical causes. ‘A steady shift to the Right, occasionally veiled by Left rhetoric, increasingly characterised the functioning of the Congress ministries as well as of the party High Command.’ Even Nehru, whom the British regarded as little better than a communist, ‘increasingly sought in internationalist gestures [like a trip to war-torn Spain] a kind of surrogate for effective Left action at home’.8
The resulting discontent in the socialist and communist wings of Congress provided the radical Bengali leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, with his chance. A vehement bhadralok opponent of the entire 1935 constitution, in 1938 he secured re-election as Congress president on a platform of uncompromising opposition to the new constitution, to the communal awards and in particular to the federation. Congress was to withdraw its collaboration in the provinces and a new wave of satyagraha was to be launched in support of immediate independence. Gandhi had virtually retired from Congress in 1934, but, deeply distrustful of Bose, he again returned to the fray and, with the support of Nehru and others, engineered Bose’s downfall in 1939. Bose, or ‘Netaji’ (‘Leader’) as he would soon be known, responded by setting up a radical party known as the Forward Bloc and espousing terrorist tactics. In 1940 he was arrested. He escaped on the eve of his trial, fled to Afghanistan and thence to Moscow and Berlin.
It was under Tokyo’s auspices that Bose would next surface, literally, when he landed from a submarine in Japanese-held Singapore in 1943. Like Sukarno in Indonesia, and despite the same left-wing reservations, Bose admired Japan’s disciplined and defiant emergence as a world power and was encouraged by her championship of Asian emancipation and of regional co-prosperity. Forced to choose between two imperialisms, he plumped for what looked at the time to be the more amenable and dynamic.
By late 1943 he was installed on Indian soil as the head of state in Azad Hind (‘Free India’) and commander-in-chief of the Indian National Army (INA), a twenty-thousand-strong force recruited from Indian prisoners of war in Japanese hands. Azad Hind comprised just the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they being the only Indian territory under Japanese occupation. Previously the Andamans had served as a British detention centre for those convicted of political crimes. Ironically, after an odyssey of some twenty thousand kilometres, Bose had ended up exactly where he would have been sent had he never fled India.
‘A BLESSING IN DISGUISE’
India entered the Second World War much as it had the First. Without consultation, let alone consent, the viceroy simply informed its people that they were at war. The response, though, was less ‘heart-warming’ than on the previous occasion. As well as telegrams of support and a rush to the recruiting stations, there was a howl of protest and, in late 1939, a mass Congress exodus from provincial government. In those provinces where Congress had formed an administration the boycott cleared the way for direct British rule and for the rapid imposition of wartime restrictions. Elsewhere the princes breathed a sigh of relief while the Muslim League provocatively declared a Day of Deliverance from the oppression of ‘Congress Raj’.
The Muslim League would be one of the few beneficiaries of Nazi aggression. As Jinnah would later put it, ‘the war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise.’ It would enable the League to make good its claim to represent the majority of Muslims and Jinnah, its leader since 1936, to make good his claim to a principal role in the transference of power. Although lacking the charm of Nehru, let alone the fire of Bose or the popular appeal of Gandhi, Jinnah possessed a formidable mind in which intimidating resolve combined with unequalled skills as a tactician. No leader of the twentieth century has a greater claim to have fathered a nation. Schooled in the adversarial techniques of the bar and, as a Bombay Ismaili, comparatively unencumbered by the taboos and concerns of more orthodox Muslims, he soared above both colleagues and adversaries, a lofty and awesome figure immaculately suited for direction rather than incitement. But when he stooped to strike, he did so with effect. Choosing a date and a venue calculated to point up the failure of Nehru’s 1930 proclamation of purna swaraj, in early 1940 also in Lahore he secured the League’s endorsement of a very different resolution which changed the whole substance of the independence debate.
Although known as the ‘Pakistan Resolution’, the Lahore text made no mention of ‘Partition’ or ‘Pakistan’ as such. The latter term was still an academic fiction. It had first been adopted by a group of Muslims at Cambridge in the early 1930s as a wishful acronym for a greater Muslim homeland consisting of P(unjab), A(fghania, i.e. the North-West Frontier), K(ashmir), I(ran), S(ind), T(urkharistan), A(fghanistan) and (Baluchista)N. It also meant, according to its inventor, ‘the land of the paks – the s
piritually pure and clean’. Since there was no ‘B’ for Bengal in ‘PAKISTAN’ it was presumably in this latter sense that it was subsequently applied to the Lahore Resolution.
The Resolution itself stemmed from a shuffling of various constitutional proposals evolved by Muslims anxious about the federation proposal and unhappy with the experience of provincial Congress government, or ‘Hindu Raj’. Some of these proposals included a Muslim homeland in the south (an ‘Usmanistan’ based on the nizam’s Hyderabad) as well as homelands in the north-west and the east. But the final Resolution was both more realistic and more vague. In recognition of the fact that Muslims represented a separate ‘nation’ it called for a constitution whereby ‘areas in which Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute “Independent States” in which the constituent elements shall be autonomous and sovereign.’
Whether these ‘states’ were to be linked in a federation, either with one another or with the rest of India, was left unclear. Bengalis who eventually found themselves in East Pakistan could thus reasonably claim that under the terms of the Lahore Resolution they should have been independent. Also unclear was the geography of the ‘areas’ and ‘zones’ to be so ‘grouped’. Existing provinces were not mentioned by name, partly because the League could as yet lay no claim to overwhelming support in any of them, and partly because Jinnah was keeping his options open. Indeed it may be that the whole Resolution represented a tactical ploy or, as the viceroy thought, ‘a bargaining position’. It would soon become something much less negotiable, but the hint of a separate Muslim sovereignty certainly had the effect of uniting Muslims behind the League and significantly empowering Jinnah in his negotiations with the Congress leadership and the British.