The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  First of all, the Muslims, by and large, were also not enamoured of Jinnah’s scheme. Any scheme for a separate Muslim state in India, to be created on the basis of British provinces in which Muslims were in a majority (i.e., in the North West Frontier Province, the Punjab, Sind, Baluchistan and Bengal) would exclude from it about 25 to 30 million Muslims who lived in provinces in which they were in a minority (i.e., in the United Provinces, Bihar, the Central Provinces, Bombay, Madras, Orissa and the capital city of Delhi). Further, it was in the Muslim-minority provinces of British India that fear of Hindu domination under a democratic constitution, i.e., rule by the majority, had started to surface and the cry of ‘Islam in danger’ could be whipped up. In the Muslim-majority provinces, earmarked for a separate Muslim state by Jinnah, Muslims dominated political life and were running the governments there. They neither feared Hindu domination under a democratic constitution nor were they interested in a separate Muslim state. This is proved by the fact that Jinnah’s Muslim League Party was unable to win absolute majorities in elections in the Muslim-majority provinces right up to independence in August 1947. So, Jinnah’s scheme would foist Pakistan on those not interested in it and leave out those who might welcome it.

  Secondly, the sentiment of those Muslim leaders who wished to escape Hindu domination was not for the withdrawal, and confinement, of Islamic power to the two corners of the subcontinent. This would mean abandoning the heartlands of India such as Delhi, Agra and Lucknow, from where Muslim rulers had held sway over many parts of the country for more than 600 years, until defeated by the British. These were the places where the most famous and magnificent symbols of past Muslim power and glory, both secular and religious, such as the great forts of Delhi and Agra, the Taj Mahal, the Jama Masjid, amongst others, were situated. It would mean to them not only an ignominious retreat but also the betrayal of centuries of Muslim conquest and rule in India. ‘A Pakistan without Delhi is a body without [a] heart’ was the sentiment that Patrick French, the historian, encountered even more than half a century after partition.

  Thirdly, Jinnah’s scheme appeared unnecessarily defeatist to many Muslims. The non-Muslims were divided into various faiths, such as Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism and animism and the Hindus, though in a great majority, were divided into castes and subcastes and a proportion of them were impregnated with pacifist and passive philosophies. On the other hand, the 85 to 90 million Muslims, i.e., more than a fourth of the total population of the country, belonged to one faith.*

  In such a situation, the Muslims not only could hope to avoid being dominated but also could establish a measure of political ascendancy in a united free India. Moreover, major Muslim princes, including the Nizam of Hyderabad, with a state as large as France, could be expected to cooperate with them to maintain the balance between the Muslims and the non-Muslims.

  Fourthly, the Muslim fundamentalist groups were particularly opposed to Pakistan, however anomalous that may sound. The leading Sunni thinker and preacher of this time was Abdul Al Mawdudi of Hyderabad. In 1941, it was he who formed the Jamaat-i-Islami, an organization whose influence during the last fifty years has spread far and wide over the Muslim world. Besides opposing Pakistan for some of the reasons given earlier, Mawdudi was against the type of sovereign authority on the Western model that Jinnah proposed to install in Pakistan. He also considered Jinnah unfit to guide the Muslims of India because of the latter’s lack of religious knowledge and his Western ways of thinking. He was for adopting chapter and verse the system of political organization as decreed by the Prophet. Mawdudi’s views were pan-Islamic and not India-centric. He foresaw a clash between the Muslims and the non-Muslims of the world – ‘a clash of civilizations’. Mawdudi’s ideas have inspired ideologues and jihadis such as Omar Abdullah, the leader of the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden himself.*

  Several Muslim groups indeed held a meeting in Delhi after Jinnah gave his call for the partition of India to denounce his proposal. There was a long tradition of opposition by the Ulema – Muslim religious scholars – and their followers to British Christian rule. These religious scholars were influenced, among other Islamic religious movements, by the tenets of the Wahhabi creed (founded by Mohammad ibn Abd al Wahhal of Najd in Saudi Arabia). The Jamaat-ul-Ulema (the Congress of the Learned), founded in the 1920s, was a byproduct of such thinking. In the same decade, the Jamaat leader Maulana Shoam Noamani of Azamgarh established the Deoband and the Nadwain Tul Ulema seminaries in the United Provinces. The impeccable anti-British credentials of the Ulema and their followers can be judged from the fact that they had exhorted their followers to support the Mutiny of 1857 and, after the British forces reconquered Delhi, about 27,000 of their members were executed in the capital and its vicinity alone. Many Ulemas felt a certain affinity for the Indian nationalists of the Congress Party because they were also fighting British domination.

  Another Muslim group, the Ahrars, was influenced by the teachings of the Persia-born Maulana Afghani. Under his inspiration they worked to create a bridge between the Pathans of the North West Frontier Province and the Pathans of Afghanistan on the one hand and the Indian National Congress Party on the other. The objective was to jointly oppose the dethroning of the Ottoman Sultan, the Khalifa or the spiritual leader of the Muslims, by the British after the First World War. The movement they launched came to be known as the Khilafat Movement. Even after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk became the president of Turkey in 1923, and formally abolished the caliphate in 1924, the Pathans of the NWFP and Ahrars retained their links with the Congress Party.

  Fifthly, quite a few Muslims feared the possibility of relocation as a result of partition for economic reasons. The All-India Momin Conference, an association of weavers, opposed the scheme because it might result in their being uprooted and losing their long-developed and assured markets. The same was true of many other Muslims engaged in cottage industries. The Shias were, by and large, more educated and held more government posts than the Sunnis. They did not feel that they would improve their prospects if Pakistan were created. In an overwhelmingly Sunni Pakistan they would face more pressure exerted by that sect than in the large polyglot and multireligious India. Consequently, the Shia Political Conference also participated in the Muslims’ protest against Jinnah’s scheme.

  The only person who suggested the partition of India before Jinnah did so in 1940 was one thirty-six-year old individual named Rahmat Ali (1897–1951). In 1933 he published a pamphlet from Cambridge in England titled ‘Now or Never’. In this pamphlet, he proposed the creation of a separate sovereign state in the northwestern region of India. He also coined the word ‘Pakistan’* for it. But the idea was so unpopular among Muslims that he was totally ignored. However, the word ‘Pakistan’ stuck and was adopted for Jinnah’s scheme a decade later. No member of the Muslim League delegation, then in London for the Round Table Conference, met Rahmat Ali. When he sought an interview with Jinnah, the latter refused to see him.

  Stanley Wolpert, the well-known American historian, in his book Jinnah of Pakistan speculates whether Rahmat Ali’s ideas might not have been inspired by the die-hard British Conservatives. Churchill and his friends were dead set against an All-India Federation that was being considered by the British Government in the wake of the Round Table Conferences of the early 1930s. They feared that whatever the safeguards incorporated in such a federation, it might encourage the Indian parties and religious groups to work together and start India’s slide towards political unity and self-rule. They would rather have three mutually antagonistic entities emerging in India: ‘A Muslimstan, a Hindustan and a Princestan’, as described by Linlithgow to Jinnah on 13 March 1940 and later by Churchill to Lord Wavell. Such a trifurcation would ‘institutionalize’ differences among the Muslims, the Hindus and the princes and would enable Britain, by playing one against the other, to rule for decades to come.

  A few years later Rahmat Ali amended his scheme to include, besides northwest India an
d Afghanistan, ‘the heterogeneous Muslim belt all the way from Central Asia to the Bosphorus, the original Pakistan’. This suggests that Rahmat Ali was a loose cannon. It cannot be said for certain that his 1933 ideas were inspired by Churchill’s friends.

  How then did Jinnah tackle the critics of his scheme, especially the Muslim Leaguers and Muslim fundamentalists? How did he square the circle? First, although Muslims may not have been enamoured of partition, there was to be found, among their elite, the sort of amorphous feelings as conveyed by the Agha Khan to Lord Zetland in 1940:

  After all there was a certain obligation on His Majesty’s Government not to put the Muslim community or other minorities and the princes under a worse position than they had occupied when the British had come to India.2

  Therefore, there existed a foundation for Jinnah to build upon. Jinnah had taken care, when announcing his scheme in Lahore, to ensure that its parameters were kept obscure and fluid. He left open the possibility of the creation of a large and powerful state, which the Muslims could be proud of. The Muslim League plan revealed in 1942 included the North West Frontier Province, Baluchistan, the Punjab and the neighbouring Delhi province – even though it did not have a Muslim majority – and Sind, in the west and Bengal, including Calcutta, and Assam – even though it also did not have a Muslim majority – in the east. The plan also included Hyderabad and all the other Muslim-ruled princely states. (Later, a corridor to connect the two wings of the proposed Muslim state was added to the plan.) Such a large Pakistan would be more than equal to Hindustan, even if all the princely states ruled by Hindu princes joined the latter. Such a possibility was remote, as made out by the League, because the chancellor of the Chamber of Princes, Nawab Muhammad Hamidullah of Bhopal, was working for the creation of a third sovereign state – a Princestan – consisting of the territories of all the Indian princes.

  After the idea of a separate Princestan collapsed, Jinnah encouraged the Nawab of Bhopal to try and persuade those non-Muslim Indian princes whose states lay between West Pakistan and Bhopal in Central India to join Pakistan; but more on this topic later. All such activity and propaganda succeeded in creating in the Indian Muslim mind an ambiguity about the future boundaries of Pakistan until the very end of British rule. This saved Jinnah embarrassment and revolt by his followers in the Muslim-minority provinces, who would have been left high and dry.

  Jinnah’s ardent supporters spread the message that without creating a powerful independent Muslim state in the subcontinent with its own armed forces, free to seek the support of foreign powers, the Muslims’ position in a post-British united India would gradually deteriorate and their identity would be threatened. Therefore, Jinnah’s adherents emphasized that the retreat of Muslim power to the two wings of the subcontinent should be seen as a strategic move, with the avowed goal to consolidate and advance as opportunities presented themselves after British withdrawal. Jinnah had given a hint of this type of militant thinking to Lord Linlithgow as early as 13 March 1940, when he told them: ‘The Muslim areas would be poorer, but because of the Muslims’ military power and British collaboration, they will be able to safeguard even those of their community domiciled in the Hindu areas.’3

  On 31 March 1940, Sir Francis Mudie, the chief secretary in the United Provinces, reported what two prominent members of the Muslim League, Khaliq-uz-Zaman (the same person we met earlier talking to Lord Zetland) and M.B. Kidwai told him:

  During the late regime [the Congress Party Government in UP till October 1939] they [the Muslims] were powerless vis-à-vis the Congress [Hindus] because of the implied sanction of the British army. If each of these dominions [Pakistan and India] had an army of its own, that position would change. The UP Muslims would then look after themselves against a UP Congress Government relying on their own resources.4

  The superior fighting prowess of the believers in Islam is entrenched in Muslim lore. A future minister of Pakistan, Ghazanfar Ali, in a speech in Lahore on 7 February 1947 (available in the British Archives), further developed the point that Jinnah had made to Linlithgow as follows:

  Mohammad Mir Qasim and Mahmud of Ghazni invaded India with armies composed of only a few thousand and yet were able to overpower lakhs of Hindus; God willing, a few lakhs of Muslims will yet overpower crores of Hindus.5

  Sir Firoz Khan Noon, a future Muslim League prime minister of Pakistan, has been recorded as declaring that if the Muslims were driven to fight, ‘the havoc they will cause will put to shame what Chenghez Khan and [his grandson] Halaku did’.6

  Sayed Ain-ud-Din had served as a district magistrate of Lucknow, the capital of the United Provinces, in the pre-independence era. In 1945 or 1946 he told my father that his acquaintances in the Muslim League were assuring him that, with England’s help, Pakistan would become strong and since there would be Hindus in Pakistan and Muslims in India, this factor would restrain the Hindus from acting against the Muslims left behind in India. This was the League’s ‘hostage theory’ to calm the Muslims who, under Jinnah’s scheme, would be left in India. Nevertheless, Ain-ud-Din migrated to Pakistan after it was founded. (He later became the administrator of the Karachi airport.)

  The Congress Party did not pass any resolution to counter Jinnah’s scheme even though it was the most direct attack on the party’s fundamental policy to work for a united India and especially when the scheme contained inherent contradictions that could be exposed. For instance: How could the scheme be justified on the basis of the two-nation theory when nearly 25 to 30 million Muslims would be left out of the Islamic state? Did the Muslim-majority provinces earmarked for Pakistan want it at all? Would the creation of Pakistan settle the communal problem in either dominion, or exacerbate it? What would be the economic consequences of partition? Would a division of India strengthen or weaken the defence of the subcontinent, which had natural boundaries based on mountains and seas? Would not partition enable foreign countries, other than Britain, to fish in troubled waters?

  Could the Congress Party’s silence be attributed to the reasons given by Jawaharlal Nehru, namely, that ‘to consider it [the Pakistan scheme] seriously would merely encourage diverse, separatist and disruptive forces’, and therefore it was best to dismiss it as a ‘mad scheme that would not last a day’, as he put it? If so, this attitude was a measure of the nationalists’ escapism and arrogance. Gandhiji termed Jinnah’s two-nation theory ‘an untruth’, but waited till 1944 to explain to the public what he meant by this term. Then in an open letter to Jinnah he contended that it was not true that the Hindus and the Muslims of India were two separate nations because an overwhelming majority of the Indian Muslims (over 90 per cent actually) were descendants from converts and there was no precedent in the history of the world that a change of religion changed the nationality of a person.

  The facts given above and in Chapter 2 might suggest that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a dyed-in-the-wool Islamic fundamentalist whose life’s aim was to divide Muslims from Hindus by carving out an Islamic state in the subcontinent. Moreover, it may appear that he had no scruples in permitting the use of violence to achieve this end. The irony is that for the first sixty years of his life Jinnah (until the mid-1930s) fought for Hindu–Muslim political unity and for the emergence of a united, independent India and worked to achieve these objectives through peaceful constitutional means.

  On his return to India as a full-fledged barrister (Lincoln’s Inn) in 1896, Jinnah chose Bombay as his place of residence, although he was born in Kathiawad in Gujarat, the same state as Gandhiji, and his parents had settled in Karachi. From the very beginning, besides pursuing his career at the Bombay Bar, he took a lot of interest in politics. At that time, there were two conflicting political currents influencing educated Indian Muslims. One represented the continuing old jihad against Christians, which in the Indian context meant against the British, who ruled over more Muslims than any other power, including the Ottoman Turks. The other represented the Muslims’ efforts to seek reconciliation with Britai
n after their decisive defeat at the hands of the British in the nineteenth century and to forge an alliance with them against the majority Hindu population.

  The Europeans (i.e., the Portuguese) had reached India in the late fifteenth century, spurred by the papal bull to get ‘rearwards of the land of the Moors’ (the Muslims) who then controlled large chunks of the territories between Europe and Asia. (Trade, of course, went hand in hand.) The French were not far behind. The British, however, defeated the Portuguese and later the French. Throughout the eighteenth century, the British fought against Muslim rulers who then held sway over much of the country. Akbar’s policy of reconciling the Hindus in the sixteenth century, which was reversed by Aurangzeb in the seventeenth, got reversed once more thereafter. As the grip of the Mughal Empire in the subcontinent weakened from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, the local Muslim satraps, who emerged, became more dependent upon the support of the majority community in their domains. This state of affairs triggered off a process of Hindu–Muslim reconciliation in the political field. Muslims and Hindus fought side by side against the British in the eighteenth century. In fact, the commander-in-chief of Bengal’s Nawab Siraj-ud-Daula’s army, which faced Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, was a Hindu general, Mir Mardan.