The Shadow of the Great Game
Page 9
The next meeting of the All-Party Conference was scheduled to be held at Calcutta on 28 December 1928. Chagla has written that ‘Jinnah was in favour of outright rejection [of the Nehru Report]’, but finally decided to attend the meeting, however, withdrawing his proposal to abolish separate electorates. Jinnah presented his case at the Calcutta meeting, which the Mahatma did not attend, as follows: ‘Here I am not speaking as a Musalman but as an Indian…. Would you be content with a few Musalmans agreeing with the Report? Would you be content if I were to say I am with you? Do you want or do you not want the Muslim India to go along with you?’ He meant that he could not carry other Muslim leaders on the issue of separate electorates without the acceptance of the increase in Muslim representation.18 Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, representing the moderates, called Jinnah ‘a spoilt child, a naughty child’, adding ‘I am prepared to say give him what he wants and be finished with it’. M.R. Jayakar, the deputy leader of the Nationalist Party in the assembly and a spokesman of the Hindu Mahasabha at the Calcutta conference, opposed any concessions whatsoever: ‘One important fact to remember…is that well-known Muslims like the esteemed patriots Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Dr Ansari, Sir Ali Imam, Raja Sahib of Mahmoodabad and Mr [Saif-ud-din] Kitchlu have given their full consent to the compromise embodied in the Nehru Report…. Mr Jinnah therefore represents, if I may say so without offence, a small minority of Muslims.’19
Such remarks deeply hurt Jinnah; they were difficult for him to swallow. Nevertheless, he continued: ‘I am not asking for these modifications because I am a naughty child…I am asking you for this adjustment because I think it is the best and fair to the Musalmans…. We are all sons of this land. We have to live together. We have to work together and whatever our differences may be, let us at any rate not create more bad blood’. Wolpert observes: ‘A born thespian that he was, Jinnah spoke his lines to a packed, if not always friendly, house, before each curtain fell on a major act of his political life. Nagpur had ended act one. Calcutta finished act two.’20
After his humiliation at Calcutta, Jinnah took the next train to Delhi where the All-India Muslim Conference, presided over by the Agha Khan, was due to begin on 1 January 1929. The Agha Khan welcomed Jinnah as the return of the proverbial prodigal son. But Jinnah could not see any signs of welcome in the eyes of the Agha Khan’s friends who had started to consider him an agent of the Congress Party. That the Agha Khan’s Muslim Conference was so well attended was proof enough of Jinnah’s and his League’s declining clout amongst Muslims. Jinnah did not commit himself to the manifesto produced by this conference, which recommended a loose federal system for India, separate electorates and further Muslim ‘weightage’ in provincial governments and in the Central Government as well as in the civil services. Jinnah was not comfortable amongst those who had continued to follow the tenets of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan. But events appeared to be pushing him to do so.
When he was facing this major crisis in his political life, Jinnah suffered another ignominy, another deep blow to his ego: his beautiful young wife, Ruttie, left him in 1928 and moved to live separately in the Taj Mahal Hotel at Bombay. It was not so much her death a year later, but this desertion, that adversely affected him. Although staggered, it made him all the more determined to gird his loins and to succeed in his public life. But how?
Lord Irwin (Edward Frederick Lindley Wood) was the first viceroy to consult Jinnah on the course that Britain should adopt in India. Then, in 1929, a silver lining in the clouds appeared.
Mr Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party leader with whom Jinnah had a fairly good rapport, became the prime minister of Great Britain. Jinnah immediately wrote to him, spelling out his ideas for India’s future. His main thrust was that Britain should pledge that India would be granted full responsible government (dominion status). Such an assurance, he emphasized, would deflate the Congress Party, which was demanding independence. This demand, he warned, was gaining ground. He also suggested that the British prime minister convene a round table conference, in which Indian and British leaders would participate to discuss India’s future constitutional advance. A recommendation for calling a round table conference was, at the same time, made by the viceroy to His Majesty’s Government. Ramsay MacDonald replied to Jinnah through a private letter, agreeing that dominion status for India should be the goal. The British prime minister’s letter brought some cheer to Jinnah in that his voice still found an echo in some quarters. Eventually, Jinnah attended the first Round Table Conference (in London in 1930), in which both British and Indian leaders took part.
It was after the third Round Table Conference of 1933 that Jinnah decided to settle down in London to practise before the highest judicial authority in the British Empire, the Privy Council, and distance himself from Indian politics. This decision reflected the measure of his disappointment with the Round Table Conferences. Since the Congress Party had boycotted the first conference in 1930, it had been like enacting Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. However, there had been, more or less, a joint demand by the Indian delegation, including by the princes, for the formation of an All-India Federation. In his opening statement, Jinnah said: ‘We are here to witness the birth of a new Dominion of India’. These words brought frowns on the brows of the English delegates and failed to evoke applause from the other Muslim delegates. Lord Irwin’s hope that Jinnah would weld the Muslims together was not fulfilled. Lord Malcolm Hailey, ex-governor of the Punjab as well as the United Provinces, who was the Government of India’s senior consultative official at this conference wrote in his report to the viceroy, Lord Irwin, from London on Jinnah’s performance:
The Agha Khan does not give them [the Muslims] a lead, but professes himself willing to follow the majority. Jinnah is of course a good deal mistrusted; he did not at the opening of the Conference say what his party had agreed. And they [the other Muslims] are a little sore in consequence. He declined to give the Conference Secretariat a copy of his speech in advance as all the others had done. But then Jinnah of course was always the perfect little bounder and as slippery as the eels which his forefathers purveyed in Bombay market.21
At the second Round Table Conference in 1931, Jinnah again failed to make a mark. He was overshadowed by Gandhiji (who attended this time) on the one hand and by the Agha Khan on the other, so much so that for the third Round Table Conference his name was dropped from the list of Muslim delegates. Meanwhile, Ramsay MacDonald was replaced by Stanley Baldwin, the Conservative leader, as prime minister.
Jinnah’s lonely existence in London – admittedly as a successful and wealthy barrister with a house on Hampstead Heath surrounded by eight acres of garden, a chauffeur-driven Bentley, occasional evenings at the theatre and dinners with friends at the Carlton Grill does not appear to have satisfied him. Long walks on the Heath gave him pause to rethink his life. At the Round Table Conference he had seen, firsthand, the influence the Agha Khan had come to wield through his ability to wheel and deal. The Agha Khan, by cooperating with the British, was able to further the interests of his Khoja sect as well as of himself. The members of this sect were successful in setting up business establishments and shops throughout the Empire and he was recognized as the leading Indian Muslim. It was to him that Jinnah turned when he sought sponsorship for a Conservative seat in the House of Commons. (He had been earlier rejected for a Labour seat.) The Agha Khan tried but did not succeed. The exercise, however, put Jinnah in touch with some important Conservative figures.
Sir Martin Gilbert, the British historian and biographer of Winston Churchill, recently revealed that he had come across Jinnah’s letters of 1946 to Churchill. Since Churchill was then out of office and did not wish to be seen in touch with Indian politicians, he had asked Jinnah to address his letters to a lady employed at Chartwell Manor, Churchill’s home in Kent. Letters to her would receive no attention. She was one Elizabeth Giliat. When this connection precisely started, I do not know. However, Jinnah’s sudden breaking away from the Federal Scheme, wh
ich Churchill opposed, in 1937, his confidence and boldness in coming out with the Pakistan scheme that Churchill favoured in 1940 and his coddling by Viceroys Linlithgow and Wavell, both Churchill’s admirers between 1940 and 1946, are undisputed facts. Jinnah admitted during the Simla Conference in 1945 that he was receiving advice from London (see Chapter 7).*
A man, so interested in power and so dynamic, was bound to get bored with his legal practice, dabbling in stocks on the London Exchange and acquiring real estate. His trips to India to argue cases between 1933 and 1936 helped him to keep in touch with his staunch supporters, who continued to plead with him to return home and lead the Muslims. In 1933 Liaqat Ali Khan, an Oxford-educated zamindar from the United Provinces, and his vivacious wife, called on him at his house in Hampstead Heath. Liaqat Ali Khan had been with him at the fateful Calcutta confrontation of 1928. Her, he had never seen. He responded to the begum’s flattery that he had the unique ability to ‘save the situation’. When Jinnah, unsure of his capacity to move the masses like Gandhiji could, demurred, Liaqat Ali promised to arrange the means to win them over. However, how this objective was to be achieved was probably not fully revealed to him, for Jinnah, in 1933, might have baulked at whipping up fanaticism and intercommunal disharmony to inflame and unite the Muslims behind him. It was only in 1936 that the process started by Liaqat Ali Khan bore fruit. The elections scheduled for 1937, under the freshly promulgated Act of 1935, offered a challenge. He sold his London house and the Bentley, though he retained his stocks in the London Stock Exchange and his rented properties in Mayfair, and returned to Bombay.* According to Mohammad Yunus (the nephew of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan), his brother Abdul Aziz, at the behest of the home secretary in the Government of India, gave up his seat in the assembly to make way for Jinnah.
On his return to India, Jinnah immediately started to reorganize the Muslim League Party. Until then there were hardly any League cells in the districts; nor was there any coordination with other important Muslim leaders. Consequently, Jinnah constituted the League’s central and provincial parliamentary boards, recruited volunteers from the Aligarh Muslim University to spread the League’s message and travelled around the country to unite the Muslim leaders behind him. By accepting the supremacy of Fazal-ul-Haq, the leader of the Peasants’ and Tenants’ Party in Bengal, of Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, the Unionist Party’s leader in the Punjab, and of Ghulam Hussain in Sind, Jinnah established a framework of cooperation with them. In the United Provinces, he persuaded Khaliq-uz-Zaman to merge his Muslim Unity Board with the League for fighting the elections. To build up funds for the party, he befriended and recruited wealthy Muslims. Hence he made M.A. Isfahani, the industrialist from Calcutta, his principal adviser for Bengal and the Nawab of Mahmoodabad, the richest Muslim landlord of United Provinces, the treasurer of the Muslim League. In Bombay, his native city, he had always been supported by members of his sect, most of whom were prosperous traders. That his popularity in cosmopolitan Bombay was high becomes clear from the fact that he was repeatedly elected to the Central Assembly by that city in absentia.
Despite all these measures, the Muslim League suffered a rout under Jinnah’s leadership in the provincial elections of 1937. This serious setback was a terrible blow to his self-esteem – he had been beaten once again. The League was able to win only 108 out of the 485 seats reserved for Muslims in the British provinces, thereby establishing that it did not represent even a quarter of the Muslims of India. The followers of the Jamaat-ul-Ulema and the Ahrars did not support the Muslim League and in the newly carved North West Frontier Province, a 95 per cent Muslim province, the Pathans humiliated him by voting for the Congress Party. Ultimately, the Congress Party formed governments in eight out of the eleven British provinces.
In defeat defiance, yes; but how to vanquish the rising Congress monolith and how to humiliate the arrogant Nehru, whose vigorous campaigning had done him in? How, indeed, to defy the game of numbers? At this point of time, the vision of a renowned poet came to his rescue. Mohammad Iqbal, now close to the end of his life, had started writing to him to work for a separate Muslim state in order to recapture the old Muslim glory in Hindustan. Jinnah was not much interested in recapturing past glory, but now began to wonder whether the partition of India may not be the only way to achieve power and glory for himself: if he could not dominate the whole Hindustan, he could at least settle for ruling a part of it. Accordingly, his rhetoric against the Congress Party sharpened: ‘We [the Muslims] do not want to be reduced to the position of the Negroes in America’, he contended and went on to further dramatize the dangers facing the Muslims.23
It is axiomatic that the massive Congress Party victory contributed to the Muslim League’s recovery in 1938–39. The insecurity that the Congress victory created amongst Muslim leaders, including those opposed to the League and Jinnah, resulted in their moving towards each other. For example, Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan, premier of the Punjab, whose Unionist Party ruled the province through a coalition with Sikh and Hindu parties and who differed with the League’s communal approach, asked his partymen to simultaneously become members of the Muslim League. Sir Sikandar’s move was a major gain for Jinnah. Similarly, Fazal-ul-Haq of Bengal and other provincial Muslim leaders began to show interest in establishing closer contact with the League.
The Muslims’ concern about the growing power of the Congress Party was given a sharper focus with the party’s decision not to form coalition governments with the Muslim League in the United Provinces and Bombay. Khaliq-uz-Zaman, a former Congressman and also third in the Muslim League hierarchy after Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan, hoped that his party would obtain two berths in the Congress Party Government in the United Provinces – one which he would keep for himself – and forge a Congress–League coalition in the province. B.G. Kher, a Congress leader from Bombay, also wanted a coalition with the League and to induct some Muslim League leaders into his cabinet. Jawaharlal Nehru, the Congress president, however, saw no reason to accommodate League leaders unless they joined the Congress Party. This attitude served to increase the feeling amongst Muslim leaders that if the Congress Party ever came to rule India, they could not expect any consideration whatsoever. It turned Khaliq-uz-Zaman into a bitter enemy of the Congress Party. He soon did everything in his power to pit the Muslims against the Hindus in the United Provinces and to embarrass the Congress Party Government there. However, the view of several historians that this Congress decision, i.e., not to form coalitions with the League, was the single most important factor that resulted in the partition of the country overlooks the importance of developments that took place during the Second World War.
The Congress victory at the hustings also alerted the British. They now began to fear that the elections to the All-India Federal Legislature may result in the Congress Party coming to dominate the Centre too. In the Lower House of the bicameral Federal Legislature, one-third of the seats were reserved for Muslims* and an equal number for the nominees of the rulers of princely states. Since, in the provincial elections, the Muslim League had won less than one-fourth of the seats reserved for Muslims, there was no gainsaying that the formula worked out to block the Congress Party at the Centre by packing this body with dependable Muslims and princes’ nominees would not go haywire. If even half the Muslim legislators cooperated with the Congress Party, there was a possibility that this party could achieve a majority in the Lower House.
The shift in the British view on the formation of the federation was not lost on Jinnah. Lord Brabourne (John Ulick Knatchbull), the acting viceroy, reported to the secretary of state, Lord Zetland, on 18 August 1938:
Jinnah ended up with the startling suggestion that “we should keep the Centre as it was now; that we should make friends with the Muslims by protecting them in the Congress Provinces and that if we did that, the Muslims would protect us at the Centre”.24
This development marked the beginning of the policy of ‘mutual support’ between Jinnah and the British, which
had far-reaching consequences for India.
There was another factor that was soon to come into play. His doctors told Jinnah that the patch on his lung, first noticed in 1928, had spread and that he was terminally ill. (The cancer came later.) He kept this fact to himself, although he took the precaution of writing and depositing his last will and testament with his Bombay lawyer on 19 May 1939. Whatever had to be done, had now to be done fast.25
The opportunity came a few months later, when at the commencement of the war, the Congress ministries walked out of provincial governments and the British looked desperately for support for the war effort towards the Muslim League and, by logical extension, to Jinnah. And he boldly grasped it (as recounted in Chapter 2).
After Pakistan was formed and his ambition fulfilled, Jinnah could afford to dispense with the theories that he had developed in the previous decade to achieve his goal. In reality, he had remained the same old Jinnah who believed in secularism in politics, who was opposed to communalism and had no faith in religion. Speaking in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in Karachi on 11 August 1947, he discussed the pros and cons of a united India and said: ‘Maybe that view [for a united India] is correct. Maybe it is not. That remains to be seen.’ This statement gives a truer picture of his ambiguous feelings about the creation of Pakistan than all the dogmatic bombast he had been indulging in about the two-nation theory in his search to fulfil personal ambition. Further, he told the Constituent Assembly, much to the amazement of Muslim Leaguers and others: ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State…. In course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.’26