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M J Akbar: BIOGRAPHY

New Book Published by M J Akbar
 "Fratelli di Sangue"
Italian Translated version of Blood Brothers

ISBN 978-88-545-0186-7
Pagine 352 Pages 352
Euro 18,50 Euro 18.50
Collana: Le tavole d'oro Series: The tables gold

Fratelli di Sangue
Published by Neri Pozza

The Launch event was attended by M J Akbar, (the author), the chairman of the Group-Gmc Adnkronos Knights of Labour and Joseph Marra, and the Deputy chairman Of the Italy-India Sandro Gozi, the president of 'Ducati Energy' Guidalberto Guidi, the chairman of Piaggio Group Roberto Colaninno and The entrepreneur Maurizio Romiti.

Traces the history of India since the Partition in 1947, and analyzes the current political situation and India's future : Amazon.com Synopsis
India: The Siege Within is the account of achievements of India’s secular democracy as well as its vulnerability and failures. I've elaborated the origins and nature of the strains on Indian unity which have deep roots in history.
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CHAPTER:  INDIA: THE SIEGE WITHIN

The Rationale of 1947 
The name India derives from Indus, the great river born in the Himalayas which sweeps down the north-west on its way to the Arabian Sea. ‘Indus’ itself is a variation of the Sanskrit word sindhu, meaning river. The Oxford English Dictionary. pointing out that King Alfred mentioned India in his manuscripts. notes that the name has, from before the birth of Christ, defined ‘a large country or territory of southern Asia, lying east of the river Indus and south of the Himalaya mountains' In 1947. The British left this large country free but divided And the Indus which gave this land its name was now in the new nation of Pakistan.

Some historians have felt obliged to sell the thesis that the concept of India as one nation is a gift of British imperial power. The implication is that it is merely a matter of time before the unifying effects of the British empire wear off and the different lingual groups go back to the destructive warfare of the past. Among the recent theorists is David Page who writes in Prelude to Partition (Oxford University Press, 1982): 'Long before the foundation of the Indian National Congress or the All—India Muslim League, there existed in India a "nationaI’’ organization whose ramifications extended in to the remotest village— the imperial power itself.

The British took Delhi in 1857; the Indian National Congress was horn in 1885. It must have been an extraordinary rule which in just three decades managed to integrate a territory as large as this subcontinent whose parts had, it seems. nothing in common for thousands of years. Two hundred and fifty years before Christ, Ashokas administration took Buddhism into ever corner of India, hut apparently did not leave any sense of common identity. Brihaspati’s principles of natural justice have been a part of popular faith for centuries. but it is the British courts which allegedly gave India a sense of law. The Mughal emperor Akbar's administrative structures held together his vast empire in the sixteenth century. but we must believe that. it. is the British Collector in the district who taught Indians how to rule themselves. Shankara walked from, Kerala to Kashmir to preach Hinduism before William of Normandy reached Britain, but it is the British railways which united India through a communications network! ‘the argument of unity by courtesy of the British empire falls on many counts, but the simplest is that even in I947 nearly half of this country was not ruled by the British bet by heir native allies, who employed Indian administrators. School maps did show the whole of India painted red, but the princely states were not technically a part of British India. A separate accession treaty ii ad to be obtained from each one of the 565 princely states on this subcontinent at the time of independence.

India has, of course, been divided into an assortment of feudal kingdoms, their maps changing with the success or failure of different rulers. But it hardly behoves the European who knows anything about Germany or Italy to say that feudal divisions signify separate countries. Even across the barriers of language, there was a geographical and cultural sense of a single entity from the Sulaiman Range and the Hindu Kush in the north—west, to the Himalayas across the north, to the seas in the west, south and east. Irrespective of the number of kingdoms along the way, the Hindu did not need permission to go to Hardwar or to Banaras; nor the Muslim in later times to the shrine of Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti at Ajmer Sharif Currents of faith and challenge flowed through this land independent of passing dynasties. The difference between the railways and the roads was Simply a difference of pace, the difference between a new technology and an old one, not the difference between a new country and an old chaos,
What the British did bring were the latest ideas in political systems. jurisprudence and science. But the most important asset India got from he British was not so much something that the British offered as something that the lndians took: a democratic polity. It was in this idea and this structure that Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress found the solution to a modern India, one which could combine old heritage and modern aspiration and be strong enough to resist the extraordinary conflicts which human beings manage to devise for themselves. It was co-operative achievement, Gandhi believed, rather than class—based violent revolution or feudal—theocratic fascism. which could power a united India to prosperity. This, broadly, was the philosophy of the Congress nationalist.

Against this doctrine was ranged what has come to be known as the ideology of communalism. Simply put, its basic plank was that the different communities in India could not coexist to their mutual benefit, that the minorites would become victims of Hindu subjugation . and that neither history nor culture would allow co-operation. There were communalist parties representing. all three major religions. Hindu, Muslim and Sikh . Democracy, instead of being. seen as an asset, was called a liability. The Muslim League argued that in a one- man-one vote system the minorities could never enter the ruling class since the overwhelming Hindu majority would successfully shut them out. Any examination of the population mix in united India would have exposed this argument as bogus. but it was simple enough to become useful propaganda. The very first demand of the Muslim League politicians, therefore, in the first decade of this century, was for separate electorates where Muslims could vote for Muslims and Hindus for Hindus. The British granted this is demand very easily, which was not in the least surprising since it fitted well with their policy to keep Hindu and Muslims at each others throats so they would not join hands arid turn against the British As the Muslim leader Mohammad Ali told Lord Sankey, presiding over the first round-table conference in November 1930: My Lord, divide and rule is the order of the day, But in India. we divide and you rule.’ Hindu fanatics with their extravagant talk of Hindu domination reinforced minority fears and prejudices. Such Hindus wanted their own theocratic state where they could take revenge’ on the Muslims and Christians for a curious anomaly of history: for seven hundred and fifty years no Hindu had held power in Delhi. From 1192 to 1857 Muslim kings, despite enormous fluctuations in the true extent of their control, had sat on the throne of Delhi. And in 1857 British Christians had replaced them.

But feudalism was a dead concept by the twentieth century. The nature of power and the terms of its acquisition in post-colonial India would be radically different: The legitimacy of he ruler would now be decided by the strength of the vote, not genetics or the sword. By the turn of the century the battle between the nationalists and the communalists began to control The mind of India. There were clashing dreams about the kind of nation the new India would he. In 1947 the British granted partial victories to both. The Muslims who said they could not live with Hindus were given Pakistan: the nationalists who wanted a united, democratic India were given the rest of the country. But the struggle is not. over. In Pakistan, those who want. a restoration of democracy and the creation of a secular state continue to protest and hope. In India. those who would divide the country once more, such as the propagators of a Sikh nation, have carried their war against the democratic state to extraordinary levels of sophistication and violence.

The historian Bipin Chandra in a well-timed book. Communalism in Modern India (Vikas Publishing house. 1984). describes the evolution of the two main political inspirations thus: ‘In India, both nationalism and communalism were recent, that is, modern historical processes — the transformation of India under the impact of colonialism. They were reflections of a new widening reality that was being born out of the ashes of the pre-colonial social structure. This also followed from the very newness of the modern politics that arose in India in the nineteenth century. Modern politics were the politics of mass participation. of the emergence at public opinion and of the revolutionary and unprecedented notion of popular sovereignty. The new political life and loyalties had to be based on new uniting principles, new political identities.’

'It is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality,' said Mahomed Ali Jinnah in his speech in 1940 supporting the Lahore resolution of the Muslim league which became the charter of the demand for Pakistan. The nationalist point of view was best presented by Mahatma Gandhi. in an article published in January 1942 'I hold it to be utterly wrong to divide man from man by reason of religion. What conflict of interest can there be between Hindus and Muslims in the matter of revenue, sanitation police, justice or the use of public conveniences, The difference can only be in religious usage and observances with which a secular state has no concern. Gandhi’s ideology was not Only a public posture: he also displayed it in his personal life, It is not commonly known that Gandhi’s eldest son converted to Islam. When taunted about this, Gandhi replied that if on becoming a Muslim his son had stopped drinking (which Islam forbids), then he welcomed the conversion! And he said to those who believed Muslims to be a separate nation: 'My eldest. son embraced Islam a few years back. What would his homeland be —Porbandar [where he was born] or Punjab [where the idea of Pakistan Was being formed]? I. ask the Mussalmans [Muslims]: If India be not your homeland, what other country do you belong to? In what separate homeland would you put my son who embraced Islam?’ (Quoted from Gandhi’s speech at the historic Congress session at Bombay in August 1942 where the ‘Quit India’ resolution was passed.) Contrast this with Jinnah, who renounced his daughter when she wanted to — and did —marry a Parsi. Jinnab went to Pakistani is daughter remained in India.

It took more than five decades of struggle, sacrifice and determination to persuade the British to grant Indians their freedom. It took just seven years to create the country called Pakistan;. Before 1940, even the hard— liners in the Muslim leadership used to stress that all they all wanted was coexistence with honour, not a separate country. The idea that Muslims were a separate nation was dismissed as absurd over kind over again by Muslim leaders of all shades of opinion. In December 1915 the man who presided over the Muslim League session, Mazharul Huq, put it succinctly: We are Indian Muslims. These words, "Indian Muslims’’. convey the ideas of our nationality and of our religion ... When a question concerning the welfare of India and of justice to Indians arises. I am not only an Indian. but an Indian alone. an Indian next and an Indian last, an Indian and an Indian alone The famous Mohammad Ali told the first round-table conference. Where God commands I am a Muslim first, a Muslim second and a Muslim last, and nothing but a Muslim . . . But where India is concerned, where India’s freedom is concerned . I am an Indian first, an Indian second, and an Indian last. 'Or to quote the President of the Muslim league in 1931, Khan Sahib Mohammad Abdulla. addressing the 22nd session which commenced on 26 December: At the outset I must frankly state that we claim to be and are as much Indians as any other community in India and are as keen to see our country achieve freedom .. . Troubles really begin when we are accused of Pan Islamism or for planning Muslim rule in India merely because we demand certain safeguards ... I take this opportunity to assure my Hindu brethren that we the Mussalmans belong to Indian soil and that our outlook is essentially Indian... We must strive in unity to develop a common Indian culture and build a happy and progressive Indian nation, which should be composed of all that is best in the varied cultures that have found their way into India. But so long as one community strives for domination over the other and dreams of Hindu or Moslem Raj . . . there is little hope for speedy realization of our legitimate aspirations to become a great. and tree nation.' Pakistan was the dream of but a handful of commited theocrats.

A strong section of the Muslims remained., in fact, with Gandhi and the nationalist mainstream till the bitter end. The greatest of them was Abul Kalam, whose scholarship in theology enabled him to use the title Maulana and whose spirit was such that he to on the honorific ‘Azad (meaning free). The quintessence of his philosophy was summed up in the moving speech he gave to the Ramgarh session of the Congress it; 1940, where he was elected president of the party in the same week that the Muslim League passed its Pakistan resolution in Lahore: I cannot quarrel with my own convictions: I cannot stifle my own conscience ... I am a Mussalman and am proud of the fact. Islam’s splendid tradition of 1,300 years Is my Inheritance. The spirit of Islam guides and helps me forward. lam proud of being an Indian. I am part of that indivisible unity that is the Indian nationality. I am indispensable to this noble edifice and without me this splendid structure of India is incomplete. I am an essential element which has gone to build India. I can never surrender this claim.’

If India’s unity is destroyed once again. it will be for the same reasons this time as last — because the leadership of a minority managed, in the midst of deliberately provoked violence, to sell the thesis that a Hindu majority would either subjugate them or swallow them. The Muslims were told that the Hindu’s secularism was a pretence, his democracy a trick to disguise a sinister ambition — to turn the Muslims into slaves. The Sikh is being told today that the faith cannot survive the Hindu effort to absorb It unless the Sikhs get their own country.

Even a casual look at the map of India makes It very clear where the vulnerable points an: the Sikh state of Punjab and the Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir. contiguous to each other and to Pakistan. If the theocrats win the renewed battle for the mind, then Punjab and Kashmir cannot be kept Inside India. If the democrats can prove that coexistence is not only possible but beneficial, then the map of India could in fact change In a different way. If we want to examine the possibilities that lie in the future, then It is vital to understand the partition of 1947. For In the rationale of that decision lies the ideology or the state, and in the truth or fraud of the ideology will lie the success or failure of a nation.

The birth or the Congress in 1885, thanks in part to a self-effacing Britisher, Allan Octavian Hume, was the seminal event on the journey to 1947. Constantly adjusting to the tides of history. the Congress kept afloat long enough to find the leader who could convert the party of lawyers into a mass organization and show the way to independence. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Even in its pre-Gandhi phase, the Congress was clear on the vital question of the relationship between the various religious communities. if the first President was a Christian from Britain, then the third was a Muslim from Bombay, Sir Badruddin Tyabji. Sir Badruddin stressed the principle in his presidential address: ‘I. at least, do not consider that there can be anything whatsoever in the position in the relations of the different communities of India — be they Hindus. Mussalmans [Muslims]. Parsees [Parsis] or Christians — which should induce the leaden of one community to stand aloof from the others in their efforts to obtain those great. general reforms, those general rights which are for the common benefit of us all.’

The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of search and revaluation in India The old order, the feudal power structure, had collapsed, and the various interest groups were searching for ways to retain their niches in a changing world. Simultaneously. is new educated Indian elite began to give voice to ideas and sentiments in an effort first to discover the true India and then to place it in the modern context. Reformers like Keshub Chandra Sen wanted a Young India’ freed of caste and united in 'one mighty federation’. Others with different aspirations began to search for an official language which might reflect the Hindu ethos of North India better than English or Persian: Hindi was a child of this need. literature and history were written to explain the past and chart the future. There was a sense that the white man’s rule was a temporary phenomenon —but who would take over power when the British had tired? Conflicting answers were offered. While the liberal elite wanted rule by the law of a great and wise Constitution, others had more dangerous ambitions. One of the most prominent Hindu communalist of this century, M, S. Golwalkar, set down his vision very clearly in his book We, published in 1939: minorities must live by the grace of the majority: only a Hindu could he a true Indian: those whose faith did not originate on this subcontinent were 'foreigners’. Muslims, Christians, Jews and Parsis would have to adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no idea but the glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . [they] may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing. deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights In this country Hindus alone are the nation and the Muslims and others, if not actually anti-national, are at least outside the body of the nation.’ The organization which Golwalkar led for many years, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was the one which inspired the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. However, such Hindu fundamentalism, long the thirst of a section of the middle class, has never got much response in all India whose population is 80 per cent Hindu. It needs to be pointed out that India remains a secular state not because one—fifth of its population is Muslim, Sikh or Christian, and therefore obviously has a vested interest in a secular Constitution, but because nine out of ten Hindus do not believe in violence against the minorities. If all the Hindus had been zealots, ho law—and—order machinery in the world could have prevented the massacre of Muslims who are scattered in villages and towns all across the country.

The old Muslim elite, created out of centuries of feudal rule, had two broad components: the landlords and the ulema. or clergy. Neither was comfortable with the concept of a democracy, in which, inevitably, there would be land reform and a common law. In no major religion are the word and the deed so closely connected as in Islam: the Quran and the Hadis (the sayings of the Prophet) are respectively the word of Cod and the basis for social law. Hence the power of the mullah, who is the interpreter and teacher. The clergy had influence not only in the Muslim court but also in the daily life of the community through its control over the educational system. The mullab had no wish to relinquish his hold over the law arid education which would guide and shape the Muslim community: he could never want a society in which law and education became the function of the state. And so a section of the priesthood took the lead in the effort to create the cultural and emotional separation between Hindus and Muslims as the prelude to the geographical separation. Its primary target was the urban or semi-urban middle class, whose voice was much stronger than its numbers, Its principal weapon was fear — and here it got invaluable help from Hindu fanatics whose excesses were propagated as the reality of Hindu muss opinion and whose fantasies were repeated as a foretaste of things to come if the Hindus ever acquired power. The war-cry was that the Muslim was in danger. The first solution proposed constitutional guarantees of security. Later, no ‘guarantees’ were found sufficient and the demand was changed to that for a separate country, where the clergy could protect itself with a theocratic Constitution. It was a difficult task and took a long while. As long ago as the last century, administrative reforms like the decision to allow the use of Hindi in the governments of the Central Provinces in 1872. Bihar in 1881 and the United Provinces in 1891, were skilfully used to spread the fear that this was only the beginning of the effort to deprive the Muslims (who knew Urdu, not Hindi) of government jobs. It is eas to see how a middle class might respond to such propaganda. But despite all this. the Muslim masses never showed any support for the Muslim League until madness seized the subcontinent in 1946 and 1947.

The landlords, the Nawabs and the Khan Bahadurs, gladly joined hands with the clergy. It was a classic combination of two traditional forces, one desperate to preserve its economic power and the other determined to continue its social domination. The All-India Muslim League. formed in 1906, was the product of this alliance, it was started in Dacca (Dhaka), at the initiative of the Nawab of Dacca. The efforts to inject hatred into the sensitive province of Bengal. where the Muslims were in a majority but Hindu landlords held the economic power, had already begun. One of the constant sources of tension used to be cow-slaughter, with the ,mullahs claiming beef as a right and their Hindu equivalents demanding that the community protect the holy cow by killing Muslims. In such an atmosphere the nationalist was most often drowned out. Says Rafiuddin Ahmed in The Bengal Muslims: 1871—1906 (Oxford University Press, 1981): ‘Mir Musharraf Husain, a leading Bengali Muslim writer of the period, thus found himself in the centre of a heated controversy when he advocated the voluntary abolition of cow slaughter by the Muslims for the sake of amity with the Hindus... [he] pleaded that the Hindus and Muslims were so interdependent on each other that "even if they profess differing religions, in heart and action they are identical”. Musharraf’s rationalism was hardly shared by many others, either in his own community or among the Hindus.’

In 1905 Lord Curzon partitioned the province of Bengal to create Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority sections. Both communities had protested vehemently when it became known that such a decision was being mooted. Lord Curzon won the Muslims over by offering rewards: in a speech at Dacca (Dhaka) on 18 February 1904 he told the Muslims that he would help them create a centre of Muslim power in Dacca ‘which would invest the Mahomedans in eastern Bengal with a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussalman viceroys and kings’.

The Muslim League displayed no embarrassment about its feudal— theocratic nature, Its Constitution of December 1907 restricted membership to four hundred ‘men of property and influence’. The first demand it made was for those guarantees: it asked for separate electorates for the Muslims, Within just three years of the births of the League, the Indian Councils Act of 1909 (better known as the Morley—Minto Reforms) gave statutory recognition to separate electorates and a weightage to Muslims in the legislatures. But the Muslim league was to suffer a serious setback soon after, when King George V at the Delhi Durbar of 1911 gave a boon’ to India by removing the partition ulcer of Bengal and reunifying the province.

A depressed Nawab Sahimullab withdrew from active politics in 1912. ‘the Muslim League had, so far, supported British rule as a safeguard against Hindu domination. In 1913 it accepted the Congress demand for self-government. fly 1916, M. A. Jinnah and Sir Wazir Hasan, on behalf of the Muslim League, and Motilal Nehru and Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru for the Congress, had worked out the famous Lucknow pact between the two parties. The implications of that agreement are best summed up in the statement made by the Muslim League leader, the Raja of Mahmudabad, welcoming the pact: ‘We are Indians first and Mahomedans afterwards.’ (There was an interesting echo of this statement during a conversation this author had with General Zia of Pakistan, in 1982. Said the General: I wish that Indian Muslims establish their own identity, as Indians and as Muslims. It would be a matter of great pride for me to see that the Indian Muslims take pride in calling themselves lndians first and Muslims next. I would he a very proud man listening to that.’ Excellent. But if it is possible for Muslims to be Indians, and proud ones at that, why then was Pakistan torn out of the country?)

The most serious problem that the Muslim League faced was that the party created in the name of the Muslims was not getting their support. If anything, Muslims seemed more attracted to the Congress platform. It needs to be mentioned here that neither the Congress nor the Muslim League were parties in the formal sense: they were movements, one for the independence of the country and the other for the protection of Muslims. Senior leaders like M. A. Jinnah held important positions in both organizations in the twenties without feeling any sense of confusion. It was only when Gandhi began shaping a firm ideological base for the Congress that both Hindu and Muslim communalists moved away from it, much to the relief of Gandhi and the new lieutenants, like Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, Maulana Azad and Acharya Kripalani. whom he was grooming. By the thirties the Muslim League had split and become moribund. Three men who could have still rescued it died: the fiery leader of the Khilafat movement. Maulana Mohammad Ali, died of diabetes on 4 January £931 in London and was buried in Jerusalem: on 31 May of the same year the old Raja of Mahmudabad died after a stroke; and on 6 January 1932 they were followed by the Punjab leader, Sir Mohammad Shafi. A disgusted Jinnab decided to give up politics and in 1931 stayed behind in London, after the second round—table conference. to renew his law practice.

This is how Choudhry Khaliquzzaman. one of the key figures in the pre-independence Muslim League. describes his own party (Pathway to Pakistan, Longmans, 1961): The Muslim league . . . was dominated by the titled gentry, Nawabs, landlords and Jee Huzoors [yes men] ... Since its very birth in 1906, the Muslim League’s activities had always been confined to indoor political shows. Even its annual sessions were held either in well-decorated pandals or in big halls where a few honourable visitors were allowed by special cards. Mass public meetings were unknown to the Muslim League organization. From 1906 when it was founded in Dacca [Dhaka], its central office remained in Aligarh till 1910 ...The income from membership and annual subscriptions was not sufficient even to maintain a decent office, much less to work among the masses. It began to live on a grant from the Rain of Mahmudabad of three thousand rupees annually. This was its main fixed income.’

Jinnah was eventually persuaded to return and rescue the Muslim League in 1934. In February of that year. the Raja of Salempur organized a dinner for him at the Cecil Hotel in Delhi where he was reintroduced to the Muslim leaders of the country. On 2 July 1935 the Government of India Act received the royal assent and the stage was set for the 1937 elections, through which power would for the first time be transferred in the provinces to Indian parties. This was the opportunity for both the Congress and the Muslim League to display how much support they had from the masses they claimed to represent. Jinnah did his best, Backed by the mullahs who went to canvass from door to door, he made ‘Hindu tyranny’ the hub of his campaign. The 230 million Hindus were going to wipe out the 70 million Muslims, he said, and the Congress was the cunning instrument of annihilation that the Hindus had found. In his 1937 presidential address to the Muslim League he told the Muslims that there were forces which would bully you, tyrannize over you and intimidate you’. In his 1938 address he said the Congress wanted the Muslims to ‘submit unconditionally to the Hindu raj . . . the high command of the Congress is determined, absolutely determined, to crush all other communities and culture in this country and to establish [Hindu] raj . . . [Gandhi’s] ideal is to revive Hindu religion and establish Hindu raj in this country’. Indian nationalism was defined as slavery of the Muslims. and therefore the worst enemies were those Muslims who remained in the Congress, like Maulana Azad and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai.

But Jinnah and the Muslim League discovered that the Muslim masses did not share this view at all, The Muslim League was decisively rejected in the 1937 elections. (It is ironical that the only elections that the Muslim League has won were those held in 1946, on the eve of partition. The League could not win an election even in the country it had created, Pakistan.) Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, leader of the League in its strong hold, the United Provinces, admits that it was a Muslim party without Muslim support. tie writes in his autobiography: We invited Mr Jiimah in December 1936 to address a meeting for raising funds for the election. The meeting, held in Ganga Parshad Memorial Hall. was a very poor show, which speaks of the interest of the Muslims in the Muslim League at that time.’ By the conditions of the Communal Award of 1932. the Muslims had been given 485 seats in the provinces. The party which was allegedly going to save the Muslims from annihilation won only 108 of those seats! And this was the party which the British kept calling the voice of Indian Muslims’. In fact, not even the clergy were completely with the League. In 1938. for instance, Maulana Madani of the jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind was telling Muslims, Nowadays nations are determined by their homelands. Race or religion does not make a nation. Maulana Azad had managed to persuade the Jamaat-e-Ulema the previous year to leave the Muslim League and go over to the Congress unconditionally, and on 17 May at a conference in Allahabad the Jamaat passed a resolution to this effect. (The fundamentalist clergy then broke away to form its separate organization. the Jamaat-e-Islami, in August 1941 at Lahore.)

Most of the important Muslim leaders refused to respond to this communal view espoused by Jinnah in 1937 If anything, they had begun to feel that the relevance of the Muslim League was over, now that the guarantees had been provided to the Muslims. They fought the 1937 elections very successfully on the basis of political rather than communal manifestos. In Punjab, leaders like Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan arid Sir Fazle-Hasan created the Unionist Party in partnership with the peasant leader Sir Chotu Rain, and swept the polls. Despite the efforts of the poet— philosopher Sir Muhammad lqbal, who campaigned hard. for the league, it could win only 2 out of the 86 Muslim seats in Punjab (and one of these two victors, Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan. went over to the Unionists after the elections). In Bengal, Fazlul Haq’s Krishak Praja Samiti. or Peasants and Tenants Party, championing the cause of the poor peasant and demanding agrarian reform, emerged the victor: in fact, Fazlul Haq showed where the Muslim vote stood by defeating the Muslim League leader Khwaja Nazimuddin in the latter’s home constituency. In Sind, there were 35 Muslim seats out of a total of 6o: the League got nothing. The Sind United Party won 18 seats; the Muslim Party won 3 the Sind Muslim Azad Party got 2, while independents won 12. Sir Hidayatullah formed the government with support from across the I-louse. In the North-West Frontier Province, the results were equally embarrassing for the Muslim League. So this was the extent of the mass support for the Muslim League in those areas which were to become the land of Pakistan.

In fact, it may sound astounding but the Muslim League never got much support in the Muslim-majority provinces where it might have been expected to be king. There were no elections in Kashmir since it was a princely state, but there, too, the Muslim masses preferred the National Conference of Sheikh Abdullah to the Muslim League, despite Jinnah’s unflagging efforts to woo them. Even in the United Provinces, where the League had its hard core, the party could not win more than 29 of the 66 Muslim seats. And yet the myth is givers currency — that the Muslim masses wanted Pakistan. The Muslim league did win Muslim support in 1946, but only after the country had begun spinning in the vortex of a great storm. Such a storm comes but rarely in human affairs, and its force can blind everyone.

Nor can it he argued that the 1937 elections were not truly indicative of the popular mood. The franchise, which had been very selective in the 1923 elections, had been expanded, .and for the first time the peasantry got a chance to vote. In the very same elections, the Congress. contesting from its nationalist platform, pleading fur unity, democracy, secularism and by now also, under the presidentship of Jawaharlal Nehru, socialism, showed how deep was its support base: it Won handsomely. It even did comparatively better than the Muslim League in the Muslim seats. Winning 26 of the 58 it contested. (The Hindu communal party, the Hindu Mahasabha, created as a reaction to the Muslim League, was, incidentally. also thoroughly demolished in these elections.) The £937 elections were considered crucial because they were the first testing-ground for the League’s claim to represent all the Muslims of the country: and the results were keenly awaited. Which philosophy, Gandhi’s or Jinnah’s, had caught the imagination of the people? Gandhi offered a simple slogan: in his quaint English he called it heart unity between Hindu and Muslim’, and proposed ‘Hindu—Mussahnan ki jai ('Victory to Hindu—Muslim unity’). Non—violence was a cardinal element of this ideology. Since Gandhi had taken charge of the Congress after its 1920 session at Calcutta. that had been his message to the masses, whom he loved and who loved him. He associated the Congress with peasant concerns and took up their causes —the indigo movement in Bihar or the Bardoli struggle in Gujarat. He had contempt for the traditional upper-class Hindu and Muslim powerbrokers: the millions ('Surely the millions do not want to become legislators and politicians’) were his concern. He had the courage to distance the Congress from those who wanted to convert it into the Hindu version of the Muslim League. ‘Those Hindus who, like Dr Moonje and Sri Savarkar, believe in the doctrine of the sword may seek to keep the Mussalmans under the Hindu domination. I do not represent that section. I represent the Congress,’ he explained in his speech to the Congress session of 1942. And just as he would not allow the Congress to become a ‘Hindu’ party, he would not recognize the ‘right’ of the Muslim league to treat all Muslims as the private property of the League. This was what Jinnah wanted the Congress to concede. And this, of course, was something the Congress could not do. without destroying its very ideology. It was this conflict which was at the root of a problem in 1937 which many consider to be the decisive element in the creation of Pakistan — the abortive bid to form a Congress—League coalition in the United Provinces after the 1937 elections.

Defeat at the polls did not dampen the Muslim league’s desire for power. It had to sustain the fiction that only the League could protect the Muslim interest. If the Congress Muslim ministers showed during their term in office that they could be of benefit to the community despite being part of a Congress government, what little was left of the Muslim League would also collapse. Jinnah was most anxious to get into power in the crucial United Provinces, and he asked the Congress to form a coalition with the League despite the fact that the Congress had won a majority on its own. Predictably, die only demand that Jinnah made was that the Congress should not appoint any Muslim ministers from its side, but behave in practice like a Hindu party. The Muslim League had won only 29 seats in a House of 228. but it insisted on having two ministers in the Cabinet — Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, who had been appointed leader of the Muslim League legislature party, and Nawab Ismail Khan.

The League proposed that if its demands were accepted, this could become the basis on which the Hindu—Muslim conflict could end, and a common front be built against the British. But it was impossible to see how the Congress could accept the League’s terms which would, in effect, destroy the legitimacy of its claim to represent every Indian irrespective of religion, caste or creed in the common struggle for freedom from colonial rule. The Congress could not become de facto a Hindu party. The fight against the proposed coalition was taken up most actively by Congress Socialists and Muslim Congressmen who felt that any deal with the League would be a betrayal of all that they had stood for. Khahiquzzaman records that on 12 May 1937 he went to discuss the proposed coalition with Nehru. who was in bed at Anand Bhavan in Allahabad that day: ‘Quite contrary to my views he [Nehru] believed that really the Hindu—Muslim question was confined to a few Muslim intellectual landlords and capitalists who were cooking up a problem which did riot in fact exist in the minds of the masses. He ridiculed the idea of Muslims having any separate organization within the precincts of the Legislature.

The man in charge of negotiations with the League was Maulana Azad, wit help from Rafi Ahmed Kidwai and G. B. Pant. The Maulana objected to the idea of keeping Nawab Ismail Khan in the Cabinet since he represented those feudal interests which were so contrary to the Congress economic philosophy. hut the League would not relent. By 15 July Maulana Azad bad offered the minimum line of the Congress. He handed a two-page typed note to Khaliquzzaman which the latter would have to sign in return for a coalition. The Muslim league group in the United Provinces shall cease to function as a separate group. The existing members of the Muslim League Party in the United Provinces Assembly shall become part of the Congress Party and will fully share with other members of the Party their privileges and obligations as members of the Congress Party,’ began the note. The League protested that this was too harsh. The Maulana modified the agreement. However, the League would not surrender its right to vote separately from the Congress when it came to problems concerning the Muslims. ‘This, in fact, was precisely what the Congress feared and could not accept.. On 27 July 1937, when the Assembly session started, the Muslim league legislators were sitting on the opposition benches. Beside them but not with them was Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan. who was to become Jinnah’s successor in Pakistan; as late as 1937. Liaquat Ali Khan had not joined the Muslim League. Even the Raja of Salempur. the man who had been among those who brought Jinnah back from London, had left the Muslim League. He, too, was sitting as an independent member in that House.

Who was right? Was Nehru correct in describing the Muslim League as only the creation of the elite, with no relationship to the needs of the masses? The proof can only be found in the practice, in the fundamental nature of the Pakistan that was created. It is quite clear now how the landlord--clergy alliance shared out Pakistan. While the landlords and capitalists allowed the clergy to make Pakistan a religious state, the clergy allowed the landlords guararteed property rights and the capitalists unbridled control over the economy. Theocracy and landlordism/ capitalism are the two pillars of Pakistan and Bangladesh. No matter who comes to power. whether the leader be in uniform or not, these two things will never be tampered with. Anyone making ever a mild effort to challenge these two rights will be removed from power. Jinnah’s belief that he had created Pakistan was an illusion which everyone encouraged because they needed a leader of his extraordinary determination, talent and sophistication. And it is true that without such qualities as Jinnah had, Pakistan might never have become a reality. The man who eventually destroyed Gandhi’s dream of a free and united India was also a Gujarati, whose parents came from a village about thirty miles south of Gandhi’s ancestral home. Mahomed Ali Jinnah was born on Christmas Day 1876 and spent his childhood in Karachi where his father had established his business.

At sixteen Jinnah was sent to England for further studies so that: he might be better qualified to inherit his fathers firm. There was one precondition, though, which his mother insisted on — that he would be married before he went, She did not want her son to be lured by an English Miss. The dutiful son married a fourteen-year-old girl he never saw. In London, business studies bored him. At one point he even thought of joining the stage, and he actually signed a three-month contract with a theatre group. But then he decided to concentrate on a degree in law, entering Lincoln’s Inn: it was a wise decision since Jinnah was to become one of the best lawyers of his generation. While Jinnah was abroad, his father’s health began to fail arid he started to plead with his son to return and take over the business. Jinnah stayed in London till he finished his legal studies. By the time he could return, both his mother and his wife had died. Instead of staying with his unwell father, Jinnah decided to come to Bombay to start his law practice. With him came his sister Fatima, who was devoted to him. (In his will, he left all his fabulous wealth to her. earmarking only nominal sums for other relatives.)

Jinnal was the archetypal 'confirmed bachelor’, with the habits characteristic of an Indian gentleman returned from England. His portraits dominate the offices of the Islamic government of Pakistan, but General Mohammad Zia-ul-Huq must be a very relieved man that Mr Jinnah, the ‘father’ of Pakistan, is not alive today — or he would have to be flogged publicly for his personal habits. Mr Jinnah not only chain— smoked Craven—A cigarettes but also liked his whisky and was not a verse to pork. His was the life of an upper-class liberal — which indeed Jinnah was for most of his life, both private and public.

In 1916 Jinnah went for a holiday to the hill resort of Darjeeling with a Parsi friend, Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit. There, at the age of thirty-nine, the confirmed bachelor’ fell madly in love with his friend’s sixteen-year-old daughter Ruttie, a girl of great liveliness and courage. Ruttie’s father tried I, is best to stop the marriage. even going to court: but on her eighteenth birthday the spirited Ruttie, carrying nothing with her except her pet poodles, walked out of her home to marry the man she loved. She belonged to the professional and enterpreneurial upper class of Bombay, and this couple was for a while a great hit in Bombay society: Ruttie liked seances arid sparkling conversation. But the marriage did not last. After Seven years, when Jinnah was forty—eight and Ruttie twenty—five, they separated. The only time Ruttie’s father spoke to Jinnah after the marriage was when he telephoned to in form Jinnah that his wife was dying. Ruttie died in 1929. of an overdose of morphine taken to ease the pain of chronic colitis. Jinnah wept like a child when he buried her. The last: thing that Mahomed Ali Jinnah did before leaving Bombay on his way to the new country in 1947 was to visit her grave. The stern, unflappable Jinnah, who rarely displayed any emotion in public, broke down again.

Only his sister Fatima accompanied Jinnah to Pakistan. (Years later she would be the candidate of the combined opposition in the elections held by Ayub Khan) Jinnah's only child, his daughter Dina, refused to go to Pakistan. The Jinnah who had married Ruttie had changed: he was now the commander of the forces of Istam Din wanted to marry a Parsi, and Jinnah became furious when he heard this, there were millions of Muslim boys, he told his daughter, from whom she could choose. Dina replied that there had been millions of Muslim, girls available, and yet Jinnah had chosen to marry a Parsi. The only answer Jinnah had was to disown his daughter: he never called her Dina again, referring to her whenever formally necessary as 'Mrs Wadia'. She was more loyal to her father. On 14 and 15 August 1947 she put out both the Pakistani and Indian flags on her balcony.

But it was Jinnah the liberal who had first caught the imagination of the Country. V. P. Menon in Transfer of Power in India (Orient Longman, 1957)calls him the true hero of my generation’.Jinnah joined politics early, entering the Imperial Legislative Council as a member from Bombay in 1909 and remaining a member till March 1919 when he resigned in protest against the passing of the Rowlalt Bill. In 1920 he was both President of the Muslim League and a senior leader of the Congress. He began moving away Iron Gandhi initially because, in fact, he felt that Gandhi was introducing religiosity into politics. He told the 1924 Muslim League session that he wanted to organize the Muslim community, not with a view to quarrel with the Hindu community, but with a view to unite and co-operate with it for their motherland’. Madhu Limaye, in an excellent essay 'Jinnah the Liberal' (Sunday, October 1983), wrote: ‘Jinnah was an ardent nationalist in the non-denominational sense of the term, While giving evidence before the Parliamentary Select Committee in 1919. Jinnah was asked whether he wished to see the complete elimination of political distinctions between Muslims and Hindus: his answer was, ‘‘Yes, nothing would please me more when that day comes,” Right up to the mid thirties he proudly claimed that be was an “Indian first and a Muslim second’. Jinnah had no love fir mullahs and maulvis who dabbled in politics.’

But it was this Jinnah who was made the chief architect of the Pakistan idea — conceived, in fact, no earlier than when Jinnah was in self-exile in England. In 1933 a student of Cambridge University, Rahmat Ali, organized a dinner at London’s Waldorf Hotel. The menu was most unIslamic, including oysters and good wine. But the idea that was proposed at the dinner was of a country for Muslims. which is why in the thirties Pakistan was often condescendingly dismissed as a ‘student’s scheme’. By March 1940 Jinnah was ready: he told a correspondent that the coming Lahore session of the League would be a historic one. Pakistan was not mentioned specifically, hut it was resolved that ‘the areas in which the 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. units shall be autonomous and sovereign’. By 1947 Jinnah’s resolve had succeeded. While Gandhi refused to join the celebrations on India’s Independence Day since this was not the India he wanted. Jinnah announced the birth of a new nation to loud cheers.

It was after he had got his Pakistan that Jinnah discovered that he did not know what to do with it. Suddenly he became the liberal again. At a press conference on 4 July 1947 a journalist asked him if Pakistan would be a religious state, Replied Jinnah, ‘You are asking a question that is absurd, I do not know what a theocratic state means.’ And on I August, the day he was elected president of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly and the flag of the new nation was adopted, he told the House, ‘We are starting the state with no discrimination ... we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not. in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as the citizens of the nation.’

Liaquat Ali Khan. Jinnah’s lieutenant and successor, echoed the liberal sentiments of the Quaid-e-Azam ('the great leader’) when he explained to the Constituent Assembly at Karachi on 11 August what the Pakistani flag that he was about to unfurl stood for, He said: This flag is not the flag of any one particular party or community. This flag will stand for freedom, liberty and equality of all those who owe allegiance to the flag of Pakistan... As I visualize the state of Pakistan, there will be no special privileges, no special rights for any particular community or individual.’ But then —why create Pakistan?
The contradictions between the people and those who had created Pakistan were visible even in Jinnah’s lifetime. Jinnah himself knew no Urdu, Gujarati being his mother tongue and English the language of his survival. The whole of Bengali Pakistan did not know Urdu. But, under pressure from the United Provinces lobby, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan. When Jinnah went to address the students of Dhaka University on 24 March 1948. he warned them, Make no mistake about it. There can only be one state language ... and that can only be Urdu.’ Herbert Feldman (The End and the Beginning: Pakistan 1969—1971. oxford University Press) puts it a little more bluntly: It is doubtful whether Mahomed Ali Jinnah himself understood the political implications inherent in the Pakistan he eventually accepted.’

Pakistan was conceived in the thirties, launched in the forties, distorted in the fifties, choked in the sixties and decimated in the seventies. With yet another gun-and-moustache man at the helm in the eighties, the future looks as tenuous as the past.
The subcontinent is becoming fluid again, If Jinnah was right, then 1947 was only the beginning of a process towards a moth-eaten subcontinent (to use the word Jinnah chose when describing post-partition Pakistan). After thirty-five years of self-rule the time has come to examine the evidence and try to find out which has been, despite all the enormous problems, more successful: the democratic federal entity Mahatma Gandhi wanted, or the theocratic state Jinnah left behind. Was partition the reality or only a rude pause in the evolution of the subcontinent? The last viceroy, Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, gave his answer to this question. He wrote down privately just after he had obtained agreement on the partition of India: the responsibility for this mad decision [must lie] squarely on Indian shoulders in the eyes of the world, for one day they will bitterly regret the decision they are about to make.'