Partition
Players’ Politics - II
By Dr. Khan Dawood L. Khan
Chicago, IL
The
rift that developed in 1920 between Gandhi and
Jinnah, in particular, and Hindus and Muslims,
in general, only widened with time.
The 1935 Act, passed by the British Parliament,
envisaged, among other things, a federation of
India in which one-third Muslim representation
was guaranteed in the Central Legislature. In
the 1937 provincial elections, Muslim League was
soundly defeated, even in Muslim majority provinces:
an estimated 4.5% of Muslims voting for the League,
which won 3 out of 33 seats reserved for Muslims
in Sindh, 2/84 in Punjab, 39/117 in Bengal and
none in NWFP. Congress-League relations, cordial
before the elections, were hostile and confrontational
after, aggravated further by Congress’ dismissal
of any coalition plans with the League.
The Muslim League had to re-think its strategy,
and looming large on the sideline was the not-so-silent
creeper, WWII, and the immense pressure the seat
of British Empire was under. The British were
trying to accommodate but wouldn’t want
to rush political landscape in India in any way
in the initial stages of a world war on several
fronts at one time.
In 1939, without consulting the provincial governments
or the Indian political leaders, the Viceroy Linlithgow
declared India's entrance into WWII. This angered
everyone: Congress asked all its elected members
to resign from the government; Jinnah called a
Muslim League session to discuss this issue as
well as the League’s humiliating defeat
in the 1937 provincial elections.
In March, 1940 the League adopted the Lahore Resolution
which formed the official basis for the creation
of Pakistan: the League thought the 1935 Act was
unworkable, and demanded that the Muslim majority
provinces be given “independent states”
status, each autonomous and sovereign in its own
right. This was different from one single contiguous
Muslim-majority area.
Gandhi was opposed to partition: to him it was
“an untruth, a denial of God, a vivisection
on the living flesh of India and therefore a sin.”
In response to the Lahore Resolution, he wrote:
“My whole soul rebels against the idea that
Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic
cultures and doctrines. To assent to such a doctrine
is for me denial of God, for I believe with my
whole soul that the God of the Koran is also the
God of Bhagavad Gita.”
While Congress did not support the British in
WWII, the Muslim League had not only supported
it (as it had WWI) but there also has been a huge
Muslim representation in the British Army in both
wars. The British knew that, and the difference.
Soon after the fall of France, the British wanted
to gain public support in India for the conduct
of war (read: Indians soldiers needed), for which
they made some well-timed concessions, including
increased Indian representation on their committees
(a token gesture, at best). In August, 1940, Linlithgow
met Jinnah, and Jinnah came to that meeting with
a much strengthened hand to discus the increasingly
grave situation. In this meeting, Stanley Wolpert
notes that “Jinnah … proposed, Linlithgow
promised, that the government should adopt no
future constitutional scheme ‘without the
previous approval of Muslim India’, and
the Viceroy agreed with no transfer of power ‘to
any system of government whose authority is directly
denied by large and powerful elements in India’s
national life’.” This was Jinnah,
the tactician/strategist, at his best. This understanding
[“August offer” of 1940] carried Jinnah
far in his later negotiations with others. In
1947, with Mountbatten, for example, without defining
or justifying his plans despite pressure, Jinnah
did manage to extract from Mountbatten: “I
[Mountbatten] said I would of course not recommend
any solution which was patently unacceptable.
He [Jinnah] seemed pleased with these remarks.”
Jinnah was similarly pleased, according to Mountbatten’s
notes of the meeting with Jinnah the night before
the 3 June, 1947 announcement of the agreement
to partition of India.
Wolpert mentions a contemporary of Jinnah saying
: “He [Jinnah] was what God made him, a
great pleader. He had a sixth sense: he could
see around corners … when he stood up in
a Court, slowly looking towards the Judge, placing
his monocle in his eye, -- with the sense of time
you would expect from an actor – he became
omnipotent. Yes, that is the word – omnipotent.”
Quite a compliment, and no wonder his opponents
didn’t like it.
When Gandhi’s
“Quit India” demand (August, 1942)
met with harsh British reaction (including arrests
of lot of Congress members, including him), he
(as an individual then on behalf of Congress party)
sought Jinnah’s cooperation on the “Rajaji
Formula” (devised by C. Rajagopala Chari
of Madras, and later a President of free India).
The ‘Formula’ was very conditional:
IF the League supported the Congress demand, the
League could join Congress in an interim government
during the WWII; IF that happens, Congress would
then agree to a plan to allow contiguous areas
of Muslim majority in North-East and South-East
for a future plebiscite for them to opt to stay
in or out of India. Chadha encapsulates the general
impression it created: “The fact that these
talks took place at Gandhi’s initiative
and at Jinnah’s house indicated the advantage
which the Muslim League had acquired while the
Congress was in the wilderness.”
Jinnah knew he was negotiating with Gandhi from
a position of strength on a plan that represented
a change in Gandhi’s previous position and
included an idea of ‘Pakistan’ in
principle. The British supported Jinnah, thinking
he was a good antidote to Congress. Jinnah was,
however, dismissive of this Gandhi initiative,
and told Gandhi that he (Gandhi) represented Hindus
and there was no point in proceeding with the
discussion. Jinnah insisted on plan for partition
before the British left, NOT after that; Jinnah
was convinced that once the British leave, Congress
would never agree to partition. The talks continued
for 18 fruitless days. To Gandhi’s final
proposal, “brother Jinnah” said NO,
‘three times’.
Many in Congress harshly condemned this Gandhi
venture. Chadha mentions a highly critical letter
that Dr. M. R. Jayakar, a jurist and liberal leader,
wrote to Gandhi: “The Muslim League leader
has gained more from you than he has lost to you.
Though you have resisted the ridiculous two-nation
theory, yet you have given him a formula which
practically concedes the substance of the Lahore
Resolution, viz., vivisection of India into two
sovereign communal states without a controlling
center…to a practical politician, it makes
no difference whether this division takes place
as between two ‘loving brothers’ or
between two ‘sworn enemies’.”
After the talks collapsed, Gandhi wrote this rather
strange letter to Jinnah: “I find no parallel
in history for a body of converts and their descendants
claiming to be a nation apart from the parent
stock. If India was one Nation before the advent
of Islam, it must remain one in spite of the change
of faith of a very large body of their children.
You don’t claim to be a separate nation
by right of conquest, but by reason of acceptance
of Islam. Will the two nations become one if the
whole India accepted Islam?” Jinnah was
firm in his reply: “We maintain that Muslims
and Hindus are two major nations by any definition
or test as a nation. We are a nation of hundred
million, and what is more, we are a nation with
our distinctive culture and civilization, language
and literature, art and architecture, names and
nomenclature, sense of values and proportion,
legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar,
history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions:
In short, we have our distinctive outlook on life
and of life. By all canons of international law,
we are a nation.” This, incidentally, came
directly from the emotional speech Jinnah gave
in the Lahore meeting, in support of the Resolution.
Chadha writes: “Despite Jinnah’s rhetoric
at Lahore, there was sufficient scope for negotiation
and compromise, for Muslims as whole, including
Jinnah himself, were not yet committed to partition.
But there were no feelers forthcoming from the
Congress side” with regard to “allaying
Muslim fears of a Hindu Raj.” There were
other possibilities of Congress-League cooperation
that could have kept the India united, but Chadha
notes that “these possibilities were hampered
by Congress’s refusal to, directly or indirectly,
be a part to the war [WWII] and by its insistence
on the plan for a Constituent Assembly which Jinnah
had summarily rejected.”
With regard to Jinnah’s estrangement from
Congress, Sunil Khilnani writes in his book ‘The
idea of India’ : “Jinnah saw Muslims
as forming a single community or ‘nation’,
but he envisaged an existence for them alongside
a ‘Hindu nation’ within a united confederal
India. The core of his disagreement with Congress
concerned the structure of the future state. Jinnah
was determined to prevent the creation of a unitary
central state with procedures of political representation
that threatened to put it in the hands of a numerically
dominant religious community. As such, this was
a perfectly secular ambition.”
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