Giants and
Myths
Milestones on the Road to Partition-Part 5
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
Jinnah’s 14 points highlight
his political thinking at that juncture in India’s
history. In 1929, Jinnah was still operating within
a paradigm of minority rights and not “two
nation theory” proposed by Savarkar five
years earlier. Jinnah was still a peacemaker between
the Congress and the League and hoped that he
could find common ground for the two. Second,
the emphasis in the 14 points was on the reciprocal
protection of minority rights, Hindu, Muslim,
Christian and Sikh alike, and not just the rights
of Muslims. Jinnah worked hard to tone down the
more strident demands of the right wing Muslim
constituency and obtain the concurrence of the
League. Students of history may argue whether
the 14 points were hard demands or were bargaining
openers. The negotiations and the hard bargaining
did not take place. The 14 points were rejected
by the Indian National Congress.
The Nehru Report and its aftermath constitute
a milestone on the road to partition. Jinnah,
who had hitherto worked hard to bring about a
convergence of Congress and League viewpoints,
was disillusioned. He was squeezed by Congress
stonewalling and marginalized by the more strident
Muslim leaders who felt that Jinnah was too nationalistic
in his outlook and too accommodating in his approach.
Although he took part in the Round Table Conferences
in London in 1931-32, his heart was no longer
with Indian politics. He settled in London as
a barrister. It was only in 1935 that he returned
to India at the invitation of Allama Iqbal to
reorganize and lead the Muslim League. The Congress
leadership had lost Jinnah whom the eminent Indian
social activist and poet Sarojini Naidu had called
“the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”.
Now they were to meet him as an advocate of the
two nation theory, and finally as Quaid-i-Azam
of a new nation, Pakistan. The wheels of fortune
were turning. The march to partition had begun.
The overarching political context of the times
was British imperialism, uncompromising in its
determination to keep India in bondage despite
the bloodletting of the First World War. As late
as 1935, the Secretary of State for India, Samuel
Hoare, reiterated in the British parliament that
the goal of British policy was to provide for
the gradual development of self-governing institutions
with a view to the progressive realization of
responsible government in India as an integral
part of the British Empire. The declarations,
conferences and commissions were all directed
towards ensuring a continuance of colonial rule.
The power equations in Asia changed only as a
result of the Second World War. A Britain exhausted
by the War realized that its imperial hold on
the Indian army was slipping and it could no longer
subjugate an India which had become conscious
of its own self.
Imperial British aims were reflected in the Simon
Commission Report of 1930. As stipulated in the
Government of India Act of 1916, the British promised
to look into further measures towards the attainment
of a dominion status for India. The Simon Commission
consisted of six members of the British Parliament,
including Clement Attlee who was to become the
British prime minister when India finally gained
its independence in 1947. Indian political opinion
was outraged at the absence of even a single Indian
on the Commission that was to decide the fate
of India. The Indian National Congress as well
as the Muslim League boycotted the Commission.
The voluminous Simon Report recommended (1) the
abolishment of diarchic rule, and (2) limited
representative government in the Indian provinces.
A separate electorate for Muslims was maintained
as in the Government of India Act of 1919 but
for a limited period. India was to remain a colony
with the possibility of dominion status sometime
in the undefined future.
It is in the context of the growing communal polarization
in North India and the intransigence of Great
Britain on the question of India’s independence
that one has to assess the address of Allama Iqbal
to the Indian Muslim League at Allahabad in 1930.
It was in this historic address that he laid out
his vision of an autonomous homeland for Muslims
in northwestern India. Iqbal was one of the most
influential Islamic thinkers of the twentieth
century. His rousing poetry inspired generations
of Muslims in the Urdu and Farsi speaking world.
In his earlier years Iqbal was a national poet.
His Taran e Hind, composed in 1904, sang
of the beauty of the Indian homeland and the love
of its people for their country. However, in his
later years he shifted his focus to Islamic civilization
and was convinced that Islam held the key to the
moral emancipation of humankind. His inspiring
poetry held up a memory of a glorious past and
the vision of a lofty future and sought to rejuvenate
a sullen Islamic community. In his Allahabad address,
Allama Iqbal said:
“I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West
Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated
into a single State, self-governing within the
British Empire, or without the British Empire.
The formation of a consolidated North-Western
Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final
destiny of the Muslims at least of north-west
India.”
“We are 70 million, and far more homogenous
than any other people in India. Indeed, the Muslims
of India are the only Indian people who can fitly
be described as a nation in the modern sense of
the word.”
The address was a crystallization of Iqbal’s
political thinking. Even though he was deeply
influenced by the tasawwuf (Sufism) of Mevlana
Rumi and the ego of the German philosopher Nietzsche,
Iqbal stayed within the framework of his heritage
as an Indian Muslim. His political thinking followed
the intellectual lineage of Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi
and Shah Waliullah of Delhi. It does not offer
alternate perspectives on how to live an Islamic
life as a Muslim minority. Indian Islam had turned
away from its universal Sufi heritage during the
reign of the Mogul emperor Aurangzeb (d 1707)
and had sought its fulfillment in the extrinsic
application of the Shariah. As elaborated in his
book, “Reconstruction of Religious Thought
in Islam”, Iqbal accepted the premise that
jurisprudence (as opposed to spirituality and
ethics) was the foundation on which the edifice
of Islam was to be erected. For him, the Shariah
was not just a set of static rules and regulations
but a dynamic tool in an evolving, expanding universe.
Ijtihad was the “principle of movement”
in the structure of Islam. India, with its vast
non-Muslim majority presented a special problem
in the application of this principle. Iqbal wrote:
“In India, however, difficulties are likely
to arise; for it is doubtful whether a non-Muslim
legislative assembly can exercise the power of
Ijtihad”. Hence, his deduction that only
an autonomous Muslim state in northwest British
India could discharge this function.
Allama Iqbal left some questions unanswered. His
address called for the establishment of a state
in the northwestern portion of British India consisting
of Punjab, NW Frontier, Sindh and Baluchistan.
In 1931 the Muslim population of these areas was
only 25 million in a total Indian Muslim population
of 70 million. What was to become of the other
45 million Muslims? Iqbal was silent on this issue.
Noticeably, Bengal was absent in his address.
While his prescription called for legislative
autonomy for the Muslim majority areas of NW India,
Iqbal offered no guidance for Muslims who would
stay as a minority in a non-Muslim or a secular
state. He left this task to future generations
of Muslim intellectuals in India, China, Europe
and America. (To be continued)
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