Giants and
Myths
Milestones on the Road to Partition-Part 7
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
Pandit
Jawaharlal Nehru was consistent, but consistently
unrealistic on the communal issue. He was a statesman
but his statesmanship failed him at certain critical
moments. In 1937, he tried to crush the League
in UP. The result was exactly the opposite. It
only crushed the pro-Congress elements in the
League and forced them into a communal corner.
A cooperative hand extended at this critical juncture
might have paid rich political dividends. His
passion for secular socialism made him insensitive
to the depths of communal suspicions in the subcontinent.
This failure showed up repeatedly in Nehru’s
political career, first in the Nehru Report of
1928, then in his decisions following the 1937
elections, and finally his sabotage of the British
Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946. His failures had
a decisive impact on the events leading to partition.
He was a political giant, next only to Gandhi
in stature, and the subcontinent paid a heavy
price for his misjudgments.
Maulana Azad observers in his book India Wins
Freedom: “Jawaharlal’s action (in
refusing to give two ministerial seats to the
League) gave the Moslem League in the UP a new
lease of life. All students of Indian politics
know that it was from the UP that the League was
reorganized. Mr. Jinnah took full advantage of
the situation and started an offensive which ultimately
led to Pakistan.”
Following the elections of 1937, the Congress
formed cabinets in seven out of eleven states
where it had won a majority of Assembly seats.
In addition, in Sindh and Assam it was part of
the ruling coalitions. The Unionist Party, a coalition
of traditional Muslim, Sikh and Hindu interests,
ruled the Punjab. In Bengal the Praja Krishak
Party formed the ministry. Thus in nine out of
eleven provinces the Congress was either in power
or part of a coalition that held power. The Muslim
League was unable to command a majority in any
of the provinces. This was a low point for the
League. It seemed as if the League had become
irrelevant to the power politics of India. It
was only the singular focus and drive of Jinnah
that galvanized the party and molded it into a
force that was, within a decade, able to dictate
the partition of the subcontinent.
The actions of the Congress in the two years that
it was in power were perceived by the minorities
to be a manifestation of a rising tide of political
Hinduism. Since its electoral base in 1937 was
predominantly Hindu (the Congress had won only
26 of 491 seats allocated to Muslims) it was understandably
responsive to the demands of its Hindu constituency.
However, it also displayed a noticeable insensitivity
to the needs of the Muslims in North India. First,
Hindi written in the Devanagri script was introduced
as the medium of instruction in schools. Urdu,
which was the lingua franca of north India, and
the cultural language of north Indian Muslims,
was marginalized. This was an unnecessary move
that introduced a Hindi-Urdu divide.
It bifurcated the Hindustani language that had
grown up in the Hindu-Muslim cultural melting
pot of northern India. The move was contrary to
the professed declarations of Gandhi and Nehru
and was seen by the Muslim elite as an attack
on their culture. Second, the singing of Vande
Mataram was introduced into schools. This song
was written by the Bengali poet Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee in 1876 as a protest against the British
who had consolidated their grip on India and had
made the singing of “God save the Queen”
mandatory for all Indian school children. The
words Vande Mataram may mean “I worship
thee” or “I salute thee” depending
on the interpretation. The context of the song,
which was set by Bankim Chanda in an anti-Muslim
novel Ananda Math (Temple of Joy) and its evocation
of the goddess Durga, made it a controversial
part of the Hindu-Muslim dialectic. Some Muslims
looked upon the introduction of this song as an
attempt to impose Hindu culture on non-Hindus.
Some Christians and Sikhs also objected to the
song on the grounds that it equated the motherland
with the goddess Durga.
In historical hindsight, these “excesses”
of the Congress would not be considered politically
significant were it not for the charged political
context of the times. It is worth remembering
that the large provinces of Punjab and Bengal
were not ruled by the Congress and were not subject
to the Congress “reforms”. Princely
India, consisting of 572 autonomous kingdoms and
containing almost 25 percent of India’s
total population was not affected. A certain amount
of cronyism and partisanship was unavoidable in
any elective government. Besides, it was not just
the Muslims of UP who were unhappy with Congress
rule. The Scheduled Caste Federation and the Justice
Party of Tamil Nadu were also unhappy. In the
larger matrix of the subcontinent the Congress
“excesses” would have subsided over
time and replaced by the give and take inherent
in a democracy. In a pluralistic, democratic India,
the center of gravity of political life would
float towards a populist mass dictated by the
dual convergence of self-interest and the impossibility
of either of the two principal religious communities
dominating the other.
Some of the reforms proposed by the Congress ministries
were perceived as an attempt to impose soft Hindutva.
The Congress pushed mass education but secularized
the curriculum under a scheme called the Wardha
Taleemi Scheme. The vast network of madrassah-based
religious schools in north India felt marginalized.
The tricolor flag of the Congress was given official
status and pictures of Mahatma Gandhi were prominently
displayed in schools. The land reforms proposed
by the Congress ministries hit hard the landed
Muslim aristocracy of UP. It was precisely this
class that was at the helm of affairs in the Muslim
League and they felt threatened.
The vast province of UP was the crucible of communal
politics as it continues to be even to this day.
The end game of partition was played out in the
Punjab and Bengal but it was UP that witnessed
the first act. There were reports of favoritism,
normal in any democratic setup, but highly suspicious
in the charged atmosphere of the times. Nehru’s
attempts to isolate and crush the Muslim League
reinforced these suspicions. However, to be fair,
Pandit Nehru was under tremendous pressure from
some of his colleagues including Pant, Rajendra
Prasad and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai to take a hard line
against the League. There was also a core right
wing group within the Congress party sympathetic
to the Hindu Mahasabha which was opposed to any
cooperation with the League.
This was the first taste of power for the Congress
party and it missed a golden opportunity to forge
a national consensus. Nehru sought to bring more
Muslims into the party and initiated a campaign
of mass contact. The attempt fizzled out because
the dominant Hindu communities of UP, savoring
their new found power, had no inclination to share
it with anyone else. To cap it all, Pandit Nehru
wrote to Jinnah mocking the League as an elitist
organization and taunting him that there were
only two political forces left in India, namely,
the British and the Congress party. “No”,
retorted Jinnah, “there is a third force,
and that is the Indian Muslims”. This was
the parting of the ways for the two men who maintained
a cold animosity towards each other until partition.
The war in Europe cast its long shadow on India.
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. On
September 3, Britain and France declared war on
Germany. The Viceroy in India, Linlithgow, followed
suit and declared that India was at war with Germany.
Indians were outraged that they were dragged into
a war that was not of their own choosing. In acting
unilaterally, without even the hint of consultations,
the viceroy had reminded India of her servile
colonial status. Gandhi was especially in a dire
predicament. He had opposed the war on moral grounds
and had gone so far as to counsel the British
not to fight the Nazis but to resist them non-violently.
The opinion among India’s leaders was split.
Within the Congress party, Nehru, Azad and Patel
saw the menace of Nazism as worse than the evil
of imperialism and were willing to cooperate with
the British provided they gave India its freedom
immediately. A free India would join the allies
as an equal and willing partner in the war against
the fascists. Jinnah extended his cooperation
to the British in return for their backing of
his demands for Muslim rights. On the other hand,
Gandhi, supported by other senior Congress workers,
remained adamantly opposed to the war on moral
grounds. (To be continued)
