The Inevitability of the Creation of Pakistan
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg, CA
Shakespeare would never use an expression like, “I don’t like you”, or “You are impressive, but only by your dress”. Instead, he would poetically phrase these blunt assertions as, ‘Thy countenance likes me not”, “Thou are made by a tailor”. Jaswant Jee, cleverly but intelligently says somewhat the same which the BJP leadership often says rather honestly and more openly to Muslims and to their Islam, in his recently published book, “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence”.
The title, “Jinnah” and the accompanying laudatory phrases for the founder of Pakistan are just the ploy to get the horse to the water. The real message conveyed in it is that Muslims by virtue of their religion are an entity that simply refuses to assimilate anywhere, not the least in India. And hence their demand for a separate homeland of their own, carved out of a geographic entity that never was theirs.
I have two books in front of me. One is: Romila Thapar’s “A History of India - Volume one”, and the other, of course, Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah. The merits of both the books become crystal clear. While Romila Thapar remains astonishingly objective throughout her narrative of some 2500 eventful years of India’s history, notwithstanding her being a Hindu herself, Jaswant Singh denudes himself of his objectivity early on by writing such phrases as, “It is, of course, self-evident that Islam is not, just as Christianity or Zoroastrianism are not indigenous to India, for born elsewhere Islam came to India wielding the evangelizing sword of the invader, in consequence it arrived as an outsider and, at least initially, remained just that (an alien faith),” pg 13. It is a fairly strong generalization.
My objection is two-fold. First to the phrase “evangelizing sword”, and second to “arrived as an outsider… remained just that”. History of India of the past thousand years, except for the period of Mahmud of Ghazna’s yearly incursions into India starting from 1004-06, and Shahabuddin Ghauri’s tenure, conveys a different message. Muslim presence in India, starting from The Slave dynasty to the Khiljis to the Tughluqs to the Sayyids and Lodhis and then by the start of the sixteenth century (1526), to the Mughals till the taking-over by the British in 1857, had been fairly consistent and permanent. They, like the British in India, did not stay as “commercial guests” who would stay for about three hundred years, and yet be ready enough to leave even within a period of seven days.
Muslims came to India like the Europeans came to America. Accuse them of whatever you like, but do not please call them “aliens”. The Indians stayed so in Uganda and West Africa, and the fate they met there is well known to all. They immersed themselves in Malaysia as they did in America and Europe, and became a story of success for all. So lived Muslims in India.
The concept of a central government, or call it the Delhi Sultanate emerged for the first time in India after Ashoka. Only 60% of the Indian territory in 1947 consisted of provinces; the rest 40% was divided among the 568 princely states. As says Romilla Thapar, “On the periphery of the Sultanate had emerged a number of kingdoms, large and small, with ambitions as great as those of the Sultans themselves. Some of them, for example Gujarat, Malwa, Mewar, Marwar, Jaunpur, and Bengal, had maintained their independence almost throughout the latter period of the Sultanate… A Hindu ruler saw nothing unusual in allying with and obtaining aid from a Muslim ruler in order to fight another Hindu ruler, and the same held true of Muslim dynasties. Religion did not count unless it could serve a definite political purpose. Where it could, however, it was exploited to the full”. Pg 281. Jaswant Singh, however, underpins Islam as the main stonewall that had inhibited Muslims from not immersing in what he calls the Vedic foundation of India. Was it so? India remained a majority Hindu India even if the Muslims had ruled over it for close to a millennium. Is it not amazing?
“But India is a cultural ocean, rivers of many faiths empty here; in that same vein Islam, too… the problem lay, still does, in attempting to separate, to keep distinctly apart this one particular strata from India’s foundational layer. That foundation is Vedic ...” The author quotes Girilal Jain to validate his conviction that “Islam is a totality”. He (Jain) has written to say; “The modern mind just cannot comprehend Islam precisely because it is a totality. Islamic society is rooted in the religion of Islam; it is not the other way about. The point needs to be heavily underscored that Islamic society is theocentric (God-centered), not theocratic (priest oriented)” - pg13. Jaswant Singh by agreeing with this assertion somewhat in a literal sense endorses the notion that Islam basically blocked all possibilities of adjustment, cultural, social or even political with the indigenous Hindu majority.
Jaswant Singh picks up the thread of Muslims’ knack for separateness from the idea which, according to him, somehow got embedded in history, that Muslims’ invasion of India had been a “Muslim Conquest”. “Why do we not, for example, speak of a ‘Christian conquest’ of America? Or why is it that the Columbus post-AD 1492 period is not called America’s ‘Christian era?... and here I cannot resist mentioning the obvious: How is it that British conquest (granted, in stages) of India is just ‘British’ and not “Christian?” - pg 15. One of the damaging consequences of this “Islamic conquest”, according to him, had been that it ‘eventually became Jinnah’s assertion of being the champion of a separate “nation within India, hence wanting a different geographical space. This could be carved only from what existed in India, and that is what the invaders (the British) finally did in 1947”. Interesting logic. This line of argument would have really upset Maulana Azad’s soul who had fought all his life to dispel this fallacy that Islam is exclusive and not pluralistic in approach, or that it is incompatible with other religions.
India, indeed, is a cultural ocean, but of a particular dye. It wants all to either dye themselves in its hues, by shearing themselves of their own identities, or get prepared to be relegated to a schedule-caste status. The question of Jaswant Singh’s enquiry should have been: “Was it the seed that was defective that it did not germinate? Or, was it the soil that would not let it catch roots? Or, both”. Muslims allowed Satee practice to continue even though it is “haram” in Islam to let anybody take his/her life. Muslims did not interfere in the local cultural or social customs of the population; Muslims trusted the indigenous population so much that it empowered them by assigning high posts to the deserving people; in the conduct of daily business, Muslims strictly followed the rule of least interference; Muslims discouraged conversions because practically it involved loss of revenues. Like in Spain, so in India, Muslims remained more or less acceptable or they would not have survived so long.
Thapar is right when she admits, “The fusion of Islamic culture with existing India culture achieved its most positive expression in the activities of the artisan classes of the town and amongst the cultivators, as is evident from the socio-religious ideas of the time…. The observance of caste was more rigid and automatic amongst the Hindus than amongst the Muslims, Jainas, Syrian Christians, and heterodox sects, the latter not being avowedly caste-conscious”. Jaswant Singh, on the contrary, does not say much about the soil in which the Muslim seed was to germinate. The cultural ocean was caste-ridden. “By the sixteenth century a pattern of living had evolved in which an appreciable degree of assimilation had taken place. Nevertheless, amongst the upper classes certain resentments remained. However free the Hindus may have been in their daily life, theoretically they were not equal citizens with the Muslims. What rankled most was that socially the Indian Muslims may have been of a lower origin, and yet they were now in a superior position. Had the Muslims remained a foreign community there, there would have been a readier acceptance of their ideology by higher caste Hindus”, writes Thapar on pg 303-304 in her book, “A History of India”. How will Jaswant Jee explain this because it diametrically opposes what he contends as his line of enquiry regarding Muslims’ demand for a separate homeland. Who rejected whom? The Muslims or the Hindus?
The fact of the history is that Muslims embraced Hindus when they ruled over them, right or wrong, but the Hindus, as the days of independence drew closer, changed. Even Allama Iqbal cried out in 1924, “The biased Hindus have now emerged equipped with the militaristic slogan of Swaraj. Now they appear unwilling to even provide shelter to Muslims unless they say good-bye to their identities by vowing to completely adopt the Hindu way of ethos and culture… Muslims under fear have now drawn themselves into religious nationalism because Hindus do not consider them as worthy of any consequence”. A year earlier he had declared, “The continent of India is a geographic illusion in which no unity of any sort exists except some deceitful slogans of fake unity”. These are the times when Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar also parted company with Gandhi Ji whom he once called “the most Christ-like”. How convenient that Jaswant Singh does not say much about the Kshatriya outlook which the Hindu revivalists had now begun practicing.
We may write whatever we feel like writing as there are always more than one angle to look at the past happenings. But then there is the trend of the era too. Imagine in the nineteenth century, within a period of 35 years (1860-1895), some 80 countries of the world just disappeared from the world map. They got devoured by those that had power: Italy chewed 4; Germany under the name of unification some 37; Great Britain and other colonial powers under such silky terms as ‘The Great Game’ or ‘Scramble for Africa’, annexed 3 into their domain. As per the statistics supplied by Trade & Global Markets, PPI Facts, by the mid-1890s Europe’s total count of independent countries got reduced to 24; Asia’s to five , and Africa’s to two. So, the nineteenth century came to be known as the age of “Grand Squeeze”. But this stifling and choking squeeze had had one day to ease out. It started by the dawn of the 20th century with the independence of Cuba in 1898.
The next to follow suit were Australia, Panama, Norway and Albania. And lo! Within the next few years, some 130 more countries emerged as independent countries because Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empires fractured. Now the world boasts itself of having some 192 countries, with the youngest being East Timor. Who could have blocked the creation of Pakistan in the backdrop of Muslims’ frustration with their neighbors with whom they lived during the past 1000 years. At the most, it would have been delayed for a few years.
Muslim fear that had created a Pakistan in 1947 has not abated. A Christian state of East Timor, carved out of the most populous Muslim state of Indonesia, ignoring the principle of self-determination became a reality, but the people of Kashmir still remain dubbed as terrorists; independence became permissible to a Christian Georgia, but its sweet fruit remains a poison for Chechnya; independence became a solution for Croatia, but it remains a taboo for Muslim Bosnia. What India gave to the Sikhs after their uprising in 1984, even half of that would have averted the creation of Pakistan. But then it was time for a ‘ruth-ride’; a time for the realization of a ‘Ram-Rajya’ dream.
Jaswant Singh Jee has not said anything new or fresh. Ms Ayesha Jalal in 1998 and Mr Ajeet Jawed in his boo, “Secular and Nationalist: Jinnah,” and even before that, Mr KK Aziz, have expressed similar views that the creation was Pakistan was made possible by the Congress, Nehru and Hindu mentality and not by Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League. “The event - the 1947 partitioning of India - was an accident; that Jinnah never wanted a separate Muslim state, that he was only using the threat of independence,” wrote Ms Ayesha Jalal. Mr Ajeet is more to the point when he says, “It were the Hindus, the Congress and Mahatama Gandhi who were responsible for this tragedy, the division, than Muslims, the Muslim League and Jinnah”.
Sir Syed Khan whom Mr Jaswant Singh views somewhat negatively even defined Hinduvta as a country where people of all religions could live as Hindustanis. Be it Maulana Shibli or Allama Iqbal, they all wanted safeguards for their religious and ethnic freedoms. It is good that the creation of Pakistan saved India from further fracturing into some 37 countries. It is better to digest the creation of Pakistan and learn to live with it, rather than to mourn the happening of the inevitable. Good governance in Kashmir, and the good treatment of the Muslim minority in India would have served as a deadly blow to the Two-Nation Theory. Since these two things did not happen, whatever the reasons, let us move on.
Good and creditable leadership in India, especially the timely presence of Manmohan Singh in the driving seat, India escaped from what Pakistan is struggling to escape and wiggle out; namely the possibility of a religiously fanatic element, taking over the reigns of the country. India narrowly escaped from this happening in its 2009 elections; more due to some economic reasons than due to any other plausible factor. But how long? It is a matter of just few years. Regionalism, religious zealotry and sectarianism combined with the dream of ushering in an era of past glory is within the reach of the fanatics on both sides of the borders. And they are working over-time for that momentous moment.
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