Giants and
Myths
Milestones on the Road to Partition - Part 10
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
It
was the uprising of Indian sailors which convinced
the British that it was time for them to quit.
They could leave in one of two ways, either through
negotiations or through armed conflict. Armed
conflict would drag India into the whirlpool of
the emerging cold war between the United States
and the Soviet Union with unpredictable consequences
for post-war Asia. The larger issue was the shape
of the post-war world and continued Western dominance
in the new world order. The huge British investments
in India would be safeguarded only through a negotiated
settlement with trusted parties. The Indian National
Congress and the Muslim League were led by British
trained lawyers and, in spite of their bitter
disagreements on power sharing, could be counted
on to safeguard British interests.
Negotiations were accelerated with the Congress
and the League and India’s independence
was placed on the fast track. The British cabinet
appointed a commission in March 1946 to visit
India, consult with the major political parties
and recommend a constitutional framework for independence.
The commission was headed by Patrick Lawrence,
then Secretary of State for India. It included
Stafford Cripps, President of the Board of Trade
and A.V. Alexander, Secretary of the navy. The
commission held intense consultations with Jinnah,
the leader of the Muslim League and Azad, the
President of Congress, and in May 1946 presented
the so-called Cabinet Mission Plan.
The Cabinet Mission Plan envisaged a united India
with a federal government consisting of three
groups. Group A was the bulk of British India
which had a Hindu majority. The northwestern portions
of the empire consisting of the Punjab, Sindh,
Baluchistan and NW Frontier constituted Group
B. Bengal and Assam were grouped under Group C.
Groups B and C had nominal Muslim majorities.
Defense, foreign affairs and communications would
be handled by the Federal Government. The residual
powers vested with the three groups. Each group
was free to delegate any additional powers to
the federal center.
Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan as he
felt this was the best that could be achieved
under the circumstances. He was assured by the
British that the Congress would accept it also.
But Gandhi was adamantly opposed to the plan.
He saw in it the genesis of a future Pakistan.
He advised the chief minister of Assam, Gopinath
Bordoloi, not to join Bengal in Zone C.
Despite Gandhi’s opposition, most of the
senior leadership in Congress supported the Cabinet
Mission Plan in the hope that India could be kept
united. On July 7, 1946 the Congress did pass
a resolution accepting the Plan. However, other
fateful events intervened. On July 10, 1946, during
a question and answer period following a news
conference in Bombay, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
stated that the Congress party was not bound by
the stipulations of the Cabinet Mission Plan.
Nehru was the newly elected President of the Congress
and his statement was the bombshell that destroyed
the Cabinet Mission Plan. Jinnah called a meeting
of the League working committee to discuss the
Congress rejection of the plan. Meanwhile, the
Congress working committee met and issued a lengthy
statement in which it said that even though they
had reservations about the Plan, they would abide
by its stipulations. Jinnah saw in this wavering
attitude of the Congress a harbinger of things
to come. If the Congress could go back on its
promises even while the British were in India,
he asked, how could the Muslims have faith in
their promises after the departure of the British?
The League working committee rescinded its earlier
acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan.
The failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan was the
single most important milestone on the road to
partition. Up until August 1946 there was a possibility,
however remote, that the Congress and the League
would find a meeting ground to keep India united.
That hope evaporated with the statement of Nehru
and the rescinding of the Plan by the League.
The question before a student of history is: why
did the leaders of the Congress and the League,
in their collective wisdom, fail to foresee the
consequences of their decisions?
Pakistan was conceived by Allama Iqbal as a Muslim
majority region in northwestern British India.
It would enjoy legislative autonomy within or
outside the British Empire. Iqbal foresaw the
fulfillment of Islamic civilization in a continuous
evolution of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). Ijtihad,
meaning a rigorous application of the Shariah,
was for him a dynamic tool which man used in his
unceasing struggle as the trustee of divine will.
Postulating that Ijtihad could be exercised only
by an elected legislative assembly of Muslims,
he argued that a non-Muslim legislature could
not discharge this function. Hence, he called
for the establishing of an autonomous Muslim region
in parts of British India wherein the Muslims
could elect their own representatives and discharge
the divine mission of Ijtihad.
While Iqbal was motivated by the vision of an
Islamic civilization rejuvenated through Ijtihad
of the masses, Jinnah, the architect of Pakistan,
was motivated by a desire to avoid Hindu hegemony
over Muslim majority areas which would bottle
up Muslim aspirations for generations to come.
Jinnah accepted the challenge of implementing
Iqbal’s concept in the matrix of a Hindu
majority India which was ruled at the time by
Pax Brittania. He was a secular man, a nationalist
who for most of his life sought Hindu-Muslim cooperation
but was frustrated in his efforts by the Congress
party which was unwilling to share power with
the Muslim League. Unlike Gandhi, Jinnah was against
using religious symbols in the struggle for independence
and believed that negotiations and constitutional
means offered the best guarantee for a peaceful
transfer of power from British colonial power
to India. Indeed, it was the use of religious
symbols by Gandhi in the non-cooperation movement
of 1921 and his alliance with the Muslim religious
right during the Khilafat Movement that had prompted
Jinnah to quit the Congress party.
Jinnah’s primary contribution to the independence
struggle was to make the Pakistanis aware of their
self-identity. It is possible to argue, as has
the noted historian Ayesha Jalal, that Qaid e
Azam Jinnah’s goal was not partition but
parity between Hindus and Muslims in a united
India. In support of this thesis, one may look
at the commitment of Jinnah to Hindu-Muslim amity
in his early career. Jinnah was a champion of
minority rights but he advanced them within constitutional
means, avoiding mass agitation and anarchy. As
late as 1928 when the Nehru Report was published,
he sought to bridge the positions of the two communities.
It was the Congress rejection of Jinnah’s
14 points that convinced him of the vulnerability
of Muslims under Hindu majority rule. (To be continued)
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