Giants
and Myths
Milestones on the Road to Partition - Part 11
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
The
Lahore Resolution of 1940 calling for the establishment
of Pakistan was deliberately vague as to what
Pakistan meant. Jinnah, a master tactician and
a political master, knew that the moment the idea
of Pakistan became concrete, it would be open
to critical scrutiny and would lose some of its
abstract appeal to the Muslim masses. A vaguely
defined Pakistan meant different things to different
people and was amorphous enough to provide at
once a rallying point for Muslims and a negotiating
platform for discussions with the British and
the Congress party.
It was Nehru’s rejection of the Cabinet
Mission Plan that killed any hope of a united
India. Events moved at a torrid pace thereafter.
Jinnah, the constitutionalist became Jinnah the
mass leader. He called for “direct action”
on August 16, 1946 which started an irrevocable
slide towards partition. However, he did not foresee
that the implementation of a Muslim majority Pakistan
would necessarily mean the partition of the great
provinces of the Punjab and Bengal. When partition
did arrive, he had to accept a “moth- eaten
Pakistan” over no Pakistan at all.
The contribution of Gandhi to the partition of
the subcontinent was more substantial than is
commonly acknowledged. He was a complex man who
touched India at multiple levels. First and foremost,
he was a nationalist whose mission was to free
India from British colonial rule. However, what
set him apart from other nationalists who were
equally passionate about India’s independence
were his methods. He had perfected the art of
satyagraha or passive non-resistance while fighting
racial prejudice in South Africa. Upon his return
to India in 1915 he set out to apply these methods
to force the British to concede India’s
independence.
It is a tribute to the genius of Mahatma Gandhi
that he understood correctly the basis of British
imperialism and came up with an effective political
strategy to undermine it. India as a colony supplied
raw materials to British factories. The British
controlled the means of production and the Indians
were the coolies and consumers. The finished goods,
marked up several fold, were brought back and
sold in the vast Indian market at monopolisic
prices. Thus India provided both the push and
the pull for British imperialism, supplying raw
materials at the input end and markets for finished
products at the output end. In the process Britain
got richer and India got poorer. Cotton provides
a good example for this process. Indian cotton
was shipped in bales to the factories in Lancashire
where it was processed into cloth, brought back
to India and sold to India’s peasants. The
British East India Company had killed the weaving
industry in Bengal as early as 1790 with exorbitant
taxation and active discouragement of the weavers.
The story was the same whether one looked at salt
or sewing needles.
Gandhi built a mass movement on the basis of passive
non-cooperation. His strategy was simple and effective.
Avoid British manufactured goods. Be self-sufficient.
He started to spin his own cloth and the spinning
wheel became a symbol of Gandhian resistance.
Khadi, or homemade cloth, became the hallmark
of Congress workers. By refusing to feed Britain’s
productive machine, he struck at the very roots
of British imperialism. In 1930 he declared he
would march to the ocean “to make salt”.
The British first laughed at him. When they realized
the political punch of his techniques, they arrested
him. When they could no longer contain him, they
negotiated with him.
The most enduring contribution of Gandhi was that
he made India aware of itself. His use of Satyagraha
(truth-force) was both a tactic and a moral weapon.
Satyagraha had its foundation in the Buddhist
doctrine of self-abnegation and self-control.
The thrust of Satyagraha was at once to tap the
inner reservoir of moral energy in its practitioner
and to place its target on the moral defensive.
However, it called for an extraordinary degree
of self-discipline and restraint, which was in
short supply among the masses. The non-cooperation
movement based on Satyagraha often became disruptive
and to the extent it was violent it was counter-productive.
It was Gandhi’s use of religious symbols
that injected communalism into India’s freedom
struggle. In 1921 Gandhi forged an alliance with
the Muslim religious right in support of the Khilafat
movement. In turn, the Muslim religious establishment
backed Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement
against the British. When the movement got out
of hand and turned violent, Gandhi abandoned it
but the seeds of religious separatism had been
sown. It was soon thereafter that religious riots
broke out in parts of the Punjab and UP. Savarkar
composed his book on Hindutva in 1924. In 1928
the Congress made an about-face on the issue of
separate electoral representation for Muslims.
The Muslim League upped the ante in its demands.
When the decade ended in 1930, India was a divided
land, locked in bitter communal Hindu-Muslim rhetoric.
The divisions were clearly visible at the round
table conference of 1931. Ironically, it was Jinnah,
who had warned the Congress and Muslim League
against the injection of religion into India’s
freedom struggle. Neither side listened to him
then. Jinnah was so disgusted with Indian politics
that he retired and settled in London after 1931.
It was only in 1935, with the Muslims completely
demoralized that he returned to take charge of
the League at the insistence of the Mohammed Ali
brothers and Allama Iqbal.
Gandhi was vehemently opposed to the Cabinet Mission
Plan of 1946 and actively campaigned against it.
His goal in life was independence of India but
he was unwilling to share power with Jinnah to
achieve it. Nehru’s statement at a news
conference in July 1946 that Congress had agreed
only to participate in a Constituent Assembly
but not the grouping of states into zones A, B
and C, effectively scuttled the Plan. Two months
later, partition became a certainty. When it was
time to make a decision and the Congress working
committee considered the proposal for partition,
Gandhi, who had steadfastly maintained that he
would never agree to partition, recommended that
the proposal be accepted. This was a paradox in
Gandhi’s political career which was hard
to explain.
Looking through the prism of historical hindsight
one wonders where the principal actors on the
stage of India’s history stood at this critical
juncture. Was Gandhi as passionate about a united
India as he is made out to be? If so, why did
he not negotiate on the basis of the Cabinet Mission
Plan? Was he willing to share power in a united
India? He was opposed to partition in all his
pronouncements but when the moment of decision
arrived in 1946, he recommended to the Congress
party that partition be accepted. Was Nehru under
so much pressure that he lost his cool at the
press conference in July 1946 where he renounced
the Cabinet Mission Plan? Was it a misspoken statement,
or, was a reflection of Gandhi’s opinion?
Was Nehru so enamored of a socialist India with
a strong center that he was willing to sacrifice
the unity of the subcontinent for his ideological
convictions? Was Jinnah really for partition or
was it a strategic ploy to obtain the maximum
concessions from an unwilling Congress? If he
was determined to have an independent Pakistan,
then why did he accept the Cabinet Mission Plan
for a united India? Did he realize until the eleventh
hour that the partition of British India would
also mean a partition of the Punjab and Bengal?
Was the Congress commitment to a united India
so flimsy that they were willing to risk partition
rather than share power? Did Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah,
Patel consider the consequences of partition for
the minorities on both sides of the border? As
for the British, why were they in such a hurry
to pack up and leave while the Punjab was in flames?
Was a divided India more in line with their long-term
strategic interests? Was it not a moral obligation
on Great Britain “to do it right”
as they left India after ruling it for more than
a century?
What is obvious in historical hindsight is that
none of them, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Patel, Azad
anticipated the holocaust that was to descend
on northern India once the partition plan was
announced. It left in its wake a million dead
and fifteen million destitute refugees. Partition
was their collective failure. (To be continued)
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