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 Quaid 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)
