Opinion

Giants and Myths Milestones on the Road to Partition - Part 4
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
CA

Historical documents capture the essence of their age. Great moments produce great men and elicit from them their visions, hopes and aspirations which are enshrined in their declarations and documents.

The American Constitution is an illustration. It captured a moment in the history of this continent when it threw off the yoke of a foreign power and produced a declaration which has withstood the test of time for more than two hundred years. Historical documents grow out of the internal, often tragic struggles of a people. They reflect the soul of a people at a specific moment in history.

The Nehru Report was the first Indian attempt at framing a constitution for the subcontinent. It was a historical benchmark which exposed the internal fissures in the body politic of Hindustan. In hindsight, it was a document produced in haste, by well-meaning intellectuals who had an insufficient grasp of the dynamics of Indian society. It proved to be a first step on the road to partition.

In 1925 the conservative party came to power in London. The British had kept a close watch on the Indian political pulse. Aware of the rising tide of Indian nationalism, the British government dispatched a group of seven members of the parliament to India in 1927. Headed by Sir John Simon, the mandate of the Simon Commission was to draft a set of recommendations for self-rule in India. However, the commission met a cold reception in India because it did not include even a single Indian member.
The central issue was the right of the Indians to draft their own constitution. The Congress led by Gandhi and the League led by Jinnah boycotted the commission.

The British Secretary of State for Indian affairs challenged the Indians to come up with a constitution that would be acceptable to a broad spectrum of communities. So confident was he of the divisions in the Indian ranks that he was certain that the Indians would fail in this effort. Mrs. Annie Besant, a British social activist and a friend of India, made an attempt to write such a constitution but her attempt received a cold reception in Indian circles.

An all-parties conference in Delhi in January 1928 failed to produce a framework for a constitution. Subsequent conferences in March and May were similarly unproductive. The main hurdle was an accommodation of the rights of the minorities and the differences on this issue between the Muslim League, the Indian National Congress, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Sikh Akali Dal.

Unable to reach a consensus in the general caucuses, the third all-party conference held in May 1928 in Bombay delegated the responsibility of drawing up a constitution to a committee headed by Motilal Nehru. The committee consisted of eleven members. Motilal Nehru was the chairman while his son Jawarlal Nehru was the secretary. There were nine other members. Motilal Nehru, who descended from Kashmiri Pundits, was a respected Congress leader, a liberal nationalist with roots in the United Provinces. The eclectic Jawaharlal Nehru, the future Prime Minister of India, protégé of Mahatma Gandhi, was a brilliant man educated at Harrow and Cambridge, a post-modern secularist with a keen sense of international events. However, he was socialistic in his impulse, influenced as he was in his formative years by the socialist movements in Pre-World War I England. The other members were local leaders, including two, Syed Ali Imam and Shoaib Qureshi, who were Muslim.

The citizens shall be protected under a Bill of Rights. All powers of the government are derived from the people.
There shall be no state religion.
India shall enjoy the status of a dominion within the British Empire.
There shall be a federal form of government with residual powers vested in the center.
There shall be a parliamentary form of government with a Prime Minister and six ministers appointed by the Governor General.
There shall be a bicameral legislature.
There shall be neither a separate electorate nor a proportionate weight for any community in the legislatures.
A recommendation that the language of the federation should be Hindustani written either in the Devanagiri or the Urdu script.
A recommendation that separate provinces be established in the Northwest Frontier, Sindh and Karnataka.
A recommendation that the provinces should be organized on a linguistic basis.
A recommendation that a Supreme Court be established.
Muslims should have a twenty-five percent representation in the Central Legislature. In provinces where their population was greater than ten percent, proportionate representation for Muslims should be considered.

It is not hard to see the stamp of Jawaharlal Nehru on the Nehru Report. Even though the report called for a federal structure, the constitution it proposed was unitary with residuary powers vested in the center. The socialist strand in Jawaharlal Nehru saw a nation state as essentially unitary with centralized planning and economic control, a philosophy which he vigorously put into practice as the first Prime Minister of independent India (1947-64).

He was a secularist, who saw religion as a private matter for the individual which should not be reflected in matters of state. He was also an idealist who did not see the practical reality of religious dynamics in the vast subcontinent. Consequently, he failed to accommodate the anxieties of Muslim majority provinces in a central legislature which would be dominated, in a “one man one vote” parliamentary structure, by the majority religious community.

The Nehru Report was a step back in the Hindu-Muslim dialectic of pre-partition India. It negated the positive aspects of the Congress-League Lucknow Pact of 1916 which had accepted the principle of separate electorates for the minorities. It threw open the question of minority protection in a parliamentary setup wherein one religious community would dominate over the others.

The Nehru Report was accepted by the Indian National Congress but was rejected by the Muslim leadership. The main issue dividing the two was the vesting of residual powers. The Congress wanted residual powers to be with the Center. The League wanted them vested with the states. There was also the issue of separate electorates for the minorities. This issue was not a show stopper as some historians have suggested. In 1927 Jinnah had proposed to the Congress that the Muslims were willing to forego the demand for separate electorates if sufficient guarantees were instituted for the protection of minority rights.

In response to the Nehru Report, Mohammed Ali Jinnah drafted his famous 14 point proposal. The important elements of this proposal were the following:

India shall have a federal constitution with residual powers vested in the states.
Adequate representation shall be given to the minorities in every state legislature.
Every state shall enjoy uniform autonomy.
Muslim representation in the Central Legislature shall be not less than one-third.
The representatives of each community shall be elected by separate electorates.
Each community shall enjoy freedom of worship, association, propagation and education.
Sindh shall be separated from the Bombay presidency and be made a separate province.
Reforms should be introduced in the NW Frontier Province and Baluchistan in the same manner as all other provinces.
Any territorial adjustments to state boundaries shall not compromise the Muslim majorities in Punjab, Bengal and NW Frontier Province.
The minorities shall enjoy adequate representation in the services of the state and the center.
There shall be adequate safeguards to protect Muslim culture, language, religion and personal laws.
The central and provincial cabinets shall have one-third Muslim representation.
No bill shall be passed in any legislature if three-fourths of the members of a community in that body oppose such a bill on the basis that it will be injurious to that community.
No change shall be made in the constitution by the central legislature except with the contribution of the states. (To be continued)