Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam 134. The Partition of India - 10
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Gandhi built a mass movement on the basis of passive noncooperation. 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 o Satyagraha often became disruptive and to the extent it was violent it was counter-productive.
However, 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 a volte-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 there for all to see 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 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. He would rather accept partition than a federal government under the Cabinet Mission Plan. This was the ultimate contradiction in Gandhi’s political career which historians will argue about for years to come.
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 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 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 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?
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.
The Cabinet Mission Plan was the last hope for keeping India united, giving a chance to the two great religious communities to work together. With the failure of this plan, India took a tortuous and precipitous slide towards partition. The constituent assembly met but the League boycotted it. Weary of the mounting tensions in India and alarmed at the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy, the British cabinet sent a new viceroy, Mountbatten to Delhi to arrange for a transfer of power. Since the League was boycotting the constituent assembly, Mountbatten invited Nehru to form a cabinet. Jinnah was furious. He saw this as proof of the duplicity of the British and connivance of the Congress. He called for “Direct Action Day” on August 16, 1946.
Until the 16 th of August 1946, the leaders of the Congress and the League were in control of history. After that date it was history that was in control of them. The Direct Action day was conceived as a day of peaceful protests. But in the communally charged atmosphere of India any excuse was sufficient to start a riot. The day passed peacefully in most parts of India but Calcutta was the scene of horrific riots with 6,000 dead and more than 20,000 injured. Some chroniclers have put the number of injured at over 100,000. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs burned each other’s homes and stabbed innocent men, women and children. For five days, Calcutta burned. The army which was still under the control of the British did not intervene until it was too late. So ferocious were the riots that they destroyed whatever hope still lingered for a negotiated settlement of the Hindu-Muslim issue.
Some historians have blamed Suhrawardy who was the Muslim League chief minister of Bengal for the riots. However, the British, after a thorough investigation, concluded that this assessment was incorrect. The viceroy Wavell wrote to the British Secretary of India Patrick Lawrence in August 1946: “Last weekend has seen dreadful riots in Calcutta. The estimates of casualties are 3,000 dead and 17,000 injured. The Bengal Congress is convinced that all the trouble was deliberately engineered by the Muslim League Ministry, but no satisfactory evidence to that effect has reached me yet. It is said that the decision to have a public holiday on 16th August was the cause of trouble, but I think this is very far-fetched. There was a public holiday in Sind and there was no trouble there. At any rate, whatever the causes of the outbreak, when it started, the Hindus and Sikhs were every bit as fierce as Muslims. The present estimate is that appreciably more Muslims were killed than the Hindus”.
Jinnah realized that staying out of the cabinet would be a tactical error as it would give the Congress a free reign over policies at a time when the British were seriously contemplating a transfer of power. A coalition interim government was formed in October 1946. Pandit Nehru served as the prime minister of the interim government, Sardar Patel was the home minister, while Liaquat Ali Khan became the finance minister.
So intense was the animosity between the League and the Congress that the interim government became an arena for political one-upmanship rather than a platform for efficient administration. There was daily acrimony between the two sides. The League and Congress ministers held separate meetings. Instead of a give and take required in a democratic setup, each side sought to curtail the activities of the other. Liaquat Ali used his position as the finance minister to subject the Congress ministries to intense scrutiny. Bitterness grew among the cabinet members. Patel in particular was so embittered that he was won over to the idea of partition.
Mountbatten was eager to finish the job of power transfer and return to London. He pushed the idea of partition, converted Nehru and Patel to his point of view and sold the project to the British cabinet. A divided India was more to the liking of Churchill who was now the opposition leader in the British parliament. Jinnah was still under the impression that partition would bring the provinces of Punjab and Bengal in their entirety into Pakistan. It came as a shock to him when the Congress advanced the position in March 1947 that partition of the subcontinent would also mean a partition of the great provinces of Punjab and Bengal. Only the Muslim majority districts would be included in Pakistan. East Punjab and West Bengal would stay in India. The 572 princely states were given the option of acceding to either India or Pakistan keeping in view their geography and the wishes of their people. Jinnah argued passionately to keep Punjab and Bengal united in Pakistan but failed to convince Mountbatten of his position. Reluctantly, he agreed to “a moth-eaten Pakistan”.
Widespread riots broke out in Punjab in March 1947. Ethnic cleansing on a scale rarely witnessed in human history was practiced on both sides of the new proposed border. No one knows how many innocent Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs perished in the riots. Estimates range from half a million to two million. Entire villages were decimated. Towns went up in flames. Thousands of women and children were abducted and abused. Fifteen million refugees crossed the border. And the new nations of India and Pakistan came into existence immersed in flames of hatred and soaked in rivers of blood. They have fought three wars and a fourth war has been narrowly avoided. Of late, there is movement towards a détente. One hopes that the process continues, leading to lasting peace in the subcontinent and prosperity for its teeming millions.
(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)
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