Opinion

Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam 128. The Partition of India - 4
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA

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, 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 Nehru report contained the following essential provisions

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 from 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 Hindu interests.

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 set up wherein the Hindus would be a majority.

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 cabinet 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.

Two significant observations are noteworthy about Jinnah’s 14 points. First,in 1929, Jinnah was still operating within a paradigm of minority rights and not “two nation theory” proposed by Savarkar five years earlier. Jinnah was still a peace maker between the Congress and the League and hoped that he could find common ground for the two. Second, the emphasis in the 14 points was on the reciprocal protection of minority rights, Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh alike, and not just the rights of Muslims. Jinnah worked hard to tone down the more strident demands of the right-wing Muslim constituency and obtain the concurrence of the League. Students of history may argue whether the 14 points were hard demands or were bargaining openers. The negotiations and the hard bargaining did not take place. The 14 points were rejected by the Indian National Congress.

The Nehru Report and its aftermath constitute a milestone on the road to partition. Jinnah, who had hitherto worked hard to bring about a convergence of Congress and League viewpoints, was disillusioned. He was squeezed between Congress stonewalling and marginalized by the more strident Muslim leaders who felt that Jinnah was too nationalistic in his outlook and too accommodating in his approach. Although he took part in the Round Table Conferences in London in 1931-32, his heart was no longer with Indian politics. He settled in London as a barrister. It was only in 1935 that he returned to India at the invitation of Allama Iqbal to reorganize and lead the Muslim League. The Congress leadership had lost Jinnah whom the eminent Indian social activist and poet Sarojini Naidu had called “the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. Now they were to meet him as an advocate of the two-nation theory, and finally as Quaid i Azam of a new nation, Pakistan. The wheels of fortune were turning. The march to partition had begun.

(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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