Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam 130. The Partition of India - 6
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
In 1933, the British government appointed a commission under the chairmanship of Lord Linlithgow to review and recommend reforms for the administration of the British Raj. The result was the Government of India Act of 1935.
The Act did not give the Indians the power to draft or enact their own constitution nor was there a Bill of Rights. It recommended the separation of Burma from British India and the establishment of Sindh and Orissa as separate states. It granted limited self-government to the provinces. The elected provincial legislatures served at the pleasure of the British governors who had the authority to convene or dissolve them. The federal legislature was to be elected indirectly with substantial reservations for the princes and the viceroy’s nominees. Separate communal electorates were accepted for Hindus, Muslims and Christians.
The elections of 1937 were held under the Government of India Act of 1935. The Indian National Congress, as the oldest and best organized party, won 750 of a total of 1,771 seats. It had a majority of seats in Madras, United Provinces, Central Provinces, Bihar and Orissa and held the largest number of seats in four other provinces including Bengal and NW Frontier. But it captured only 26 of the 491 seats reserved for Muslims. The Muslim League fared no better. It captured only 106 seats out of a total of 491 reserved Muslim seats. Significantly, it failed miserably in the Punjab where it won only two seats and 39 out of 250 seats in Bengal.
The Congress formed cabinets in the provinces where it had a clear majority. It joined coalitions in Assam and Sindh. Jinnah offered to form coalitions with the Congress in the critical UP and Bombay legislatures. But the Congress, buoyed by its success at the polls, rejected the offer. An elated Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru declared that there were only two political powers in the India, namely, the British and the Congress. He offered to cooperate with the League in UP only if it dissolved itself and joined the Congress.
In declining to cooperate with the League in 1937, the Congress missed a golden opportunity to forge a united political alliance in India. The League had cooperated with the Congress in some of the local electoral districts in UP and in return expected that the Congress would invite it to form a coalition government. Maulana Azad records in his book, “India Wins Freedom”, that he had arranged for two of the senior members of the League, Chaudhari Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Ismail Khan to join the UP ministry. But the UP Congress went back on the tacit pre-election understanding for a coalition with the League. Only one ministerial seat was offered to the UP Muslims and that too if they abandoned their allegiance to the League and joined the Congress. Mohammed Mujeeb, a prominent member of the League recalls (Ref: India’s Partition, ed. by Musheerul Hasan, p. 410): “I was at home in Lucknow when the draft of the agreement proposed by Maulana Azad on behalf of the Congress was sent to Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman. My immediate reaction on reading it was that the Muslim League was being asked to abolish itself”. Ultimately, the lone Muslim seat in the ministry was given to Jameet e ulema e Hind, a religious party which had shifted its allegiance from the League to Congress.
Nehru was consistent, but consistently unrealistic on the communal issue. He was a statesman but his statesmanship failed him at critical moments. In 1937, he tried to crush the League in UP. The result was exactly the opposite. It only crushed the pro-congress elements in the League and forced them into a communal corner. A cooperative hand extended at this critical juncture might have paid rich political dividends. His passion for secular socialism made him insensitive to the depths of communal suspicions in the subcontinent. This failure showed up repeatedly in Nehru’s political career, first in the Nehru report of 1928, then in his decisions following the 1937 elections, and finally his sabotage of the British Cabinet Mission plan in 1946. His failures had a decisive impact on the events leading to partition. He was a political giant, next only to Gandhi in stature, and the subcontinent paid a heavy price for his misjudgments. Maulana Azad observers in his book India Wins Freedom: “Jawaharlal’s action (in refusing to give two ministerial seats to the League) gave the Moslem League in the UP a new lease of life. All students of Indian politics know that it was from the UP that the League was reorganized. Mr Jinnah took full advantage of the situation and started an offensive which ultimately led to Pakistan”.
Following the elections of 1937, the Congress formed cabinets in seven out of eleven states where it had won a majority of Assembly seats. In addition, in Sindh and Assam it was part of the ruling coalitions. The Unionist Party, a coalition of traditional Muslim, Sikh and Hindu interests, ruled the Punjab. In Bengal the Praja Krishak Party formed the ministry. Thus, in nine out of eleven provinces the Congress was either in power or part of a coalition that held power. The Muslim League was unable to command a majority in any of the provinces. This was a low point for the League. It seemed as if the League had become irrelevant to the power politics of India. It was only the singular focus and drive of Jinnah that galvanized the party and molded it into a force that was able within a decade to dictate the partition of the subcontinent.
The actions of the Congress in the two years that it was in power were perceived by the minorities to be a manifestation of a rising tide of political Hinduism. Since its electoral base in 1937 was predominantly Hindu (the Congress had won only 26 of 491 seats allocated to Muslims) it was understandably responsive to the demands of its Hindu constituency. However, it also displayed a noticeable insensitivity to the need of the Muslims in North India. First, Hindi written in the Devanagri script was introduced as the medium of instruction in schools. Urdu, which was the lingua franca of north India, and the cultural language of north Indian Muslims, was marginalized. This was seen by the Muslim elite as an attack on their culture. Second, the singing of Vande Mataram was introduced into schools. This song was written by the Bengali poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1876 as a protest against the British who had consolidated their grip on India and had made the singing of “God save the Queen” mandatory for all Indian school children. The words Vande Mataram may mean “I worship thee” or “I salute thee” depending on the interpretation. The context of the song which was set by Bankim Chanda in an anti-Muslim novel Ananda MathTemple and its evocation of the goddess Durga made it a controversial part of the Hindu-Muslim dialectic. Some Muslims looked upon the introduction of this song as an attempt to impose Hindu culture on non-Hindus. Some Christians and Sikhs also objected to the song on the grounds that it equated the motherland with the goddess Durga.
In historical hindsight, these “excesses” of the Congress would not be considered politically significant were it not for the charged political context of the times. It is worth remembering that the large provinces of Punjab and Bengal were not ruled by the Congress and were not subject to the Congress “reforms”. Princely India, consisting of 572 autonomous kingdoms and containing almost 25 percent of India’s total population was not affected. A certain amount of cronyism and partisanship was unavoidable in any elective government. Besides, it was not just the Muslims of UP who were unhappy with Congress rule. The Scheduled Caste Federation and the Justice Party of Tamil Nadu were also unhappy. In the larger matrix of the subcontinent the Congress “excesses” would have subsided over time and replaced by the give and take inherent in a democracy. In a pluralistic, democratic India, the center of gravity of political life would have floated towards a populist mass dictated by the dual convergence of self-interest and the impossibility of either of the two principal religious communities dominating the other.
Some of the reforms proposed by the Congress ministries were perceived as an attempt to impose soft Hindutva. The Congress pushed mass education but secularized the curriculum under a scheme called the Wardha Taleemi Scheme. The vast network of madrassah-based religious schools in north India felt marginalized. The tricolor flag of the Congress was given official status and pictures of Gandhi were prominently displayed in schools. The land reforms proposed by the Congress ministries hit hard the landed Muslim aristocracy of UP. It was precisely this class that was at the helm of affairs in the Muslim League and they felt threatened. The vast province of UP was the crucible of communal politics. The end game of partition was played out in the Punjab and Bengal but it was UP that witnessed the first act.
There were reports of favoritism, normal in any democratic setup, but highly suspicious in the charged atmosphere of the times. Nehru’s attempts to isolate and crush the Muslim League reinforced these suspicions. However, to be fair, Pandit Nehru was under tremendous pressure from some of his colleagues including Pant, Rajendra Prasad and Rafi Ahmed Kidwai to take a hard line against the League.
(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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