Signs from Allah: History, Science and Faith in Islam
141. Tradition, Reform and Modernism in the Emergence of Pakistan - 5
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, CA
Neither the Congress nor the Muslim League position was without inherent contradictions. By insisting on a strong central government that would by default be dominated by Hindus, the Congress party failed to accommodate the anxieties of the Muslim-majority areas. The Muslims were a majority in large portions of the northwest and the northeast. But they were a small minority in central and southern India. On the other hand, the position of the Muslim League had its own contradictions. While it might have made sense for the League to speak of the northwestern and northeastern regions as separate “nations” with Muslim majorities, the idea of an all-India Muslim “nation” glossed over the presence of millions of Muslims in the Indian hinterland who would remain in India, partition or no partition.
Some historians have argued that the objective of Mohammed Ali Jinnah was not partition but autonomous Muslim majority regions in the northwest and the northeast that were free to govern themselves within a federated India. In support of this argument they offer as evidence Jinnah’s acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan (1946) which envisaged three autonomous regions in a federated India. Two of these, in the northwest and the northeast would have Muslim majorities. It was Jawaharlal Nehru who torpedoes this plan. When the chips were down, Jinnah was for a united India with a weak center while Nehru accepted a partitioned India with a strong center. These positions were a reflection of the philosophical makeup of the two men, each a giant in his own right, and each pivotal in shaping the destiny of the subcontinent. I will elaborate in a separate series how these conflicting philosophies played themselves out in the turbulent years immediately after the World War II, leading to the holocaust that accompanied partition.
The demise of the Unionist Party and the shift in allegiance of the sajjada nishins of the Punjab were not an accident of history. They were a result of the deliberate and determined policies of the Muslim League. Jinnah knew that there would be no Pakistan without the Punjab. But he had a tactical hurdle before him. The Punjab was ruled by the Unionist party which was inclusive and had largely stayed out of the communal frenzy in northern India. The challenge before him was to break Punjab loose from the Unionist party and bring the Muslims of Punjab within an all-India Muslim framework.
The Congress party claimed to represent all sections of India’s population including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Parsis. Indeed, during much of the period for the agitation of Pakistan, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a scholarly Muslim, was the President of the Congress party (1940-45). The inclusive, all-India posture of the Congress party was a threat to Jinnah’s position that the Muslim League alone represented the interests of all the Muslims of India. This position may at first seem obdurate. On closer examination, it was directed less at the Congress than at the Unionist party of the Punjab. As long as the Unionist party represented the interests of the Muslims of the Punjab, the Muslim League could not negotiate with the British and the Congress as the sole representative of all the Muslims of India. Indeed, the Unionist party was a threat to the very basis of the two-nation theory.
Jinnah proceeded to demolish the Unionist party in a two-step process. The first step was the abrogation of the Jinnah-Sikandar Pact that Jinnah had signed with the Unionist party in 1942. Sikandar Hayat was the Unionist Chief Minister of Punjab and was enormously popular in the rural areas of that vast province. The Jinnah-Sikandar Pact was a tactical stand down agreement that enabled the League to consolidate its position in the rural areas even while it professed its partnership with the Unionists. When Sikandar Hayat died in 1944, Jinnah made his move and abrogated the Pact. Without the strong leadership of Sikandar, the Unionists came apart at the seams. There were many defections. Some were co-opted by the League, some went over to the Congress, yet others to the Sikh Akali Dal.
The Second World War was rapidly coming to an end and the British, exhausted from the War, wanted to divest themselves of the Indian Empire which was bursting at the seams with nationalist fervor. They called the Simla Conference of 1945 whose declared intent was to reconcile the positions of the Congress and the League so that an Advisory Committee could be formed to advise the British viceroy on all matters affecting the governance of the subcontinent. At the Conference, Jinnah took a hard stand that only the League, as the sole representative of all the Muslims of India, could nominate Muslim delegates to the Advisory Committee. Jinnah understood very well that the Congress could not accept this demand. It would have meant that the Congress could not even nominate a stalwart like Maulana Azad to the Advisory Committee. The Simla Conference collapsed.
The failure of the Simla Conference was a triumph for Jinnah’s strategy. It demonstrated to the Unionists that in the political end game between the British, the Congress and the League, only the All-India Muslim League would be accepted as the spokesman for India’s Muslims. But it also hardened the position of Congress leadership and killed any hope of Congress-League rapprochement and a united India.
The repercussions in the Punjab were rapid. The landlords and the sajjada nishins realized that if they wanted to safeguard their privileged positions in the emerging political order, they had to get on board with the League. The sajjada nishins abandoned the Unionists and formed a de facto alliance with the Muslim League. This was a key turning point in the struggle for Pakistan.
Defections from the Unionist party came rapidly. Notable among those who switched over to the League were Pir Syed Ahmed Shah of Hazrat Shah Nur Jamal, Pir Jamaat Ali Shah, Pir Fazal Shah, Pir Hussain Shah, and the Pirs of Musa Pak Shaheed, Jalalpur, Rajca and Golra. The pirs injected a religious fervor into the political campaign of 1946 which had not been there in previous elections. Their tilt was decisive in the elections of 1946. Only a small minority of sajjada nishins, such as Pir Bahaul Haque, stayed with the secular agenda of the Unionist party.
Arrayed against the League were the urban based reformist ulema as well as the Ahrar party, the Ahl e Hadith and the Jamiat e ulema e Hind. These reformist ulema visualized the future of Muslim India not in an independent state but in a society based on the Shariah with themselves as the priestly class that interpreted the Shariah for the masses. However, the intellectual approach of the reformist ulema made no impact on the rural masses who stood by their allegiance to the hereditary pirs and voted in droves for the League and its agenda.
The Pakistan movement was also helped by the hereditary landlords. These entrenched interests sensed that their privileged position would be at risk if they did not join up with an emerging Pakistan dominated by the League. Examples of the landlord families who supported the League were the Hayat, Noon and Daulatana families. Some of these families were interconnected through an extensive network of tribal brotherhood called biraderees. The landlords and the tribal leaders controlled the votes of their tenants and brotherhoods just as the sajjada nishins controlled the votes of their murids through the fatwas. The Salafi reformist ulema opposed to the idea of Pakistan were unsuccessful against the solid social structure of the sajjada nishins and the landlords.
The dislocations caused by the Second World War were an added element in the extraordinary events leading to partition. As the war dragged on into 1945, there was a scarcity of food grains in the Punjab. Black marketers, sensing an opportunity to make a killing, hoarded the scarce supply of wheat driving up prices and causing immense hardship to the poor rural peasantry. Riots erupted in several areas. The League and its supporters blamed the policies of the Unionist government who they said was pandering to the profiteers, many of whom were Sikh and Hindu. As the war ended and the large Indian army was demobilized, over a million soldiers returned to the Punjab only to find that there were no jobs for them and inflationary prices made even the basic food items beyond their reach. They voted against the Unionist party.
The election of 1946 was a triumph for the reformist pirs and the landlords. It was a defeat for the reformist molvis and the ulema. Traditional Islam operating in a medieval agrarian structure dominated by powerful landlords won over reformist Salafi Islam advocated by the molvis and the ulema.
It was only after partition and the establishment of Pakistan that the reformist ulema and molvis flocked to the new state and hijacked the emerging political agenda. Witness, for instance, the turnabout in the position of Maulana Maududi. He had opposed the idea of Pakistan all his life but soon after partition moved to Pakistan at the head of the Jamaat e Islami that called for the establishment of an “Islamic state”. This was a far cry from Jinnah’s concept of a modern, secular Muslim majority state wherein Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs would live as equal citizens. The injection of a Salafi reformist agenda into a traditional rural social structure led by the sajjada nishins and dominated by powerful landlords introduced multiple tensions that continue to rock the body politic of Pakistan to this day.
Was Pakistan an “Islamic State” or a “Republic” whose population had a Muslim majority? Jinnah apparently had a vision of the latter while the revised agenda of the Salafi ulema supported the former. These tensions have not been resolved. Torn by these tensions, hesitant to define its destiny, faced with unending confrontations with India, Pakistan turned to the only organized body capable of providing it with a degree of stability, namely the army. But this stability has come at the price of economic development. The people of Pakistan continue to struggle with the tensions inherent in the contradictions between a rural traditionalist Sufi Islam of the sajjada nishins, a reformist Sufi Islam of some of the pirs, an urban Salafi Islam led by Jamaat e Islami, and a modernist Islam envisioned by its founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah, all of these in a political structure dominated by the army and the hereditary landlords. The tensions will persist until Pakistan defines its own soul.
(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)
Back to Pakistanlink Homepage
