- What were the various factors leading up to the Partition of India? Was it inevitable?
No other event has influenced contemporary Indian history culture, literature, and historiography in a manner more profound than the Partition of 1947. The events that preceded Partition form an interesting study in the interplay of politics and ideology and the role of individuals like Jinnah. The rapid rise to power of the Muslim League in the 1940s and the Congress’ acceptance of Partition, with seeming readiness were some such paradoxes. In this essay, we shall attempt to examine whether the logic of communalism or the circumstances and nature of colonial rule made Partition ‘inevitable’.
From a traditional historical perspective, the Partition of India has been seen as ‘inevitable’ in which it is seen as the obvious and eventual culmination of the ‘logic of communalism’ and Muslim separatism. Kenneth Cragy writes that Partition was the most eloquent and compelling instance of the Islamic sense of separate identity. HG Wells, who also saw Partition as inevitable, felt that political fragmentation among sovereign states is inevitable. In this kind of a view the blame for Partition is placed squarely on the ‘separatist’ tendencies of the Muslim community. This view can be seen as a part of the conception of the Muslim community as the ‘alien other’, having ‘cultural unity’. It is necessary to repudiate the suggestions implying the ‘inevitability’ of Partition on the basis of Hindu-Muslim feuds that took place before and after the advent of British rule in India in order to answer the above question. It is undeniable that the first half of the 19th century witnessed a definite growth of communal forces. This however does not imply that Partition was inevitable.
The theory of inevitability was born out of the ‘Two-Nation theory’, believed to have been first articulated by Saiyyid Ahmed Khan, and subscribed to by the official historians of Pakistan. The ‘Two-Nation’ theory essentially says that the Indian Muslims were always a distinct, divergent and separate community and therefore ought to live in a distinct political space. Sir Saiyyid Ahmed Khan, who founded the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College, believed that education and cooperation with the British was vital for the survival of the Muslim community. Tied to all the movements of Muslim revival was the opposition to assimilation and submergence in Hindu society. Sir Saiyyid Ahmed Khan was thus the first to conceive of a separate Muslim homeland. While many nationalist writings regard Saiyyid Ahmed Khan as the perpetuator of such separatist tendencies and one who helped carve out a niche for India’s Muslims within the spheres of colonial policy and discourse, it needs to be understood that his politics was essentially elitist. He could not and did not have even partial mobilization of the subordinate classes and therefore one cannot draw any definite correlation between his ideas and electoral representation in Muslim politics. Some people felt that the very nature of Islam called for a communal Muslim society. Many groups within the Muslim community may have had ideals of an exclusive identity and rule by an Islamic government, but this is not an adequate explanation for the actual process of the formation of Pakistan.
As Mushirul Hasan has rightly pointed out, one needs to examine how these nebulous, vague and often ambiguous ideas of Muslim nationhood got translated into political reality. If Partition was not inevitable, the question then arises – what was the crucial turning point leading to the formation of Pakistan. Some see the Nehru Report (1928) as the point where there was a parting of ways. Others point to the failure of coalition ministries in the United Provinces and Bombay in 1937, while others again assert that the period of Congress rule from 1937-39 was more significant. Still some others point out that the crucial issue leading to Partition came as late as the Shimla Conference in 1945 and the decision of the British government to hold elections before negotiating a settlement, or even as late as the League’s call for direction.
The idea of a separate state first started to be talked about after the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation days. The first articulation of a demand for a separate Muslim state was first done by Mohammad Allama Iqbal in 1930, though the idea of a separate Muslim state in a new form was elaborated by Rehmat Ali at the time of the Round Table Conference which was to include Punjab, NWFP, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan and coined the name Pakistan. This idea interestingly did not receive a serious consideration and initially even the League rejected it as an impracticable idea.
It was only after 1937 that this idea came into the formal political sphere with the performance and subsequent resignation of the Congress Muslims in 1939, the fluid political climate of World War II, the Quit India Movement and the government’s readiness to modify its strategy towards the Muslims League. Mushirul Hasan has argued that the creation of Pakistan had more to do with tangible material considerations and power sharing, than with any ideological or even instinctive urge to create a separate Islamic state. In this context it is also important to analyse the role played by Jinnah and the Muslim League; whether it was their concerted effort which made the Partition of India inevitable.
Colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’ forms a background to understanding the manner in which communal politics developed in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s ultimately culminating in Partition. Traditionally British policy has been blamed for creating rifts based on perceived divergent economic and political interests between the two communities – Hindu and Muslim, which had been historically and traditionally united. In the census too the British categorized people according to religion and viewed and treated them as separate from each other. Mushirul Hasan has seen the introduction of separate electorates in this context as giving a sense of Muslims being religious-political identity in the colonial image. Separate electorates are regarded as having reinforced religious identities in a politico-economic sphere, a process which was essentially in conception divisive and undermined the secular foundations of Indian nationalism. In other words the idea of the separateness of Muslims in India was built into the electoral process of India. Hasan writes that the ideological contours of the future Pakistan were had been delineated by British opinion and policy, long before Jinnah and the Muslim League came into prominence
Ayesha Jalal has however criticized this view since these interpretations tend to be tautological. Under separate electorates Muslims voted for Muslims, if the elected representatives worked for the interests of their constituents, the politics of the Muslims became ‘communalized’. She writes that what is underplayed in this analysis is the extent of provincial dynamic in representative activity, as envisaged by the Montford Reforms, countered the process of ‘communalization’ of Muslim politics at the all-India level. By 1937, the provincial imperative had prevailed over a specifically Muslim community line within the domain of representative Muslim politics.
The full autonomy of provinces as envisaged by the 1935 Act was a blow to the Muslims of the minority provinces. It was at around this time that some Muslim politicians from minority provinces began to turn towards Mohammad Ali Jinnah. We can now analyze the role of Jinnah, which has been the subject of much academic controversy. While some historians like Stanley Wolpert and BR Nanda blame Jinnah for the Partition, revisionists like Ayesha Jalal have challenged this view. Two of the most popular and even academic misconceptions about Partition dynamics and ideology have been that the Muslim League had always been in favour of Partition in opposition to the Congress, which stood steadfast for unity. A blow to the conventional view came with the publication of 30 pages of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s book (which had been sealed for 30 years) in which Azad pointed his finger in a determined manner at Jawaharlal Nehru’s responsibility for Partition. There is therefore a clear need to reexamine the traditionally ascribed roles to Nehru and Jinnah in the process of Partition. We shall try and chronologically discuss the events which led up to August 1947, and try and analyze them, while looking at both the conventional and the revisionist perspectives. The question before us is – did the emergence of Jinnah and the Muslim League as the ‘sole spokesman’ of the Muslim community, make Partition inevitable or were there other variables involved.
In the early 20th century, Jinnah had been a moderate who encouraged secularism and Hindu-Muslim unity. He was in fact one of the two men who framed the Congress-League Lucknow Pact of 1916 to cooperate on all national issues. He also became the president of the All India Home Rule League founded with Annie Besant, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and other prominent Indian nationalists. He, however moved from the centrestage of politics around 1919-1920 with the beginning of the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation movement, as he criticized the mixing of religion and politics. Jinnah had always been in favour of constitutional reforms. In 1920 he resigned from the Indian National Congress. He still did not voice his support for separate Muslim negotiations with Britain over the future of India. From 1924 onwards he formed an in-house party of moderates that played a bridge between the Congress and the government. Later he was elected president of the Muslim League but the Muslim League itself was divided into two factions i.e. the Pro-Congress Jinnah faction and the pro-British Shafi faction. After a brief retirement from politics, Jinnah returned in 1934 and took over the leadership of the Muslim League.
It is intriguing how the man who Sarojini Naidu had called the ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’ eventually came to demand a separate Islamic state. According to Bipan Chandra, the transformation of Jinnah reflected what he called the ‘logic of communalism’. Ayesha Jalal sees the change in the demands of Jinnah as a transformation of political strategy and tactic rather than one of ideology. She writes that the decade which led up to the Partition should be seen as a ‘battle between Jinnah and the Congress in which they both openly stood for what they did not want, said what they did not mean and what they truly wanted was betrayed in their vital political decisions and actions.
While doing a comparative analysis of the conventional and revisionist perspectives on Partition Asim Roy points out that till 1935 there is a broad convergence in views regarding the significance of events. Till this point of time the League objective was a negotiated pattern of sharing power with the Congress, conditional on significant League representation at the Centre. The agreement between the orthodox and revisionist views also extends to the recognition of the importance of the provincial elections of 1937. The two views however diverge with regard to the nature and meanings of this significance. The Congress scored an overwhelming success with a clear majority in six and emerging as the single largest party in three of the eleven provinces. The total rout the League suffered reduced their importance as allies to the Congress, as was apparent in the post-election attitudes and dealings. The elections of 1937 had shown that in reality while Hindus dominated the Hindu-majority provinces, the Muslims barely dominated the Muslim-majority provinces. Jinnah realized that in case of a transfer of power the prospect of a Congress dominated centre was very much a reality. In such a scenario he realized that the Muslim interests could hardly be safeguarded. The orthodox view regards this as the turning point of Jinnah’s personality, ideology and policy when his earlier secular ideals were discarded in favour of the two-nation theory. The revisionist view however envisages no real change in Jinnah’s political goals, only in his strategy and tactics. His aims are regarded to have remained the same i.e. secure Muslim interests ‘within’ and not in a total separation from India.
The first formal demand for Pakistan came in 1940 at the Lahore session of the Muslims League. The Muslim League, without announcing any exact geographical boundaries formally demanded independent Muslim states in the north-west and north-east of India. Ayesha Jalal argues that Pakistan could not have been perceived as the best solution for Indian Muslims scattered as they were all over the subcontinent. Revisionists do not believe that the Lahore Resolution was the final commitment to Partition – rather it served as a ‘bargaining counter’. Ayesha Jalal writes that not only was this an explicit revolt against ‘minoritarianism’, it was also an implicit coup against the dominant rhetoric which extolled the Congress ‘secular nationalism’ as legitimate and derogated Muslim differences as illegitimate ‘religious communalism’. Jinnah’s stance at this point of time seems rather contradictory. The very Party aiming to represent the Indian Muslims had staked an apparently separatist demand for independent Muslim states.
Stanley Wolpert has seen the 1940 Lahore Resolution as Jinnah’s first official pronouncement for Partition. This is a very representative statement for the conservative voice. According to this view, Jinnah saw Partition was the only workable and feasible solution to the communal problem and the 1940 declaration marked the ‘Islamization’ of Jinnah, as well as the communalization of politics.
This argument however needs to be revised and some of the problems with it have been highlighted by Ayesha Jalal, who has critiqued the basic orthodox thesis of the demand for Pakistan. Jalal points out that it should be noted that in the Lahore Resolution there was no mention of Pakistan. The term Pakistan was first coined by Rehman Ali, a student at Cambridge. Also, this demand for Partition defies the communal logic since around 40 million Muslims living in the Muslim minority provinces were sidelined by this proposition which sought to form an Islamic state whose contours were defined according to Muslim majority areas. In fact the Partition was likely to make the position of these 40 million Muslims even more precarious. The interests of the Muslim minority provinces could definitely not be ignored, especially since it was the leaders of these very minority provinces who had brought Jinnah back to the centre stage of politics and the leadership of the Muslim League. Also, not even the interests of the Muslim majority provinces, as their political future was assured in a federal structure with provisions for strong provisional government. The revisionist view therefore makes it clear that that the Lahore Resolution, did not make Partition an inevitable event.
The orchestration of separate nationhood is not an inevitable advance to state formation. While the negotiations on national status for Indian Muslims ended in 1940, the demand for a separate and sovereign state of ‘Pakistan’ remained open to negotiation as late as the summer of 1946. The claims of Muslims ‘nationhood’ were perfectly compatible with a federal or confederal structure within India and it should be clarified that such a claim did not automatically translate into o imply a secessionist demand. Jalal in fact believes that this argument was in essence a bargaining tool in order to secure and further Muslim interests in a confederal arrangement. The ambiguous and imprecise wording of the Resolution, gave Jinnah space to maneuver his stance. The revisionist view therefore sees the Lahore Resolution of 1940 Resolution as a ‘tactical move’ rather than an outright demand for Pakistan.
Jinnah eventually resorted to religion due to the diversity of opinion within the Muslim political voice as well as the lack of organizational capacity of the League. Religion he realized would have to be used as a unifying and mobilizing tool within the Muslim community as well. This is one of the primary lacunae with the revisionist thesis. It focuses only on the ‘high politics’ of the decade before the Partition and not of its impact on the growth of popular communalism. While at this stage Jinnah himself may not have seen Partition as an actual possibility, the idea of an Islamic state caused much excitement and enthusiasm amongst the ‘Muslim masses’, and this popular force was also a significant variable which needs to be considered in analyzing Partition.
The idea of ‘Pakistan’ fired popular imagination. Many Urdu poets and writers endowed the new nation with a historic destiny and projected the Pakistan ‘project’ as a crusade for an Islamic state. The idea of an Islamic state was thus embedded in popular imagination as a religious crusade in defence of Islam. Many Muslim groups also began to support the idea for their own vested interests. The Muslim middle class in particular which felt that it had gotten a raw deal in terms of jobs in government service, welcomed up the idea of a Muslim state. Industrialists and merchants too felt that they would benefit from the lack of Hindu competitors. The war years therefore witnessed a spectacular jump in the popularity of a ‘Pakistan’ among most Muslims. Yet, it needs to be reiterated that popular sentiments for an undefined demand of Pakistan still did not translate into matching political organization working for it.
With regard to mass mobilization and Jinnah’s appeal to the religious sentiments of the Muslim community, the revisionists are of the opinion that Jinnah needed Islamic fervour to rally the Muslim masses to achieve his aims. However there was also a check on this as he could not afford to push it too far since it could jeopardize his objective of securing the interests of all the Muslims, which could only have been possible except within a framework of Indian unity. Moreover Jinnah was also interested in a strong centre to maintain and ensure the dominant position of the League vis-à-vis the provincial bases of Muslim power. For Jinnah, the ideal situation lay in one Hindu and one Muslim federation, making it possible to bring the two into a system of political unity on a confederal basis. This was of course based on the assumption that just as the rights of the non-Muslims would be protected in the Muslim states, the Muslims in Muslim-minority provinces would also be protected.
The revisionist argument helps us in order to understand better many of Jinnah’s actions and decisions which the conventional view had failed to do. This can especially be seen in the academic analysis of the Cripps Mission of 1942 and the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 which the traditional view has not explained adequately. His rejection of the former and acceptance of the latter are ostensibly in opposition to Jinnah’s perceived desire for Partition, as the traditional school of thought would have us believe.
Ayesha Jalal argues that the Cripps Mission which offered provinces and not communities the right to opt out of the Indian union nearly exposed the inconsistencies and incongruities in Jinnah’s stand by offering him what he was apparently demanding and not what he actually wanted. In 1944 Rajagopalachari offered Jinnah a ‘Pakistan’ carved out of the Muslim majority districts in Punjab and Bengal. Since this would not help safeguard the rights of Muslims in minority provinces, Jinnah rejected it as a “maimed, mutilates and moth-eaten Pakistan”.
The Cabinet Mission Plan on the other hand which had rejected Partition and did not even mention a Pakistan was accepted by the League. It provided a weak centre, denied secession, clubbed the Muslim provinces under the League and set up an interim government and a Constituent Assembly. The Cabinet Mission Plan was close to what Jinnah’s political vision was. However the Congress imperatives for the extension of the Centre’s power led to the undoing of Jinnah’s strategy. Although the Congress approved the Plan initially, within days of Nehru taking over as President it was declared that the Congress was ‘uncommitted’ to the Plan, stressed that the central government would require some overall power to intervene in crisis and warned that central power ‘inevitably grows’.
In the popular realm the Congress seemed to stand for unity as opposed to the League, which supposedly stood for partition. This idea needs to be reexamined. Congress commitment to freedom conditional to a unified subcontinent was a significant part of their ideology. They conveniently sidestepped the “Muslim problem” by taking a line that freedom should precede and not follow the resolution of the communal problem. Ultimately the vital and most crucial and determining factor in the Partition was the nature of the central government. Confronted with a choice between ‘unity’ and a ‘strong centre’ Congress was beginning to favour the unity even if it came at the cost of strong central control. This commitment also came from the vision of Congressmen like Nehru, who had been influenced by the Socialist model who realized the importance of a strong centre for economic modernization through centralized planning.
Many believed that it was actually Lord Mountbatten who had eventually brought Nehru round to Partition, Asim Roy points out that in fact it might just have been the other way round. It appears that the Congress while presenting a façade of the ideal of unity was in fact aiming for a situation in which Jinnah would be forced to take his Pakistan and leave the political scene for good. The Congress realizing the contradictions in Jinnah’s strategy, ‘called Jinnah’s bluff’ after the Cabinet Mission left. Jinnah by accepting something less that Pakistan had lost his bargaining counter.
It was at this point of time that the political situation and context was undergoing rapid change. Inter-communal relations were starting to deteriorate in many parts of the country. The accompanying violence was narrowing the options of those negotiating at the Centre even further. Moreover, the return of the Labour government to power in Britain, with its commitment to decolonization also meant that new imperatives were at work. Not only did the British decide to withdraw in a short specified period, but they were keen on leaving behind a strong centralized government which would safeguard British economic interests in the region. The British and the Congress discovered their common interests in an India with a strong centre and this they achieved this by using Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan. Jinnah’s ostensible demand was conceded while his real objective was ignored. By 1947 Jinnah was left with no choice but to go along with the creation of a Pakistan shorn of eastern Punjab and western Bengal, model which had been proposed to him time and again, and which he had rejected.
Asim Roy raises some questions about the revisionist thesis, as presented by Ayesha Jalal. He has questioned the soundness of Jinnah’s political strategy, given his ultimate goal of maximizing Muslim interests within a confederal structure. There is also at the same time a need to question the rationale of the Lahore resolution. The Pakistan idea, however nebulous it may have been appealed somehow to popular Muslim sentiments and eventually as some believe contributed to the growth of communal sentiments as well. Asim Roy however has also questioned the fact that if Partition was never an option for Jinnah, then how would the Congress and the British have been able to force this decision on eighty million Muslims in the subcontinent.
We can therefore surmise that Partition was not an ‘inevitable’ culmination of Muslim separatism, the ‘communal logic’ or even colonial policy. Partition should be understood in its specific contexts and not as a logical culmination to divisions dating pre-colonial times. The creation of Pakistan far from being the logical conclusion of the ‘two-nation theory’ was in fact its most decisive political abortion. Pakistan in the ultimate analysis was not embedded in the historical logic of the two-nation theory. The Partition arose from a complex interaction of changing communal policy, communal question and the demands and strategies of the Congress and the League. The Partition of India in 1947 also needs to be seen in the context of the relationship between ‘high politics’ and popular sentiments. The Partition of India arose out of the specific conditions of the post-war period, growing communal tensions and the nature of political strategy of the League and the Congress.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Jalal and Bose – Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political economy
- Sumit Sarkar – Modern India
- Bipan Chandra – India’ Struggle for Independence
- Mushirul Hasan (ed.) – India’s Partition, Process, Strategy and Mobilization
- Mushirul Hasan – Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence
- Ayesha Jalal – The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.
- Anita Inder Singh – The Origins of the Partition of India, 1936-1947.