- Was the partition of India inevitable?
The Partition is probably the most cataclysmic event in the history of 20th century India. It had a profound impact on contemporary culture, literature, history and historiography. The impact left on the minds of those who lived through these traumatic times persists until this day. To the historian, Partition, and the subsequent birth of Pakistan presents a series of paradoxes: the Muslim League’s sudden rise to power from a relatively insignificant position in the pre-1940 period; the emergence of Jinnah, (the erstwhile secular nationalist) as the major advocate of the Pakistan demand; and finally, the Congress’ acceptance of the Partition Plan, with seeming alacrity, thus relinquishing the vaunted principles of national unity. In this essay, we shall attempt to examine whether the logic of communalism or the circumstances and nature of colonial rule made Partition ‘inevitable’.
The Partition of India is regarded as ‘inevitable’ in the teleological constructs of historians, who regard it as the culmination of the ‘logic of communalism’ and of Muslim separatism. The Muslim community has been demonized as ‘separatist’ and blamed for the Partition of the country. From the 19th century, ideology and studies have seen the Muslim community as the ‘alien other’, endowed with ‘cultural coherence’. Kenneth Cragy saw India’s Partition in 1947, as the most eloquent and compelling example of the Islamic sense of separate identity. Theories associated with the Partition keep such myths alive. 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. From the 1920s there was a definite and undeniable growth of communal forces, but this did not make the Partition of the subcontinent inevitable.
The official historians of Pakistan have in the main, subscribed to the ‘Two-Nation’ theory, according to which the Indian Muslims were always a distinctive and separate community that had resisted assimilation into their Indian environment. The ‘Two-Nation’ theory has been attributed to Saiyyid Ahmed Khan. Many orthodox and nationalist writings regard him as the ‘evil genius’ who helped carve out a separate niche for India’s Muslims within the spheres of colonial policy and discourse. But it is worth noting that Sayyid Ahmed’s politics was essentially elitist and to confuse his ideas on electoral representation with Muslim politics is something which required at least partial mobilization of the subordinate social classes, which was unacceptable. Many groups within the Muslim community may have had ideals of an exclusive identity and rule by an Islamic government, but this in no way explains the actual process of the formation of the nation-state of Pakistan. As a Mushirul Hasan has rightly pointed out, we need to examine how these nebulous ideas of Muslim nationhood got transformed into political reality. The idea of a separate state talked about in muted terms after the Khilafat and Non-Cooperation days came to be formally mooted in a specific context after 1937, with the performance and subsequent resognation of the Congress Muslims in 1939, the fluid political climate on the eve and during World War II, the Congress decision to launch the Quit India Movement and the government’s readiness to modify its strategy towards the League. Mushirul Hasan argues that the creation of Pakistan had to do with tangible material considerations, especially those related with power sharing, than the profound urge to create an 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 ‘running of a knife’ across ‘Mother India’s body’ an inevitable fact.
However, before we proceed to examine the role of Jinnah and the Muslim League, another factor needs to be considered and that is of the Partition being the result of colonial policy. The British policy of ‘divide and rule’ is blamed for tearing apart two communities which history and tradition had joined. Even Mushirul Hasan sees the introduction of separate electorates as giving a sense of Muslims being religious-political identity in the colonial image. Separate electorates are regarded as having created the space for reinforcing religious identities, a process which was both in conception and articulation was profoundly divisive and undermined the secular foundations of Indian nationalism. He writes that the ideological contours of the future Pakistan were delineated by British opinion and policy, long before Jinnah burst on the political scene.
Ayesha Jalal has however criticized this view since these interpretations tend to be tautological. Under separate electorates Muslims voted for Musilms, 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 electoral and representative activity, as envisaged by the Montford Reforms, countered the process of ‘communalization’ o 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 the provinces as envisaged by the 1935 Act dealt a hammer blow to Muslims in the minority provinces. This was the backdrop against which some Muslim politicians from the minority provinces turned to Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It is the role of Jinnah which has been the subject of much academic controversy. While historians like Stanley Wolpert and BR Nanda blame Jinnah for the Partition, revisionists like Ayesha Jalal have challenged this entire view. The twin Partition myths in popular and academic circles for over a generation have been: ‘The League for Partition’ and ‘the Congress 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 points his finger in a determined manner at Jawaharlal Nehru’s responsibility for Partition. So there is a 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 situation.
Jinnah had been involved in politics in the early 20th century as a moderate who encouraged secularism and Hindu-Muslim unity. He was one of the two men who framed the Congress-League Lucknow Pact of 1916. 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. It seems intriguing how the man called the ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’ by Sarojini Naidu became the one to demand an Islamic state. According to Bipan Chandra, the transformation of Jinnah reflected 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 there is a convergence in views regarding the significance of events (?) till 1935. Till this point of time the ultimate League objective was a negotiated pattern of sharing power with the Congress, on the basis of substantial League representation at the Centre. The agreement between the orthodox and revisionist views also extend to the recognition of the supreme importance of the provincial elections of 1937. It is however, with regard to the nature and significance that their divergences begin. The political reality of 1937 had shown that while Hindus dominated the Hindu-majority provinces, the Muslims barely dominated the Muslim-majority provinces. With the prospect of a Congress dominated centre in case of a transfer of power, Jinnah realized that the Muslim interests could hardly be safeguarded. The orthodox view, a mentioned earlier, regards this as the turning point of Jinnah’s personality, ideology and policy. His earlier secular ideals were discarded in favour of the two-nation theory. The revisionist view, in contrast, 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.
In 1940 at the Lahore session, the Muslim League, without announcing any exact geographical boundaries formally demanded independent Muslim states in the north-west and north-east of India. There is an official abandonment of the ‘minority’ status and the claim that the Indian Muslims were a nation. Ayesha Jalal writes that not only was it an explicit revolt against ‘minoritarianism’, it was also an implicit coup against the dominant mode which extolled 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.
This 1940 Lahore Resolution us seen by the conventional view as best represented by Stanley Wolpert, as Jinnah’s first official pronouncement for Partition. This view believes that Jinnah thought Partition to be the only workable solution to the communal problem and the 1940 declaration marked not only the ‘Islamization’ of Jinnah, but also the communalization of politics. There are significant inadequacies in this argument which are brought forward by Ayesha Jalal. Firstly, there is no mention of Pakistan, which was a term coined by Rehman Ali, a student at Cambridge. Moreover the logic of this ‘Partition demand’ does not seem to hold good as it would have meant the sacrifice of around 40 million Muslims living in the Muslim minority provinces. If anything, the Partition was likely to make their position even more precarious. And it is worth noting that it was the leaders of the minority provinces who had brought Jinnah back to the centre stage of politics. 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.
It has been rightly pointed out in the revisionist view that the Lahore Resolution, in no sense made Partition an ‘inevitability’. The orchestration of separate nationhood is not an inevitable overture to exclusive statehood. While the negotiations on national status for Indian Muslims ended in 1940, the demand for a wholly separate and sovereign state of ‘Pakistan’ remained open to negotiation as late as the summer of 1946. The claim that Muslims constituted a ‘nation’ was perfectly compatible with a federal or confederal structure covering the whole of India. The claim for Muslim ‘nationhood’ did not translate into a secessionist demand. Jalal writes that this was essentially a ‘bargaining counter’ to further Muslim interests in a confederal arrangement with the Hindu majority provinces at a sub-continental level. The imprecision of the Resolution, along with the lack of clear reference to a centre, gave Jinnah some breathing space. So it does seem fairly correct to argue that the 1940 Resolution was a ‘tactical move’ and not an outright demand for Partition or Pakistan.
Jinnah’s resort to religion came essentially due to the diversity of opinions within the Muslim politicians and the lack of organizational capacity of the League. Religion was used as a means of building bridges within the Muslims. At this stage we need to examine a weakness of the revisionist thesis – it only discusses 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’.
It is worth noting that while Jinnah claimed that the nomenclature of ‘Pakistan’ was thrust upon the Lahore Resolution by the Hindu and British Press, he did nothing to rectify their statements. The popular ideas of ‘Pakistan’ fired the imagination of many. A good 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. Romanticized notions of Islamic identity were heightened in this period. The Pakistan idea was thus embedded in popular imagination as a religious crusade led by Muslims in defence of Islam. Many Muslim groups supported the idea for their own vested interests. The Muslim middle class, which had lost out on jobs in government service, lapped up the idea of a Muslim state. The industrialists and merchants would benefit from the lack of Hindu competitors. The remaining years of the war witnessed a spectacular jump in the popularity of a ‘Pakistan’ among most Muslims. Yet, popular sentiments for an undefined demand of Pakistan did not translate into matching political organization working for it.
Jinnah, according to the revisionist view needed Islamic fervour to rally the Muslim masses to achieve his aims. Yet he could not afford to push it too far so as to jeopardize his constant 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 (as was the Congress) to maintain the dominant position of the League against the provincial bases of Muslim power. His ideal solution lay in two federations – one Hindu and one Muslim – making it in every way possible to bring the two into a system of political unity on a confederal basis. The calculation was that the Muslims in minority provinces would be protected by the same rights as the non-Muslims in the Muslim states.
This revisionist perspective seems to explain many of Jinnah’s actions and decisions which the conventional view had failed to do. His responses, in particular to the Cripps Mission (1942) and the Cabinet Mission Plan (1946) remain the weakest links in the traditional argument. His rejection of the former and acceptance of the latter clearly run counter to the view that Jinnah was craving for Partition. As Ayesha Jalal very convincingly argues, the Cripps Mission of 1942 offering provinces and not communities the right to opt out of the Indian union nearly succeeded in bringing out the contradictions in Jinnah’s tactics 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 of 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, which categorically rejected Partition and did not even mention 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 Mission Plan came so close to what Jinnah’s political vision embraced. However the Congress imperatives for the extension of the Centre’s power led to the undoing of Jinnah’s tortuous strategy. Although the Congress (under Azad’s presidency) voted its approval to the Plan, a month after the League – there was a change of stance within days of Nehru taking over as President. Nehru declared that the Congress was ‘uncommitted’ to the Plan, stressed that the central government would require some overall power to intervene in grave crisis and warned that central power ‘inevitably grows’. The Congress was making it increasingly difficult for Jinnah to find a solution to the problem before them.
At this juncture we must reexamine the ‘popular’ ideas of ‘Congress for Unity’. Their commitment to freedom with unity had been a significant part of their ideology since their inception. They refused to take a share in the responsibility of the failure to solve the Muslim problem by taking a convenient 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 steadily beginning to favour the latter (at the cost of the former). The commitment of the Congress to a strong centre came not only from their desire to maintain their own dominance but also from the vision of a strong united and modernized India. Congressmen (like Nehru) realized the importance of a strong centre for economic modernization through centralized planning.
While Nehru’s contemporaries like Abul Kalam Azad thought that it was Mountbatten who swung Nehru round to Partition, Asim Roy points out that they ignored the possibility that the reverse might be true. In the mirror image of the dichotomy between Jinnah’s professions and intentions, the Congress continued to present the façade of the ideal of unity while it steadily and deliberately worked itself up to a position where Jinnah was forced to take his Pakistan and forced to leave the 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.
Although at this stage also Jinnah could have continued his game for some time, the situation and political context was rapidly changing. The relationship between different communities deteriorated sharply in many regions in India. Violence going out of control at the social base narrowed the options of those negotiating at the Centre even further. Moreover, the return of the Labour government to power, with its serious commitment to decolonization changed the political scenario dramatically. 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 protect British economic interests in the Indian Ocean region. The British and the Congress discovered their common interests in an India with a strong centre and they achieved this by ‘hitting’ at Jinnah ‘Achilles Heel’ – his Pakistan demand. They ousted him by conceding his professed and not his real objective. At this juncture in 1947 Jinnah was left with no choice but to acquiesce in the creation of a Pakistan shorn of eastern Punjab and western Bengal – the “maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten” state which he had rejected outright in 1944 and then again in 1946.
Although the revisionist perspective dislodges some serious misconceptions about the Partition of India in 1947 it is likely, in Robinson’s words ‘to become the orthodox academic interpretation’. Asim Roy raises some questions about the revisionist thesis, as presented by Ayesha Jalal. He casts ‘serious doubts’ on the soundness of Jinnah’s political strategy, given his ultimate goal of maximizing Muslim interests within a confederal structure, there is a need to question the rationale of the Lahore resolution. The Pakistan idea, however vague and undefined, touched a tender point in the Muslim heart and eventually contributed to the growth of communal sentiments. If the Partition was an unwelcome prospect, these tactics risked its achievements. Asim Roy raises a very pertinent question in this respect. He writes that if Partition was never an option for the League and Jinnah, would the Congress and the British, even in the changed circumstances in the latter half of the 1940s have found it as easy to force it on eighty million Muslims of British India? Further research on similar questions needs to be done to further enhance our understanding of this cataclysmic event in Indian history.
In conclusion we can say that the Partition of India was not an ‘inevitable’ culmination of Muslims separatism or the colonial policy. The creation of Pakistan far from being the logical conclusion of the ‘two-nation theory’ was in fact its most decisive political abortion. 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 cannot be seen merely in terms of Jinnah’s demands and Nehru’s opposition. It also needs to be seen in the context of the relationship between ‘high politics’ and popular sentiments. The Partition of India was not inevitable. It 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
- Mushirul Hasan (ed.) – India’s Partition, Process, Strategy and Mobilization
- Mushirul Hasan – Legacy of a Divided Nation
- Sumit Sarkar – Modern India
- Bipan Chandra – India’ Struggle for Independence