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Jinnah, Golwalkar, Communalism and the two nation theory
1.0 Introduction
The Partition and the consequent division of India into India and Pakistan was an event whose repercussions we can feel even today. The partition was the climax of a series of events which perpetrated communalism, the chief among them being the British Policy of ‘Divide and Rule’. Another surprising feature is that M.A. Jinnah in 1906 was the ambassador of ‘Hindu-Muslim Unity’ and had refused to join the Muslim League when it was set up. But today he is seen by the majority as the creator of Pakistan, and not a friend of India.
2.0 The two phases of communalism
The rise of communalism in India can be distinctly divided into two
phases-liberal communalism and extreme communalism.
2.1 Liberal communalism
Liberal communalism accepted the broad concept of one Indian nation. Though the liberal communalists demanded separate communal rights, safeguards, reservations, etc., they accepted that Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians had common interests and national unity was the ultimate goal. However, liberal communalism had also a rather narrow social base. Politically, it was based mainly on the upper and middle classes. Communalism in India remained in this stage till 1937.
2.2 Extreme communalism
Politics of hatred, fear psychosis and irrationality were the bases of extreme communalism. Instead of reconciliation, the interests of Hindus and Muslims were now declared to be permanently in conflict. Their leaders launched a virulent attack on members of other communities. People of the same community who advocated nationalism were attacked. Even the National Congress and Gandhiji were not spared from their vitriolic tirade.
3.0 Muhammad Ali Jinnah – from Nationalist to Communalist
M.A. Jinnah, after his return to India in 1906, immediately joined the Congress and acted as Dadabhai’s secretary at the Calcutta session of the Congress in 1906. He was an opponent of the Muslim League then being founded. The Aga Khan, the first president of the League, was to write later that Jinnah was ‘our toughest opponent in 1906’ and that he ‘came out in bitter hostility toward all that I and my friends had done and were trying to do’.. . Jinnah was also opposed to the policy of separate electorates for Muslims and was of the opinion that the system of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself. He even earned the title of ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ from Sarojini Naidu.
Jinnah’s first step towards communalism was taken unknowingly when he entered the Central Legislative Council from Bombay as a Muslim member under the system of separate electorates. Though he joined the Muslim League in 1913, he remained in the Congress and still opposed the idea of separate electorates arguing that it would divide India into ‘two watertight compartments.’ But he also started assuming the role of a spokesperson of the Muslim ‘community’ as a whole. These dual roles reached the height of their effectiveness in the Lucknow Congress-League Pact of which he and Tilak were the joint authors.
Acting as the spokesperson of Muslim communalism, he got the Congress to accept separate electorates and the system of communal reservations. But he still remained fully committed to nationalism and secular politics. He resigned from the Legislative Council as a protest against the passing of the Rowlatt Bill. He refused the communal assumption that self-government in India would lead to Hindu rule; and argued that the real political issue in India was Home Rule or ‘transfer of power from bureaucracy to democracy.’
3.1 Leaving the Congress
In 1919-20, the Congress took a turn towards mass politics based on the peaceful breaking of existing laws. Jinnah disagreed and with many other leaders such as Surendranath Banerjea, Bipin Chandra Pal, Tej Bahadur Sapru, C. Sankaran Nair, left the Congress. But unlike most of the other liberals, he turned to communal politics. His political career now entered the phase of liberal communalism.
During the 1920s, Jinnah’s nationalism was not fully swallowed by communalism. He revived the down-and-out Muslim League in 1924 and started building it upon and around the demand for safeguarding ‘the interests and rights of the Muslims’. His politics were now based on the basic communal idea that ‘Muslims should organize themselves, stand united and should press every reasonable point for the protection of their community’.
At the same time, he still pleaded for Hindu-Muslim unity on the basis of a fresh Lucknow Pact so as to fight the British together, and he cooperated with the Swarajists in opposing Government policies and measures in the Central Legislative Assembly. As late as 1925, he told a young Muslim, who said that he was a Muslim first: ‘My boy, no, you are an Indian first and then a Muslim’. In 1927-28, he supported the boycott of the Simon Commission, though he would not join in the mass demonstrations against it.
3.2 The 14 demands
But like Tilak in 1906, he had mounted a tiger which was impossible to climb down from. His entire social base comprised communal-minded persons. He could not give up communalism without losing all political influence. During the discussions on the Nehru report in 1928-29, he slowly but surely surrendered to the more reactionary communalists, led by the Aga Khan and M. Shafi, and in the end became the leader of Muslim communalism as a whole, losing in the bargain the support of nationalist leaders. The 14 demands made by Jinnah as objections to the Nehru report was a an acute reflection of this slide.
In 1930 when Congress organized the massive mass movement the Muslim masses especially the younger generation increasingly shifted to nationalist and left-wing politics and ideologies. Jinnah was faced with a dilemma. He saw little light; and decided to stay mostly in Britain.
But Jinnah returned to India in 1936 to once again revive the Muslim League. Throughout 1936, he stressed his nationalism and desire for freedom and spoke for Hindu-Muslim cooperation. For example, he said at Lahore in March 1936: ‘Whatever I have done, let me assure you there has been no change in me, not the slightest, since the day when I joined the Indian National Congress. It may be I have been wrong on some occasions. But it has never been done in a partisan spirit. My sole and only object has been the welfare of my country. I assure you that India’s interest is and will be sacred to me and nothing will make me budge an inch from that position’.
The Muslim League contested the elections in 1937 under Jinnah’s leadership. The only ‘Muslim’ demands in the manifesto were protection and promotion of the Urdu language and script, and adoption of measures for the amelioration of the general conditions of Muslims. All other communal demands had been accepted by the Communal Award of 1932.
But the Muslim League failed in winning sufficient seats in the elections. A power sharing arrangement between Congress and the Muslim league also could not be worked out. Therefore, Jinnah took to mass politics which in view of the semi-feudal and semi-loyalist social base of the League and his own socially, economically, and politically conservative views could only be based on the cries of Islam in danger and the danger of a Hindu raj. Having made this decision he went all the way towards extreme communalism putting all the force and brilliance of his personality behind the new politics based on themes of hate and fear.
3.3 The fall from grace
If a leader of the stature of Jinnah could take up politics and agitation at this low level, it was inevitable that his followers would be often even worse. Men like Z.A. Suleri and F.M. Durrani surpassed themselves in Goebbelsian demagogy. Even Fazl-ul-Huq, holding a responsible position as the Premier of Bengal, told the 1938 session of the League: ‘In Congress provinces, riots had laid the countryside waste. Muslim life, limb and property have been lost and blood had freely flowed. . . There the Muslims are leading their lives in constant terror, overawed and oppressed by Hindus.. . There mosques are being defiled and the culprit never found nor is the Muslim worshipper unmolested’. M.H. Gazdar, a prominent League leader of Sind, told a League meeting in Karachi in March 1941: ‘The Hindus will have to be eradicated like the Jews in Germany if they did not behave properly’. Jinnah was however in no position to pull up such people, for his own speeches often skirted the same territory.
The Muslim communalists now launched a vicious campaign against nationalist Muslims. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and other nationalist Muslims were branded as ‘show boys’ of the Congress, traitors to Islam and mercenary agents of the Hindus. They were submitted, during 1945- 47, to social terror through appeals to religious fanaticism and even to physical attacks. Jinnah himself in his presidential address to the League in April 1943 described Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as being ‘in-charge of the Hinduizing influences and emasculation of the martial Pathans’.
[ The Frontier Gandhi (Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan or Badhshah Khan or Bacha Khan) was to be tormented by independent Pakistan’s rulers for decades to come. After India’s partition, Bacha Khan pledged allegiance to Pakistan and demanded an autonomous “Pashtunistan” administrative unit within the country, but was arrested by Pakistani government many times between 1948 and 1954. He spent much of the 1960s and 1970s either in jail or in exile. Upon his death in 1988 in Peshawar under house arrest, he was buried in his house at Jalalabad, Afghanistan. ]
Religion was also now brought into the forefront of propaganda. In 1946, Muslims were asked to vote for the League because ‘a vote for the League and Pakistan was a vote for Islam’. League meetings were often held in the mosques after Friday prayers. Pakistan, it was promised, would be ruled under the Sharia. Muslims were asked to choose between a mosque and a temple. The Quran was widely used as the League’s symbol; and the League’s fight with the Congress was portrayed as a fight between Islam and Kufr (infidelity).
4.0 Hindu Communalism
The swirl of events ensured that the Hindu communalism did not lag behind. The political trajectory was, of course, different. The two main liberal communal leaders during the 1920s were Lala Lajpat Rai and Madan Mohan Malaviya. Lajpat Rai died in 1928 (after receiving a brutal beating at the hands of the British during a protest against the Simon Commission) and Malaviya, finding himself in 1937 in the sort of situation in which Jinnah found himself in the same year, decided to retire from active politics, partly on grounds of health.
But Hindu communalism would also not commit suicide; it too advanced to the extremist or the fascist phase. The logic of communalism brought other communal leaders to the fore. The Hindu Mahasabha made a sharp turn in a seemingly fascist direction under V.D. Savarkar’s leadership. The RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) had been from the very beginning organized on extreme lines; it now began to branch out beyond Maharashtra.
4.1 Veer Savarkar
Year after year, V.D. Savarkar warned Hindus of the dangers of being dominated by Muslims. He said in 1937 that Muslims ‘want to brand the forehead of Hindudom and other non-Muslim sections in Hindustan with a stamp of self-humiliation and Muslim domination’ and ‘to reduce the Hindus to the position of helots in their own lands’. In 1938, he said that ‘we Hindus are (already) reduced to be veritable helots throughout our land’.
4.2 Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar and the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh
The RSS was founded in 1925 by Keshav Baliram Hedgewar. Shri M.S. Golwalkar, who became the head of the RSS in 1940 codified the RSS doctrines in his booklet, “We, or Our Nationhood Defined”. In 1939, he declared that if the minority demands were accepted, ‘Hindu National life runs the risk of being shattered’.
Above all, the RSS attacked Muslims and the Congress leaders. Golwalkar attacked the nationalists for ‘hugging to our bosom our most inveterate enemies (Muslims) and thus endangering our very existence’. Condemning the nationalists for spreading the view by which Hindus ‘began to class ourselves with our old invaders and foes under the outlandish name — Indian’, he wrote: ‘We have allowed ourselves to be duped into believing our foes to be our friends . . . That is the real danger of the day, our self-forgetfulness, our believing our old and bitter enemies to be our friends’.
To Muslims and other religious minorities, Golwalkar gave the following advice: ‘The non-Hindu peoples in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture, i.e., they must not only give up their attitude of intolerance and ungratefulness towards this land and its age long traditions but must also cultivate the positive attitude of love and devotion instead — in one word, they must cease to be foreigners, or may stay in the country, wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment — not even citizen’s rights’.
The RSS launched an even more vicious attack on the Congress leaders during 1946-47. Provocatively accusing the Congress leaders in the true fascist style of asking Hindus to ‘submit meekly to the vandalism and atrocities of the Muslims’ and of telling the Hindu ‘that he was imbecile, that he had no spirit, no stamina to stand on his own legs and fight for the independence of his motherland and that all this had to be injected into him in the form of Muslim blood’, he said in 1947, pointing his finger at Gandhiji: ‘Those who declared “No Swaraj without Hindu-Muslim unity” have thus perpetrated the greatest treason on our society. They have committed the most heinous sin of killing the life-spirit of a great and ancient people’.
He accused Gandhiji of having declared: “There is no Swaraj without Hindu-Muslim unity and the simplest way in which this unity can be achieved is for all the Hindus to become Muslims”. The Hindu communalists also tried to raise the cries of ‘Hinduism in danger’.
The bitter harvest of this campaign of fear and hatred carried on by the Hindu and Muslim communalists since the end of the 19th century, and in particular after 1937, was reaped by the people in the Calcutta killings of August 1946 in which over 5,000 lost their lives within five days, in the butchery of Hindus at Noakhali in Bengal and of Muslims in Bihar, the carnage of the partition riots and the assassination of Gandhiji.
4.3 The Muslims in independent Pakistan
But after 1947, perhaps, the heaviest cost was paid by Muslims who remained in or migrated to Pakistan. Once Pakistan was formed, Jinnah hoped to go back to liberal communalism or even secularism. Addressing the people of Pakistan, Jinnah said in his Presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947: ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State. . . We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. . . Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal, and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State’.
But it was all too late. Jinnah had cynically spawned a monster which not only divided India, but would, in time, eat up his own concept of Pakistan and do more harm to Muslims of Pakistan than the most secular of persons could have predicted or even imagined. On the other hand, despite the formation of Pakistan and the bloody communal riots of 1947, nationalist India did succeed in framing a secular constitution and building a basically secular polity, whatever its weaknesses in this respect may be.
In other words, ideologies have consequences.
5.0 Questions about creation of Pakistan
Would the communal problem have disappeared or been solved if Jinnah had been conciliated during 1937-39 and, in particular, if a coalition government with the Muslim League had been formed in U.P. in 1937?
The rebuff to Jinnah’s political ambitions, it is said, embittered him and made him turn to separatism. Let us first look at the general argument. It entirely ignores the fact that before he was ‘rebuffed’ Jinnah was already a full-fledged liberal communal. Secondly, every effort was made by the Congress leaders from 1937 to 1939 to negotiate with Jinnah and to conciliate him. But Jinnah was caught in the logic of communalism. He was left without any negotiable demands which could be rationally put forward and argued. Consequently, and it is very important to remember this historical fact, he refused to tell the Congress leaders what the demands were whose acceptance would satisfy him and lead him to join the Congress in facing imperialism. The impossible condition he laid down to even start negotiations was that the Congress leadership should first renounce its secular character and declare itself a Hindu communal body and accept the Muslim League as the sole representative of the Muslims. The Congress could not have accepted this demand. As Rajendra Prasad put it, for the Congress to accept that it was a Hindu body ‘would be denying its own past, falsifying its history, and betraying its future’.
Jinnah, too, all the while, was following the logic of his ideology and politics. But this posture could also not be maintained for long. The motive towards Pakistan was then inevitable, for separatism was the only part of the communal ideological programme left unfulfilled. The alternative was to abandon communal politics. And so Jinnah and the Muslim League took the ultimate step in early 1940 and, basing themselves on the theory that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations which must have separate homelands, put forward the demand for Pakistan. Hindu communalism too had moved in the same direction.
Its separatism could not take the form of demanding a part of India as Hindustan — that would be playing into the hands of Muslim communalism. It, therefore, increasingly asserted that Hindus were the only nation living in India and Muslims should either be expelled from India or live in it as second-class citizens.
Something similar was involved in the U.P. decision of 1937. Jinnah and the League were firmly opposed to mass politics. To have joined hands with them would have meant retreating to constitutional politics in which people had little role to play. Much before the ministerial negotiations occurred or broke down, Jinnah had declared Muslims to be a distinct third party in India, as distinguished from the British and Indian nationalism represented by the Congress. As S. Gopal has put it: ‘Any coalition with the League implied the Congress accepting a Hindu orientation and renouncing the right to speak for all Indians’.
Nationalist Muslims, who had firmly taken their stand on the terrain of secular nationalism and soaked in the communal propaganda of extreme communalists, would have felt betrayed. Furthermore, it would have meant abandonment of the radical agrarian programme adopted at Faizpur in 1936 to which the Congress Ministry was fully committed, for the League was equally committed to the landlords’ interests. With their representatives in the Government, no pro-peasant legislation could possibly have been passed. In fact, it was the Congress Socialists and the Communists, quite important in the U.P. Congress at the time, who put pressure on Nehru to reject any coalition with the League and threatened to launch a public campaign on the issue if their demand was rejected. Interestingly, even before negotiations for the formation of a Congress Ministry in U.P. had begun, the Muslim League had raised the cry of ‘Islam in Danger’ in its campaign against Congress candidates in the by-elections to U.P. assembly during May 1937. Jinnah himself had issued appeals to voters in the name of Allah and the Quran.
If a leader could turn into a vicious communalist and separatist because his party was not given two seats in a provincial ministry, a fresh set of demands would have cropped up. Communalism is basically an ideology which could not have been, and cannot be, appeased; it had to be confronted and opposed. The failure to do so was the real weakness of the Congress and the national movement. Interestingly, the Communists did try to appease the Muslim League from 1942 to 1946, hoping to wean away its better elements. They not only failed but in the bargain lost some of their best cadres to Muslim communalism. The effort to have a coalition with it turned out to be a one way street from which the Communists had the wisdom to withdraw in 1946. In fact, the negotiations by the Congress leaders as also the Left were based on the false assumption that liberal communalists could be conciliated and then persuaded to fight extreme communalism which was anti-national. After 1937 it was only the nationalist Hindus and Muslims who firmly opposed communalism. Liberal communalists like Malaviya, Shyama Prasad Mukherji and N.C. Chatterjea failed to oppose Savarkar or the RSS. Similarly, the liberal Iqbal or other liberal communal Muslims did not have the courage to oppose the campaign of hatred that Jinnah, Suleri, Fazl-ul-Huq and others unleashed after 1937. At the most, they kept quiet where they did not join it.
Was the acceptance of an independent Pakistan by the Congress a big failure regarding communalism? Was there any other option?
It is also not true that the Congress failure regarding communalism occurred in 1947 when it accepted the partition of the country. Perhaps, there was no other option at the time. Communalism had already advanced too far. There was, it can be argued, no other solution to the communal problem left, unless the national leadership was willing to see the nation plunged in a civil war when the armed forces and the police were under the control of the foreign rulers and were themselves ready to join the civil war.
The fact is that not all historical situations have an instant solution. Certainly, no such solution existed in 1947. There is never an instant solution to a socio-political problem like communalism. Conditions and forces for a solution have to be prepared over a number of years and even decades. This is something which the Congress and the national movement failed to do. Despite their commitment to secularism, and despite Gandhiji’s constant emphasis on Hindu-Muslim unity and his willingness to stake his life for its promotion, and despite Nehru’s brilliant analysis of the socio-economic roots of communalism, the Indian nationalists failed to wage a mass ideological-political struggle against all forms of communalism on the basis of patient and scientific exposure of its ideological content, socio-economic roots, and political consequences. In fact, the Congress relied too heavily on negotiations with the communal leaders and failed to evolve a viable and effective long-term strategy to combat communalism at the political, ideological and cultural levels. The Congress and its leadership may be faulted on this minor count.
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