The ANP challenge in NWFP
by Yasser Latif Hamdani
Here is a suggestion: What if instead of a PPP prime minister or PML-N prime minister, ANP’s Asfandyar Wali Khan was to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan? Could this be a viable option?
The high politics of coalition making and breaking have already begun in the capital. Besides the many considerations of judiciary and democracy, the mainstream Pakistani parties which have won- PPP and PML-N- must take stock of the new situation emerging out of the NWFP with ANP’s massive victory there. Informed cynics have begun to question the victory of ANP as part of a grand strategy to bolster up Hamid Karzai and the NATO forces against the rising tide of militancy, the underlying implication being that the elections were indeed rigged in a new and unique manner this time around. ANP and secular Pushtun nationalism has long been viewed as the one party that might be able to successfully challenge the talibanization in the region.
What is forgotten however is that today these two forces or ideas may be loggerheads, but in the past forces of Pushtun nationalism and the left forces have been willingly coopted by the Islamist forces and vice versa. The story of Pushtun left’s romance with the right wing Islamists is a long one, spanning back to the 1920s. There was a time when Mufti Mahmood, the stalwart of the Deobandi Islamist movement, the precursor of Talibanism of today, could preside over the left-oriented National Students Federation.
So make no mistake about it: The portrayal of ANP’s victory NWFP as a victory for secularism and democracy in that province is perhaps too optimistic an analysis given the history. While many Pakistanis, including this author, rooted for the ANP’s victory as a less bitter pill or simply the means of getting the Islamist MMA out of power in the frontier, to suggest that ANP has historically been consistently secular or democratic is not only naive but almost criminal when it comes to history. There is no question that Asfandyar Wali Khan today speaks in favor of the war on terror, but it was his illustrious grandfather, Bacha Khan also known as the Frontier Gandhi, who colluded with Fakir of Ipi in Waziristan in 1947 to bring down the “irreligious” Pakistan government. Their allegation was that the founders of Pakistan are too irreligious and secular to allow Islam to take root in Pakistan. Instead of getting into a protracted war with the Fakir, the Pakistan government carried out the Operation Curzon and very wisely withdrew Pakistani forces, thereby taking the wind out of those machinations.
A decade later, Bacha Khan’s brother, Abdul Jabbar Khan, became the staunchest ally of the military establishment as a member of the newly formed and Army-backed “Pakistan Republican Party”- Pakistan’s first true King’s Party, the sole purpose of which was to bury the Muslim League parliamentary party. During Bhutto’s PPP government of the 1970s , the Khan family formed both a government in the NWFP and an electoral alliance with JUI’s Mufti Mahmood. They were part of the Nizam-e-Mustafa movement which sought to establish retrogressive theocratic rule in Pakistan in 1977. Bacha Khan’s son, Wali Khan, found a willing ally in the form of General Zia who freed him from sedition charges and later decorated Ghani Khan, Bacha Khan’s eldest son, with the highest state honor which the latter graciously accepted. It was during Zia’s regime, that the supposedly secular and leftist ANP was allowed to emerge from the ashes of the NAP. During the 1990s, they chose to form governments with Islamists and with Nawaz Sharif’s conservative right wing party than ally themselves with centre-left Pakistan People’s Party. This is not to say that they never acted principally. Wali Khan’s unqualified support to Fatima Jinnah during her candidature in 1965 had indicated that he was ready to work with the rest of the Pakistanis, including Jinnah’s own sister for the creation of a truly democratic and constitutional order in Pakistan. However such instances are few and far between in their politics since 1947.
Still to Asfandyar’s credit, it must be said that he is not his father or his grandfather. Indeed ANP under him is perhaps far more consistently secular than before. Those of us not swayed by his appeals to Pushtun Nationalism consider ANP’s victory an important step in the direction of a secular, democratic and federal Pakistan, as many claim Pakistan was originally intended to be. The point is whether the Pakistani nationalists will create an opportunity to bring in all sub-nationalisms into the greater fold of national unity? And more importantly, will Asfandyar Wali Khan realize that the vote that he got has little to do with Pushtun nationalism and more with his constructive social agenda which promises clean water and health care.
With this in the backdrop and if for nothing else, then to negotiate with and reconcile Pushtun nationalism with an over all secular Pakistani identity, Asfandyar may yet be the most viable solution for a coalition that increasingly promises to be bogged down in infighting. Having the PM from a minority party may yet be the best response to the establishment grand-plan of letting the new government wreck itself against the icebergs of energy and food crises. Asfandyar as the head of a 10-member ANP parliamentary party may yet be the consensus candidate of a new coalition. Tomorrow when these crises fall on the government like a ton of bricks, he can always cite his inability as a PM from the minority party, while both PPP and PML-N would successfully evade the blame for these events which they have nothing to do with in any event.
15 Comments
February 23, 2008 at 1:46 pm
[...] dÃ?n¥ïÃ?L wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptThe ANP challenge in NWFP by Yasser Latif Hamdani Here is a suggestion: What if instead of a PPP prime minister or PML-N prime minister, ANP’s Asfandyar Wali Khan was to become the Prime Minister of Pakistan? Could this be a viable option? The high politics of coalition making and breaking have already begun in the capital. Besides the many considerations of judiciary and democracy, the mainstream Pakistani parties which have won- PPP and PML-N- must take stock of the new situation emerging out of the NWFP with ANP’s massive victory there. Informed cynics have begun to question the victory of ANP as part of a grand strategy to bolster up Hamid Karzai and the NATO forces against the rising tide of militancy, the underlying implication being that the elections were indeed rigged in a new and unique manner this time around. ANP and secular Pushtun nationalism has long been viewed as the […] [...]
February 23, 2008 at 5:24 pm
Interesting article YSL. Iss hammam mein sub hi nangey hain. But I think that we are overplaying this as victory against “Islamists”. I am from Pukhtoonkhwa, and I can tell you that the vote was as much for better governance, social justice, and freedom from social oppression that thrived under the MMA.
February 23, 2008 at 7:08 pm
[...] Post at An option for the new Prime Minister in Pakistan by Pak Tea House addthis_url = [...]
February 25, 2008 at 5:39 am
YSL’s presented an interesting analysis. However it could not be taken seriously. I’m sure YSL would appreciate that people of Pakistan have given a clear mandate to PPP and no one with 10 seats from a single province should even dream of becoming PM. We should instead let the majority party decide. In my view PM ship is PPP’s right and Makhdoom Amin Faheen is the most deserving candidate for this slot.
February 25, 2008 at 11:25 am
Yasser, your idea is unique but not realistic. If secular inclinations and social agendas were to determine the next PM, there would be many in the new coalition propogating the same. The PM should be from a majority party-to ensure that somebody takes responsibility.
By the way why have people referred to you as YSL?
February 25, 2008 at 1:49 pm
I have no idea why people are referring to me as YSL.
However I agree with you that the idea I have given is not very realistic … in current circumstances.
Had politics been a game of gentlemen (and ladies) and nuances perhaps, this would have worked.
After all… what would have been greater than to have Bacha Khan’s grandson paying homage to the Quaid on 23rd March, 14th August, 11th September and 25th December?
February 27, 2008 at 4:22 am
Typical of hamdani redicules. blaming Ghaffar Khan for violance. If I remember correctly this Faqir of Ipi was the guy who said I will Kill Nehru if Qaid-e-Azam gives me orders. He was the soldier of Jinnah, since Jinnah didn’t know Urdu or pashto. this great leader’s followers would tell people we will bring Islam when we create Pakistan. Shariya is our Law. their famous slogan was to decide between Masjid and Mandir. when that great leader was refused to form government of India after accepting The Cabinet Mission’s plan dumping the Idea of Pakistan in 1946. He called for civil war started with direct action day and killed thousand of hindus in Calcutta. The same faiqr of Ipi was involved in this violence. it was the first time Muslim League formed a government in any province which was Bengal. The result was exactly like Nirender Moodi’s muslim massacre in Gujrat. only that was the massacre of Hindus by the hands of Leagui criminals and in the consequence thousands of Muslims killed in other places, but since Jinnah was the representative of British government. Viceroy would request him to stop the violence as oppose to other politicians who would be thrown in jails for their non-violent demonstrations. So when Pakistan was formed Jinnah imposed the same British India act 1935. When people saw this betrayal of the trust they went to oppose it. One of them was Faqir of Ipi the soldier of Jinnah. he chose violent way to bring Shariya. So Mr Hamdani has heard a few things like that and read a few books from some hindus and made his mind that Jinnah was a great leader. Well a great leader or any leader has at least one quality and that is he can communicate with their followers, and the non leaders are those created by rulers through media. In that time Newspaper was the important media. He was created a leader sent from Britain to head a party which was formed by some Nawabs and a Sir. After Jinnah became the head he showed his colors and started political struggle, but not against the Imperial rulers for freedom but the enemies of them. His whole politics is against the freedom fighters of India. I challenge Mr Hamdani and all others to show me the proof that he did something against British to get freedom. (Please don’t show me his meetings with people and accepting proposals and rejecting some, changing his stance for something and other similar sacrifices. Find something concrete). He would appear in meetings as a party leader after the Congress and other parties struggle only to sabotage their victories.
Pakistan would have been formed anyways because the American government wanted a the tribal and feudal Muslim areas for his war against communism. Now should know why Pakistan was divided to get rid of educated and politically advanced Bengali people. And why we always have military rulers who act like American stooges. But people like Mr. Hamdani after reading so much still cannot understand that freedom doesn’t come with bucket of roses it comes with the sacrifices of human heads. Coming to the subject: Asfandyar Wali Khan was offered the Prime Minister ship which he refused. Exactly the way Zia-ul-Haq offered PMship and Nawaz Sharif offered president ship of Pakistan to his father Wali Khan but he refused to take them. Find me anyone in Pakistan who will not be ready to accept these posts. Even Imran Khan was ready to become PM in Musharaf cabinet. It shows their height character. Next time when you write about Ghaffar Khan please also do some research about Jinnah’s freedom struggle against the British and don’t forget to read about the civil war he started in 1946 to tell people if you don’t give me another country I will destroy the peace of India.
Good luck in your research.
February 27, 2008 at 6:00 am
They say little knowledge is dangerous. Salman’s post above is so full of half truths and lies that one wonders if its “little knowledge” or deliberate “subversion” of the facts.
1. No Fakir of Ipi was never associated with Jinnah and nowhere did he make that comment. He was however very intimately involved with the Congress and the Khan Brothers. I am afraid Salman is making up facts as he goes along.
2. Even Wali Khan in his book notes that the number of Muslims killed was many times more than the number of Hindus killed.
According to most historians [no evidence was found of Muslim League’s involvement in the riots. Infact evidence to the contrary was found of Congress’ involvement in the rioting:
‘On August 21, Wavell informed Pethick Lawrence that “the present estimate” of casualties was 3000 dead and 17,000 injured. Congress was convinced that all the trouble was deliberately engineered by the Muslim League ministry but the Viceroy had as yet seen no “satisfactory evidence to that effect.” The latest estimate of casualties was that “appreciably more Muslims than Hindus were killed”
The Congress Mouthpiece “Blitz” wrote this about the direct action day:
The worst enemies of the Muslim League cannot help envying the leadership of Mr Jinnah. Last week’s cataclysmic transformation of the League from the reactionary racket of the Muslim Nawabs, Noons, and Knights into a revolutionary mass organisation dedicated, by word if not be deed, to an anti-Imperialist struggle, compels us to express the sneaking national wish that a diplomat and strategist of Jinnah’s proven calibre were at the held of the Indian National Congress. There is no denying the fact that by his latest master-stroke of diplomacy Jinnah has outbid, outwitted and outmaneuvered the British and Congress alike and confounded the common national indictment that the Muslim League is a parasite of British Imperialism
Famous Cambridge Historian Ayesha Jalal says in her acclaimed book “Sole spokesman” that Mahomed Ali Jinnah, a constitutional politician who believed in orderly advance of ideas, never imagined that a simple call for direct action day would lead to violence in Calcutta. She is of the view that Direct Action Day only hurt Jinnah’s cause in Bengal as it forced him to come to terms with the Congress at the center in form of the interim government, which he had hitherto declined to enter. Suhrawardy too was similarly hurt by the prospects of violence as his government rested on cross communal alliances.
Author Shaista Ikramullah in her biography of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy has also seconded the view that Chief Minister Suhrawardy never imagined nor intended for the Direct Action Day protest to degenerate into communal warfare. She mentions how Suhrawardy swung himself to the protection of the Hindus against violence.
^ Stanley Wolpert Jinnah of Pakistan Page 287
^ Sharif ul Mujahid http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/011216/dmag18.htm
^ Ayesha Jalal “The Sole Spokesman”
^ Patrick French “Liberty or Death”
^ On Pages 286-287 of Jinnah of Pakistan, OUP, 1993 edition Stanley Wolpert.
^ (Wavell to Pethick Lawrence, August 21, 1946, Mansergh, Transfer of Power, Vol. VIII, P.274) Template:Cite Transfer of Power Papers
So this proves clearly that Jinnah started NO civil war.
What is ironic is that Salman doesn’t even know that Government of India Act 1935 was the interim constitution of both India and Pakistan. So his accusation that Jinnah imposed “GOIA1935″ is equally true of Nehru and Gandhi. Not only that … but Bacha Khan’s erstwhile allies got an Englishman to be the first governor general of India.
As for Cabinet MIssion Plan…. now everyone knows that by accepting the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jinnah gave a way out for the irreconcilable position. It would have preserved both the ideal of Pakistan and Unity of India. It was a master move by a great leader… infact both Bacha Khan and Abu Al Kalam Azad were in favor of it. It was Nehru who destroyed it.
My humble suggestion for people like Salman is to read history instead of propaganda.
February 27, 2008 at 6:11 am
As for what Jinnah did for the freedom of India and its unity…. I am going to present as evidence the testimony of Dr. B R Ambedkar – the author of the Indian constitution and the great Indian leader:
“Among these Mr. Jinnah, of course, must be accepted as the foremost. The revolution in his views on the Hindu-Muslim question is striking, if not staggering. To realize the nature, character and vastness of this revolution it is necessary to know his pronouncements in the past relating to the subject so that they may be compared with those he is making now.
A study of his past pronouncement may well begin with the year 1906 when the leaders of the Muslim community waited upon Lord Minto and demanded separate electorates for the Muslim community. It is to be noted that Mr. Jinnah was not a member of the deputation. Whether he was not invited to join the deputation or whether he was invited to join and declined is not known. But the fact remains that he did not lend his support to the Muslim claim to separate representation when it was put forth in 1906.
In 1918 Mr. Jinnah resigned his membership of the Imperial Legislative Council as a protest against the Rowlatt Bill. 98[f.54] In tendering his resignation Mr. Jinnah said :
” I feel that under the prevailing conditions, I can be of no use to my people in the Council, nor consistently with one’s self-respect is cooperation possible with a Government that shows such utter disregard for the opinion of the representatives of the people at the Council Chamber and the feelings and the sentiments of the people outside. ” In 1919 Mr. Jinnah gave evidence before the Joint Select Committee appointed by Parliament on the Government of India Reform Bill, then on the anvil. The following views were expressed by him in answer to questions put by members of the Committee on the Hindu-Muslim question.
EXAMINED BY MAJOR ORMSBY-GORE.
Q. 3806.—You appear on behalf of the Moslem League— that is, on behalf of the only widely extended Mohammedan organisation in India ?—Yes.
Q. 3807.—I was very much struck by the fact that neither in your answers to the questions nor in your opening speech this morning did you make any reference to the special interest of the Mohammedans in India: is that because you did not wish to say anything ?—No, but because I take it the Southborough Committee have accepted that, and I left it to the members of the Committee to put any questions they wanted to. I took a very prominent part in the settlement of Lucknow. I was representing the Musalmans on that occasion.
Q. 3809.—On behalf of the All-India Moslem League, you ask this Committee to reject the proposal of the Government of India ?—I am authorised to say that—to ask you to reject the proposal of the Government of India with regard to Bengal [i.e., to give the Bengal Muslims more representation than was given them by the Lucknow Pact].
Q. 3810.—You said you spoke from the point of view of India. You speak really as an Indian Nationalist ?—1 do.
Q. 3811.—Holding that view, do you contemplate the early disappearance of separate communal representation of the Mohammedan community ?—I think so.
Q. 3812.—That is to say, at the earliest possible moment you wish to do away in political life with any distinction between Mohammedans and Hindus ?—Yes. Nothing will please me more than when that day comes.
Q. 3813—You do not think it is true to say that the Mohammedans of India have many special political interests not merely in India but outside India, which they are always particularly anxious to press as a distinct Mohammedan community? —There are two things. In India the Mohammedans have very few things really which you can call matters of special interest for them—I mean secular things.
Q. 3814.—I am only referring to them, of course ?—And therefore that is why I really hope and expect that the day is not very far distant when these separate electorates will disappear.
Q. 3815.—It is true, at the same time, that the Mohammedans in India take a special interest in the foreign policy of the Government of India ?—They do ; a very,—No, because what you propose to do is to frame very keen interest and the large majority of them hold very strong sentiments and very strong views.
Q. 3816.—Is that one of the reasons why you, speaking on behalf of the Mohammedan community, are so anxious to get the Government of India more responsible to an electorate ?—No.
Q. 3817.—Do you think it is possible, consistently with remaining in the British Empire, for India to have one foreign policy and for His Majesty, as advised by his Ministers in London, to have another ?—Let me make it clear. It is not a question of foreign policy at all. What the Moselms of India feel is that it is a very difficult position for them. Spiritually, the Sultan or the Khalif is their head.
Q. 3818.—Of one community ?—Of the Sunni sect, but that is the largest; it is in an overwhelming majority all over India. The Khalif is the only rightful custodian of the Holy Places according to our view, and nobody else has a right. What the Moslems feel very keenly is this, that the Holy Places should not be severed from the Ottoman Empire— that they should remain with the Ottoman Empire under the Sultan.
Q. 3819.—I do not want to get away from the Reform Bill on to foreign policy.—1 say it has nothing to do with foreign policy. Your point is whether in India the Muslims will adopt a certain attitude with regard to foreign policy in matters concerning Moslems all over the world.
Q. 3820.—My point is, are they seeking for some control over the Central Government in order to impress their views on foreign policy on the Government of India ?—No.
EXAMINED BY MR. BENNETT
Q. 3853.—………..Would it not be an advantage in the case of an occurrence of that kind [i.e., a communal riot] if the maintenance of law and order were left with the executive side of the Government ?—1 do not think so, if you ask me, but I do not want to go into unpleasant matters, as you say.
Q. 3854.—It is with no desire to bring up old troubles that I ask the question ; I would like to forget them ?—If you ask me, very often these riots are based on some misunderstanding, and it is because the police have taken one side or the other, and that has enraged one side or the other. I know very well that in the Indian States you hardly ever hear of any Hindu-Mohammedan riots, and I do not mind telling the Committee, without mentioning the name, that I happened to ask one of the ruling Princes, ” How do you account for this ? ” and he told me, ” As soon as there is some trouble we have invariably traced it to the police, through the police taking one side or the other, and the only remedy we have found is that as soon as we come to know we move that police officer from that place, and there is an end of it. ”
Q. 3855.—That is useful piece of information, but the fact remains that these riots have been inter-racial, Hindu on the one side and Mohammedan on the other. Would it be an advantage at a time like that the Minister, the representative of one community or the other, should be in charge of the maintenance of law and order ?—Certainly.
Q. 3856.—It would ?—If I thought otherwise I should be casting a reflection on myself. If I was the Minister, I would make bold to say that nothing would weigh with me except justice, and what is right. Q. 3857.—I can understand that you would do more than justice to the other side; but even then, there is what might be called the subjective side. It is not only that there is impartiality, but there is the view which may be entertained by the public, who may harbour some feeling of suspicion ?—With regard to one section or the other, you mean they would feel that an injustice was done to them, or that justice would not be done ?
Q. 3858.—Yes; that is quite apart from the objective part of it ?—My answer is this: That these difficulties are fast disappearing. Even recently, in the whole district of Thana, Bombay, every officer was an Indian officer from top to bottom, and I do not think there was a single Mohammedan—they were all Hindus—and I never heard any complaint Recently that has been so. I quite agree with you that ten years ago there was that feeling what you are now suggesting to me, but it is fast disappearing.
EXAMINED BY LORD ISLINGTON
Q. 3892.—. …… You said just now about the communal representation, I think in answer to Major Ormsby-Gore, that you hope in a very few years you would be able to extinguish communal representation, which was at present proposed to be established and is established in order that Mahommedans may have their representation with Hindus. You said you desired to see that. How soon do you think that happy state of affairs is likely to be realized ?—1 can only give you certain facts : I cannot say anything more than that: I can give you this which will give you some idea: that in 1913, at the All-India Moslem League sessions at Agra, we put this matter to the lest whether separate electorates should be insisted upon or not by the Mussalmans, and we got a division, and that division is based upon Provinces ; only a certain number of votes represent each Province, and the division came to 40 in favour of doing away with the separate electorate, and 80 odd—1 do not remember the exact number—were for keeping the separate electorate. That was in 1913. Since then I have had many opportunities of discussing this matter with various Mussulman leaders ; and they are changing their angle of vision with regard to this matter. I cannot give you the period, but I think it cannot last very long. Perhaps the next inquiry may hear something about it.
Q. 3893.—You think at the next inquiry the Mahommedans will ask to be absorbed into the whole ?—Yes, I think the next inquiry will probably hear something about it.
Although Mr. Jinnah appeared as a witness on behalf of the Muslim League, he did not allow his membership of the League to come in the way of his loyalty to other political organizations in the country. Besides being a member of the Muslim League, Mr. Jinnah was a member of the Home Rule League and also of the Congress. As he said in his evidence before the Joint Parliamentary Committee, he was a member of all three bodies although he openly disagreed with the Congress, with the Muslim League and that there were some views which the Home Rule League held which he did not share. That he was an independent but a nationalist ,is shown by his relationship with the Khilafatist Musalmans. In 1920 the Musalmans organized the Khilafat Conference. It became so powerful an organization that the Muslim League went under and lived in a state of suspended animation till 1924. During these years no Muslim leader could speak to the Muslim masses from a Muslim platform unless he was a member of the Khilafat Conference. That was the only platform for Muslims to meet Muslims. Even then Mr. Jinnah refused to join the Khilafat Conference. This was no doubt due to the fact that then he was only a statutory Musalman with none of the religious fire of the orthodox which he now says is burning within him. But the real reason why he did not join the Khilafat was because he was opposed to the Indian Musalmans engaging themselves in extra-territorial affairs relating to Muslims outside India.
After the Congress accepted non-co-operation, civil disobedience and boycott of Councils, Mr. Jinnah left the Congress. He became its critic but never accused it of being a Hindu body. He protested when such a statement was attributed to him by his opponents. There is a letter by Mr. Jinnah to the Editor of the Times of India written about the time which puts in a strange contrast the present opinion of Mr. Jinnah about the Congress and his opinion in the past. The letter 99[f.55] reads as follows :—.
” To the Editor of ” The Times of India ”
Sir,—1 wish again to correct the statement which is attributed to me and to which you have given currency more than once and now again repeated by your correspondent ‘ Banker ‘in the second column of your issue of the 1st October that I denounced the Congress as ‘ a Hindu Institution ‘. I publicly corrected this misleading report of my speech in your columns soon after it appeared ;.but it did not find a place in the columns of your paper and so may I now request you to publish this and oblige. ”
After the Khilafat storm had blown over and the Muslims had shown a desire to return to the internal politics of India, the Muslim League was resuscitated. The session of the League held in Bombay on 30th December 1924 under the presidentship of Mr. Raza Ali was a lively one. Both Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Mahomed Ali took part in it. 100[f.56]
In this session of the League, a resolution was moved which affirmed the desirability of representatives of the various Muslim associations of India representing different shades of political thought meeting in a conference at an early date at Delhi or at some other central place with a view to develop ” a united and sound practical activity ” to supply the needs of the Muslim community. Mr. Jinnah in explaining the resolution said 101[f.57] :—
” The object was to organize the Muslim community, not with a view to quarrel with the Hindu community, but with a view to unite and cooperate with it for their motherland. He was sure once they had organized themselves they would join hands with the Hindu Maha Sabha and declare to the world that Hindus and Mahomedans are brothers. ”
The League also passed another resolution in the same session for appointing a committee of 33 prominent Musalmans to formulate the political demands of the Muslim community. The resolution was moved by Mr. Jinnah. In moving the resolution, Mr. Jinnah 102[f.58] :—
“Repudiated the charge that he was standing on the platform of the League as a communalist. He assured them that he was, as ever, a nationalist. Personally he had no hesitation. He wanted the best and the fittest men to represent them in the Legislatures of the land (Hear, Hear and Applause). But unfortunately his Muslim compatriots were not prepared to go as far as he. He could not be blind to the situation. The fact was that there was a large number of Muslims who wanted representation separately in Legislatures and in the country’s Services. They were talking of communal unity, but where was unity ? It had to be achieved by arriving at some suitable settlement. He knew he said amidst deafening cheers, that his fellow-religionists were ready and prepared to fight for Swaraj, but wanted some safeguards. Whatever his view, and they knew that as a practical politician he had to take stock of the situation, the real block to unity was not the communities themselves, but a few mischief makers on both sides. ”
And he did not thus hesitate to arraign mischief makers in the sternest possible language that could only emanate from an earnest nationalist. In his capacity as the President of the session of the League held in Lahore on 24th May 1924 he said 103 [f59] :—
” If we wish to be free people, let us unite, but if we wish to continue slaves of Bureaucracy, let us fight among ourselves and gratify petty vanity over petty matters. Englishmen being our arbiters. ”
In the two All-Parties Conferences, one held in 1925 and the other in 1928, Mr. Jinnah was prepared to settle the Hindu-Muslim question on the basis of joint electorates. In 1927 he openly said 104[f.60] from the League platform :—
” I am not wedded to separate electorates, although I must say that the overwhelming majority of the Musalmans firmly and honestly believe that it is the only method by which they can be sure. ”
In 1928, Mr. Jinnah joined the Congress in the boycott of the Simon Commission. He did so even though the Hindus and Muslims had failed to come to a settlement and he did so at the cost of splitting the League into two.
Even when the ship of the Round Table Conference was about to break on the communal rock, Mr. Jinnah resented being named as a communalist who was responsible for the result and said that he preferred an agreed solution of the communal problem to the arbitration of the British Government. Addressing the U. P. Muslim Conference held at Allahabad on 8th August 105[f.61] 1931 Mr. Jinnah said :—
” The first thing that I wish to tell you is that it is now absolutely essential and vital that Muslims should stand united. For Heaven’s sake close all your ranks and files and slop this internecine war. I urged this most vehemently and I pleaded to the best of my ability before Dr. Ansari, Mr. T. A. K. Sherwani, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Dr. Syed Mahmud. I hope that before I leave the shores of India I shall hear the good news that whatever may be our differences ; whatever may be our convictions between ourselves, this is not the moment to quarrel between ourselves.
” Another thing I want to tell you is this. There is a certain section of the press, there is a certain section of the Hindus, who constantly misrepresent me in various ways. I was only reading the speech of Mr. Gandhi this morning and Mr. Gandhi said that he loves Hindus and Muslims alike. I again say standing here on this platform that although I may not put forward that claim but I do put forward this honestly and sincerely that I want fair play between the two communities. ”
Continuing further Mr. Jinnah said: “As to the most important question, which to my mind is the question of Hindu-Muslim settlement—all I can say to you is that I honestly believe that the Hindus should concede to the Muslims a majority in the Punjab and Bengal and if that is conceded, I think a settlement can be arrived at in a very short time.
“The next question that arises is one of separate vs. joint electorates. As most of you know, if a majority is conceded in the Punjab and Bengal, I would personally prefer a settlement on the basis of joint electorate. (Applause.) But I also know that there is a large body of Muslims—and I believe a majority of Muslims—who are holding on to separate electorate. My position is that I would rather have a settlement even on the footing of separate electorate, hoping and trusting that when we work our new constitution and when both Hindus and Muslims get rid of distrust, suspicion and fears and when they gel their freedom we would rise to the occasion and probably separate electorate will go sooner than most of us think.
” Therefore I am for a settlement and peace among the Muslims first; I am for a settlement and peace between the Hindus and Mahommedans. This is not a lime for argument, not a time for propaganda work and not a time for embittering feelings between the two communities, because the enemy is at the door of both of us and I say without hesitation that if the Hindu-Muslim question is not settled, I have no doubt that the British will have to arbitrate and that he who arbitrates will keep to himself the substance of power and authority. Therefore, I hope they will not vilify me. After all, Mr. Gandhi himself says that he is willing to give the Muslims whatever they want, and my only sin is that I say to the Hindus give to the Muslims only 14 points, which is much less than the ‘ blank cheque ‘ which Mr. Gandhi is willing to give. I do not want a blank cheque, why not concede the 14 points ? When Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru says: ‘Give us a blank cheque ‘ when Mr. Patel says : ‘ Give us a blank cheque and we will sign it with a Swadeshi pen on a Swadeshi paper ‘ they are not communalists and I am a communalist ! I say to Hindus not to misrepresent everybody. I hope and trust that we shall be yet in a position to settle the question which will bring peace and happiness to the millions in our country.
” One thing more I want to tell you and I have done. During the lime of the Round Table Conference,—it is now an open book and anybody who cares to read it can learn for himself—I observed the one and the only principle and it was that when I left the shores of Bombay I said to the people that I would hold the interests of India sacred, and believe me—if you care to read the proceedings of the Conference, I am not bragging because I have done my duly—that I have loyally and faithfully fulfilled my promise to the fullest extent and I venture to say that if the Congress or Mr. Gandhi can get anything more than I fought for, I would congratulate them.
” Concluding Mr. Jinnah said that they must come to a settlement, they must become friends eventually and he, therefore, appealed to the Muslims to show moderation, wisdom and conciliation, if possible, in the deliberation that might take place and the resolution that might be passed at the Conference. ”
As an additional illustration of the transformation in Muslim ideology, I propose to record the opinions once held by Mr. Barkat Ali who is now a follower of Mr. Jinnah and a staunch supporter of Pakistan.
When the Muslim League split-into two over the question of cooperation with the Simon Commission, one section led by Sir Mahommad Shafi favouring co-operation and another section led by Mr. Jinnah supporting the Congress plan of boycott, Mr. Barkat Ali belonged to the Jinnah section of the League. The two wings of the League held their annual sessions in 1928 at two different places. The Shafi wing met in Lahore and the Jinnah wing met in Calcutta. Mr. Barkat Ali, who was the Secretary of the Punjab Muslim League, attended the Calcutta session of the Jinnah wing of the League and moved the resolution relating to the communal settlement. The basis of the settlement was joint electorates. In moving the resolution Mr. Barkat Ali said 106 [f62] :—
” For the first time in the history of the League there was a change in its angle of vision. We are offering by this change a sincere hand of fellowship to those of our Hindu countrymen who have objected to the principle of separate electorates. ”
In 1928 there was formed a Nationalist Party under the leadership of Dr. Ansari. 107[f.63] The Nationalist Muslim Party was a step in advance of the Jinnah wing of the Muslim League and was prepared to accept the Nehru Report, as it was, without any amendments—not even those which Mr. Jinnah was insisting upon. Mr. Barkat Ali, who in 1927 was with the Jinnah wing of the League, left the same as not being nationalistic enough and joined the Nationalist Muslim Party of Dr. Ansari. How great a nationalist Mr. Barkat Ali then was can be seen by his trenchant and vehement attack on Sir Muhammad lqbal for his having put forth in his presidential address to the annual session of the All-India Muslim League held at Allahabad in 1930 a scheme 108[f.64] for the division of India which is now taken up by Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Barkat Ali and which goes by the name of Pakistan. In 1931 there was held in Lahore the Punjab Nationalist Muslim Conference and Mr. Barkat Ali was the Chairman of the Reception Committee. The views he then expressed on Pakistan are worth recalling 109[f.65] Reiterating and reaffirming the conviction and the political faith of his party, Malik Barkat Ali, Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Conference, said :
” We believe, first and foremost in the full freedom and honour of India. India, the country of our birth and the place with which all our most valued and dearly cherished associations are knit, must claim its first place in our affection and in our desires. We refuse to be parties to that sinister type of propaganda which would try to appeal to ignorant sentiment by professing to be Muslim first and Indian afterwards. To us a slogan of this kind is not only bare, meaningless cant, but downright mischievous. We cannot conceive of Islam in its best and last interests as in any way inimical to or in conflict with the best and permanent interests of India. India and Islam in India are identical, and whatever is to the detriment of India must, from the nature of it, be detrimental to Islam whether economically, politically, socially or even morally. Those politicians, therefore, are a class of false prophets and at bottom the foes of Islam, who talk of any inherent conflict between Islam and the welfare of India. Further, howsoever much our sympathy with our Muslim brethren outside India, i.e., the Turks and the Egyptians or the Arabs,—and it is a sentiment which is at once noble and healthy,—we can never allow that sympathy to work to the detriment of the essential interests of India. Our sympathy, in fact, with those countries can only be valuable to them, if India as the source, nursery and fountain of that sympathy, is really great. And if ever the lime comes, God forbid, when any Muslim Power from across the Frontier chooses to enslave India and snatch away the liberties of its people, no amount of pan-lslamic feeling, whatever it may mean, can stand in the way of Muslim India fighting shoulder to shoulder with non-Muslim India in defence of its liberties.
” Let there be, therefore, no misgivings of any kind in that respect in any non-Muslim quarters. I am conscious that a certain class of narrow-minded Hindu politicians is constantly harping on the bogey of an Islamic danger to India from beyond the N.-W. Frontier passes but I desire to repeat that such statements and such fears are fundamentally wrong and unfounded. Muslim India shall as much defend India’s liberties as non-Muslim India, even if the invader happens to be a follower of Islam.
” Next, we not only believe in a free India but we also believe in a united India—not the India of the Muslim, not the India of the Hindu or of the Sikh, not the India of this community or of that community but the India of all. And as this is our abiding faith, we refuse to be parties to any division of the India of the future into a Hindu or a Muslim India. However much the conception of a Hindu and a Muslim India may appeal and send into frenzied ecstasies abnormally orthodox mentalities of their party, we offer our full throated opposition to it, not only because it is singularly unpractical and utterly obnoxious but because it not only sounds the death-knell of all that is noble and lasting in modern political activity in India, but is also contrary to and opposed to India’s chief historical tradition.
” India was one in the days of Asoka and Chandragupta and India remained one even when the sceptre and rod of Imperial sway passed from Hindu into Moghul or Muslim hands. And India shall remain one when we shall have attained the object of our desires and reached those uplands of freedom, where all the light illuminating us shall not be reflected glory but shall be light proceeding direct as it were from our very faces.
” The conception of a divided India, which Sir Muhammad lqbal put forward recently in the course of his presidential utterance from the platform of the League at a time when that body had virtually become extinct and ceased to represent free Islam—I am glad to be able to say that Sir Muhammad lqbal has since recanted it—must not therefore delude anybody into thinking that it is Islam’s conception of the India to be. Even if Dr. Sir Muhammad lqbal had not recanted it as something which could not be put forward by any sane person, I should have emphatically and unhesitatingly repudiated it as something foreign to the genius and the spirit of the rising generation of Islam, and I really deem it a proud duty to affirm today that not only must there be no division of India in to communal provinces but that both Islam and Hinduism must run coterminously with the boundaries of India and must not be cribbed, cabined and confined within any shorter bounds. To the same category as Dr. lqbal’s conception of a Muslim India and a Hindu India, belongs the sinister proposals of some Sikh communalists to partition and divide the Punjab.
” With a creed so expansive, namely a free and united India with its people all enjoying in equal measure and without any kinds of distinctions and disabilities the protection of laws made by the chosen representatives of the people on the widest possible basis of a true democracy, namely, adult franchise, and through the medium of joint electorates—and an administration charged with the duty of an impartial execution of the laws, fully accountable for its actions, not to a distant or remote Parliament of foreigners but to the chosen representatives of the land,—you would not expect me to enter into the details and lay before you, all the colours of my picture. And I should have really liked to conclude my general observations on the aims and objects of the Nationalist Muslim Party here, were it not that the much discussed question of joint or separate electorates, has today assumed proportions where no public man can possibly ignore it.
” Whatever may have been the value or utility of separate electorates at a time when an artificially manipulated high-propertied franchise had the effect of converting a majority of the people in the population of a province into a minority in the electoral roll, and when communal passions and feelings ran particularly high, universal distrust poisoning the whole atmosphere like a general and all-pervading miasma,—we feel that in the circumstances of today and in the India of the future, separate electorates should have no place whatever. ”
Such were the views Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Barkat Ali held on nationalism, on separate electorates and on Pakistan. How diametrically opposed are the views now held by them on these very problems ?
So far I have laboured to point out things, the utter failure of the attempts made to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity and the emergence of a new ideology in the minds of the Muslim leaders. There is also a third thing which I must discuss in the present context for reasons arising both from its relevance as well as from its bearing on the point under consideration, namely whether the Muslim ideology has behind it a justification which political philosophers can accept.
Many Hindus seem to hold that Pakistan has no justification. If we confine ourselves to the theory of Pakistan there can be no doubt that this is a greatly mistaken view. The philosophical justification for Pakistan rests upon the distinction between a community and a nation. In the first, place, it is recognized comparatively recently. Political philosophers for a long time were concerned, mainly, with the controversy summed up in the two questions, how far should the right of a mere majority to rule the minority be accepted as a rational basis for government and how far the legitimacy of a government be said to depend upon the consent of the governed. Even those who insisted, that the legitimacy of a government depended upon the consent of the governed, remained content with a victory for their proposition and did not cane to probe further into the matter. They did not feel the necessity for making any distinctions within the category of the ” governed “. They evidently thought that it was a matter of no moment whether those who were included in the category of the governed formed a community or a nation. Force of circumstances has, however, compelled political philosophers to accept this distinction. In the second place, it is not a mere distinction without a difference. It is a distinction which is substantial and the difference is consequentially fundamental. That this distinction between a community and a nation is fundamental, is clear from the difference in the political rights which political philosophers are prepared to permit to a community and those they are prepared to allow to a nation against the Government established by law. To a community they are prepared to allow only the right of insurrection. But to a nation they are willing to concede the right of disruption. The distinction between the two is as obvious as it is fundamental.. A right of insurrection is restricted only to insisting on a change in the mode and manner of government. The right of disruption is greater than the right of insurrection arid extends to the secession of a group of the members of a State with a secession of the portion of the State’s territory in its occupation. One wonders what must be the basis of this difference. Writers on political philosophy, who have discussed this subject, have given their reasons for the justification of a Community’s right to insurrection 110[f.66] and of a nation’s right to demand disruption. 111[f.67] The difference comes to this : a community has a right to safeguards, a nation has a right to demand separation. The difference is at once clear and crucial. But they have not given any reasons why the right of one is limited to insurrection and why that of the other extends to disruption. They have not even raised such a question. Nor are the reasons apparent on the face of them. But it is both interesting and instructive to know why this difference is made. To my mind the reason for this difference pertains to questions of ultimate destiny. A state either consists of a series of communities or it consists of a series of nations. In a state, which is composed of a series of communities, one community may be arrayed against another community and the two may be opposed to each other. But in the matter of their ultimate destiny they feel they are one. But in a state, which is composed of a series of nations, when one nation rises against the other, the conflict is one as to differences of ultimate destiny. This is the distinction between communities and nations and it is this distinction which explains the difference in their political rights. There is nothing new or original in this explanation. It is merely another way of staring why the community has one kind of right and the nation another of quite a different kind. A community has a right of insurrection because it is satisfied with it. All that it wants is a change in the mode and form of government. Its quarrel is not over any difference of ultimate destiny. A nation has to be accorded the right of disruption because it will not be satisfied with mere change in the form of government. Its quarrel is over the question of ultimate destiny. If it will not be satisfied unless the unnatural bond that binds them is dissolved, then prudence and even ethics demands that the bond shall be dissolved and they shall be freed each to pursue its own destiny.
V
While it is necessary to admit that the efforts at Hindu-Muslim unity have failed and that the Muslim ideology has undergone a complete revolution, it is equally necessary to know the precise causes which have produced these effects. The Hindus say that the British policy of divide and rule is the real cause of this failure and of this ideological revolution. There is nothing surprising in this. The Hindus having cultivated the Irish mentality to have no other politics except that of being always against the Government, are ready to blame the Government for everything including bad weather. But time has come to discard the facile explanation so dear to the Hindus. For it fails to take into account two very important circumstances. In the first place, it overlooks the fact that the policy of divide and rule, allowing that the British do resort to it, cannot succeed unless there are elements which make division possible, and further if the policy succeeds for such a long time, it means that the elements which divide are more or less permanent and irreconcilable and are not transitory or superficial. Secondly, it forgets that Mr. Jinnah, who represents this ideological transformation, can never be suspected of being a tool in the hands of the British even by the worst of his enemies. He may be too self-opinionated, an egotist without the mask and has perhaps a degree of arrogance which is not compensated by any extraordinary intellect or equipment. It may be on that account he is unable to reconcile himself to a second place and work with others in that capacity for a public cause. He may not be over-flowing with ideas although he is not, as his critics make him out to be, an empty-headed dandy living upon the ideas of others. It may be that his fame is built up more upon art and less on substance. At the same time, it is doubtful if there is a politician in India to whom the adjective incorruptible can be more fittingly applied. Anyone who knows what his relations with the British Government have been, will admit that he has always been their critic, if indeed, he has not been their adversary. No one can buy him. For it must be said to his credit that he has never been a soldier of fortune. The customary Hindu explanation fails to account for the ideological transformation of Mr. Jinnah.”
This is the father of the Indian constitution and a contemporary of Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru speaking.
I also recommend H M Seervai’s “Partition of India : Legend and Reality”.
Jinnah is recognized by many openminded Indians as a great collossus and a leader who was alienated by the attitude of Gandhi and Nehru.
Furthermore… it must be remembered that Bacha Khan himself owes national prominence to Jinnah not Gandhi. It was Jinnah who worked for Bacha Khan’s release in 1930 and it was Jinnah who recommended him to be at the Round table conference….
February 27, 2008 at 6:16 am
They say little knowledge is dangerous. Salman’s post above is so full of half truths and lies that one wonders if its “little knowledge” or deliberate “subversion” of the facts.
1. No Fakir of Ipi was never associated with Jinnah and nowhere did he make that comment. He was however very intimately involved with the Congress and the Khan Brothers. I am afraid Salman is making up facts as he goes along.
2. Even Wali Khan in his book notes that the number of Muslims killed was many times more than the number of Hindus killed.
According to most historians [no evidence was found of Muslim League’s involvement in the riots. Infact evidence to the contrary was found of Congress’ involvement in the rioting:
‘On August 21, Wavell informed Pethick Lawrence that “the present estimate” of casualties was 3000 dead and 17,000 injured. Congress was convinced that all the trouble was deliberately engineered by the Muslim League ministry but the Viceroy had as yet seen no “satisfactory evidence to that effect.” The latest estimate of casualties was that “appreciably more Muslims than Hindus were killed”
The Congress Mouthpiece “Blitz” wrote this about the direct action day:
The worst enemies of the Muslim League cannot help envying the leadership of Mr Jinnah. Last week’s cataclysmic transformation of the League from the reactionary racket of the Muslim Nawabs, Noons, and Knights into a revolutionary mass organisation dedicated, by word if not be deed, to an anti-Imperialist struggle, compels us to express the sneaking national wish that a diplomat and strategist of Jinnah’s proven calibre were at the held of the Indian National Congress. There is no denying the fact that by his latest master-stroke of diplomacy Jinnah has outbid, outwitted and outmaneuvered the British and Congress alike and confounded the common national indictment that the Muslim League is a parasite of British Imperialism
Famous Cambridge Historian Ayesha Jalal says in her acclaimed book “Sole spokesman” that Mahomed Ali Jinnah, a constitutional politician who believed in orderly advance of ideas, never imagined that a simple call for direct action day would lead to violence in Calcutta. She is of the view that Direct Action Day only hurt Jinnah’s cause in Bengal as it forced him to come to terms with the Congress at the center in form of the interim government, which he had hitherto declined to enter. Suhrawardy too was similarly hurt by the prospects of violence as his government rested on cross communal alliances.
Author Shaista Ikramullah in her biography of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy has also seconded the view that Chief Minister Suhrawardy never imagined nor intended for the Direct Action Day protest to degenerate into communal warfare. She mentions how Suhrawardy swung himself to the protection of the Hindus against violence.
Stanley Wolpert Jinnah of Pakistan Page 287
Sharif ul Mujahid http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/011216/dmag18.htm
Ayesha Jalal “The Sole Spokesman” Patrick French “Liberty or Death”
On Pages 286-287 of Jinnah of Pakistan, OUP, 1993 edition Stanley Wolpert.
(Wavell to Pethick Lawrence, August 21, 1946, Mansergh, Transfer of Power, Vol. VIII, P.274) Template:Cite Transfer of Power Papers
So this proves clearly that Jinnah started NO civil war.
What is ironic is that Salman doesn’t even know that Government of India Act 1935 was the interim constitution of both India and Pakistan. So his accusation that Jinnah imposed “GOIA1935″ is equally true of Nehru and Gandhi. Not only that … but Bacha Khan’s erstwhile allies got an Englishman to be the first governor general of India.
As for Cabinet MIssion Plan…. now everyone knows that by accepting the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jinnah gave a way out for the irreconcilable position. It would have preserved both the ideal of Pakistan and Unity of India. It was a master move by a great leader… infact both Bacha Khan and Abu Al Kalam Azad were in favor of it. It was Nehru who destroyed it.
My humble suggestion for people like Salman is to read history instead of propaganda.
February 27, 2008 at 6:20 am
PS: I find it ironic that Salman is so desperate as to lie about Fakir of Ipi. The man was the biggest enemy of Pakistan and Jinnah.
February 27, 2008 at 6:24 am
As my previous comment did not get posted… let me try again:
1. No Fakir of Ipi was never associated with Jinnah and nowhere did he make that comment. He was however very intimately involved with the Congress and the Khan Brothers. I am afraid Salman is making up facts as he goes along. But Salman’s claim contradicts his other claims as well… For example if the violently anti-British Fakir of Ipi was “Jinnah’s soldier” … how was Jinnah not working for India’s freedom. Actually, Fakir of Ipi had nothing to do with Jinnah because Jinnah stood for constitutional advance to freedom … which meant equal rights for Indians under law. I have already detailed this bit above.
2. Even Wali Khan in his book notes that the number of Muslims killed was many times more than the number of Hindus killed.
3. According to most historians [no evidence was found of Muslim League’s involvement in the riots. Infact evidence to the contrary was found of Congress’ involvement in the rioting:
‘On August 21, Wavell informed Pethick Lawrence that “the present estimate” of casualties was 3000 dead and 17,000 injured. Congress was convinced that all the trouble was deliberately engineered by the Muslim League ministry but the Viceroy had as yet seen no “satisfactory evidence to that effect.” The latest estimate of casualties was that “appreciably more Muslims than Hindus were killed”
The Congress Mouthpiece “Blitz” wrote this about the direct action day:
The worst enemies of the Muslim League cannot help envying the leadership of Mr Jinnah. Last week’s cataclysmic transformation of the League from the reactionary racket of the Muslim Nawabs, Noons, and Knights into a revolutionary mass organisation dedicated, by word if not be deed, to an anti-Imperialist struggle, compels us to express the sneaking national wish that a diplomat and strategist of Jinnah’s proven calibre were at the held of the Indian National Congress. There is no denying the fact that by his latest master-stroke of diplomacy Jinnah has outbid, outwitted and outmaneuvered the British and Congress alike and confounded the common national indictment that the Muslim League is a parasite of British Imperialism
Famous Cambridge Historian Ayesha Jalal says in her acclaimed book “Sole spokesman” that Mahomed Ali Jinnah, a constitutional politician who believed in orderly advance of ideas, never imagined that a simple call for direct action day would lead to violence in Calcutta. She is of the view that Direct Action Day only hurt Jinnah’s cause in Bengal as it forced him to come to terms with the Congress at the center in form of the interim government, which he had hitherto declined to enter. Suhrawardy too was similarly hurt by the prospects of violence as his government rested on cross communal alliances.
Author Shaista Ikramullah in her biography of Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy has also seconded the view that Chief Minister Suhrawardy never imagined nor intended for the Direct Action Day protest to degenerate into communal warfare. She mentions how Suhrawardy swung himself to the protection of the Hindus against violence.
Stanley Wolpert Jinnah of Pakistan Page 287
Sharif ul Mujahid http://www.dawn.com/weekly/dmag/archive/011216/dmag18.htm
Ayesha Jalal “The Sole Spokesman”
Patrick French “Liberty or Death”
On Pages 286-287 of Jinnah of Pakistan, OUP, 1993 edition Stanley Wolpert.
(Wavell to Pethick Lawrence, August 21, 1946, Mansergh, Transfer of Power, Vol. VIII, P.274) Template:Cite Transfer of Power Papers
So this proves clearly that Jinnah started NO civil war.
What is ironic is that Salman doesn’t even know that Government of India Act 1935 was the interim constitution of both India and Pakistan. So his accusation that Jinnah imposed “GOIA1935″ is equally true of Nehru and Gandhi. Not only that … but Bacha Khan’s erstwhile allies got an Englishman to be the first governor general of India.
As for Cabinet MIssion Plan…. now everyone knows that by accepting the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jinnah gave a way out for the irreconcilable position. It would have preserved both the ideal of Pakistan and Unity of India. It was a master move by a great leader… infact both Bacha Khan and Abu Al Kalam Azad were in favor of it. It was Nehru who destroyed it.
February 28, 2008 at 9:41 am
I see that Salman has failed to respond to my posts. He made adhominem attacks without any basis in history in response to some perceived “attack” on Bacha Khan, even though the tenor of my post was very respectful.
He glossed over Jinnah’s 30 years as the “Best Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity” (something even Gandhi called Jinnah) as well as his numerous attempts for Indian unity and independence which go as far back as 1906. He doesn’t want us to quote what Jinnah did – as in pass laws, work for Indians’ rights, and his attempt at getitng a consensus constitution for self governance…. he wants us to tell him what other things Jinnah did.
Perhaps a more perceptive person would ask Salman what Gandhi or Bacha Khan did for freedom of India (other than being bundled off to jail) ? But I won’t. I think deliberate obfuscation has been created. No one in their right mind would make such childish claims as this fellow.
If we were to consider the facts at the closing stages, which I have mentioned above… one sees that it was the Congress which was supporting the British. Here is an article I wrote (which is as usual sourced and does not contain outrageously wrong claims as given by Salman above):
Communists and the Making of Pakistan
Yasser Latif Hamdani October 24, 2007
Tags: Pakistan , India , Muslim League , Congress , Communist Party of India , P C Joshi , Jinnah , Gandhi , Two Nation Theory , Partition
History of the last years of Punjab under the Raj
Our Party is the only organization that has actually worked for Congress-League Unity. We alone have tried to explain the view-point of one to the other during the last two and a half years. We have popularized the Muslim demand for Pakistan among Congress men, and the Congress demand for NationalGovernment and the need for the release of Congress leaders among the Leaguers… Anti Unity, pro-sabotage and pro-Hindu elements among the Congressmen have tried to stop us getting a hearing by spreading the slander that we were government agents and in private paying the compliment (not meant to be such) that we were able to work out the case for Pakistan better than even the Leaguers. Joshi P C, They Must Meet Again, People’s Publishing House Bombay, January 1945.
General Zia’s ideological Islamisation in the 1980s disconnected the Pakistanis from their history, not just ancient but recent history i.e. events leading up to the creation of Pakistan. Most notable of this was amnesia induced vis a vis the left elements in Pakistan. The communist left which had played a very important role in Muslim League’s victory in Punjab was presented as the group that had always opposed Pakistan, whereas the right wing Islamic clerical class which had opposed the creation of Pakistan were championed as its true ideologues.
These claims of the Military regime in the 1980s flew in face of the real facts. It remains a little known fact that the only organized political party which supported the Pakistan Movement other than the Muslim League was the very secular and non-communal Communist Party of India. The coveted prize was Punjab where a non-communal alliance of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu feudal elites- which called itself the Unionist Party- had its firm grip on power. Indian National Congress and the Communist Party had been unable to make inroads into the feudal heartland of Punjab, which consisted of collaborators and pro-British zamindars. A lot of this had to do with how Punjab was actually ruled by the British. Punjab’s importance to the British was two-fold:
1. From West of Delhi to Potohar Plateau Punjab had some of the most fertile lands in all of the Indian Subcontinent and was therefore the agricultural hub of the subcontinent.
2. From Potohar Plateu to the rugged North West Frontier, Punjab produced the “martial race” of soldiers that made the bulk of the cannon fodder for the armies of the British Empire in the two world wars.
Therefore the British preferred to deal with local notables through the bureaucracy with wide ranging political powers.
A deputy commissioner was the king in his jurisdiction dealing with notables – choosing who to acknowledge, who to offer a chair etc. In no small way did this help dwarf any genuine political development in this region. In a way this was also natural given that Punjab did not have the industrial bourgeoisie that other areas of the subcontinent did. It was therefore natural that All India Parties – organized on no matter what agenda- were unable to make a dent on the political landscape of the province. The stalwarts of the Unionist Party which included such capable men as Sir Fazli-Hussain, Sir Chotu Ram and Sir Sikandar Hayat kept the Congress, the Communists and the Muslim League at bay. Congress’ push for independence found no support in a sufficiently collaborated Punjab. The local communist movements such as inquilab, Gadar, Naujawan Bharat Sabha and the Kirti Kissan Party were too weak to mount a counter and Sir Chotu Ram’s theory of Jatt consciousness and identity was far too deeply entrenched in the Unionist Party for any Muslim leader to seriously consider Jinnah and his Muslim League in UP and Bombay as a serious ally. Still, by 1938 Sir Sikandar Hayat thought it prudent to enter into what is referred to as the “Sikandar-Jinnah Pact” which benefitted the Unionists more than it did the Muslim League as the latter failed to get any real organization going in the presence of the dubious allies in form of the Unionist Party. The pact fell apart in the 1940s and Muslim League was up in arms against the Khizer-led Unionist Party.
In Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan the Communists saw the first really potent slogan that could be used to upstage the Unionist Party in Punjab. For accuracy and in all fairness, it must be remembered that the Muslim League itself had made a similar calculation after 1937. The 1937 elections had shown that Muslim League was essentially a party of the Muslim minority in Hindu Majority provinces which enjoyed little support in the Muslim Majority areas in North West and North East of India. This considerably compromised the effectiveness of the Muslim League to negotiate as the main organization of the Muslim minority in India. League needed a slogan that would have appeal in the Muslim Majority areas. The idea of a separate Muslim state had been talked about for a while and even crudely referred to as “Pakistan our fatherland” by Ch. Rahmat Ali. Since the idea had found enough currency for a major political leader in Punjab to sponsor the publication of “A Confederacy of India” by “A Punjabi” (ironically the original name of the book “Pakistan” was changed on the request of Mahomed Ali Jinnah, the president of the Muslim League), it was adopted as Muslim League’s central creed through the Lahore Resolution on 23rd March, 1940.
Muslim League’s case was based on the premise that the unitary centre for India was a British creation and India consisted of many nationalities and creeds who had to be brought together through a compact that recognized its diverse character. This was endorsed by the Communist Party. P C Joshi, a stalwart of the Communist Party wrote:
We were the first to see and admit a change in its character when the League accepted complete independence as its aim and began to rally the Muslim masses behind its banner. We held a series of discussions within our party and came to the conclusion in 1941-1942 that it had become an anti-imperialist organization expressing the freedom urge of the Muslim people that its demand for Pakistan was a demand for self determination and that for the freedom of India, an immediate joint front between the Congress and the League must be forged as the first step to break imperialist deadlock. A belief continues to be held that League is a communal organization and what Mr. Jinnah is Pro-British.
But what is the reality? Mr. Jinnah is to the freedom loving League masses what Gandhiji is to the Congress masses. They revere their Qaid-e-Azam as much as the Congress do the Mahatma. They regard the League as their patriotic organization as we regardthe Congress. This is so because Mr. Jinnah has done to the League what Gandhi did to the Congress in 1919-1920 i.e., made it a mass organization. Congress and the Communists, PC Joshi, People’s Publishing House Bombay, p 5.
G. Adhikhari explained the soundness of the Two Nation Theory in the following words:
In 1938, were yet wrapped in the theory like the rest of the nationalists, that India was one nation and that the Muslims were just a religious cultural minority and that the Congress-League United Front could be forged by conceding ‘protection of cultural and religious rights and demands’. We stood on the same basis as the Congress leadership, and were guilty of the charge of denying the peoples of the Muslim nationalities their just right to autonomy in free India. Since 1940, the party began to see that the so called communal problem in India was really a problem of growing nationalities and that it could be solved on the basis of the recognition of the right of self determination, to the point of political secession of the Muslim nationalities as in fact of all nationalities which have India as their common mother land. In those days many comrades were shocked by the formulation that India was not one nation and its development was in the direction of a multinational unity… the demand for Pakistan if we look at its progressive essence is in reality the demand for self determination and separation of the areas of Muslim nationalities of the Punjab, Pathan, Sindh, Baluchistan and the Eastern Provinces G.Adhikari, Pakistan and National Unity, People’s Publishing house, August 1942, pp. 29-30
The break up of Sikandar-Jinnah pact in 1944 had come about after Sir Chotu Ram- the leader who succeeded the then departed Sikandar Hayat- declared that he would have nothing to do with Muslim League and would not be dictated policy by Jinnah. Muslim League leader Shaukat Hayat, Sikandar Hayat’s son, was snubbed by the Governor of Punjab for declaring the Punjab ministry was in effect a Muslim League ministry. This break between the League and the Unionists was widely held to be turning point by the Communist Party.
Sajjad Zaheer wrote explaining why the Governor had a problem with the Muslim League ministry:
Behind this conflict of names was hidden a bigger reality. So long as the League acquiesced in whatever the Unionists chose to do in its name, the Unionists, that is to say, the Governor and his fellow bureaucrats had no objection to Unionists being also called Muslim Leaguers; but when it was a question of submitting to the democratic discipline of a rapidly growing people’s party and of carrying out its policy and acting according to its instructions, it could not possibly be tolerated by the bureaucracy. It is precisely this conflict long brewing- which finally came to ahead in March, April, 1944… the task of every patriot is to welcome and help this democratic growth which at long last is now taking place among the Muslims of Punjab. The last strong hold of imperialist bureaucracy in India is invaded by the League. Let us all help the people of Punjab capture it. Zaheer, Sajjad, Light on League Unionist Conflict, People’s Publishing House, Bombay, July, 1944, pp 26-33
Many young communists, like Daniyal Latifi, Abdullah Malik and Mian Iftikharuddin (the major leader of the Congress Party in Punjab) now joined the Muslim League, viewing it as a truly people’s party waging a valiant war against the feudal aristocracy of Punjab.
The elections of 1946 brought about the following results:
1. Muslim League 75 seats
2. Congress 51 seats
3. Unionists 20 seats
4. Panthic Sikhs 23 seats
5. Miscellaneous 4 seats
The Communists now sponsored the idea of a people’s ministry supported by the League, Congress, Akali and the Communists. A Congress-Muslim League coalition at this point would have been a terrific blow to the British control over Punjab. What is more is that it could have made a compromise between the Muslim League and Congress easier at the centre and a settlement on the basis of Pakistan would have come about in terms qualitatively different from the terms on which it was eventually achieved.
Shortsightedness on the part of the Congress made sure such a ministry would never come about. Congress chose instead to join up with the Unionists and the Akalis to form their own ministry, which dealt a death blow to the Communist expectations. The British encouraged and egged the Congress on, seeing in its actions a new lease of life for itself. The Congress-Unionist-Akali coalition instead of soothing the tensions amongst communities only exacerabated the issues since it was viewed by Muslims of Punjab as a great betrayal by the Hindus and the Sikhs. Muslim League described those who entered the ministry as traitors in cahoots with the British and launched a civil disobedience movement against the ministry.
The Communist role in the entire thing was the most positive of them all. They had hardest to bring together a coalition of Indian peoples against the British raj but had failed due to petty and selfish considerations of those who had long donned the mantle of being the champions of independence and United India. History would have been different, had the Congress Party paid heed to the Communists then.
http://www.chowk.com/articles/12747
March 9, 2008 at 5:36 am
PAKISTAN AND ISLAM : ETHNICITY AND IDEOLOGY
by Hamza Alavi
Pakistan and Islam
There is a pervasive belief, held more widely outside Pakistan than in the country itself, that Pakistan like Israel and Iran, is one of three confessional states in the world; that, like Israel, Pakistan’s very origin was to fulfil a religious ideal, to create an Islamic state and Islamic society for Muslims of India. Within Pakistan itself that slogan was proclaimed most stridently by the Jamaat-e-Islami, a fundamentalist extreme right wing party, which was aided and abetted by politically bankrupt regimes such as that of Gen. Zia which hoped, by exploiting the good name of Islam, to gain some spurious political legitimacy.
Quite apart from the fact that the Jamaat-e-Islami never succeeded in gaining mass public support, a fact that was confirmed by the fact that it was routed totally even in the few seats that it chose to contest in successive elections, its fortunes have languished even further since the sudden death of Gen. Zia, its great benefactor. What much is more to the point in the present context is the time-serving quality of the Jamaat-e-Islami’s political ideology and that party’s demonstrated capacity to turn it upside down, when circumstances made that more expedient. Before Pakistan was created, the Jamaat-e-Islami’s ideological stance was exactly the opposite of what it now claims. Then the Jamaat had vigorously opposed the Pakistan movement and denounced its leadership. Once Pakistan was created it decided to stand on its head and for the nearly half a century since the Partition it has masqueraded as the principal thekedar, the authoritative steward, of the so-called ‘Pakistan Ideology’ , an undefinable conception which it has used as a weapon with which to berate and beat down every political opponent. But behind that present image lies the truth of the fact that this was an overnight politically opportunistic conversion of faith, So much for consistency and intellectual honesty.
This is but only one of many facets of a cascade of major contradictions that underlie any suggestion that the creation of Pakistan was the result of a struggle by Muslims of India to create an ‘Islamic State’. We have to face up to the glaring fact that the Pakistan movement was vigorously opposed by virtually the entire Muslim religious establishment in India. The Jamaat-e-Islami itself was then of little consequence, for before the Partition it was a small and insignificant band of religious zealots. Far more significant was the opposition by the major authoritative Muslim religious bodies in India such as the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, the principal organisation of Sunni Ulema. It was only on the eve of Independence that Liaquat Ali Khan was able to win over a section of that great body who were to find their new fortunes in the new State of Pakistan. At another level, in terms of popular Islamic religious movements was the fanatical Majlis-i-Ahrar. A powerful populist movement of lower middle class and poor urban Muslims, mainly of the Punjab, the Majlis-i-Ahrar was implacably anti-colonialist and equally hostile to the Pakistan movement whose leaders they denounced as stooges of the British imperialists. After the Partition, Majlis-i-Ahrar ceased to be a political party and degenerated into a tiny extremely bigoted and fanatic religious sect.
This universal opposition of virtually every significant religious group in Undivided India, indeed the entire Muslim religious establishment to the Pakistan movement and the Muslim League cannot be reconciled with any idea of religious origins of Pakistan. This is just one of many paradoxes that anyone who thinks of that the true reason for the creation of Pakistan was to establish a religious ‘Islamic state’, must unravel.
Our people are ignorant about these facts because there has been a systematic campaign of disinformation over more than four decades. It reached its peak under General Zia. In a recent work, entitled ‘The Murder of History in Pakistan’. 1A the distinguished historian, K.K. Aziz has shown how thoroughly distorted is the presentation of our own past through the re-writing of history is in Pakistan. The people of Pakistan are entitled to know the truth. The motives of the state authorities in instigating and promoting this project of systematic disinformation need to be examined and understood.
Here we have yet another paradox. The men of power in Pakistan, the bureaucrats, military leaders and politicians generally, all in truth have an essentially secular intellectual make up and few are devout practitioners of their religion. In their hands Islam has been made into just a political slogan, a mask that feel they must wear when facing the public. They mistakenly feel that they need this for the legitimization of power in the eyes of the masses. Because having nothing to offer to the common people by way of improving their material conditions of life and labouring under the illusion that the mass of the people are and unthinking fanatical lot who will be carried away by their insincere slogans, they wrongly believe that they can mobilise their support by resort to religious slogans. The results of successive elections have proved them wrong. But the falsification of Pakistan’s history continues, driven by the unthinking political calculations of the state authorities who organise the production and dissemination of distorted propagandist accounts of our history through the commissioning of ‘approved’ textbooks, controlled by a bureaucratic ‘Textbook Board’. Schools and colleges in Pakistan are required to disseminate such falsified accounts of the past to their students. As a consequence of this, after nearly half a century since the Partition, we have generations of Pakistanis who have no idea whatever of the reality of our history. All they know is the fiction that is relayed to them through the state controlled educational system and the media.
What then was Pakistan movement all about, if it was not a religious movement for creating an ‘Islamic State’ ? The answer, in a nutshell, could be that the Pakistan movement was a movement of Muslims i.e. an ethnic movement, rather than a movement of ‘Islam’ i.e. a religious movement. Even that formulation needs to be qualified, for the Pakistan movement, paradoxically, failed (until the very eve of the Partition) to draw any substantial support in the Muslim majority provinces which were later to constitute the State of Pakistan. The solid base of support for the Muslim League (for most of its history i.e. until 1946, as well shall examine) lay in the Muslim minority Provinces of India, notably The UP and Bihar. The Muslim League was founded in 1906. It was not Mr. Jinnah who founded it. He was, rather, a leading figure of the Indian National Congress. It was in 1913 that he was invited by the Lucknow based Muslim Leaguers, led by Wazir Hassan, to join them. Their motive in asking him is quite interesting. They asked him because of the enormous standing and prestige that Mr Jinnah had in the Congress with which the League leadership had decided to build closer links. It was later that Mr. Jinnah reassessed the situation and recognised the value of an organised Muslim constituency and a role for himself as their spokesman, though that was for a long time with him still within the Indian National Congress of which he remained an active an influential member.
For nearly four decades the Muslim League failed to make any significant impact in the Muslim majority areas which were dominated by feudal landed magnates (indeed by a coalition of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landlords). The main political support of the Muslim League, it will be argued here, derived mainly from the job-seeking educated urban middle classes and professionals (whom we have designated as the ‘ salariat’, although at one stage the Muslim landed magnates of the UP, fearful of radical politics that were developing within the Congress with its commitment to land reform, decided to back the Muslim League as a political counter to the Congress but without fully understanding where the Muslim League politics would ultimately take them.
In the 1920s, following the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, Hindu and Muslim landlords were allied under the ‘Agriculturist Party’ (similar to the Unionist Party of the Punjab). It was the coming of the Government of India Act, 1935 that changed the political equation and with the parallel radicalisation of the Congress with its commitment to land reform, the landed magnates in the UP looked for other options. They decided to join communal organisations, the Hindu Mahasabha, or the All India Muslim Conference or the Muslim League. Behind the rivalry of the Muslim Conference and the Muslim League lay the rival ambitions of Sir Fazl-i-Hussain, who set up the Muslim Conference, to displace Mr. Jinnah as the legitimate spokesman of the Muslims of India. Though the loyalties of the landed magnates were thus much divided, the Muslim ’salariat’ stood solidly with the Muslim League.
How did this organisation of a minority of Muslims of India suddenly become successful in founding a new State ? For an answer to that question we must examine rather closely developments that took place in the later war years, the changing hopes and fears of various classes of people, not least the landed magnates, as the prospects of Independence appeared over the horizon. The year 1946 was the decisive when the destiny of the Muslim League was finally settled. That year was a true turning point. Forces based in the Muslim majority provinces that had so far opposed the Muslim League, suddenly changed their colours and turned completely round. It might appear, on the face of it, that they now chose to follow Mr Jinnah and the Muslim League into Independence. The truth of the matter was the new converts, the feudal lords, did not just join the Muslim league. In reality they took it over. We have to examine the implications of this for the fate of Pakistan that was newly created, its founding father a dying man.
What do we mean when we say that the Pakistan movement was at its weakest in all the Muslim majority provinces of India. Take the situation in the Punjab. There the dominant ruling Party was a secular alliance of landed magnates, Muslims, Hindu and Sikh together, in the shape of the Unionist Party. The Unionist Party was a political alliance of Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landowners. Its founder and famous leader was Sir Fazli Hussain, a Muslim. But Sir Fazli Hussain’s right hand man was Sir Chhotu Ram, a great Hindu landowner. The third main figure in that ruling triumvirate Sir Sundar Singh Majithia, the leader of Sikh landed interests.
The Muslim League in the Punjab did have some famous figures associated with it, notably Mohammad Iqbal. These were mainly urban professionals, and members of the ’salariat’ (see page 6 ff.), the educated classes that look to access to government jobs for their upward advancement. But, as a group they were merely a handful and weak and ineffective. in the political arena. They were patronised by Sir Fazli Husain who at the same time despised them. That Party remained the unchallenged ruling Party in the Punjab until the eve of the Partition, with a only a few defections to the Muslim League; but such defections increased rapidly as the prospects of Independence drew over the horizon. The politically more astute and, in terms of recognition of their class interests, far sighted landlords such as Mumtaz Daulatana and Nawab Mamdot, saw the need to change horses earlier than many others. Ultimately, by that fateful year 1946, most of them accepted the change of tactics to preserve the long term interests of their class by joining the Muslim League and taking over the new state of Pakistan, which was to be the guarantee of their survival as a landlord class which was threatened by the Congress commitment to land reform.
Likewise in Sindh, the provincial government were in the hands of changing coalitions of Muslim and Hindu landlords working together, their social background being much the same that of the Unionists in the Punjab. In the Sarhad (NWFP), there was in fact a Congress Government in power until mass arrests of all Congressmen during the war, which temporarily gave some room for groups of Khan’s to play politics for a while, manipulated by the British Governor, Sir George Cunningham. In Bengal, there was a more radical coalition of Muslim and Hindus in power, under the banner of the secular Krishak Proja Party, in which all religious communities stood together. Led by A.K. Fazlul Haq, their main demand that united them was for abolition of Zamindari. Not surprisingly Zamindars of Bengal both Hindu and Muslim, were lined up together against them, even if they belonged to different Parties. These included Nawab Salimullah of Dacca whose name is associated with the founding of the Muslim League. It would be a mistake to read too much into that for soon after its founding conference the leadership of the League passed into the hands of the urban professionals and the salariat, mainly of the UP and Bihar. Of this too more later. Finally, Baluchistan was ruled directly from the centre and the people of Baluchistan had no voice in national struggles.
If we reflect on the fact that the main strength of the movement led by the Muslim League came not from the from the Muslim majority provinces but, instead ,from the Muslim minority provinces of India, notably the UP and Bihar, we are faced with yet another paradox. If we think of the Pakistan Movement as one that was aimed at creating a separate state for the Muslims of India, that could be constructed only out of the Muslim majority provinces of India; but initially at any rate, they gave little support to the movement. What we need to ask what that offer to Muslims of the minority provinces ? Given the fact that the main beneficiaries of the Partition were bound to be Muslims of the Muslim majority provinces what was in it for the people of UP and Bihar who were prepared to sacrifice themselves and their families and their future for it ? What was the motivation that drove them behind a movement that offered so little to those who were bound to be left behind in India. True, a few of them managed to migrate to Pakistan, though under conditions of great hardship and heartbreak, to found a new future and new fortunes. But still India remains a country with the largest Muslim population and the creation of Pakistan the Muslims of UP, Bihar and other Muslim minority provinces of India. The Partition has solved no problems for those who were left behind, the majority of them. What motivated them therefore to back the Pakistan movement far more strongly than the Muslims of Muslim majority provinces.
If we were to answer this question by saying that their motivation was purely ideological, that they were carried away by a movement of ‘Islam’ and practical considerations did not matter, at first sight that may sound to be a plausible answer. No doubt those who wish to represent the Pakistan movement as a religious movement, committed to ‘Islamic Ideology’ (however that may be defined) might seize on such an argument. But if we examine the argument closely, we soon find ourselves bound up with yet more questions and contradictions. Such an explanation would undermined by the fact that the main bases of the Muslim religious establishment that were located precisely in the Muslim minority provinces were implacably hostile to the Pakistan movement and its ‘westernised’ leadership. On the other hand, the educated Muslim government job-seekers and professionals , the Muslim ‘Salariat’ (see page 6ff.) who had lined up behind the Muslim League, with very few exceptions, could hardly be said to have been deeply moved by religious motives. They certainly did not allow themselves to be guided in this matter by the Islamic religious establishment. The notion that the Pakistan movement was motivated by ‘Islamic ideology’ cannot be sustained on the basis of evidence and reason. This points to some issues to which we shall come later, that need to be examined much more carefully than has so far been done.
Some Alternative Theories of the Origin of Pakistan
We have begun by recognising that the Pakistan movement was not motivated by an Islamic ideology, a proposition that we shall examine more fully below. There are other alternative explanations, of the Pakistan movement which too we will examine in the course of our analysis as we proceed. We shall find that most of them too have no more substance than the one that we have mentioned above. At this stage we might see what these alternative explanations are.
After the ‘Islamic Ideology’ thesis, a second argument, that we may consider is one that has been much favoured by Indian Nationalist historians and which was also the official position of the Communist Party before 1942 (when it changed its mind and decided to support the Pakistan movement) and once again after Independence when the CPI again changed its mind and resumed its original argument, is that the Pakistan movement was a movement of Muslim ‘feudal’ landlords who were hand in glove with the British colonial rulers. They suggest that the Movement was instigated and fostered by the British who hoped thereby to divide the Indian nationalist movement – Divide and Rule ! As we proceed to examine the facts, we will find that this theory too is misconceived and slurs over many facts and aspects of a complex history.1
There is a third explanation of the Pakistan movement. It was adopted by the Communist Party in 1942 (when it decided to support the Pakistan movement and tried to push for ‘Congress-League Unity’ via ‘Gandhi-Jinnah talks’). This position lasted until Independence when its position was again reversed. This was also the ‘Soviet’ official view from 1942 onwards and continued through the years unchanged, unlike that of the CPI. This view that the Pakistan movement was a movement of the ( weak ) Muslim national bourgeoisie and therefore a legitimate anti-imperialist movement, deserving of communist support, in line with the stand taken by Lenin at the Second Congress of the Communist International in 1921.2 This view was reiterated by Soviet scholars, notably in the widely available work of Yuri Gankovsky and Gordon-Polonskaya on the History of Pakistan.3 They produced names of a few prominent Gujarati Muslims from a business community background who were associated with peripherally the early Muslim League, to support their argument. That view is also mistaken. The predominantly Gujarati Muslim trading communities of India, barring one or two individuals, took little part in the Muslim movement, which was dominated, above all by Muslim professionals and the salariat (see below) of northern India, especially of the UP and Punjab. The Gujaratis were isolated from them linguistically and culturally as well as politically and had no objective class interests of their own that the Muslim movement could then serve. There were a few individuals, especially professionals, drawn from Gujarati business communities, notably Mr. Jinnah himself, a rich and successful lawyer son of a not too successful trader, who did play a part in the Muslim movement. But from this we cannot infer class involvement.
Muslim State and Islamic State
The irony of the argument that Pakistan was founded on religious ideology lies, if we may repeat the point, in the fact that every group and organisation in the Sub-continent of India that was specifically religious, was hostile to Jinnah and the Muslim League and had strongly opposed the Pakistan movement. Fore most amongst them was the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Hind, the leading organisation of the so-called ‘Deobandi’ Ulema, whom we might categorise as Islamic Traditionalists. A great deal of effort was devoted by the Muslim League leadership to win them over and eventually they succeeded in that, though only partially, on the eve of the Partition, by winning over a section of them led by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, who formed the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Islam. Likewise, the Islamic Fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, led by Maulana Maududi, was no less opposed to the Pakistan movement, although since the Partition they have gone to great lengths to conceal or explain away their earlier stance. Again, the Nationalist Muslims who were in the Indian National Congress not only included secular minded figures like Rafi Ahmad Kidwai, but also, and especially, Muslims educated in the classical tradition who were deeply religious such as their leader Abul Kalam Azad who was steeped in Muslim classical and religious learning.
This was in contrast to the modernist education and style of life and aspirations of the Muslim League leadership. A claim that the creation of Pakistan was a fulfilment of millenarian religious aspirations of Indian Muslims would therefore stand in contradiction to the alienation of the principal bearers of the religion of Islam in India from the Pakistan movement and, contrary-wise, the explicit commitment of the leaders of the movement to secular politics. These apparently contradictory aspects of the history of Pakistan are over looked by scholars, mostly foreign, who are mesmerised by the spectre of militant fundamentalist Islam arisen throughout the ‘Muslim world’.4 In Pakistan itself history has been systematically rewritten and ideologists of the regimes in power have spared few efforts to present the Pakistan movement as a fundamentalist religious movement.
A Theory of ‘Ethnicity’ in Colonised Societies
With an Agrarian Production Base.
My contention is that the Pakistan movement was neither a millenarian ideological movement devoted to the realisation of an Islamic state nor was it a movement of feudal landlords nor yet again a movement of an emergent Muslim national bourgeoisie, although it is true that by 1946 the Muslim League reached an accommodation with the landed magnates who ruled over Sind and Punjab, but on their terms. We shall examine their specific role. It will be argued that central driving force behind the Muslim movement was a class that has a distinct place in colonised societies whose role needs to be recognised more fully and explicitly. I have labelled that class as the ’salariat’, the urban educated classes who qualify for employment in the colonial state. With them we may take the new professionals, especially lawyers, journalists and urban intellectuals generally who share many of the problems and aspirations of the salariat.
In a nutshell the argument of this paper is, to repeat, that the Pakistan movement was a movement of Muslims rather than of Islam; a movement in which diverse Muslim ethnic groups from different regions, representing different social strata and interests, were allied in pursuit of quite material objectives. At the centre of that movement was a coalition of the emerging Muslim salariats of different regions of India. That coalition was to break down as soon as Pakistan was created and the Muslim movement had outlived its purpose. Moreover, that temporary and precarious alliance did not include all Muslims of India all the time, for Muslim nationalism was at its weakest in the Muslim majority provinces, having little appeal to the rural classes. Even for those who were drawn into the movement, there was no automatic nor permanent translation of the attribute of Muslim by faith or Muslim by descent, into an enduring conception of an undifferentiated Muslim nation. On the contrary, the central axis of Pakistan’s political history has revolved around strident affirmations of regional and linguistic ethnic identities that have refused to be set aside, de-legitimised and dissolved by slogans of Islamic ideology or claims of ‘Muslim’ nationhood raised on behalf of the dominant ethnic groups.
Comprised of diverse groups, both regionally and socially, the unity of the movement that ultimately resulted in the creation of Pakistan was a precarious one. Jinnah’s political genius lay precisely in his ability to orchestrate a loose, volatile and unpredictable coalition of forces. He is generally pictured as a man with a firm and total grip over the groups that he was leading. But that is a myth, made plausible by his powerful and commanding personality. In reality his hold over the various groups was quite tenuous and he had to take them on their own terms. He merely stood at the centre of a political process around which diverse regional groups revolved, over whom he had little control.
By the late 1940s, as Independence, very likely to be inherited by the Indian National Congress, was clearly on the horizon, Jinnah and the All India Muslim League provided the predominantly rural magnates of the Muslim majority provinces (notwithstanding the fact that hitherto they had been united with Hindu and Sikh landlords and organised in right-wing ’secular parties, such as the Unionist Party of the Punjab) a convenient voice and hopefully influential voice at the centre of Indian politics, in the dialogue with colonial masters about the fate of independent India, as well as the Indian National Congress their main rival contender. The landed magnates were quite cynically prepared to make use of Jinnah and the All India Muslim League for that purpose. That supported the illusion of a unified Muslim nation in India. But it was a marriage of convenience, for the provincial magnates on whom Jinnah depended for support and his own legitimacy, were not prepared to surrender their local power and autonomy. It was they, rather than the central leadership of the Muslim League, who dictated the terms of their mutual alliance. Nevertheless the idea of a Muslim nation gained temporary currency and Jinnah became the embodiment of that conception. The Pakistan movement, in that sense and to that extent, became a national movement, on the basis of the ‘Two Nation Theory’ that Jinnah propounded, affirming that Muslims of India were a separate nation from Hindus. Insofar as their politics entailed the establishment of their own state, their objective was the creation of a ‘Muslim state’, as a nation state; they did not seek an ‘Islamic state’, as a theocratic conception.
The Muslim Salariat and Muslim Ethnicity
I will argue here that there was one particular social group for whom, more than any other, the conception of Muslim’ nationhood (and not religious ideology) was particularly meaningful. That class was the product of the colonial transformation of Indian social structure in the 19th century and it comprised those who had received an education that would equip them for employment in the expanding colonial state apparatus as scribes and functionaries, the men ( for few women were so employed ) whose instrument of production was the pen. For the want of a better term I have referred to them as the salariat. The term ‘middle class’ is too wide and ‘petty bourgeoisie’ has connotations, especially in Marxist political discourse, that would not refer to this class.
The ’salariat’ is an ‘auxiliary class’ (a concept that must be distinguished from that of a ‘ruling class ) whose class role can be fully understood only in terms of its relation to ‘fundamental classes’ (from which the ‘ruling class’ is drawn); i.e. the economically dominant classes viz. the economically dominant metropolitan and indigenous bourgeoisies and the land owning classes on the one hand and, and the subordinate classes, the proletariat and the peasantry on the other. Given a particular configuration of class forces in the state and society members of the salariat attach themselves to ‘fundamental classes’ by virtue of their own personal ‘class origins’ or through ‘class affiliation’ by virtue of its need and willingness to serve an economically dominant class for career considerations regardless of their individual class origins. . An example of such careerism can be seen in the willingness of the Indian and Pakistani salariat to serve anti-national purposes of foreign (metropolitan) bourgeoisies at the cost of the nation that they purport to serve.
The ’salariat’ looms large in colonial societies because there the bulk of the population is rural and agricultural. In the absence of a significant number of people clustered around urban industrial activities, and leaving aside a small number of people engaged in petty trading or in the relatively tiny sector of export trade and finance, the urban society revolves mainly around functionaries of the state, and the educated look primarily to the Government for employment and advancement. In some contexts it would be useful to distinguish between different levels of the salariat, for its upper echelons, the bureaucratic and military oligarchies, play a role that is qualitatively different from that of its lower level functionaries. The relative weight of upper echelons of the salariat in the political process vis a vis elected political representatives, is the greater the lower the level of development of the society in question. It is very prominent in many societies of Africa, for example, as it is in Pakistan which has been ruled over by a military bureaucratic oligarchy since its inception, with only a temporary interruption during the rule of the Pakistan People’s Party for barely five years. It is less so in post-colonial India which has experienced relatively higher levels of economic and political development, though even there it has not failed to make its mark. The salariat not only serves the economically dominant classes in the colonial and the post-colonial state but it also has its own specific interests by virtue of its particular structural location and its powers, privileges and opportunities for corruption as the ‘governing class’ in the post-colonial state. In the relatively backward post-colonial societies the upper echelons of the salariat, the bureaucracies and the military, come into their own, by virtue of their direct grip over the state apparatus, in the absence of institutional structures of democratic political control. This is a striking feature of the political scene of Pakistan. 5
It was the Indian salariat and professional classes who were at the core of the Indian nationalist movement in its early stages during the late 19th century, demanding a rightful place for Indians in the state apparatus, for ‘Indianisation’ of the services and the creation of popular institutions of representative government through which they could have a share in the exercise of power, or at least some measure of control over the state in the name of ’self-government’.6 It was only later that the Indian bourgeoisie threw in its weight behind the nationalist movement and Indian nationalism mobilised wider sections of the Indian people.
Jinnah’s ‘Two Nations’ theory expressed the ideology of the weaker Muslim ’salariat’ vis-a-vis the dominant high caste Hindu salariat groups. The Muslim salariat was central to the Pakistan movement. However, in a society in which the rural votes predominate and are controlled by landed magnates, the Muslim salariat could make little progress in elections until it reached an accommodation with the rural magnates by the late 1940s. That was a fragile alliance, founded on temporary calculations of mutual interests. In the Punjab there was a wide gulf between the urban Punjabi salariat and the rural magnates. In Sindh there was no ethnic Sindhi Muslim salariat to speak of.
The alliance between the landed magnates of the Punjab and Sindh and the Muslim salariat, such as it was, was effected between its national leader ship, Jinnah and the All India Muslim League, who had something to offer to the regional power holders by way of ensuring that the post-independence government would not be in the hands of the Congress Party but rather a party that was dependent on them which would therefore ensure their own survival as a class.
In contrast to the character of the alliance between the rural magnates of Punjab and Sindh and the organisation of the Indian salariat, the All India Muslim League, that between the salariats of Bengal and Sindh in the post-Partition regional ethnic movements in Bengal and Sind with the respective rural power-holders, was quite different. In both these cases there was an ‘organic alliance’ or bond between the respective salariats and the dominant rural classes of these provinces. The ethnic Bengali and Sindhi salariats, respectively, were the sons of well to do peasants and landlords big and small. The interests of these salariats were, through kinship, organically linked with those of the landed classes of the provinces. Such organic ties are often overlooked when questions of class formation and class alignment are considered entirely in the abstract, when classes are thought of as wholly separate segments of the population.
The Muslim salariat was not evenly distributed in size and influence in different parts of India and its future fragmentation was written into the pattern of its uneven development. If we take the numbers of persons of over 20 years of age who were literate in English as an index of their size, we get the following picture:
ENGLISH LITERATES OVER 20 YEARS OF AGE
AMONG MUSLIMS AND HINDUS (Census, 1931)
TOTAL POPULATION (IN MILLIONS)
U.P Punjab Bengal Sindh
Total: 48.4 28.5 51.0 3.9
Muslims 7.2 14.9 27.8 2.8
Muslims % (14.8%) (52.4%) (54.5%) (72.8%)
LITERATES IN ENGLISH OF 20 YEARS AND OVER (IN THOUSANDS)
U.P Punjab Bengal Sindh
Total: 266.0 185.0 722.0 34.0
Muslims 49.4 58.8 175.6 4.9
Muslims % (18.6%) (31.7%) (24%) (14.5%)
Source: Census of India, 1931: Compiled from relevant Provincial Volumes. The 1931 Census date are used because the 1941 Census data, the last pre-partition Census, are notoriously unreliable.
We find that as a class the salariat itself, has a propensity to be easily fractured into different ethnic groups which vie with each other for preference and privilege. Such groups are not defined and determined, once for all, by cultural, linguistic, religious or regional criteria. There is, rather, a process of definition and redefinition of ethnic identity on the basis of perceptions of the distribution of privilege and politically viable options, as they are brought into focus from one stage to the next. Thus in Pakistan Muslim ethnic identity, once it had fulfilled its purpose for the salariats of Bengal, Sindh, Sarhad and Baluchistan, have way to the respective regional ethnic identities. The newly affirmed identities are not of course, constituted out of nothing. They draw on deeply embedded cultural, linguistic, religious or regionally significant symbols around which they can mobilise popular support, symbols that can generate a powerful political charge.
Muslim ethnicity therefore was only one stage in such a process of ethnic definition and redefinition. It represented a temporary alliance of various regional groups. Its original thrust came from the Muslim salariat of the UP, where it was especially privileged rather than otherwise but where it was fast losing ground. Elsewhere the Muslim salariat was less developed than the Hindu salariat, so that the interests of the Muslim salariats could be considered to be in opposition to those of Hindus.
The Muslim salariat of the Punjab was the largest amongst Muslims, both in terms of its absolute size as well as its larger percentage share of the entire Punjabi salariat (i.e. 31.7%), though even in that Muslim majority Province the Muslim salariat share was lower than that of Hindus. This was the principal grievance that fuelled the Muslim movement there. Later, after the creation of Pakistan, the Punjabi salariat, by virtue of its much greater size and development was to occupy a dominant position in Pakistan society and the state.
The urdu speaking UP salariat was the next largest. In contrast to Punjab, historically its proportionate share of the overall salariat in the UP was greater than the relative numbers of Muslims in the UP population. But their relative position declined sharply in the 19th century. For example their share of jobs in the highest ranks of colonial service which were then open to Indians, declined from 64% in 1857 to about 35% by 1913, which was a dramatic decline.7 The UP Muslims had a deep sense of grievance and insecurity, notwithstanding the fact that they were still a privileged minority for their share of the population was only about 13%. This perceived threat to their (privileged) situation probably explains the fact that the initial and the major thrust of the Muslim movement in India came from the UP.
The Bengali Muslim salariat was the largest in terms of absolute size as compared to Muslims of other provinces, although its share of government jobs was proportionately much smaller than that of Hindus of Bengal; Bengali Muslims were always an underprivileged majority. The Sind figures show how small the Muslim salariat was in that province. These figures in fact give a somewhat inflated picture of the insignificant share of ethnic Sindhi Muslims in salariat positions, as these figures include the considerable numbers of non-Sindhi Muslims who were employed in Sindh.
The conception of a unified ‘Muslim Nation” of South Asia did not outlast the day of independence and the creation of Pakistan. The inter-regional coalition of the ‘Muslim’ salariat broke up in the new state, for a new equation of the distribution of privilege and deprivation between them became visible. The Punjabis ( who were temporarily joined by an elite group from ‘Muhajirs’, Urdu speaking migrants from India) were preponderant in the bureaucracy and the army and were quickly perceived as the privileged and dominant group whereas the other ethnic salariat groups had less than their fair share of access to education, jobs and power.
Overnight the ‘Muslim’ identity, behind which they had all rallied together in the Pakistan movement, was laid aside by the regional groups and new ethnic identities were affirmed – Bengali, Sindhi, Pathan and Baluch. It must be added though that the Pathan position has been a little ambiguous after Zia’s military coup d’état, in view of the relatively strong representation of Pathans in the army. Again, we find a replication of the Indian example, for now the slogan of ‘Akhand Bharat’ was echoed in Pakistan by a new slogan of the indivisibility of the Muslim Nation that was proclaimed on behalf of the dominant Punjabis. A person could not legitimately declare himself or herself to be Bengali or Sindhi or Pathan or Baluch, because he or she was a Muslim, and Islam was a religion of equality and brotherhood and would recognise no divisions amongst the people of the faith. It is in that context that Islamic ideology was first placed at the centre of political debate, only after Pakistan was created, to oppose regional ethnic movements.
After Pakistan was created the slogan of Islam was adopted by the dominant component of the salariat in Pakistan. It was invoked at first only nominally. Insofar as it was included in the vocabulary of political debates in Pakistan during the first 30 years, only a few symbolic concessions were made to men of religion to make the argument look convincing. It was no more than a political argument that was used by the dominant Punjabis against the assertion of the new regional and linguistic ethnic identities of Bengalis, Sindhis, Pathans and Baluch. The ruling bureaucratic-military oligarchy, which has dominated Pakistan since its inception, had no intention, thereby, of allowing mullahs and Islamic ideologues, to encroach on their monopoly of power and privilege.8
It was only after the seizure of power by the Zia regime that Islamic ideology was invoked in a rather more strident manner for a new purpose, namely the legitimation of state power itself for a politically bankrupt regime that lacked legitimate authority. It has had to go much further in affirming, symbolically, its commitments to Islam than any previous regime. But the question of Punjabi dominance ( urdu speaking migrants from India who had shared that position with them gradually fell behind ) has not thereby been displaced by politics of Islamic Ideology for it was recognised by opposition groups that this is only a cover for continued Punjabi domination. Ethnicity and religious ideology therefore remain closely intertwined and the various disaffected regional groups are unimpressed by the dramaturgy of religious fervour.
The Formation of the Structure of Muslim Society in India
In view of the relatively low development of the Muslim salariat in general and its uneven development regionally the question has often been asked why Muslims did not take more to education or to trade or commerce, i.e. to middle class occupations. Was that due to some peculiarities of their religion or culture or was it due, as the displaced erstwhile rulers, to their hostility to colonial rule, that systematically discriminated against them after the unsuccessful War of Independence, the Indian Mutiny, in 1857 ? Speculation along these lines most favoured by Muslim nationalist historians.9 But the question is better inverted and we may well ask why in pre-colonial India the urban middle classes, who were engaged in Government service or trade did not convert to Islam. This had much to do with the route through which Islam came into the Indian subcontinent.
There are clear patterns of conversions to Islam by different social strata in different regions, which have been little noticed, let alone explained, although the patterns themselves are not difficult to see. There are two distinct and contrasting patterns, each related to the route by which Islam came to a particular region. One route of the advent of Islam was with the Muslim conquerors – though, this did not mean that Islam was therefore spread by the Sword; quite the contrary. The other route was by the sea, through contact with Arab seafarers and traders who for centuries dominated the Arabian sea. These two routes of the penetration of Islam into India had quite different effects on the class distribution and regional patterns of Islamisation. It is the resulting distribution of Muslims between different communities and regions that has constituted the context in which later ethnic movements, that we are concerned with here, were to arise.
A paradox of the advent of Islam with Muslim rule was that at the heart land of Muslim empires of India, in the Gangetic Plain, conversions to Islam were minimal. On the other hand they were maximal in the two peripheries of the empire, namely the Indus Plain, now Pakistan, and Bengal. We have no answers yet to the question why that was so, though we would suspect that there are social structural explanations to be found. The peripheries were perennially given to heresy against the Brahminical orthodoxy that ruled at the heartland of empire.
Before Islam, Buddhism flourished in the two peripheral regions of the Delhi Empires; the Indus plain and the Ganges Delta. Even after the advent of Islam, it was a dissident version of Islam that took root there rather than the orthodox puritanical version of Islam that was established in the UP, where great seminaries of Muslim religious learning flourished. The Islam of the periphery was influenced instead by sufism and was ruled over by pirs who claimed miraculous powers and made profitable business out of the credulity of their followers. It was also infused with a large dose of syncretism, much condemned by the UP based Ulema. By contrast in the UP influence of pirs and sufism was minimal.
The divergence in patterns of religious belief between the Gangetic Plain and the two peripheries is paralleled in divergence in many other aspects of social life. A study by Marriott, for example, plots the scale of rigidity and fluidity in caste ranking and ritual between different regions of India. He found greater fluidity in these the further West one moved away from the Brahminical heartland of the Gangetic Plain towards Punjab and Sindh. Marriott found such differences also among Hindu communities of these regions.10 My own work in the Punjab shows likewise that there is no social institution operating there that can seriously be treated as caste. Even in the matter of structures of kinship there are differences, for patrilateral-parallel cousin marriage (i.e. preferential marriage to father’s brother’s daughter or structural equivalent) is the rule in the Indus Plain whereas, as one moves East, to East Punjab and Western UP the so-called ‘Muslim’ structure of kinship gives way to ‘gotra’ exogamy practised by Jat, Rajput, Meo (etc.); Muslim peasants. Parallel to the regional differences in religious ideology there were also regional differences in social structure, which raises questions about the nature of the connections between the two.
If we consider the pattern of conversion to Islam along another axis, we find that there is a fairly clear class pattern of Islamisation associated with the advent of Muslim rulers. Muslim rule installed expatriate Muslims brought from Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan as feudal lords at the foundations of their empires and many Hindu, especially Rajput, chiefs converted to Islam. Their dependant peasants ‘converted’ likewise. Islam was established thereby as a predominantly rural religion. It made much less headway in towns and cities. The relatively low level of conversions to Islam among urban classes suggests absence of coercion by Muslim rulers, who were quite happy to be served by Hindu officials. In the UP Kashmiri Brahmins and Kayasthas were the two main Hindu castes who have traditionally worked for the state both before and after the colonial conquest. The UP and Punjab diverge from this general rule, for there far more Muslims found themselves in the salariat than elsewhere as descendants of those associated with the courts at Delhi, Agra, Lucknow and Lahore found their way into salaried state service. When Pakistan was created men from Punjab and the UP, where the Muslim salariat was the most developed, dominated the bureaucratic-military oligarchy. Over the years, Punjabis have acquired complete ascendancy in Pakistan.
In contrast to the UP and Punjab, Muslims had little share of urban middle class occupations in Sindh and Bengal or in Baluchistan and the NWFP. In Sindh, under Muslim rule, government service was virtually the exclusive prerogative of Amils, a Hindu community. The number of ethnic Sindhi Muslims in government service was minute. Trade in Sindh was traditionally in the hands of another Hindu community called Bhaibands, though during the latter half of the 19th century there was an influx of Muslim and non-Muslim trading communities mainly from Gujarat (including Kathiawar and Cutch) into Sindh (and Punjab). Bengal was no different, for the size of the Muslim salariat there was small and suffered much from discriminatory colonial policies. Aparna Basu notes that ‘In lists of qualified candidates drawn up by the Council of Education in Bengal in the years after 1846, Muslim names are conspicuous by their absence’.11 Politics of Muslims in Bengal were predominantly based on rural classes, especially the struggle of ( mainly Muslim) ‘Occupancy Tenants’ (de facto landowners), for abolition of Zamindari over-lordship, a cause upheld by the non-communal Krishak Proja Party led by A.K. Fazlul Haq.
Islam that came by the sea, with Arab control of overseas trade, resulted in a rather different class configuration of Muslims. (Our concern in this paper is primarily with Northern India and we will ignore for the moment the logic and patterns of Muslim conversions in southern India). In Gujarat (including Cutch and Kathiawar) on the West coast of India, Muslim conversions were mainly from trading communities, Sunnis such as Memons and Shias such as Bohras and Khojas (Ismailis) and Ithna Asharis. This seems to be closely related to the fact that the bulk of the export trade from northern India went abroad through ports in this region, which were all under Hindu rule. Arabs dominated the trade of the Arabian sea. Substantial trading communities which were engaged in export trade in Gujarat, not surprisingly, converted to Islam. The myths of origin of these communities speak of benign and tolerant Hindu rulers who did not discourage this. One can see the functionality of such tolerance and goodwill when rival ports were competing with each other to attract the Arab trade. Contrary to the Northern Indian pattern no Muslim land lords were installed in these areas and there were no dependent peasantry therefore to take to Islam, except to the extent that the pattern was to be modified later when Muslim rule itself was extended southwards and was established in Gujarat. There was a diffusion of the Muslim trading communities of Gujarat over various parts of India, during the second half of the 19th century, when they began to move to the new expanding centres of colonial trade, like Bombay, Karachi and Calcutta and elsewhere. There was a push effect as well as a pull effect, for the development of the railway links between Bombay and Karachi with northern India short-circuited the traditional trade routes to the Gujarat ports and the trading communities there had to look for fresh pastures.
These Muslim trading communities were isolated, with respect to language and culture, from the northern Indian salariat. Moreover, these trading communities set a low value on higher education, which was functional for those aspiring for salariat positions. In terms of their own values they despised salaried employment, however eminent. Their children were expected to join the family business after secondary schooling. They missed out therefore even the politicising effects of university life. Nor were they impelled as a class into the Muslim movement which at that time had little to offer them. Their role in Muslim movements was negligible, except for one or two individuals, notably, of course, Mr. Jinnah himself who, however, had cut himself off very early from the modest background of his family and community in Karachi and assimilated himself, as an extremely successful and very rich lawyer, into cosmopolitan upper class Bombay society.
Much is made by some historians of another exceptional case of Gujarati businessmen, namely that of Sir Adamjee Pirbhai, a Dawoodi Bohra industrialist who owned textile mills and the Matheran railway, amongst his varied interests. As a friend of the Agha Khan, he was made to preside over the conference of the Muslim League at Karachi in 1907, that is when the Muslim League had just been launched by the Muslim ‘notables’ and was about to be seized by the Muslim salariat who soon pushed the notables aside. Sir Adamjee Pirbhai himself was soon to get embroiled in an anti-clerical movement within his own community for which he was to sacrifice his time and his fortune. He had little interest in or time for the Muslim League. It would be a mistake therefore to read in his momentary and peripheral participation or similar participation of a very few such individuals in the Muslim movement, to imply the class involvement of the Gujarat based Muslim bourgeoisie. There was also a much smaller Punjabi section of the Muslim bourgeoisie which likewise, was peripheral to the Muslim movement.
Islamic and Secular Ideologies of Muslims in India
There is a widespread tendency, in the language of scholars as well as in the rhetoric of politicians, to attribute political and ideological positions to ‘Muslims’ of India, in an over -generalised way, as if Muslims of different social strata and classes in different regions, were equally involved. That is manifestly untrue. There were sharp differences in these respects not only between different classes and strata but also between Muslim majority provinces and Muslim minority provinces.
‘MUSLIM’ IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL POSITIONS IN BRITISH INDIA
I ‘MUSLIM’ POSITIONS (’All-India – but main base in Muslim minority areas).
i. Islamic Traditionalism- (I) The Ulema I : ‘Deobandis’
ii Islamic Traditionalism- (II) The Ulema II: ‘Barelvis’ & Pirs
iii. Islamic Fundamentalism_- Maududi and the Jamaat-e-Islami
iv. Jamiat-e-Ahrar Anti-colonial ‘nationalist’ Muslims– anti-. Muslim League
v. Islamic Modernism – Sir Syed Ahmad Khan & Iqbal
vi. Secular Muslim Nationalism – exemplified by Jinnah and the Muslim League
II NON-COMMUNAL POSITIONS OF MUSLIMS IN MUSLIM MAJORITY AREAS 4
vii. Secular Provincial Non-communal Transactional Politics:
Landlord Dominated Right Wing Punjab Unionist Party and various landlord political groups in Sind, being the ruling groups/parties in both cases.
viii. Secular Provincial Non-Communal Radical Politics:
The Krishak Proja Party of Bengal, led by A.K. Fazlul Haq, the ruling Party in Bengal; Hindu and Muslim tenants together against Zamindars.
x Secular Non-Communal Nationalist Muslims(in Congress Party)
in Sarhad, the N.W.F.P. the ruling party was the Congress under Ghaffar Khan
It was in the Muslim ‘minority’ provinces, especially in the UP, rather than those in which Muslims were in a majority, that specifically Muslim political and ideological movements were generated. Until the late 1940s, when Jinnah and the Muslim League managed to form an uneasy alliance with dominant groups in the Muslim majority provinces, their politics were not even Muslim nationalist not to say ‘Islamic’. They were, rather non-communal politics of landlord dominated groups and political parties.
We have identified eight ‘Muslim’ ideological-political positions amongst Muslims in India. In addition to the groups mentioned in the above table, there are also Shias, who are estimated to number about 15% of the population of Pakistan; some estimates are considerably greater. No reliable data are available. Shias organised the All-India Shia Conference in 1907 to rival Sunni organisations. But, given the fact that leading Shias of the UP were active in the Muslim League instead, the Shia Conference did not make any headway. Since the 1980s, under General Zia, some extremist Shia organisations have surfaced, that parallel extremist Sunni organisations. These are complex and contradictory reactions to the Government’s campaign for Islamisation. Shia organisations have been influenced by the dramatic impact of the Iranian revolution, and they are demanding imposition in the country of ‘Fiqh-e-Ja’faria’, the Shia legal code, rather than a Sunni code. This is obviously a quite extra-ordinary and unrealistic demand which expresses Shia fears of being forced to accept Sunni legislation. The main current of Shia opinion in the country however seems to favour the notion of a secular state.
Contrary-wise there have been equally strident demands that Pakistan be declared a Sunni Hanafi republic and the Hanafi ‘fiqh’, or legal code, be made the law of the land, that all other sects be declared minorities and be reduced to second class citizenship. This has led to a great deal of sectarian violence. These developments are the inevitable logical extensions of the claim made by the Zia regime that Islamic Law be imposed in Pakistan. The question is: Which Islamic Law ?’ Each sect expects that its own particular version be acknowledged and imposed on the rest. Rather than promote any conception of ‘Islamic Unity’ this is a powerful recipe for disunity and inter-sectarian strife.
There have been numerous other Muslim political movements during the colonial period, such as Khaksars and Ahrars. The latter were extremely hostile to the Pakistan movement. We can also distinguish several sectarian divisions among Sunni Hanafis some of whom are, from time to time, at war with each other. Of these I have listed only three main sectarian categories, namely the i) the ‘traditionalist Deobandi Ulema’, ii) the ‘traditionalist Barelvi Ulema’ and iii) the Islamic Fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami, whose beliefs and creeds are quite incompatible with each other. (see below) We may also mention two others namely the Ahl-i-Hadith who deny the validity of the four medieval schools of Islam and insist on a literal application of the Quran and Hadith and the Ahl-i-Quran who go even further in demanding absolute reliance only on the Quran, casting some doubt on the reliability of the Hadith which was transmitted through fallible human channels and therefore precarious. Each declares the others to be ‘kafirs’ or infidels. Summing up evidence taken from all major religious groups a high level judicial Committee of Inquiry (into sectarian riots in 1953), which was headed by the country’s two most eminent judges, concluded as follows: ‘The net result of all this is that neither shias nor sunnis, nor Deobandis nor Ahl-i-Hadith nor Barelvis are Muslims and any change from one view to the other must be accompanied in an Islamic State with the penalty of death, if the State is in the hands of the party which considers the others to be kafirs.12
Traditionalist Islam: The Ulema -’Deobandi’ and Barelvi
The ‘Ulema’ (plural of alim, a man of – religious – learning) is a grandiose term, which is often used quite loosely, as for example in the results of a survey recently published by the Government of Pakistan which finds the vast majority of them to be barely literate. To be properly classified amongst the ‘Ulema’ a person would have been educated at a religious seminary and would have gone through the ‘Dars-e-Nizami’ a syllabus that was laid down in medieval India and has hardly changed. Generally, they have little knowledge of the world that they live in, nor even perhaps of the world of Islam except for myths and legends. They inhabit little temples of their own uncomprehending and enclosed minds in which they intone slogans, petrified words and dogmas. Affairs of state and society are, generally, beyond their narrowed vision. There are only a few amongst them who have had the benefit of some tolerable education and who, in their own ways, try to follow current affairs.
The Ulema of the Sunni Hanafi Mazhab, as mentioned above are themselves divided into warring groups of whom the two main are popularly known as the ‘Deobandis’ ( after the great seminary at Deoband ) and ‘Barelvis’, after the town of Bareilly in the UP, which was the seat of their mentor Maulana Ahmad Raza Khan Barelvi. Deobandis and Barelvis differ in many respects, by virtue of their different doctrinal positions, the different classes (and regions) amongst whom they have influence and their different political stances. The hallmark of Deobandi Ulema in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was their unremitting anti-colonialism. Barelvis Ulema and Pirs, unlike the Deobandis, were not involved in anti-colonial ideology and struggle. On the contrary, most of them, with few exceptions, supported the colonial regime and, were in turn, favoured by it.
The ‘Deobandi’ Ulema
It took the Deobandi Ulema many decades of British rule before they began to show their eventual deep resentment against it. One should add, parenthetically, that the label Deobandi is not wholly appropriate here, except for brevity, for the eponymous Dar-ul-Uloom at Deoband was not founded until 1867. Very few of these worthies played a part in the Wahhabi movement of the early 19th century which was led by men of the sword, the last defenders of Indian feudalism, rather than the dispensers of law. Be that as it may the belated hostility of these Ulema to British rule was derived from changes that were being brought about during the middle decades of the 19th century by the colonial state, that directly impinged upon their lives and livelihood.
There were three contexts in which the changes impinged upon them. Firstly, in pre-colonial India Muslim Ulema and Hindu Pandits played a central role in the judicial system and held lucrative and influential positions. That continued in the early years of colonial rule. But soon a new legal system was being established to meet new needs of the expanding colonial capitalist economy. The old feudal dispensations were no longer appropriate. Along with the new laws and new types of courts to adjudicate them, a new class of English educated lawyers and judges took over from the Ulema and they were pushed out of their influential high status and lucrative jobs. Secondly, the Ulema were also being pushed out of the educational system. That process was a bit more slow, though that was not because the colonial regime spared any efforts to speed it up. Indian clerks were needed who would be educated along lines that would prepare them for service in the apparatus of colonial government. The traditional schools run by Ulemas (and Hindu Pandits), with their emphasis on classical learning, Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit, were no longer suited to that purpose. They were replaced by new Anglo-vernacular schools, with the active sponsor ship and support from the colonial state. The hostility of the Ulema to the colonial regime no doubt owed much to these bread and butter questions, although it was expressed and legitimised in terms of moral out rage. A third factor underlying the anti-colonialism of the Ulema was the plight of Indian weavers, the Julahas, who were their most fervent followers. Indian weavers, once the most prosperous of the Indian artisan classes, were devastated by the colonial impact and consequent destruction of Indian textile manufacturing. Julahas, were therefore amongst the most embittered opponents of colonialism. They became extremely bigoted and developed an uncompromising attitude towards the West. The Ulema’s outlook reflected that also.
All these factors bound the Ulema to the Indian nationalist cause. They never argued for the setting up of an ‘Islamic’ state nor a Muslim state. Quite the contrary. They called upon Muslims to join hands with their Hindu brothers in the patriotic cause against foreign rule. To rationalise that position they put forward a theory that constituted an essentially secular public philosophy. They separated the domain of faith, as a private domain, from the public domain of politics and government. This was formulated quite explicitly by Maulana Hasan Ahmad Madani of Deoband who argued that:-
(i) faith was universal and could not be contained within national boundaries but
(ii) that nationality was a matter of geography and Muslims were bound to the nation of their birth by obligations of loyalty along with their non-Muslim fellow citizens.
Hindus, Muslims and members of other communities would live together in harmony in independent India which, although not ‘dar-ul-Islam’, as it would be under Muslim rule was, nevertheless, ‘dar-ul-aman’, the land of peace, where Muslims would be guaranteed freedom to practice their faith, where it would be the duty of Muslims to live as loyal and law abiding citizens. It was the duty of the Muslim in India to fight with a sense of dedication for the freedom and independence of his country quite as much as he was obliged to fight for the liberty of his conscience and the sanctity of his faith. The political philosophy of the Ulema was a peculiar amalgam of pan-Islamic ideas and Indian nationalist ideas which were fused in their anti-imperialism.13
That contradictory amalgam of ideas came together in the Khilafat Movement (1919-23) in the aftermath of the First World War, which was the climactic moment in the political struggles of the Deobandi Ulema. The aim of the movement, was to resist the removal of the Ottoman Caliph from his high office. It was a bizarre movement of religious obscurantism that unleashed rabid and atavistic passions among Indian Muslims. It ran counter to the aspirations of Turkish and Arab nationalism. It was strongly disapproved by Jinnah. But, ironically, it was backed by Gandhi, leader of secular Indian Nationalism! The movement promised to isolate the Muslim salariat leadership from Muslim masses by arousing their fanatical passions behind a hopeless and anachronistic cause. In 1919, under the leadership of Deoband and in the wake of the Khilafat movement, the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind was formed as the political organisation of the Deobandi Ulema. It was during that movement, that they made their biggest, though somewhat brief, impact on the Indian political scene. But they left behind a bitter legacy of narrow communalism especially amongst some sections of the Muslim urban subordinate classes. In the late 1940s the Muslim League made great efforts to win over the Ulema to the Pakistan cause. They eventually succeeded in November 1945, when Pakistan was already in prospect, in winning over a breakaway group from the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind to form the Jamiat-e-Ulema-Islam which has established itself as a political party in P
November 28, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Dear YLH,
I see that you are well educated person. You wrote too much about the history.
History is past but the result of politics of different leaders are on the face.
Don’t live in the past. Check the present of Pakistan. What is happening? Every one is in Jihadi mood. they are killing each other by name of Allah.
This is country is the tree planted by Jinnah Saheb.
Eat the fruits.
Don’t tell the lie to the people, because you will start believing you own lie.
Take care