Muhammad
Nurul Huda
Historians are polarised on the question whether freedom in August 1947 was seized by the Indians or power was transferred voluntarily by the British “as an act of positive statesmanship.” The British decision to quit was significantly based on the un-governability of India in 1940′s. The constitutional arrangements of 1919 and 1935 were actually meant to secure British hegemony over the Indian empire through consolidation of control over the central government. Therefore, it is unlikely that the British left India voluntarily in 1947 in pursuance of a policy of decolonisation. Freedom was not a gift to the Indians.
The Cripps Mission of March-April 1942, though a failure, signified an important shift in British policy. It announced Indian independence after the war, within or outside the empire, to be the ultimate goal of British policy; and that unity would no longer be a precondition for independence.
The major obstacle to an unruffled transfer of power in India was the Hindu-Muslim divide, which by 1940s had become quite apparent at the negotiating table. The 1940 Lahore resolution had elevated the Indian Muslims from the status of ‘minority’ to that of a ‘nation,’ and subsequent developments projected Jinnah as their “sole spokesman.” Jinnah rejected the Cripps proposal precisely because it did not recognise the Muslims’ right to self-determination and equality as a nation.
The demand for Pakistan was not well defined in 1942-43. At this stage what Jinnah wanted was autonomy for the Muslim majority provinces in a loose federal structure, with Hindu-Muslim party at the central government, the minority Hindus in the Muslim majority provinces serving as security for the Muslim minorities elsewhere.
The vagueness of the Pakistan demand made it an excellent instrument for a Muslim mass mobilisation campaign in the 1940′s, the primary objective of which was to construct a Muslim national identity transcending class and regional barriers. Muslim politics during the period began to attract support from a cross-section of Muslim population, particularly from the professional and business classes for whom a separate state of Pakistan would mean elimination of Hindu competition. To this was added the political support of the leading ulama, pirs and maulavis who lent this campaign a religious legitimacy.
Muslim politics at a national level was being institutionalised and Jinnah gradually emerged as its control over the provincial branches of the Muslim League. The provincial groups or leaders where systematically pulled down and politically marginalised. During the closing years of the Second World War, in Bengal and Panjab, the Pakistan demand became an ideological rallying symbol that helped overcome the various fissures within a heterogeneous Muslim community.
‘Pakistan’ was presented as ‘a peasant utopia’ which would bring in liberation for Muslim peasantry from the hands of the Hindu zamindars and moneylenders. As a result, by the mid-1940′s, Pakistan as an ideological symbol of Muslim solidarity gained almost universal acceptance among the Muslim peasants. Abul Hashim, the Bengal League leader, travelled extensively throughout East Bengal countryside campaigning for Pakistan and his draft manifesto that outlined the moral, economic and political objectives of the movement, and also appealed to the Muslim middle classes, particularly the students. By 1945 the Muslim League had emerged as the only mass-based political party of the Muslims.
Muslim League’s popularity was translated into a massive election victory in 1946, with the League winning 93% of Muslim votes in the province and 119 of the 250 seats in the Assembly.
Jinnah, in 1944, launched a well orchestrated mass campaign to popularise the idea of Pakistan in rural Punjab by enlisting the help of Punjab Muslim Students federation and the sajjaidhishins (custodian of Sufi slrrines) who were pressed into the political service of Islam. When the pirs, with their huge rural influence, issued fatwas, support for Pakistan became an individual religious responsibility of every Muslim.
As the election of 1946 approached, the entire power structure of the Punjabi Muslim community—from the rural magnates and the landowning class, which previously supported the unionist party, to the ordinary Muslim peasants in Western Punjab — drifted towards the Muslim League.
Jinnah began preparing the Muslim nation for agitational politics from August 16, 1946, which was chosen as the “Direct Action Day,” and it was on this very day that all hell was let loose on Calcutta. If the Muslim league mobilised the masses around the ideological symbol of Pakistan, the Hindu Mahasabha had also raised the slogan of Hindu rastra (state) and launched a mass mobilisation campaign. In fact, since the late 1930s the Hindu organisations were trying to convert the “putative ‘Hindu Family’ into a single harmonious whole,” and by the mid-1940s they were preparing for an ultimate showdown by giving their volunteer groups “pseudo-military training.”
The elite and popular communalism combined to create a general environment of distrust and tension between Hindus and Muslims that finally exploded in August 1946. As a reaction, riots broke out in Chittagong, Dhaka, Mymensingh, Barisal and Pabna. The worst riots broke out the Noakhali and Tipperah. The entire north Indian Hinds belt experienced the same communal build-up in the 1940s. All communities “had blood on their hands.”
The Hindu Mahasabha and local congress in Bengal led a well-orchestrated campaign that advocated partition of Bengal and construction of a Hindu Homeland by retaining the Hindu majority areas in a separate province of West Bengal within the Indian Union. The movement was led by the Hindu Bhadrolok who were trying to seize political initiative once again to determine their own destiny.
The Indian Independence Act was ratified by the crown on July 18 and implemented on August 14/15, 1947. For many Indians freedom came with a sense of loss caused by the partition, while to many Muslims in Pakistan partition itself meant freedom. It is no wonder, therefore, that ‘partition’ happens to be the most contested discursive territory of South Asian historiography.
For some Pakistani historians the partition was a liberating experience, a logical culmination of a long historical process that was started in the 19th century by Syed Ahmed Khan and others when the South Asian Muslims began to discover their national identity that was articulated later in the complex sub-continental politics of the 1940s. For some it was ‘a divide that is 50 years young and 5,000 years old.”
The concept of Pakistan was irresistible and widespread among Muslims. In 1947 they forced a separation and thus claimed for themselves a separate history of their own. There were others who questioned the inevitability and legitimacy of partition. There is a view that the Lahore resolution of 1940 was Jinnah’s tactical move to have the claim of nationhood accepted by the congress and the British. The ideal constitutional arrangement Jinnah preferred for India in mid-1940s was a weak federal structure with strong autonomy for the provinces, and Hindu-Muslim parity at the centre.
Some historians are of the belief that “it was not the League but the Congress who chose at the end of the day to run a knife across Mother India’s body.” Though Jinnah may have first floated the idea of Pakistan as a “bargaining counter” it is doubtful if he had the same bargaining autonomy once the mass mobilisation campaign began in 1944 around this emotive symbol of Muslim nationhood. The Pakistan movement was hardly an elite affair in the run-up to the partition in August 1947.
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