Of Muslim minorities and their territories

M Rajivlochan

Two countries were formed for specific religious groups in the mid-20th century. One was Israel for the Jews, the other was Pakistan for Muslims. Millions were sacrificed for the belief that specific religious groups needed a separate country for these groups to be safe. This book is about the creation of Pakistan. It examines the role of Jinnah and Gandhi in the events leading up to the Partition. It certainly has nothing to do with either Gandhi’s Hinduism or Jinnah’s Islam. May be those two words, Hinduism and Islam, are in the title merely to make it more appealing to readers, especially because of the present scenario in India.

The book tells history as if it were a story. The heavy underpinning of information from various archives and primary sources makes the reader familiar with facts that are frequently ignored by professional historians in their writings on the events of the Partition of India. Essentially it is about the first victory of pan-Islamism in 1947, over the Indic way of looking at the world. The pan-Islamists got a country for Muslims, even when the majority of Muslims in India rejected them. Gandhi, insisting on dharmic ways of conducting politics, got killed by a Hindu who was too perturbed by the insistence on dharma even after the Islamists had won their victory. “India choked and slumped into silence” is how Akbar ends this book.

“Millions of Musalmans in this country come from Hindu stock. How can their homeland be any other than India?” Gandhi asked on the eve of urging Indians to launch a movement to force the British to Quit India. “My eldest son embraced Islam some years back. What would his homeland be — Porbander or the Punjab?” he asked his followers and claimed that all Indians were one in their fight against the British. The British, though, says Akbar, tried to create an alternate reality in India as they claimed that “the ‘ninety million’ Indian Muslims were fundamentally opposed to the Congress and deserved the right of self-expression”.

As the British set about prosecuting a Hindu, Muslim and Sikh for joining the INA, the Congress was prepared to defend Captain P K Sahgal, Captain Shah Nawaz Khan and Lt G S Dhillon for their right to fight for the liberation of India. At that time, Akbar tells us, the Director, Intelligence Bureau, reported to the government of the sympathy within the British Indian Army towards the INA heroes and the spread of disquiet against the British within the military. “This particular brand of sympathy cuts across communal barriers,” the DIB had warned.

Jinnah and his Muslim League, though, persisted with their insistence that Muslims did not belong to India and continued to counter the cries of Jai Hind with ‘Pakistan’. Soon such cries transformed into murderous assaults on people of the other religious community. In Calcutta, on Bakr-Id of 1946, amid growing communal violence, the Muslim League urged the Muslims of Calcutta to sacrifice cows to assert themselves while Gandhi insisted on going to Noakhali to sympathise with victims of communal violence. He was harsh towards those Muslim leaders who tried to convince him that “99 per cent of Muslims” disapproved of violence. Gandhi demanded that they join him in moving from village to village and urge people to shun violence.

As Mountbatten pushed India towards Partition, Akbar points out that Churchill’s only concern was that both India and Pakistan remain within the ambit of the Commonwealth. The concerns of Nehru that the Partition would initiate the Balkanisation of India, add to the violence and breakdown the authority of the State were all brushed aside. As Pakistan was created, the ruler of Bhopal, Hamidullah, Akbar tells us, “moaned that Bhopal stood alone ‘in the midst of Hindu India surrounded by … enemies of Islam’.” The Nizam of Hyderabad, too, pleaded for being allowed to retain an independent Muslim country within India. Jinnah’s dream of having a separate country for Muslims seemed to be creating a situation where, if people like Patel had not intervened, Muslims just might have got many countries within India and not just a Pakistan outside of it.