H I S T O R Y

Punjabi Muslims and Creation of Pakistan- 3
Professor J.S. Grewal

THE Congress and the League had begun to drift apart after the Khilafat movement which was made redundant by the political developments in Turkey, closing the question of Khilafat once for all. The Hindu-Muslim rapprochement in the Punjab suffered a severe jolt in the early 1920s. When the Congress boycotted the Simon Commission and took up the challenge of framing a ‘national’ constitution for India through the Moti Lal Nehru committee, Jinnah was cooperative. A consensus was sought to be hammered out in All-Parties meetings but the effort eventually failed.

The leaders of the Congress, and more so the Hindu leaders, were wedded to universal suffrage and joint electorates. This carried the implication of a ‘majoritarian democracy’ which appeared to the Muslim leaders, increasingly since the time of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, to be a lasting threat to minority interests.  Jinnah was not prepared to accept majoritarian democracy without safeguards for the minorities. Nor were the Akalis.

Henceforth, the Congress leadership became increasingly uncompromising about secular Indian nationalism, treating communitarian concerns as ‘communal’ notwithstanding the assurance given in 1929 that the Congress would not accept any constitution for India without the consent of the Muslim and Sikh minorities. The term ‘communalism’ became an antonym for nationalism. The chances of accommodating the political concerns of religious minorties receded more and more into the background. Even Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of communitarian nationalism and Indian unity, began to use the term ‘communal’ in a pejorative sense.

After the announcement of the ‘Communal Award’ in the early 1930s, Jinnah was telling the Congress leaders that Muslims were in no way behind any other community ‘in their demand for national self-government’. But the crux of the whole issue was: could the Congress leaders completely assure the Muslims that ‘the safeguards to which they attach vital importance will be embodied in the future Constitution of India?’ Jinnah accepted the ‘Communal Award’ for want of a better agreed upon substitute, and looked upon the whole issue as a political problem which involved the ‘question of minorities’. He explained his view in 1935 in the following terms:

Minorities means a combination of things. It may be that a minority has a different religion from the other citizens of a country. Their language may be different, their race may be different, their culture may be different, and the combination of all these various elements- religion, culture, race, language, arts, music, and so forth make the minority a separate entity in the state, and that separate entity as an entity wants safeguards. Surely, therefore, we must face this question as a political question; we must solve it and not evade it.

This view involved the question of adjustment between the Indian State and the ethnic ‘entities’ of the Indian subcontinent.

During the election campaign of 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru made it amply clear that no consideration could be given to Jinnah’s entities. There were only two forces in the country, the Congress and the British Government: ‘To vote against the Congress candidate is to vote for the continuance of British domination’.  Jinnah refused to accept this line.  He felt obliged to say that there was ‘a third party’ in this country; and that was ‘the Muslims’.

However, the Muslim League fared badly in the elections, getting only 105 out of a total of more than 500 Muslim seats in the country. The Congress swept the polls and formed ministries in six provinces. The Congress leaders refused to share power with the League. The way in which the Congress used its power in these provinces, and at the Centre, gave an indication of what Congress Raj would do after having gained power. It made the Muslims, even of the Muslim majority provinces, uneasy. In Jinnah’s words, the Congress Ministries had ‘by their words, deeds and programmes shown more and more that the Musalmans cannot expect any justice or fair play at their hands’.  His attitude began to change.

Jinnah began to organize the Muslim League on the model of the Congress, appointing a Working Committee and reducing membership dues to two annas. At the same time he started declaring that the Congress did not represent the Muslims. He blamed the Congress for not solving what was called the ‘communal problem’. It remained unsettled ‘not because of the communalism of the minorities, but because of the communalism of the majorities’? Mahatma Gandhi, more than any other leader, appeared to Jinnah to have turned the Congress into an instrument for the establishment of Hindu Raj in the country.

Jinnah started projecting the Muslims as a nation: ‘The Musalmans are not a minority. The Musalmans are a nation by any definition’. Logically, the problem in India was not ‘inter-communal’ but ‘international’. Any proposition not based on this understanding was bound to end in disaster for all concerned. 'If the British Government are really in earnest and sincere to secure the peace and happiness of the people of this sub-continent, the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands, by dividing India into “autonomous national states”.’ Though Jinnah was still thinking of a number of sovereign states in the subcontinent, he was thinking primarily of Muslims. The transition from Indian ethnicities to two 'nations' was already taking shape in his mind.

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