‘Subcontinent of Nationalities’ versus ‘Indivisibility of India’
- By : Anirban Ganguly
- Category : Articles
Jinnah’s demand for separate Muslim homelands sparked fierce opposition, with leaders like Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and BR Ambedkar rallying for Hindu unity and an indivisible India
In his voluminous study ‘Pathway to India’s Partition’, historian Bimal Prasad, observes that in January 1940, Jinnah wrote to Mahatma Gandhi, in response to an article that the latter had written in the Harijan, that his premises were ‘wrong as you start with the theory of an Indian nation that does not exist…’ India, Jinnah told the Mahatma, ‘Is not [a] nation, nor a country. It is a subcontinent composed of nationalities, Hindus and Muslims being two major nations.’
Addressing the Muslim League council in Delhi on 26 February 1940 Jinnah hinted at the League’s new proposal. He said people asked him what their goal was, ‘If you do not understand even now, then I say you will never understand what our goal is. Great Britain wants to rule India. Mr Gandhi wants to rule India and the Musalmans. We say that we will not let either the British or Mr Gandhi rule the Musalmans. We want to be free.’
A few weeks before the Lahore Resolution was passed, addressing students of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on 6 March 1940, Jinnah said that as far as he had understood Islam, it did not ‘advocate a democracy which would allow the majority of non-Muslims to decide the fate of the Muslims. We cannot accept a system of government in which the non-Muslims merely by the numerical majority would rule and dominate us.’ Jinnah’s concluding appeal to the students at AMU was to ‘stand firm as one solid block of steel’ and to ‘go on organizing our people, training them, disciplining them. They are with us. Do not worry about handicaps, organize the Muslims, bring them all together, train them, drill them and make of them the most wonderful political army that India has ever seen and we will soon reach the goal of our freedom.’
‘Slightly over a fortnight after this,’ writes Bimal Prasad, ‘came the fateful day – 22 March 1940 – when the Muslim League met for its 27th annual session at Lahore.’ In his presidential address Jinnah argued that ‘If the British were keen to ensure peace and happiness in the country, the only course open to them was to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into autonomous national States.’ Jinnah points out Prasad, ‘must have been the happiest person at the adoption of the Lahore Resolution. Since his conversion to the Pakistan idea in 1937, he had been working incessantly for its spread among the intelligentsia and the youth, preparing the ground for its adoption by the League.’ While the Muslim League session was being held in Lahore, the Khaksar militia, supported by the Muslim League, took out an armed procession and pledged to carve out an independent state.
In his captivating study of the partition of India, ‘The Tragic Story of Partition’, H.V. Seshadri makes an interesting observation on Jinnah’s Pakistan resolution. Seshadri points out that ‘in the Pakistan Resolution, demand was made for independent states for Muslims in North-Eastern and Eastern Zones of India. This itself was a repudiation of the League’s claim of separate nationality for Muslims based on their Islamic identity. The demand for the formation of two states implied two different nations even among the Indian Muslims.’ The word ‘States’ was only later on changed to ‘State’, and, notes Seshadri, ‘Jinnah made light of the whole affair by saying that the original word was a printing error.’ Seshadri argues that Lahore’s choice as ‘the place for the League’s Pakistan Resolution was very significant.’ It was at Lahore, a decade earlier that the ‘Congress had vowed under Nehru’s presidentship to achieve complete independence’ and ‘now the Muslim League had thrown the gauntlet for a divided independence.’
Indian communists endorsed Jinnah’s line and worked as megaphones to amplify it. From 1941 onwards the CPI’s cadres and leaders carried on a sustained campaign across India, supporting the Pakistan resolution and Jinnah’s line of separate homelands. The Communist Party of India (CPI)’s Central Committee plenum argued that ‘Every section of the Indian people which has contiguous territory as its homeland, common historical tradition, common language, culture, psychological make-up, and common economic life would be recognised as a distinct nationality with the right to exist as an autonomous state within the free Indian Union or federation and will have the right to secede from it if it may so desire…’ In its election manifesto of 1946, the CPI called ‘for power to be transferred to 17 different “sovereign national constituent assemblies…””
Several Communist leaders ‘instructed its cadres to fan out across the country in support of the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan.’ They were told to explain to the Hindu masses, ‘what is just in this Pakistani demand, namely the right of the Muslim nationalities to autonomous state existence’, including the right to separation. The communist party organs ‘were instructed to portray the Muslim League and Jinnah as progressive.’ Public meetings and conferences organized by the CPI in support of the Muslim League’s demand of Pakistan invariably ended with cries of ‘Pakistan Zindabad’ and ‘Muslim League Zindabad.’
Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee declared an all-out resistance to Jinnah’s Pakistan resolution. It was meant to perpetuate Muslim domination, he held large public meetings that he addressed all over Bengal. The province was then ruled by a Muslim League ministry. Syama Prasad warned that the Lahore resolution aimed at carving out Bengal as a separate and independent Muslim state. Addressing a public meeting in Serampore in Hooghly, Dr Mookerjee ‘appealed for Hindu unity’ and said that they were willing to accept as brothers and join hands with anyone or community who accepted India as the fatherland.
Around the same time, Dr Ambedkar also warned Hindus and the Congress that ‘concession’ and ‘appeasement’ would only ‘exacerbate Muslim aggressiveness for they would interpret it as a sign of Hindu defeatism’, writes Venkat Dhulipala, in his profusely documented, ‘Creating a New Medina.’ Dr Ambedkar compared the Muslim League to the Nazi fascists and drew a parallel from the past of the concessions made by the Allies to appease and satiate Hitler. It was an appeasement which had only served to increase Hitler’s hunger for occupation and domination.
Meanwhile, the Hindu Mahasabha’s (HM) Working Committee which met at Dadar, between May 18-19 1940, ‘called upon the govt to give a definite undertaking that no Pact entered into by the Congress and the Moslems between themselves, to which the HM is not made a party and which is not sanctioned by it, can be binding on the Hindus as a whole.’ Another resolution called for imparting military training to Indians for the defence of India and called for the raising of a national militia ‘on a large scale and a voluntary basis without distinction of caste or creed, which should be equipped in an up-to-date manner both on Land and Air and which would serve as a force reserved for Indian Defence.’
The HM Working Committee also ‘reiterated its demand for a declaration by the Government that Dominion Status will be granted to India immediately on the cessation of the War guaranteeing the indivisibility of India as a political unit…’ This, it argued, ‘should not be conditioned on any Hindu-Muslim Pact as indispensable pre-requisite.’ Another crucial resolution was passed, ‘urging the Hindus to co-operate wholeheartedly with the Census authorities to get their numerical strength well registered in the coming census.’ The HM Working Committee also emphasised ‘the need to popularize the definition that everyone ‘who recognises this Bharatvarsha as his or her Fatherland or Holy Land is a Hindu.’
Referring to the Muslim League’s declaration on Pakistan, the HM Working Committee ‘urged upon all Hindu princes the necessity of taking immediate steps to awaken and consolidate the Hindus their States by extending every support to the Hindu Sanghathan movement in general and the Hindu Mahasabha in particular.’ The Dadar meeting of the Hindu Mahasabha with senior leaders in attendance, decided to go all out in advocating united India and Hindu unity in the face of Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan.
It was from here and against the backdrop of such tumultuous developments, that Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee reached Nagpur to meet Doctorji on 20 May 1940 especially. The meeting was brief yet deeply significant.