Abdul Qadir
JINNAH was hailed as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity by people as big as Gokhale and Sarojini Naidu. He wanted Muslims to be treated as equals instead of a minority. However, the 1932 Round Table Conference and Rule of Hindu Majority Congress (1937-39) changed him forever. Indian National Congress, the first political party in British India, was founded in 1885 by a group of lawyers, who sought no more than colonial self-government. The true face of the radical nationalist elements within the party came to the fore just two decades later, in 1905, when Lord Curzon divided the largest province of Bengal for administrative reasons. It was also during this movement against the partition of Bengal that Vande Mataram became popular as the anthem of Indian nationalism, while Bal Gangadhar Tilak used his newspaper Kesari to promote Hindu festivals having anti-Muslim themes.
It was against this backdrop that the Muslim League was established in 1906, whereby Muslims made their demands for political representation as a separate community with a distinct identity. Soon after, the British introduced the Minto-Morley reforms in 1909 which called for elections at the provincial level with separate electorates for Muslims. In the year 1916, in Lucknow, the Indian National Congress and Muslim League jointly produced an agreement, called the Lucknow Pact. The Congress agreed formally to the demand for separate electorates for Muslims. However, soon afterward, in 1920, the seeds of division were already sown when Jinnah wrote to Gandhi, after the later tried to change the constitution of Annie Besant’s former organization, Swaraj Sabha, expressing his disgust at the policies that Gandhi pursued, resulting in grave divisions among the Indian nations, which later, through the Poona Pact would be manifested more forcefully.
In May 1927, Jinnah successfully convinced a group of prominent Muslim leaguers to abandon the Muslim League’s position on separate electorates. This facilitated Delhi proposals in which Congress accepted joint electorates with reserved seats for Muslims. This cemented Jinnah’s aspirations as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. The Congress, however, succumbed to the Hindu Mahasabha which did not want Muslim majorities in Bengal and Punjab.
The all-parties conference held in 1928 resulted in the Nehru Report which called for, besides, rejecting reserved seats for Muslims in Punjab and Bengal; take away the separate electorates for Muslims by replacing them with reserved seats for Muslims under joint electorates, with the right to contest general seats. However, it did not refer to Jinnah’s most crucial point about one-third representation of Muslims. Jinnah condemned the Nehru Report as a ‘Hindu document’. In response, he proposed fourteen points in which an important provision was the right of any community to veto any legislation by two-thirds of its members.
Not long after, the British organized Round Table conferences to be held between 1930 and 1932 to discuss constitutional reforms. During the conference, Gandhi tried his best to prevent the Untouchable leader Dr Ambedkar from his advocacy for separate electorates. When he failed, Gandhi went to Sir Agha Khan and Jinnah in a bid to silence Ambedkar but the Muslim League stood with the Dalit community of 60 million people.
Ambedkar, under pressure, withdrew his demand for separate electorates for the Dalit community. While Gandhi had confided to a colleague that if Untouchables were accorded separate identities, they would gang up with ‘Muslim hooligans and kill caste Hindus’, the minorities finally came together and issued joint demands in the form of the Indian Minorities Pact which was handed over to British Prime Minister in 1931. Nehru’s ability as a political leader was put to the test during the Provincial elections of 1936-37. He campaigned tirelessly and covered eighty thousand kms in just five months. Eventually, Congress was elected on 761 out of 1161 seats. However, of the 485 seats reserved for Muslims, it contested only 58 losing more than half, while also failing to field candidates in 90 percent of the Muslim constituencies, creating an atmosphere of uneasiness among Muslims.
Nehru announced in hubris that Congress and the British government were the only political powers of consequence shutting Muslims out. The subsequent Congress rule from 1937 to 1939 proved to be a nightmare for Muslims, marked by fifty-seven serious communal riots and policies that marginalized Muslims. Congress adopted ‘VandeMataram’ as the national anthem and Congress tri-color flag became the national flag. Steps were taken, including the creation of a Congress Army and the Mandar Scheme, aimed at promoting Hindu culture by making Mandar education mandatory at the elementary level.
By 1938, eight out of the eleven provinces were under Congress rule and party membership had increased tenfold from 470,000 to 4.5 million in three years. In-factCongress was a Hindu body from the start. In 1914, it had a total of 856 delegates, in 1915 there were 2190 and in 1916 there were 2249. Of these the number of Muslims were less than 1% in 1914, 2% in 1915 and 3% in 1916. In 1937, 97%, members of Congress were Hindus. Referring to the hindu majority rule of Congress, Churchill said that the Congress had resorted to police firing on civilians so much that it killed more people in comparison to 200 years of British rule. It was a severe indictment but well deserved. These events had confirmed the worst fears of Muslims. Jinnah said in Oct 1937: “On the very threshold of what little power and responsibility is given, the majority community has clearly shown their hand: that Hindustan is for the Hindus”.
Jinnah was a visionary, who didn’t just recognize the threat from Hindu Mahasabha but also from the Machiavellian perfidy of a hindu body called Congress. Sarojini Naidu described him as one incorruptible man in whole of India on 18 Jan 1945 in Madras. She said: ‘I may not agree with him, but if there is one who cannot be bought by title, honour or position it is Mr Mohammed Ali Jinnah’
—The author is an independent researcher. He can be reached at [email protected]
