The myth of for and against
A timely book by Shamsul Islam demolishes stereotypes associated with the role of Muslim masses during Partition
The standard narrative about the Partition, actively
propagated by the Hindu communalists and innocently believed by most
Hindus, puts the onus on the Muslim masses that supported the Muslim
League’s demand for a separate country. It is not uncommon to hear
people referring to an area where Muslims live in substantial numbers as
“Pakistan”. However, as a recently published book tells us, the reality
is very different.
“Muslims Against Partition”,
written by Shamsul Islam, the multi-talented theatre activist,
anti-communal propagandist and political scientist, and published by
Pharos Media and Publishing Pvt. Ltd., offers an eye-opening account of
the way a large number of Muslim political leaders, thinkers and
organisations opposed the idea of Pakistan and actively worked against
it. Renowned historian Harbans Mukhia has penned a thought-provoking
foreword wherein he praises the writer for drawing our attention to the
ambivalent attitude of the Congress to the question of communalism as it
had many leaders who were sympathetic to the “exclusivist Hindu cause”.
All of us know about prominent Muslim leaders like
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, M. A. Ansari, Asaf Ali and Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad who fiercely opposed the communal politics of the Muslim League.
However, since they were in the Congress, their opposition to the
creation of a separate homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims is
generally ignored. What is remembered is the fact that the Muslim League
led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah was successful in mobilising the Muslim
elite as well as Muslim masses in support of its Pakistan demand and had
won most of the Muslim seats in the 1946 election to provincial
assemblies.
However, most people remain unaware that
this fact conceals a vital aspect of reality. The Sixth Schedule of the
1935 Act had restricted the franchise on the basis of tax, property and
educational qualifications, thus excluding the mass of peasants, the
majority of shopkeepers and traders, and many others. Thus, as Shamsul
Islam informs us quoting from Austin Granville’s book on the Indian
Constitution, only 28.5 per cent of the adult populations of the
provinces could cast their votes in the 1946 provincial assembly
elections. This makes it amply clear that the Pakistan demand was not
supported by the majority of Muslims because only a small percentage of
the Muslim population was eligible to vote.
Nationalist
Muslims had started expressing themselves as early as 1883 when the
Congress was not even born and nationalism was in the early stages of
its inception. Shamsul Islam’s book contains a very informative chapter
on Muslim patriotic individuals and organisations. It tells us the
inspiring story of Shibli Nomani who established a National School in
Azamgarh in 1883 and actively opposed the Muslim League agenda of
cooperation with the British and opposition to the Hindus. Nomani, who
died a year after Jinnah’s entry into the League in 1913, castigated the
organisation because “everyday the belief which is propagated, the
emotion which is instigated is (that) Hindus are suppressing us and we
must organise ourselves.” In a chapter titled “Two-Nation Theory: Origin
and Hindu-Muslim Variants”, Shamsul Islam underlines the fact that much
before the Muslim League came up with the two-nation theory, leaders
such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, B. S. Moonje and Lajpat Rai were
championing the cause of a Hindu nation. Much before them, Raj Narain
Basu (1826-1899), maternal grandfather of Aurobindo Ghosh, and his close
associate Naba Gopal Mitra (1840-1894) had emerged as the co-fathers of
Hindu nationalism. Eminent historian R. C. Majumdar has remarked that
“Naba Gopal forestalled Jinnah’s theory of two nations by more than half
a century”. So, the onus for spreading the belief that Hindus and
Muslims constituted two separate nations that could not peacefully
co-exist with each other should first be placed at the door of Hindu
leaders.
Of all the Muslim leaders who were opposed to the idea of Partition, the case of Allah Bakhsh seems to be most interesting.
When
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a derogatory reference to
the Indian freedom struggle and Quit India Movement, Allah Bakhsh, who
as head of the Ittehad Party was the Premier (chief minister) of Sind,
decide to return his titles of Khan Bahadur and Order of the British
Empire (OBE). Consequently, he was dismissed by the Viceroy. Later, he
was assassinated by supporters of the Muslim League and his murder paved
the way for the entry of the separatist organisation into Sind. The
rest, as they say, is history.