FREEDOM MOVEMENT

Kuldip Nayar on Lahore Resolution

How Created Two Minority Problems

Nothing could be more futile than an argument now about who was responsible for the partition of the subcontinent. With the sequence of events stretching back for several decades, such an exercise can only be an academic distraction. But it is clear that the differences between Hindus and Muslims had become so acute by the beginning of the forties that something like partition had become inevitable.

March 23, 1940, when the Muslim League adopted a resolution to demand the formation of Pakistan, comes to my mind when I think of those days.

In his address, Jinnah said that "the Musalmans are a nation by any definition" and that "if the British government are really earnest and sincere to secure the peace and happiness of the people of this subcontinent, the only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into autonomous national states."

He did not use the word 'Pakistan'. Nor did it figure in the body of resolution, which was hammered into final form at the League's Subjects Committee long after his speech. But Pakistan was by then a popular term, the concept of an independent country for Muslims. Sikandar Hayat was opposed to partition because his Unionist Party, then in power in Punjab, was a platform of Hindu- Muslim-Sikh co-existence. But he was in a minority of one.

The operative portion of Lahore Resolution or, for that matter, of the Pakistan Resolution was: "That no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent States in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign".

Jinnah lived to rue the day the words "such territorial readjustment as may be necessary" were used in the resolution. Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy, picked up the words to justify the split of the Muslim-majority Punjab and Bengal when the subcontinent was partitioned. Still catastrophic was the phrase "independent states" because, later the supporters of independent East Bengal (now Bangladesh), argued that the creation of two independent countries, one in 'North- Western' and the other in the Eastern' zones of India, was conceived in the Pakistan Resolution itself. In the archives in London, there is a report on the findings of a Muslim League Committee constituted to implement the principle of the Lahore Resolution.

The committee had recommended the formation of the two Muslim states: one in the north-west (Sind, Baluchistan, NWFP and Punjab, together with Delhi after amalgamation with Punjab); the other in north-east (Assam and Bengal excluding the districts of Bankura and Midnapur, together with the district of Purnea from Bihar). Surprisingly, the committee did not say a word on Kashmir, which led India and Pakistan to wars subsequently.

An Avalanche

The Pakistan Resolution did wonders, beyond Jinnah's own expectations. It was an avalanche that swept away all other ideas from the Muslim mind and transformed the League into the Congress of Muslims. Only the Pathans in the NWFP remained unaffected.

From then on, Jinnah went on developing. relentlessly and impassively, his two-nation theory and the Pakistan demand. When his opponents talked of matters like the economic non-viability of the sate he envisaged, his reply was: "Then leave us to our fate" When some spoke nostalgically about the composite culture of Hindus and Muslims, he said: "Our sense of values and objectives in life and politics differ so greatly." And when Hindu referred to the Pakistan demand as "vivisection of the motherland", he said that for Muslims it was a struggle for survival.

For Muslims, Pakistan became "the promised land" and Jinnah a Moses. Rich and poor, politicians and civil servants, farmers and shopkeepers, young and old, men and women, rallied behind him. In Pakistan, they saw the realization of their personal dreams, separation from Hindus, who had more riches and jobs. Still more, they saw in Pakistan the return of the days (of Islamic conquests).

Linlithgow, the British Viceroy at that time, summed up the Muslim attitude in a letter to Amery, then Secretary to State: "No matter what guarantees were given to the Muslim minority, they would always feel like a Cinderella with trade union rights and a radio in the kitchen, but still below stair".

The Muslims began to believe more and more that Islam would be in danger in an India with a vast Hindu majority. Little thought was apparently given to what might happen to Muslims living in UP, Bihar, Maharashtra, Karnataka or in the other states which were to remain part of 'Hindu Hindustan' after the Muslims were given their 'homeland' state. And it was strange to find the Muslims of those areas more vocal in support of the demand for Pakistan than those in Punjab, the NWFP and Sind, which were to form parts of the new country.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, top Congress leader, warned that the Muslims in UP, Bihar and Madras would Awake and discover overnight that they have become aliens and foreigners. Backward industrially, educationally and economically, they will be left to the mercies of what would then become an unadulterated Hindu Raj".

When Jinnah was once asked by former Maharashtra Chief Justice M.C. Chagia what would happen to the Muslims left behind, he said: "They can take care of themselves". And later, he said elsewhere that there would be after all "Hindus in Pakistan just as Muslims in India". It looked as if to solve one minority problem, he was creating two similar problems in India and Pakistan.

(The Radiance Viewsweekly, 18-24 August, 1996)

Extracts from the Guilty Men of Partition

Ram Manohar Lohia's Views on Muslim Indians

"Muslims of India think that they owe their origin to such marauders as Ghazni and Ghori. An element of false self-pride enters into such erroneous understanding, which is further sustained by a theory of history that sees in every conquest an act of progress. Undoubtedly, there must have been stagnation and utter decadence in a society, which fell to an invader. Equally undoubtedly, every new force also one that conquers, brings some good alongside of the evil that it injects. To assess a conquest on the basis, first, of its success against a weaker foe and, secondly, of its introduction of novelty and movement would be to obliterate the distinction between good and wars evil, to worship the powerful and to select facts one- sidedly. No conquest is ever good, except in the wholly imaginary instance of a people that would have stayed beyond stagnant until doomsday without it. A nation that reads swept history in any other way becomes chronically subject to ad and invasions and conquests and India easily holds the world muslims. record in this respect.

"Muslims, because they have acknowledged Ghazni and Ghori as their ancestors, have been unable to protect their own freedom and rule India's mediaeval history is just as much a war between Muslim and Muslim as between Hindu and Muslim. The invading Muslim has fought and conquered the native Muslims. Five times were the native Muslims unable to protect their freedom. They were subjected to such unparalleled massacres as hose of Taimur and Nadirshah. The Mogul Taimur massacred the native Pathans and the Irani Nadirshah the native Moguls. A people who acknowledges invaders and massacres as their ancestors are unworthy of freedom and their self-pride is false, because they have no continuing identity that they can maintain. This, however, does not solve the problem of the enduring effects of a conquest, if it has lasted long. Conquerors who change into natives in course of time become a part of the nation and a formula must be evolved that corresponds to this change in realities. It is one thing not to acknowledge the rape of one's mother; it is quite another to refuse to accept its results. The Muslim has erred in acknowledging both the rape and its results, the Hindu in refusing to acknowledge either. The Hindu has been unable to protect his mother and he adopts the easy way of transferring his anger at his own infirmity on to the head of his half-brother. The half- brother in the turn goes native and falls victim to another variation of the disease. His scale of values falls so low that he mistakes infirmity for prowess.

"I have felt lately that the Moguls with the exception of the great Akbar and the clever Jahangir were a relapse into estrangement, while the Pathans had reached an unusual degree of approximation with the Hindu. Jayasi and Rahiman are as bright stars of Hindi poetry as any Hindus. In fact, Rahiman is a name that embodies the Indianization of Islam. It is like the name of Russian Muslims, whose Islamic names have been traditionally Russianized by the addition of such suffix as 'ov' or 'in' or that of Indonesian Muslims, most of whose Indonesian or Hindu names have not been changed in spite of the conversion to Islam."

(Source: The Organizer, 21 July, 1996)

Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan on Hostage Theory

One day in October 1938 during a conversation with Sir Sikander I began talking to him, rather enthusiastically about the merits of the Pakistan idea and suggested that it might after all be the best way of dealing with the communal problem. Sir Sikander, usually so calm and suave, after listening for a few minutes turned upon me, his eyes burning with indignation, and took me to task with these words:

"How can you talk like this? You have been long enough in Western Punjab to know the Muslims there. Surely you can see that Pakistan would be an invitation to them to cut the throat of every Hindu bania."

"I put forward the hostage theory - there would be so many Muslims in Hindustan and so many Hindus in Pakistan that both sides would hesitate to harass their minorities for fear of reprisals. He brushed it aside. The Baluchis and Awans of West Punjab, he said, would not care at all about the lives of Muslims in Hindustan. The hostage idea was a mere fancy. Both sides would kill their own hostages. 'I do hope', he went on, I won't hear you talk like this again. Pakistan would mean a massacre".

(Source: Divide and Quilt by Sir Penderel Moon LCS) (Courtesy: The Organizer)