1947: The Splitting Up of India

1947: The Splitting Up of India

The British government’s well calibrated policy of divide and rule paid off. The Quit India Movement unwittingly strengthened the Muslim League. For three years the Congress was outlawed, its leaders in prison, its funds seized and its organization virtually destroyed. In the political vacuum thus created the Muslim League, which was practically wiped out in 1937 elections, polling just 4  percent of votes, had grown into a mass party appealing successfully to religious emotions. Between 1942 and 1945, the League increased its membership to two million. 

Jinnah, unable to adapt to the secular and liberal ethos of the freedom struggle, left India and settled in England. Interestingly, his family was originally Hindu (Jinnah’s grandfather Punjabhai Thakkar, a Lohana, got converted to Islam and became an Ismaili Khoja).  He was persuaded to return to India to assume the leadership of the League.  He turned into a bitter critic of Gandhi and the Congress. He consolidated the League and the British Government started treating the League on par with the Congress and accepting him as Gandhi’s principal adversary.  

The momentum for partition of India was gaining due to communal politics. In his presidential address at the All India Hindu Mahasabha Session in 1937, Ahmadabad, V.D.Savarkar said: “There are two antagonistic nations living side by side in India…India cannot be assumed to be a unitarian and homogeneous nation… there are two nations in the main: the Hindu and the Muslim.” Three years later in 1940 Jinnah came out with his two-nation theory at the Muslim League’s Lahore session, demanding a separate country Pakistan for Muslims.  He argued Hindus and Muslims were two different nations and hence could not live together as one. On August 15, 1943, Savarkar endorsed this:“I have no quarrel with Jinnah’s two-nation theory. We, Hindus, are a nation by ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations”. Both of them were ignoring the historical fact that for more than  thousand years Hindus and Muslims lived together in India.

Ambedkar observed: "Strange as it may appear... Savarkar and Jinnah, instead of being opposed to each other on the one nation versus two nations issue, are in complete agreement about it. They differ only as regards the terms and conditions on which the two nations should live.  Jinnah says India should be cut up into two, Pakistan and Hindustan... Savarkar insists… India shall not be divided into two parts… the two nations shall dwell in one country … the constitution shall be such that the Hindu nation will be enabled to occupy a predominant position  and the Muslim nation made to live in the position of subordinate .”

Nehru's rebuttal: “Why only two… for if nationality was based on religion, then there were many nations in India... These two nations existed in varying proportions in most of the villages… A Bengali Muslim and a Bengali Hindu living together, speaking the same language, and having much the same traditions and customs, belonged to different nations”.  He was very critical of the communal organisations which undermined the cause of a united India. They were revivalists, representing feudal interests claiming protection and special privileges for their respective groups and hence supported the British Government.

The introduction of separate electorate for Muslims resulted in communal divide, as evident from the elections of 1945-46.  The Congress  won 59 of 102 elected seats in the Central Assembly, while the Muslims League won all 30 Muslim seats, and 427 of 482 Muslim seats in the Provinces. However, it lost in the predominately Muslim North West Frontier Province of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan- Frontier Gandhi. The Congress won 90 percent of the general seats, and the League 87 percent of Muslim seats in the Provinces. Jinnah insisted the League should be recognized as the sole representative organization of the Muslims and the Congress as a party of Hindus alone. He refused to entertain Congress President Azad.

Gandhi and Nehru had several meetings with Jinnah and exchanged many letters to find a satisfactory solution to the Hindu-Muslim question. He was vague, evasive and refused to identify the problem, adopting a rigid and adamant attitude. As Nehru observed: “he is a strangely negative person. Hence all attempts to understand his positive aspect failed...” The Hindu Mahasabha activists protested Gandhi's initiative to hold talks with Jinnah. Savarkar denounced Gandhi’s efforts for Hindu-Muslim unity as ‘appeasement' and attacked the Congress for making concessions to Muslim separatists.  

The Congress leaders were released from prison in March 1945. In 1946, the Congress held a presidential election. Patel was the overwhelming choice of the Provincial Congress Committees. But as in 1929 and 1937 Gandhi intervened and Nehru was elected.  The Mahatma’s reason: “Jawaharlal cannot be replaced today, whilst the charge is being taken from Englishmen. He, a Harrow boy, a Cambridge graduate and a barrister, is wanted to carry on the negotiations with the Englishmen,” making Patel to remark,‘there is only one genuinely nationalist Muslim in India-Jawaharlal.’ Moreover, as Michael Brecher believed, “Nehru could speak with greater authority for a united Congress than Patel, who was inclined to distrust nationalist Muslims in general.” The Viceroy invited Nehru, as the Congress President, to form an Interim Government. Had Gandhi not intervened, Patel would have been the first de facto Premier of India in 1946. And ‘Sardar was robbed of the prize and it rankled deeply.’ The destiny of India at that crucial juncture was intertwined with Gandhi and Nehru  

On all the three occasions, Gandhi chose Nehru over Patel. In 1937 when Gandhi publicly designated Nehru as his successor, dismissing the rumors of their split, issued a statement: “It will require much more than differences of opinion to estrange us. We have had differences from the moment we became co-workers, and yet I have said for some years and say now that not Rajaji but Jawaharlal will be my successor. He says he does not understand my language, and that he speaks a language foreign to me...I know this, that when I am gone he will speak my language’- a prophetic statement.

On August 16, 1946, the Muslim League launched the ‘Direct Action’ to press its demand for Pakistan. This led to wide spread communal violence and riots across the country.  In Calcutta some 4,000 persons were killed and thousands more wounded in communal violence. It was the beginning of a tidal wave of communal madness. And “the scene soon shifted to Noakhali  where Muslim gangs went on the rampage, killing, looting, converting Hindus by force, and destroying Hindu temples and property indiscriminately…These spread like wildfire to the neighboring province of Bihar where the Hindu majority wreaked vengeance with equal savagery…” killing more than 7,000 Muslims.

On February 20, 1947, Prime Minister Attlee made an historic declaration in the House of Commons that power would be transferred by June 1948. Lord Mountbatten replaced Wavell as the last Viceroy. Despite his keenness to avoid dividing India, the tense communal situation made him to conclude that partition had become necessary, setting August 15 for transfer of power. He came out with the Plan for dividing the British India into two Dominions.

Patel was the first Congress leader to accept the partition. He had been outraged by Jinnah's ‘Direct Action’ campaign, an open conflict between him and the nationalists could degenerate into a Hindu-Muslim civil war. He used the analogy of a diseased body and argued that if one limb was poisoned it must be removed quickly lest the entire organism suffer irreparably. The nationalist Muslim leaders Azad, Frontier Gandhi and many others felt betrayed. The Muslim League joined the Interim Government only to wreak it. Its Ministers adopted a hostile non-co-operative attitude,Finance Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and Home Minister Sardar Patel clashing more often.

On June 3, 1947, the Congress Working Committee accepted the partition.  And on June 15 Patel, addressed the AICC delegates: “Nobody likes the division of India... But the choice is between one division and many divisions. We cannot give way to emotionalism and sentimentality... I am afraid of one thing, that all our toil and hard work of these many years might go waste or prove unfruitful… Muslim officials from the top down to the chaprasis are working for the League. Whether we like it or not,  de facto Pakistan already exists in  Punjab and Bengal. Under the circumstances, I would prefer a de jure Pakistan.”

On August 15, 1947 India was partitioned.  Jinnah had succeeded in splitting up of India. As Stanley Wolpert, his official biographer who wrote Jinnah of Pakistan, said: “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three."The truth is the partition became inescapable due to Jinnah’s personal ambition, intellectual dishonesty and opportunistic politics.  In his personal life Jinnah never really cared much about religion or God. The man who never went to jail, nor participated in the freedom struggle, walked away taking a portion of India.  He had no interest in Islamic principles, the Quran, or Muslim culture. To Rafiq Zakaria, author of the book The Man who divided India, “Jinnah began his political career as a messenger of Hindu-Muslim unity, but ended as communalist whose ultimate aim was to divide the Indian subcontinent on the basis of religion.”  

Jinnah died on  September 11, 1948.  Prime Minister Nehru upon his death had said: "How shall we judge him …only a great sadness for all that has been ... he succeeded in his quest and gained his objective, but at what a cost ..." And many years later, Mountbatten stated that “if he had known Jinnah was so physically ill, he would have stalled, hoping Jinnah's death would avert partition.”   Jinnah suffered from tuberculosis, which only his sister Fatima and a few others close to him were aware of.  He kept it secret as he believed public knowledge of his lung ailments would hurt him politically.