Rajmohan Gandhi's imminent arrest and deportation

Prof Rajmohan Gandhi writes in the Indian Express-

In February 1943, some months after his Quit India call, prisoner Gandhi went on a 21-day fast in protest against the British empire’s worldwide anti-Quit India propaganda. That month Gandhi discussed the Muslim League’s Pakistan demand with a visitor, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the only senior Congress leader not in jail at the time. Having openly disagreed with the Quit India move, Rajagopalachari had not been imprisoned.

Rajmohan is speaking of his two grandfathers.

In their Pune talks, Gandhi and Rajagopalachari quietly agreed under what was later called the C R formula that if the League joined the Congress in a common campaign for independence, the Congress could accept a post-independence plebiscite in contiguous Muslim-majority districts in the north-west and the east of undivided India. If the plebiscite favoured Partition, a bond of alliance would cover the subjects of defence, commerce and communications.

So Gandhi & Rajaji agreed to Partition the country. No 'bond of alliance' would exist because the border would be contested. Population exchange would be far from 'voluntary'.

Nineteen months later, in September 1944, a freed Gandhi met Jinnah 14 times in Mumbai to sell him the CR formula. The talks failed. Jinnah offered five grounds for rejecting this formula’s Pakistan. One, it was not large enough: West Bengal and East Punjab were excluded. Two, he said, it was not sovereign enough: The proposed bond of alliance clipped sovereignty. Three, the scheme gave all residents in the contiguous Muslim-majority areas the right to vote on Pakistan, whereas Jinnah wanted the right restricted to Muslims. Four, while Gandhi wanted voting for separation to follow independence, Jinnah wanted the British to divide India before quitting.

So, everyone was agreed on dividing India. How exactly and by whom it would be divided would be decided by events.

Finally, complained Jinnah, while Gandhi was conceding the right of contiguous Muslim-majority areas to separate, he was refusing to admit that Hindus and Muslims were two different nations. “Let us call in a third party or parties to guide or even arbitrate between us,” Gandhi suggested. Jinnah did not agree. Three years later, in August 1947, Jinnah obtained no more than the Pakistan area that Gandhi had offered, but he obtained it without any bond of alliance.

He also got a chunk of Jammu & Kashmir.

Though a sad Gandhi acquiesced in the 1947 Partition, neither he nor any of the Congress’s prominent leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Rajagopalachari, Maulana Azad or Rajendra Prasad agreed that Hindus and Muslims comprised two nations.

Yet they had agreed that Muslim majority areas were not part of the Indian Nation. By this principle, a part of India where Muslims become a majority and which is contiguous with Pakistan or Bangladesh, can cease to be India.

What took place in August 1947 was emphatically not the creation of two nations, one Hindu and the other Muslim.

It was, quite emphatically, the creation of a Muslim nation named Pakistan and another nation which accepted that any Muslim majority part of it which was contiguous to Pakistan ceased to be Indian. This is the basis of the Pakistani claim to Jammu & Kashmir which they pursue to this day.

Gandhi and Rajaji and Patel and Nehru came from Hindu majority parts of India. They agreed that Hindus living in Muslim majority parts of the country were not their fellow citizens to whom they owed any duty of care or mutual protection. Nehru's ancestors came from Kashmir and it so happened that India was able to hand on to the Muslim majority Valley. But Nehru's caste fellows were ethnically cleansed from it in the Nineties.

It was only the separation of contiguous Muslim-majority areas in the subcontinent’s north-west and east. Later, Pakistan indeed chose to become an Islamic nation, yet India remained a nation for all, with equal rights, firmly entrenched in its Constitution, for all its citizens, irrespective of religion (or race, gender or caste).

India replaced Royal dynasties with political dynasties. Its Constitution permitted the Prime Minister to take on dictatorial powers. Indira Gandhi suffered no legal or other sanction for jailing her opponents and forcibly sterilizing hundreds of thousands of people. No one has been brought to book for the extra-judicial killing of over a hundred thousand people in insurgency blighted States.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has blamed Partition on Nehru.

Maulana Azad did so too.

Assigning sole or main responsibility for that painful event to Nehru lacks any historical basis.

Gandhi bears more responsibility because he chose Nehru for the top job.

It should be recognized, moreover, that if Partition had not occurred, all the residents of today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh would have been free to move to any corner of today’s India.

Unless killed by the locals. The reason any tribal population has survived in India is because of killing ability.

This should be realised by persons like Union minister G Kishan Reddy of the BJP who claimed, on February 9, that if Indian citizenship was offered, half the population of Bangladesh would migrate to India.

They may yet do so if sea-levels rise.

Who should be held responsible for Partition is not this article’s theme. Nor am I focusing here on movements or migrations of people. My purpose is to recall that though the two-nation theory was indeed advanced by the Muslim League after March 1940 and by the Hindu Mahasabha from 1937, India’s 1947 partition did not validate the two-nation theory. It should also be remembered that the Constitution of India adopted at the end of 1949 totally rejected that theory.

So what? Burma and Pakistan and Ceylon and everywhere else adopted Constitutions which talked of non-discrimination. It was all hog-wash.

Ignorance about one another is a reality in almost every society. So is prejudice about groups different from ours.

What about Rajmohan's ignorance and prejudice about the BJP? 

But the history of human beings is, among other things, a story of growing awareness that all of us are the same underneath.

So why continually attack the BJP?

When a Korean movie wins the Oscar in the US, when people of Asian descent hold powerful political positions in several countries in Europe and North America, when Indian-Americans not only win seats in the US Congress but hope, one day, to send an Indian to the White House, something like the two-nation theory can only be seen as a relic from a retrograde past.

In what way is Pakistan's existence and its continual export of terrorism a 'relic of the past'. Why pretend that there isn't Islamic terrorism even in the US and the UK and Europe? Just recently, in London, two people of Kashmiri Muslim descent were involved in terrorist incidents after being released from jail for similar offenses. 

Long ago, people indeed thought that other tribes, races, religious groups or castes were inferior, or superior, or menacing, or an easy target. We know better today.

If so, why demonize Modi and Shah? They are doing the same thing as Nehru and Indira and so forth. 

The two-nation theory has to be rejected not only categorically but also thoroughly.

What is Rajmohan getting at? Akhand Bharat? The conquest of Pakistan and Bangladesh? 

It is not enough to agree that as between Indian citizens no law can discriminate against anyone on religious grounds. Denying a path to citizenship to immigrants of a particular religion is an unconcealed expression of the two-nation theory, apart from being a violation of the constitutional and human principle of equality.

Rubbish! Recognising that non Muslims are legitimate refugees if they have run away from certain Islamic Republics does not represent a 'denial of a path to citizenship' for Muslims who are genuine refugees from those same countries. However, Muslims are not persecuted on the grounds of their Religion in Islamic countries. Nobody says to them 'convert to Islam or die' because they reply 'we are already Muslims. Listen to us recite the Shahada. Feast your eyes on our circumcised members. What more do you want? Just tell us and we will happily do it because it is our Religious duty.' 

Applied today to immigrants, the theory will be directed tomorrow against fellow-citizens whose ancestors were Indians several hundred years ago.

Rajmohan is in America where illegal immigrants are being deported. He himself is in America perfectly legally. Why does he not complain that if illegals are deported then, sooner or later, so will he be? Moreover, currently some darker skinned people are in Jail in America for lewd behavior. This is proof that Rajmohan will himself soon be arrested for running around flashing his genitals at elderly women. Moreover, in America, there are a number of male prostitutes who are constantly getting their assholes pounded. This means Rajmohan himself is bound to end up with a very sore asshole. Yet he refuses to leave America. Why? Is it because he secretly desires to end up as a homosexual prostitute incarcerated for lewd behavior? Or is it because he knows he will be deported at the Government's expense sooner or later? 

Eventually, it will set neighbour against neighbour. It should be given no sustenance whatsoever, not even in the name of succour for the persecuted.

Similarly, America must stop deporting illegal migrants and put an end to the practice of incarcerating homosexual prostitutes whose lewd behavior constitutes a public nuisance. Otherwise Rajmohan himself will end up in prison, waiting to be deported, with a very sore ass-hole indeed.