14 years ago, Perry Anderson published a book called 'the Indian ideology'. At the time, the Dynasty was in power. Rahul was expected to become PM and lead his party to victory in 2014. Now, Congress has been displaced by the BJP. The Indian ideology is Hindutva. One might say that the fad for Secularism and Socialism has passed. Hindu leaders of a previous generation went in for it to a greater or lesser extent, but beneath it all there was nothing but ecumenical Hinduism which, per force, became more and more hostile to Islam as Islamic terrorism and militancy emerged at the Global level.
Hindus needed democracy for two reasons
1) reform of their personal law. Hindus believe that a lot of onerous restrictions were 'apadh dharma'- due to exigent circumstances (i.e. Muslim rule)- these could now be removed by Parliament under the 'Ramrajya' principle as stated by Saint Tulsidas- करब साधुमत लोकमत नृपनय निगम निचोरि।
The State should act by distilling the collective wisdom of the saints (Sadhumat), the voice of the people (Lokmat / Jan-Vaani), the representation of soverignty and the essence of the scriptures (Nigama).
The British Raj had been secular (no established Church) and the Congress party, from the time of A.O Hume (a Vedantin, Vegetarian) was for cow-protection, prohibition etc. on supposedly scientific grounds. Indeed, at that time it was usual to claim that the Vedas confirmed the findings of geology and astronomy and even quantum physics!
2) Hindus have the bad habit of stabbing each other to inherit property or settle family disputes. Indian Society is segmentary. Elections- seen as a team sport, like cricket- defused the instinct to reach for a knife or agricutural implement in a moment of rage. Feuds of various types could continue under the relatively benign rubric of party politics. Incidentally, reserving lots of seats for Dalits was a great way to prevent the principal families of the District killing each other over who got to be the MP. It must be said, many of the Dalit legislators were of superior quality. Lord Wavell was amazed that the 'token' Dalit, Jagjivan Ram, in his Cabinet, turned out to have the greatest ability.
The other piece of good news, for Hindus, was that religious nutters followed Gandhi's example and stayed out of Parliament, prefering to roam around the countryside doing stupid shit.
Congress rather liked Islamic religiosity of a traditional kind and Urdu, Persian & even Arabic retained a certain aristocratic prestige- beside being useful for lawyers, like 'Mullah' Sapru, dealing with complicated cases involving waqf law. Since, in a previous age, Indic sectarian differences had been resolved by Umaswati, Nagarjuna & Sankara such that though matam (dogma) differed the vigyan (praxis) was the same, the temptation was to affirm एकम सत विप्रा बहुधा वदन्ति or 'Wahdat-e-din' i.e. essential identity of all religions no matter what their outward forms might be.
Ecumenical theology was all very well but the problem was that the emerging Muslim professional class wanted their share, or more than their share, of government jobs. To be frank, the Muslim was often better than the more numerous Hindu and the Hindus wanted to profit from their superior ability. The father-in-law of Michigan Senator El-Sayed is descended from one such Muslim. He was with the League before Independence but switched to Congress and was made a Deputy Minister entirely because of his ability.
The crucial question for India was who would control the army. Gandhi had put in an early claim for Congress to get full control of the Army. This incensed Churchill who believed the whole thing was a cunning Brahmin plot. But, it was obvious, whatever deal was made before the hand of power, it would be altered by whoever controlled the Army.
Thus, the real issue- when it came to partition- was whether there could be a single, apolitical, Army, or whether the Army would be partisan. Muslims decided not to risk coming under a Hindu dominated Army. They got their own country & their own army. Sadly, like Prussia, Pakistan became an Army with a country rather than the other way around.
Oblivious of the rather obvious points made above, Perry Anderson, writing for the LRB, Perry asked 'Why Partition'?
The answer was given by the Cabinet Mission. The Muslim Leage, demanding Pakistan, had got 90 percent of the Muslim vote in January 1946. The Brits hoped that India would remain united but the League wanted partition.
The Cabinet Mission Report of May 16 1946 takes note of this-
4. It is not intended in this statement to review the voluminous evidence which has been submitted to the Mission; but it is right that we should state that it has shown an almost universal desire, outside the supporters of the Muslim League for the unity of India. 5. This consideration did not, however, deter us from examining closely and impartially the possibility of a partition of India; since we were greatly impressed by the very genuine and acute anxiety of the Muslims lest they should find themselves subjected to a perpetual Hindu majority rule.
Hardly a problem if you are the majority- as would be the case in Muslim majority provinces. Thus the indigenous people of what would become Pakistan had been living under Muslim rule, not Hindu rule, since 1937.
This feeling has become so strong and widespread amongst the Muslims that it cannot be allayed by mere paper safeguards.
Muslims in Hindu or Sikh majority areas would be subjected to ethnic cleansing so as to accommodate refugees streaming across the new border. 'Paper safeguards' were known to be worthless from about 1934 when Poland unilaterally repudiated Minority Treaties.
The safeguard the Mission should have looked at had to do with an orderly exchange of population supervised by the Armed forces and facillitated by elected politicians and government employees.
This is because the Muslim League had failed to reach an agreement with Congress.
we… the Cabinet Ministers and the Viceroy… have done our utmost to assist the two main political parties to reach agreement upon the fundamental issue of the unity or division of India. After prolonged discussions in New Delhi we succeeded in bringing the Congress and the Muslim League together in conference at Simla. There was a full exchange of views and both parties were prepared to make considerable concessions in order to try to reach a settlement, but it ultimately proved impossible to close the remainder of the gap between the parties and so no agreement could be concluded. Since no agreement has been reached, we feel that it is our duty to put forward what we consider are the best arrangements possible to ensure a speedy setting up of the new constitution.
Guys who knew nothing about India were saying they had the solution for its political problems. This was bound to fail.
This statement is made with the full approval of His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom.
Which was bankrupt. Atlee wanted out of India as soon as possible. His Viceroy had a plan to evacuate the White population.
If there is to be internal peace in India it must be secured by measures which will assure to the Muslims a control in all matters vital to their culture, religion, and economic or other interests.
Sadly, Muslims are quite capable of slaughtering each other. Also, if Muslim kill kaffirs, kaffirs retaliate where they are stronger.
We therefore examined in the first instance the question of a separate and fully independent sovereign state of Pakistan as claimed by the Muslim League.
This was a waste of time. The army and civils service was already polarised. The problem for Jinnah was that Punjab might revert to a 'Unionist' coalition while Bengal might come under a KPP coalition. The League's moment of glory would be evanescent. That is why he was in a hurry.
The Cabinet Mission rejected 'greater Pakistan' on the basis that non-Muslim majority districts would not accept it. The League, at that time, would not accept the smaller Pakistan which they eventually got. This is the reason the Mission rejected partition.
We are therefore unable to advise the British Government that the power which at present resides in British hands should be handed over to two entirely separate sovereign states. This decision does not, however, blind us to the very real Muslim apprehensions that their culture and political and social life might become submerged in a purely unitary India,
If it hadn't been submerged during Maratha or Sikh or British rule, how would it become so if Congress- which contained a fair number of Muslims- formed a governing coalition at the Centre.
in which the Hindus with their greatly superior numbers must be a dominating element. To meet this the Congress have put forward a scheme under which provinces would have full autonomy subject only to a minimum of central subjects, such as foreign affairs, defence and communications.
This was what the 1935 Act had envisaged- a Federal India not too dissimilar to what already obtained. Why did the Mission reject it? The answer is that it was using the chimera of 'Grouping' to satisfy the Pakistan demand.
Under this scheme provinces, if they wished to take part in economic and administrative planning on a large scale, could cede to the centre optional subjects in addition to the compulsory ones mentioned above. 13. Such a scheme would, in our view, present considerable constitutional disadvantages and anomalies. It would be very difficult to work a central executive and legislature in which some ministers, who dealt with compulsory subjects, were responsible to the whole of India while other ministers, who dealt with optional subjects, would be responsible only to those provinces who had elected to act together in respect of such subjects. This difficulty would be accentuated in the central legislature, where it would be necessary to exclude certain members from speaking and voting when subjects with which their provinces were not concerned were under discussion. Apart from the difficulty of working such a scheme, we do not consider that it would be fair to deny to other provinces, which did not desire to take the optional subjects at the centre, the right to form themselves into a group for a similar purpose. This would indeed be more than the exercise of their autonomous powers in a particular way.
This is specious reasoning but the purpose is obvious. Jinnah & Co. could claim that 'grouping' was almost the same thing as 'greater Pakistan'. But, it had to be backed up by the offer of seccession after a ten year stand-still agreement.
The Cabinet Mission offered a very weak Centre with Provinces and Princely States retaining all residuary powers. The kicker was
5) Provinces should be free to form groups with executives and legislatures, and each group could determine the provincial subjects to be taken in common.
Could the whole of Punjab and Bengal/Assam compe into such groupings? If so, greater Pakistan would exist in all but name.
(6) The constitutions of the Union and of the groups should contain a provision whereby any province could by a majority vote of its legislative assembly call for a reconsideration of the terms of the constitution after an initial period of ten years and at ten-yearly intervals thereafter.
Did this mean secession? Yes- if big enough 'groupings' were involved. The problem was that nobody could be sure how people would vote in five years time- let alone after a decade. The Muslim League had a narrow window of opportunity.
One final point. The Brits owed a lot to the Sikhs. They were going to leave them lurch. Thus, they pretended otherwise-
We think that for these purposes it is sufficient to recognize only three main communities in India, General, Moslem and Sikh, the "General" community including all persons who are not Moslems or Sikhs.
Sadly, the Sikhs found that, when it came ethnic cleansing, they clustered with the 'General' community.
Nehru, quite rightly, rejected this crock of shit. Partition became inevitable because that's what the League wanted. The truth is there was a 'new Medina' ideology. By separating from the Kaffirs, Muslims would create a pure Islamic country and lose such traits as they retained by reason of their Kaffir ancestry.
Perry takes a different view-
By 1945, the era of Gandhi was over,
Gandhi's demand, during the Thirties, was for Congress to have control of the Army. Churchill had said that the Hindus were cowards and lacked fighting spirit. If so, Gandhi argued, it was the Congress Hindu who needed protection from 'Muslims, Punjabis (regardless of sect) and maybe Gurkhas as well.
and that of Nehru had begun.
It began with the Nehru report & the 1930 Lahore Resolution. Churchill said Nehru was a cunning Brahmin using the saintly Mahatma for his own Machiavellian ends.
It is conventional to dwell on the contrasts between the two, but the bearing of these on the outcome of the struggle for independence has remained by and large in the shadows.
Nonsense! The Indian freedom struggle is well understood by Indians because our grandparents took part in it.
Nor are the contrasts themselves always well captured. Nehru was a generation younger; of handsome appearance; came from a much higher social class; had an elite education in the West; lacked religious beliefs; enjoyed many an affair. So much is well known. Politically more relevant was the peculiar nature of his relationship to Gandhi. Inducted into the national movement by his wealthy father, a pillar of Congress since the 1890s, he fell under Gandhi’s spell in his late twenties, at a time when he had few political ideas of his own.
Motilal Nehru's daughter married a Muslim. Gandhi stepped in and got the couple to dissolve the marriage. He then got a suitable Brahmin boy for Vijaylaxmi to marry. The Nehrus owed Gandhi. They backed him to the hilt. It was a stroke of luck that the British Governor of their Province jailed both of them during the Prince of Wales's visit. Since the boycott worked best in the Hindi 'cow-belt', the Nehrus gained prominence. Motilal allied with CR Das (whose protege was Netaji Bose) to enter the legislature to show it was useless. But this was itself a useless tactic. Jawaharlal stood aloof from this foolishness & thus came to displace his father. He wanted a Republic of the conventional League of Nations type. At that time 'Minority Treaties' were believed to be effectual. It wasn't till 1934 that Poland unilaterally repudiated that shite. Subsequent events showed that partitions on the basis of language, religion, ideology etc. were inevitable unless a kick-ass Army could crush the thing. That's why what really mattered was control of the Army.
Once the Indian army and civil service became polarised, Partiton was bound to follow. The only question was whether there would be an orderly exchange of population. Since this would require some actual administrative capacity on the part of the political class, no such thing obtained.
A decade later, when he had acquired notions of independence and socialism Gandhi did not share, and was nearly forty, he was still writing to him: ‘Am I not your child in politics, though perhaps a truant and errant child?’
Jawaharlal hadn't joined his father's Swaraj party in 1923. He was Gandhi's son, in terms of politics, in 1928. But sons go their own way, while retaining love for their father. Nehru was going in the direction of Socialism, Industrialisation on the Soviet pattern (Nehru had visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and published a book about it, the very next year) and 'poorna swaraj' (i.e. a Republic wholly independent of the British Crown). In all these matters, Nehru prevailed.
Gandhi remained important at times of nation-wide agitation. Sadly, this involved forming an orderly queue and getting hit on the head. After that, you got to sulk in jail till Congress surrendered & accepted whatever arrangement the Brits decided to unilaterally impose.
The note of infantilism was not misplaced; the truancy, in practice, little more than coquetry.
No. Nehru won. Gandhi lost. Get over it.
Like so many others, dismayed by Gandhi’s scuttling of Non-Cooperation in 1922, in despair at his fast against the introduction of Untouchable electorates in 1932, baffled by his reasons for suspending civil disobedience in 1934, he nevertheless each time abased himself before his patron’s judgment.
No. He wasn't utterly stupid. He says in his Autobiography that visiting rural UP for the first time, he learned that the only thing people cared about was the land. They wanted to take it from the landlords without any compensation. The problem was that title would not be secure. The Brits could ditch the zamindars & do a deal with the peasants- i.e. give secure land title in return for a small Revenue demand. This would cause a 'scissors crisis'. The urban middle class professional (lawyers like his father) would starve. The future might belong to provincial godmen & clan chiefs. His own English speaking class would meet the same fate as the older Persian speaking clerical class.
Nehru, you may say, wanted a bourgeois revolution which would leave people like himself in charge. They could then move towards Socialism in a Fabian manner, using the administrative machinery suitably expanded so as to provide white collar jobs for the sons of his own political supporters.
Sacralisation of the national movement? ‘I used to be troubled sometimes at the growth of this religious element in our politics,’
what scared the shit out of him was that the guy spearheading the peasant agitation in Rae Bareli was a Brahmin from Maharashtra who recited the Tulsi Ramayan. The guy had been warned off from Fiji as a trouble maker. His name was Baba Ramchandra (born Shridhar Balwant Jodhpurkar) and there were many more like him who could come forward to give leadership to the Kisan Sabhas that were sprouting up. That is why the Brits rushed through a Rent Act in 1921 to give some relief to the tenants. Could Swaraj (or any other party) do more after the elections? Not really. Govind Vallabh Pant did criticise the Agra 1926 act as not going far enough, but most considered this hypocritical. It was only 1939 that Congress passed a better law though it too favoured the better off tenants and gave Zamindars considerable powers to get land classified as 'self-cultivated'.
but ‘I knew well that there was something else in it, something which supplied a deep inner craving of human beings.’
Gandhi brought people together and imbued them with an esprit de corps which tended to increase in the prison cell. Thus, for Hindus, Gandhi truly was a Mahatma. In the shadow of the 'great soul', smaller souls were able to forge bridging and bonding ties.
The fiasco of Non-Cooperation? ‘After all, he was the author and originator of it, and who could be a better judge of what it was and what it was not. And without him where was our movement?’
Kisan Sabhas would displace Congress. The Brits could do deals with different economic interest groups. Some of the Princes & big Zamindars might respond by creating paternalistic quasi-clans of which they themselves were the chiefs. They could always recruit preachers and rustic bards to re-create the feudal ties of the past.
The fast unto death at Poona? ‘For two days I was in darkness with no light to show the way out, my heart sinking when I thought of some results of Gandhiji’s action ... And then a strange thing happened to me. I had quite an emotional crisis, and at the end of it I felt calmer and the future seemed not so dark. Bapu had a curious knack of doing the right thing at the psychological moment, and it might be that his action – impossible as it was to justify from my point of view – would lead to great results.’
What results? The one's Nehru wanted. While visiting the Soviet Union, Nehru came to know of the Leninist notion ( expressed in his 1908 article "Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution") that Tolstoy had paved the way for the 1905 Revolution, which in turn, paved the way for the two revolutions of 1917.
The claim that God showed his displeasure with civil disobedience by visiting an earthquake on Bihar? He had been ‘dragged away from the anchor’ of his faith by Bapu’s announcement, but deciding his mentor’s action was right, ‘somehow managed to compromise’. For ‘what a wonderful man was Gandhiji, after all.’ All these avowals date from 1936, when Nehru was politically more radical – ‘inclining to a communist philosophy’ – than at any other time in his career. By 1939 he was simply exclaiming: ‘India cannot do without him.’
Gandhi was India's Tolstoy. Could Nehru be its Lenin? He had put in enough jail time. Also, he kept writing books. What more was required.
... the depth of parental affection... Gandhi felt for Nehru was unique.
Nehru was a Brahmin Hindi speaker. The future belonged to him. He had been the main author of the 1928 Nehru report. He raised the flag at Lahore, 2 years later, declaring 'poorna swaraj'. As Churchill said in his 'our duty in India' speech, in 1931, Nehru was the coming man. He was using the elderly Mahatma, not the other way around.
Mingled with these emotional bonds were calculations of mutual interest. So long as he operated in the ambit of Congress, Gandhi could count on Nehru never taking adult political issue with him,
because Nehru aways won. Still, having an excuse not to do stupid shit, is convenient. 'I'm sorry Subhas, though I agree it is imperative we all chop off our own heads and stuff them up our poopers, I can't join you in doing so because I really lurve the Mahatma & don't want him to fast to death'.
It should also be remembered that there was a strong irenic, or pacifist, aspect to the Socialists of the Thirties. Gandhi may not have drunk cow's milk but he was on the side of dairy in the guns vs butter debate.
while as Gandhi’s favourite, Nehru could count on prevailing over rivals to head Congress,
He prevailed over them by being more popular. Congress needed him more than he needed Congress.
and after independence, to rule the country. Still, was there not even so an intellectual gulf between them?
Yes. Gandhi was a bania with a straightforward belief in karma. Nehru was in the lineage of Abhinavagupta such that karma isn't maya simply, but rather arises, as impurity, from an impurity in it. Mayiya-mala, impurity in maya, gives rise to karma-mala. It is in this sense that karma is the cause of samsara. Obviously, there are many esoteric variations on this theme which, back at that time, were of considerable interest to writers or belles lettrists.
Anderson- a shithead who teaches a low IQ subject very badly- has a low opinion of the intellect of Gandhi & Nehru. Yet both gained a lot of money and influence through their books. To be descended from one or the other of them yields considerble financial and reputational benefits to this day.
Nehru became a competent orator and prolific writer.
He made himself financially independent by his books. His 'Autobiography'- where he revealed that his first political campaign was to secure the right to have 12 birthdays a year- impressed Leftists in the UK who had decided that MacDonald had harmed the party. 'Discovery of India' was more important because it convinced the Americans that Nehru was the man they should do business with.
What he never acquired, however, was a modicum of literary taste or mental discipline.
Says a shithead who teaches shite.
His most ambitious work, The Discovery of India, which appeared in 1946, is a steam bath of Schwärmerei. It would be unfair to compare Nehru to Ambedkar, the leader of the Untouchables, intellectually head and shoulders above most of the Congress leaders, owing in part to far more serious training at the LSE and Columbia.
It was shit. Back then a PhD in Econ just meant you had sat in the library for a bit. It wasn't till the Fifties or Sixties that you were forced to learn some Math & Stats.
To read Ambedkar is to enter a different world.
One filled with bitterness and hate.
When Gandhi was blackmailing Ambedkar to submit to the demand that Untouchables be treated as loyal Hindus within the caste system, rather than pariahs excluded from it,
In which case they would get zero affirmative action. Why help those of a different religion?
Nehru uttered not a word in solidarity or support for Ambedkar.
The man was a nutter being advanced by the Tories who, foolishly, were trying to keep their grip on India. Ambedkarites have failed in Indian politics. This was not obvious in 2012 when the BSP had 36 MPs. Even after it lost to Akhilesh it had get 80 Assembly seats. Now it has 5.
Nehru, as he often confessed, was no believer: the doctrines of Hinduism meant little or nothing to him. But, in much the same artless way as Gandhi, he identified the religion with the nation, explaining that ‘Hinduism became the symbol of nationalism. It was indeed a national religion, with its appeal to all those deep instincts, racial and cultural, which form the basis everywhere of nationalism today.’
This isn't too different from the beliefs of Savarkar or, indeed, L.K Advani.
By contrast Buddhism, though born in India, had lost out there because it was ‘essentially international’.
Shramans run away or are killed by Muslims. Brahmins can reproduce in the villages.
Islam, not even born in India, was inevitably even less national.
It was about going to fight for the Turks or Arabs even though neither the Turk nor the Arab gave a shit about you.
Nehru’s first real test as a political leader came
when he became President of Congress & committed it to complete Independence in 1930.
with the elections of 1937. No longer an adjutant of Gandhi,
He had the upper hand because Congress adopted his program in Dec. 1929. One might say, he was the Field Marshall, Gandhi was the general tasked with the Salt Satyagraha.
who had withdrawn to the wings after 1934, he was president of Congress in the year of its triumph at the polls and the formation of its first regional governments.
He was in the driving seat. Interestingly, he chose only Hindu CMs.
Crowing over the results, Nehru announced there were now only two political forces that mattered in India:
Hindu India
Congress and the British government.
He was right. The Muslim League disappeared almost everywhere in India after 1947. There was no separate Dalit party or Zamindar party etc. Even the anti-Brahmin parties were thin on the ground till the issue of Hindi imposition enabled Dravidian parties to displace Congress in the late 60s in Tamil Nadu. Incidentally, the leader of the non-Brahmin party in Bombay ditched Ambedkar for Savarkar.
There is little doubt that, with fateful self-deception, he believed this.
It was true. Nehru probably understood well enough that Hindu Congress men weren't keen on 'Mass Contact' with Muslims. What they wanted was a complete reversal of 'appeasement'. Nehru went further. He wanted a strong center. This made him the idol of the Hindus who, moreover, understood that Parliament was needed to reform Hindu personal law. Having a Pundit in charge added legitimacy to the proceedings. Brahmins were spread across the length and breadth of India. They would rally to one of their own.
In fact, it was a confessional victory. By this time, the membership of Congress was 97 per cent Hindu. It could not even find candidates to run in close to 90 per cent of Muslim constituencies across India.
In Punjab, there was an element of calculation to this. Congress preferred the Unionists to the League.
In Nehru’s own province, Uttar Pradesh, then as now the most populous in India, Congress had swept the board of Hindu seats. But it had not won a single Muslim seat.
Which is why Nehru wouldn't accommodate the League. This is one reason he stood out as the Hindu strongman par excellence. On the other hand, one Muslim did get in on the Congress ticket in a by-election. He later got a Ministerial berth in Independent India.
Still, relations between the Muslim League and Congress had not been bad in the electoral campaign itself, and when the results were in, the League sought a coalition between the two parties that would give it some representation in the ministry now to be formed in Lucknow. At Nehru’s behest – ‘I am personally convinced that any kind of pact or coalition between us and the Muslim League will be highly injurious’ – it was curtly told to dissolve itself into Congress if it wished any such thing. Ambedkar would describe the mentality of high caste Hindus as monopolist.
He married one. She tried to monopolise his jizz. Sad.
Whatever the validity of such a generalisation, obviously questionable, there could be no doubt that the central ideological tenet of Congress was its claim to a monopoly of legitimacy in the struggle for independence.
Congress was a Hindu party and it created a Hindu India to the taste of progressive Hindus. What other outcome was possible from a democratic political process.
Why then had ordinary Muslims, unlike all other Indians, failed to vote for it in sufficient numbers? Nehru’s answer was that they had been misled by a handful of Muslim feudatories, and would rally to Congress once they had understood the social interests they shared with their Hindu brethren.
Put another way, with universal suffrage, Congress could put up candidates belonging to dominant rural sub-castes. After Independence, Muslims did become a vote bank for Congress.
Under his leadership, a ‘mass contact’ campaign was launched to convince them of these. But unlike Bose, Nehru had little intuitive contact with the masses,
No. He was the darling of the crowds. Bose was a bit fat and frumpy. He and his brother had been out monuvered in Bengal by Fazl ul Haq who, in May 1939, brought in the Calcutta Municipal Amendment Act which caused Hindus (the vast majority) to lose control of the Calcutta Corporation. Bose, having quit Congress, allied with the Muslim League. He had slit his own political throat. That's why he escaped from India to try to get help from Stalin or Hitler or Tojo.
and the effort soon fizzled out. It was the last time he would engage in an attempt at mobilisation from below.
He was the Chief. The details were left to minions.
Two years later, no longer president, he colluded with the ousting of Bose,
Bose demanded that the Congress give the British government a six-month ultimatum to grant independence, failing which a massive, militant civil disobedience movement should be launched. The problem was that Bose could not carry Bengal, let alone the Hindi belt. History proved Nehru right. The Quit India movement failed even thought the Brits were in a far more precarious position.
in theory a fellow fighter on the left of the party, but
crazy
unlike Nehru immune to the spell of Gandhi, and a rival capable of denying him the succession.
Bose couldn't get elected CM of Bengal. Nehru had the Hindi belt.
Bose ascribed Nehru’s desertion not to political ambition but to weakness of character. He was still not an independent actor, remaining, in the matter-of-fact judgment of Judith Brown, in her biography of Nehru, an ‘utterly reliable’ prop of the old guard within the party.
Nehru was older and had taken his party with him down the road to Purna Swaraj. He understood that 'non-violence' means 'money'. Gandhi had access to it. Bose didn't. Birla didn't like him and Birla and his fellow Marwaris were the guys with pots of money.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Congress high command
Nehru
instructed all its provincial governments to resign in protest at the viceroy’s declaration of war on Germany without consultation with the people of India. The immediate result was
nothing at all. The efficiency of the administration was not impaired. Welfare programs were abandoned. ICS officers pursued the Viceroy's war aims without having to bother consulting elected politicians. On the other hand, by standing aside (and, later on, by going to jail) the core Congress team didn't get soiled with the massive corruption and unjust enrichment which occurred during the War. This was important to maintain esprit de corps. However, there can be no doubt, that the League gained greatly. Muslim business houses thrived. They saw that they had a golden future in a Pakistan from which their kaffir competition was excluded.
If the aim was to get the Muslims to fuck off, Nehru's strategy succeeded. Otherwise it was a childish move which, however, was the unanimous decision of the Working Committee.
When did Jinnah decide to split up India? The Lahore resolution, in March 1940, is the conventional date. It was the fruit of the Sikandar-Jinnah pact of 1937 when Muslim Unionists in the Punjab came into the League. He and Fazl ul Haq, the Bengali leader, may have been thinking more of turning provincial autonomy into quasi-independent states. The problem was that independence means having an Army. The greatly expanded Indian Army could be split on religious lines. Sadly, Pakistan became an Army with a country while India became a country with an Army. This isn't to say every Islamic Republic will witness military interference. Senegal & Malaysia are examples.
(at the provincial level) the Muslim League was weak, either locked out of power by Congress in Hindu-majority areas, or bypassed by rival formations in Muslim-majority zones. What saved it was Jinnah’s standing as the only Muslim politician capable of operating with sufficient skill and brio at an all-India level to make the Unionist, KPP and other leaderships willing to let him represent them in negotiations with the British at the centre, while they held onto their provincial fiefs.
There was a substantial Muslim professional middle class. Once they understood that they could dominate a new Muslim state the call of 'hirjat' became the call of the 'new Medina'. One could leave behind one's old life and begin a better, more prosperous, life in the 'land of the Pure'.
In August 1940, the Viceroy, in effect, gave the Muslim League a veto over constitutional change for the duration of the war. The problem was that the Allies were doing badly. France fell in June. The Battle of Britain began in July. Change might come with Britain's defeat. Jinnah had an incentive to help the Brits. They appreciated this but Hindus were the majority and had more of the industrial base. Would they be content to be mercenaries? Fuck, yeah! You could serve Mammon by fighting the Brits by evading taxes. Black Money exploded.
Meanwhile, Jinnah's position grew stronger as the Japs approached. In 1942, Cripps's no-accession clause meant no Province would be forced to join the Indian Union. This would still leave the problem of Muslims in Hindu majority areas. But Jinnah was prepared to bite the bullet. In March 1941, he had told the Muslim Student's League “In order to liberate 7 crore Muslims where they are in majority, I am willing to perform the last ceremony of martyrdom if necessary and let the 2 crores of Muslims be smashed.” This chimed with religious ideas of sacrifice and 'hijrat' (exodus to a purely Muslim place).
Jinnah got parity for Muslims with caste Hindus in the Central Government Councils and this played a part in changing how politics was used. Fazl ul Haq kept demanding some 'fat job' for himself so that he could ride out the War in comfort. People lower down the pecking order saw that post-war economic conditions would remain bleak. Being an official gave you a chance to 'squeeze'. The new horizon for the zamindar as much as the mazdoor, the proletarian as much as the Prince, was to get a bureaucratic berth where you could squeeze the poor saps who actually made stuff.
if majority areas seceded from a putative India, what would happen to the minorities – Jinnah’s own political base – they left behind?
Fuck them. What mattered was getting in the groundfloor of the architecture of the new State.
Would these not need the shelter of an encompassing union of some kind, in which the Muslim majorities could protect them from arbitrary exercises of Hindu will? Given all these thorns, might not Jinnah himself be bluffing – floating unrealistic demands as bargaining counters, to get a realistic maximum? Many thought so at the time, and not a few since.
During both wars, vast numbers of people had crossed border- or perished. Now Pax Brittanica was ending, why should India be an exception?
Whatever gloss might be put on the Lahore Resolution, it was now clear that independence was not in itself going to be a guarantee of that ageless unity of the nation on which the ideologues of Congress had so often dwelt.
Hindus- belonging to 'sanatan dharma' (the eternal religion)- got back their ageless unity. Nehru pulled the trigger on it and thus, deservedly, created a dynasty which would still rule India if assassination hadn't tempered autocracy & Rahul hadn't been a moon-calf.
The threat to this posed by the rivalry between Hindu and Muslim political identities was immediate and unmistakeable. What was Nehru’s reaction? In 1935 in a characteristic passage of his Autobiography, he had dismissed any possibility of a Muslim nation in India: ‘Politically, the idea is absurd, economically it is fantastic; it is hardly worth considering.’
What he had to accept was that Muslim majority areas were irrevocably lost. The alternative was forcible 'shuddhi'- re-conversion.
‘There is no religious or cultural conflict in India,’ he informed an American audience in 1938. ‘The tremendous and fundamental fact of India is her essential unity through the ages.’ Republishing his essay in 1941, after Lahore, he saw no reason to revise his claim that ‘the forces working for Indian unity are formidable and overwhelming, and it is difficult to conceive of any separatist tendency’ – it was staring him in the face – ‘which can break up this unity.’
Buddhist Burma had gone its own way in 1937. Were the Muslims bound to follow? Yes. The whole point of getting rid of the British was that kaffirs could be slaughtered with vim and vigour.
By 1945 Wavell – commander-in-chief in India during the war – was viceroy and knew the imperial game was up, remarking: ‘Our present position in India is analogous to that of a military force compelled to withdraw in the face of greatly superior numbers.’
His big idea was to evacuate the White population.
In June, Nehru and his colleagues were released from imprisonment for the Quit India campaign during the war, and in the winter provincial and central elections were held, still on the suffrage of 1935. The result was, or should have been, a cold douche for Congress.
Nonsense! They monopolised the Hindu vote. Nehru had got a cohesive India which his dynasty would rule, almost continuously, for many decades. Jinnah got his moth-eaten Pakistan. But his descendants would be Indian & Parsi- not Muslim.
From London, the Labour government despatched a cabinet mission to negotiate a constitutional framework for independence acceptable to all parties. The federal scheme it eventually proposed bore some resemblance to the arrangements vaguely evoked by Jinnah at Lahore. But though by this time the position of the League had stiffened considerably, both parties at first consented to the plan.
Everything depended on how the secession clause was interpreted. Nehru lost patience and pulled the trigger on Partition. Greater Pakistan was off the table.
Two weeks later, Nehru repudiated it, declaring Congress free to act as it pleased. It was his first purely individual decision as a political leader.
His instinct was right. Nehru got Congress to agree to
1) Purna Swaraj with universal suffrage
2) Partition
3) Adopting Socialism as its creed.
Had he retired after that last, his memory would be golden. Sadly, Congress twisted his arm to stay on (they threatened to elevate his daughter reducing him to the position of King Lear) and his final years were bitter.
Even his hardline colleague Vallabhbhai Patel described it as ‘emotional insanity’, but once launched the torpedo could not be called back. In retaliation, Jinnah – who had always denounced street protests as a reckless appeal to the mob – declared a ‘day of direct action’ to demonstrate that Muslim patience with a constitutional road was now over. A politician skilled in manoeuvre at elite level, he had no experience of mass action or any idea of how to direct or control it. Communal slaughter ensued in Calcutta. Initiated by Muslim thugs, it ended – inevitably, given the relative size of the two communities – with many more Muslims killed than Hindus.
This was 'discovery'. Would the Hindus fight back? Yes. Okay then.
At his wits’ end, Wavell called an interim government into being, headed by Nehru as prime minister, Patel as interior minister and – after an initial League boycott – Jinnah’s deputy, Liaquat Ali Khan, as finance minister.
Liaquat ran circles around Patel. This was the final straw.
Each party was determined to thwart the other. The League boycotted a constituent assembly composed of delegates nominated on the basis of the provincial election results, so dominated by Congress, to which the government was in principle to be responsible; Congress blocked Liaquat’s proposal for a wealth tax on the grounds that since most businessmen were Hindu, the measure would be an act of religious discrimination. Such was the situation when in February 1947, the Attlee government announced that India would have independence by June 1948, and dispatched Mountbatten to take over as viceroy in charge of the handover.
Even Azad, who disliked him, admired his industry. He got through the files in double quick time and handed over power within six months. Nehru found him so useful, he kept him on as India's Governor General. Atlee escaped blame for the partition violence because India & Pakistan had become independent. Most importantly, both countries remained part of the Sterling zone. Since Britain had incurred war time debts to both countries, their own investments there were protected.
It must be said, Jinnah & the League settled the problem of the North West Frontier in a deft manner. The option of a separate Pakhtoon state was left off the referendum ballot. Jinnah then dismissed and crushed the pro-Congress government. He dealt directly with the autonomous tribes & the invasion of Kashmir Valley held out to them the prospect of jihad combined with looting.
Why did Nehru change his stance about membership of the Commonwealth. In 1946/47 he was against it. By the end of 1948, he had changed his mind. In April 1949, the Brits agreet to drop the term 'British' from the Commonwealth & he was all for it. I suppose, he realised India would still need the British navy- the first Indian admiral was only appointed in 1958- and, in any case, Commonwealth membership gave him more opportunity to influence British policy towards its remaining Colonies.
Perry takes a different view- re. the role of
V.P. Menon, a Hindu functionary from Kerala in the upper ranks of the imperial bureaucracy, working on Mountbatten’s personal staff and a close confederate of Patel, the organisational strongman of Congress.
Menon was known to be a Congress man.
Why not offer Indian entry into the Commonwealth to Mountbatten in exchange for a partition so point-blank that it would leave Congress not only in control of the far larger territory and population to which it was entitled by religion, but also in swift command of the capital and the lion’s share of the military and bureaucratic machinery of the Raj?
This is nonsense. Nehru had first mentioned staying in the Commonweatlh in Dec. 1948, six months after Mountbatten left India.
As a final sweetener, Menon suggested throwing the princely states – hitherto left inviolate by Congress, and nearly equal in size and population to any future Pakistan – into the pot, as compensation for what would be foregone to Jinnah.
By December, 1948, the fate of all the Princely States was sealed. Thus, this could not have been a consideration.
Patel and Nehru needed little persuasion. If these assets were handed over within two months, the deal would be done. Informed of this breakthrough, Mountbatten was overjoyed, later writing to Menon: ‘It was indeed fortunate that you were reforms commissioner on my staff, and that thus we were brought together into close association with one another at a very early stage, for you were the first person I met who entirely agreed with the idea of dominion status, and you found the solution which I had not thought of, of making it acceptable by a very early transfer of power. History must always rate that decision very high, and I owe it to your advice.’ History would be less admiring than he supposed.
History didn't give a shit. Mounty was a sailor. Menon started off as a steno-typist. Both did the job they were paid to do well enough but neither had any great insight into Indian politics.
The early transfer of power had to do with the risk of anarchy. Mounty didn't want to be the guy who presided over a second black hole of Calcutta. Getting Whites out before the shit hit the fan was the priority. In the event, there was no need. Indians- as Gandhi told Wavell- wanted a blood-bath were only the purest Indian blood was shed.
There was one last-minute hiccup. Due to present London’s finalised plan for independence and partition to leaders of all the interested parties at Simla, Mountbatten had a ‘hunch’ that he must show it in confidence to Nehru before any of the others saw it. Nehru’s reaction was furious: the plan did not adequately acknowledge that the Indian Union would be the successor state to the Raj, with all that went with such a position, and Pakistan a secession from it. The two were not to be put on the same footing. The viceroy thanked his lucky stars for his intuition. Without it, he said, he and his men would have ‘looked complete fools with the government at home, having led them up the garden path to believe that Nehru would accept the plan’, and ‘Dickie Mountbatten would have been finished and could have packed his bag.’
This was just ignorant. In International Law, India was the sole continuity (or "continuing state"). Pakistan was a new state created by secession and, as such, had to apply for membership of the UN.
The invaluable Menon was to hand, and the day was saved when he redrafted the plan to Nehru’s satisfaction. In the first week of June, Mountbatten announced that Britain would transfer power at what he himself would describe as ‘the ludicrously early date’ of 14 August. The logic of such a rush was plain, and in speaking of it Mountbatten did not beat about the bush. ‘What are we doing? Administratively it is the difference between putting up a permanent building, and a Nissen hut or a tent. As far as Pakistan is concerned we are putting up a tent. We can do no more.’
He didn't need to. It turned out the Pakis were rather good at international diplomacy. Zafrulla Khan, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, later presided over the ICJ.
The rules laid down for the territorial division of the Raj excluded any consultation with its population.
Unless a referendum was held.
Instead, the legislative assembly of each province would decide to which state it wished to belong, with three exceptions. In Punjab and Bengal, the assembly would be given the option of dividing the province; and in the North-West Frontier, uniquely,
there was also one in Manipur
there would be a referendum. Religion automatically assigned all but these to either India or Pakistan. In Punjab, the Muslim majority in the assembly voted for Pakistan, the Hindu and Sikh minorities for India. Bengal was another matter. With nearly four times the population, it was not landlocked, had a stronger common identity, a richer cultural-intellectual tradition and more advanced politics under the Raj. There, division was not a foregone conclusion. In the Hindu community a movement led by Bose’s brother Sarat, and in the Muslim community by the local head of the League, Hoseyn Suhrawardy, joined forces to call for a United Bengal as an independent state, adhering neither to India nor to Pakistan.
Sarat had shit for brains. Fortunately he died soon after.
Mountbatten wanted only two dominions in the subcontinent, though if it was difficult to avoid, did not rule out a third. Jinnah, to his credit, said he would not oppose a unitary Bengal.
Bengal was more politically developed. There's a good reason Pakistan delayed having a General Election for two decades. When it finally held one, the country broke apart.
Leading a violent attack on the idea in Bengal was the ancestor of today’s BJP, the rabidly confessional Hindu Mahasabha.
It was less rabidly confessional than the Christian Democratic party in Germany.
The first mass upsurge of Indian nationalism had come over Curzon’s division of Bengal in 1905, Hindu activists leading the revolt against it. Now the roles were reversed, Hindu chauvinists insisting that Bengal be partitioned on religious lines.
For some reason, they objected to being hacked to death. J.N. Mandal, a Bengali Dalit, threw in his hand with Jinnah and became his Law Minister. But he soon had to flee to India along with hundreds of thousands of his caste fellows. Why? A Dalit is still a kaffir and worthy of being hacked to death
The condition of Ambedkar’s sanity was that he had broken with Hinduism.
and become a Buddhist- the religion which spread untouchability to Japan. Bali has Brahmins but no untouchables.
The condition of Nehru’s obduracy was that he had not. When in the summer of 1945 an emissary of the Communist Party, the one other force in the subcontinent that understood something of the principles of self-determination,
Self should determinedly follow Stalin till Stalin decided to kill it.
appealed to him to accept the prospect of Pakistan, he was told that was impossible because of the strength of Hindu opinion in Congress. Three years later, Nehru would show what that attachment meant. When the Indian army took over Hyderabad, massive Hindu pogroms against the Muslim population broke out, aided and abetted by its regulars.
Hindus had previously been at the receiving end. The current President of Congress's mother was killed by Rezakars.
On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate. It reported that at a conservative estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks after the Indian takeover.
Narasimha Rao, a future Congress Prime Minister, had been part of the Hindu resistance. To be fair, the Muslims never stood a chance because they were too few and too stupid.
This was the largest single massacre in the history of the Indian union,
There was also a Communist uprising which the Army crushed.
dwarfing the killings by the Pathan raiders en route to Srinagar
but dwarfed by the killing of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan
which India has ever since used as the casus belli for its annexation of Kashmir.
They were the reason given by the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley for not wnting to join Pakistan.
If the Raj can be eliminated as an efficient cause of partition, we are returned to the famous remark of a veteran of Non-Cooperation at the Round Table Conference of 1931: ‘We divide and you rule.’ The ultimate drivers of the split were indigenous, not imperial.
It was Islamic. Muslims have a different political horizon- at least in underdeveolped countries where the call of exodus to the New Medina is not anachronistic.
The sad truth is Marx can't compete with Muhammad.
How were they distributed? The official view in Delhi, shared across the political spectrum, has always been that it was Jinnah’s personal ambition that fired Muslim separatism, destroying the unity of the national liberation struggle and wrecking what would otherwise have been its natural culmination in a single ecumenical state coinciding with the borders of the Raj and bearing the proud name of India.
The Muslim political class would have been better off in a united India with a non-political Army. Almost every popular Pakistani politician has been jailed at one time or another by the Army. Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was arrested by General Ayub Khan’s military regime and kept in solitary confinement for refusing to endorse the military coup and coup-installed government. Fazl ul Haq had previously been under house arrest. Even, politicians promoted by the military were not safe if they tried to assert their independence. Zulfiqar was hanged. Benazir & her husband were imprisoned. The Sharifs have been exiled or imprisoned. Imran is still in jail.
Like most politicians, Jinnah was certainly ambitious. But he was also an early architect of Hindu-Muslim unity; had little mass following down to the end of the 1930s; and even when he acquired one, probably aimed at a confederation rather than complete separation.
Yet, separation occurred. Either Jinnah was an utter moron or got what he wanted- albeit not as much.
The division in the struggle for independence, when it came, was confessional, but it was not Jinnah who injected religion into the vocabulary and imagery of the national movement, it was Gandhi.
Very true. Jinnah was the head of the 'not very Muslim League'. Sadly, the Hindus beat and sodomised him and forced him to move to Pakistan.
After 1917, it was obvious that the age of multi-ethnic Empires was over. By 1934, it was clear that collective security didn't work & Minority Treaties were just pieces of paper. The question was whether military dictators or Marxist tyrannies would prevail or whether civil Society could maintain the trappings of democracy under the rule of law. India did so. Why? It was overwhelmingly Hindu. Pakistan did not. Why? It was and is Islamic.
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