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December 22, 2002
Voice of the Muslim nation
How is Jinnah now seen in retrospect by historians? Claude Markovits gives an insightful analysis
WHEN detailed attention was paid to the question of Muslim separatism by Indian historians, the dominant theme was that of missed opportunities, of an outcome which had been the result of an accumulation of human errors, rather than of structural factors. That the use by the Congress, including by Gandhi, of Hindu symbols facilitated the mobilization of Muslims by the Muslim League was a point generally missed by Indian authors.
There were, however, dissenting voices, mostly outside academics: some Marxists, taking a leaf from CPI ideologue Adikhari’s synthesis of Stalin and Jinnah, and influenced by W. Cantwell Smith’s views, believed the Pakistan movement was a genuine bourgeois nationalist movement; on the other hand, those who were close to a Hindu nationalist point of view saw in it the continuation of a deep-seated Muslim conspiracy against Hinduism and Mother India.
For the left-leaning ‘secular’ historians who dominated the field in India in the 1970s and 1980s, there was, however, an added element: Muslim communalism, far from being either an authentic bourgeois movement or the mere result of an imperialist conspiracy, was an expression of false consciousness and basically reflected the class hegemony exercised over the Muslim masses by a narrow elite of landed magnates and big traders who feared that the development of a unitary mass movement of Hindu and Muslim peasants and workers would endanger their material interests.
Sumit Sarkar, in his authoritative Modern India, tended to take this view and to dismiss the League’s claim to represent the entire Muslim community. But to these authors also, the Pakistan movement and partition were a diversion from the main struggle against imperialism. They seemed to think that it was the weakness of the Left in India which had allowed the diversionary forces of communalism to move in.
What I want to stress, however, is that, in spite of wide differences of opinion between Indian and Pakistani historians, and even within the academic communities of each country, a kind of basic consensus could be identified, around a few key points, such as the crucial role given to the dynamics of Muslim politics and to Jinnah’s personal intervention. In 1983, R.J. Moore, an Australian historian, could still write: “In an age sceptical of the historic role of great men there is universal agreement that Jinnah was central to the Muslim League’s emergence after 1937 as the voice of a Muslim nation; to its articulation in March 1940 of the Pakistan demand for separate statehood for the Muslim majority provinces of north-western and eastern India; and to its achievement in August 1947 of the separate but truncated state of Pakistan by the partition of India.”
The emphasis in Pakistan on Jinnah’s historical role had nothing surprising about it, but even in Indian accounts he occupied a prominent place. Apart from divergent appreciation on the personality of Jinnah, there was a high degree of consensus on the fact that the creation of Pakistan as a separate state was basically his work, even if the idea of Pakistan was known to be somebody else’s brainchild (and here accounts diverged, some singling out Iqbal, others Chaudhri Rahmat Ali). A Pakistani historian expressed a widely-held view when he stated:
“After March 1940, Jinnah’s course became clear. The Muslim League had adopted the conferment of independent status on contiguous Muslim majority areas, i.e., Pakistan, as its goal, and he strove for its achievement with the same tenacity of purpose and single-mindedness with which, some years earlier, he had pursued his dream of Hindu-Muslim unity. All his efforts after that day, his interviews, his speeches, his negotiations, and his strategic moves were inspired by one idea — to achieve this end.”
By contrast with Jinnah’s relentless pursuit of a definite goal, all other actors, be they British statesmen or Congress leaders, appeared to have been fumbling, unclear about the objectives they sought. In particular, the role of the Congress was seen as largely reactive. Although Pakistani indictments of Nehru’s intransigent attitude towards the Muslim League at the time of the formation of the Congress provincial governments in 1937 were not totally without echoes in India (and received partial confirmation from the publication in 1988 of the expunged passages in Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s memoirs, India wins freedom, first published in 1958), nobody in India dared yet blame Nehru for the increasing gap which opened up between the Congress and the League after 1937.
In Pakistan, a lot of criticism was also directed at Sardar Patel, whose strong hostility to the Muslim League got particular notice. Indian historians were not at ease with the attitude of the Congress leadership in 1947, particularly with the open divide between Gandhi on the one hand, and Nehru and Patel on the other, but by concentrating heavily on Jinnah, they managed to largely avoid the issue.
The part played by the British was one of the most controversial points. Both Pakistani and Indian authors were very critical of British attitudes and policies, but they directed their criticisms at different aspects. Indian authors, taking a long-term view, stressed the fateful consequences of the ‘divide and rule’ policy followed by the Raj and in particular of the institution of separate electorates in the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. But they did not gloss much over Mountbatten’s crucial role in expediting things.
Pakistani historians, wary of recalling the Muslim League’s friendly attitude to the British between 1940 and 1946, preferred on the one hand to evoke the role of Muslims in the 1857 uprising and on the other hand to concentrate on the attitude of Mountbatten at the time of partition and on his indubitable pro-Congress bias. While Mountbatten was generally acknowledged as the midwife of the partition (Jinnah being its putative father), he nevertheless got a better press in India than in Pakistan.
This appears paradoxical, but can be explained in part by the adversarial relationship he had with Jinnah during the last negotiations which led to the actual partition of the Indian Empire. Some also stressed the crucial role played by V.P. Menon, Patel’s close adviser, in framing the actual partition plan.
But beyond the endless squabbles about precise responsibilities, there was a deeper consensus between Indian and Pakistani historians about the fact that the division of British India was the result of the growth of a specific political movement amongst the Muslims of the subcontinent. Whether labelled as Muslim ‘nationalism’ by Pakistani authors, or by Indian authors as ‘communalism’, ‘separatism’ being interestingly used both by supporters and adversaries of the movement, the fact is that Muslim political self assertion was seen as the key factor in the whole chain of events.
Divergences existed as to the causes but not as to the fact. Pakistani historians, trying to give substance to the ‘two nation theory’ formulated by Jinnah, sought to muster all possible evidence on the existence over a long period of a sense of cultural and political separateness among India’s Muslims. Indian historians, less preoccupied with cultural arguments beyond general statements about the existence of a ‘composite’ culture in the subcontinent, preferred to locate the origins of Muslim ‘separatism’ in the machinations of a Raj on the decline, a position which was supported by a lot of the evidence available.
Outside the subcontinent, the few historians who dared tackle the Pakistan movement and the partition, being less preoccupied with matters of state and of political legitimacy, focused particularly on the role played by religion.
Some, of whom Paul Brass was the most outspoken, stressed how religion had been instrumentalized by elites, both Hindu and Muslim; to give legitimation to a fight over positions and power, especially in the context of Northern India. Others, while taking more seriously the claim of a struggle for Islam raised by the Muslim League, stressed the existence of a complex combination of factor.
Paradoxically, it was from within this elitist historiography that the most effective challenge came. Although (Ayesha) Jalal’s preoccupations were strictly with the haute politique of the partition, her iconoclastic study of Jinnah helped nail the coffin on the elitist historiographical project. Jalal located herself firmly in the camp of those who took the view that, in the story of the Pakistan movement, religion had been instrumentalized.
She concentrated entirely on Jinnah’s political activities, paying little attention to his attitude towards religion, which remains a very controversial subject, particularly in Pakistan, and more generally to the question of his ‘Muslimness’. Her considerable critical faculties, supported by a great deal of research in still partly closed archives, helped her make hash, in particular, of the widely held and somewhat self-evident notion that Partition was Jinnah’s original goal.
Jalal argued that Jinnah was actually aiming at a federal India in which the League would have shared power with the Congress, and that it was the frustration of that aim which led him to accept partition as the only way to avoid Hindu domination over the whole of undivided India. Jalal put the onus of partition squarely on the refusal by the Congress, with British implicit support, to make the concessions which could have satisfied Jinnah’s demands.
Jalal’s book got a mixed critical response, but it undoubtedly helped change the terms of the debate. Both Pakistani and Indian historians saw some of their most cherished myths challenged. Jinnah, although portrayed rather sympathetically, was shown as having had feet of clay. He had often miscalculated, had relied too much on the British remaining as arbiters, and when faced with the evidence of their decision to depart quickly, had seen his weakness exposed.
This had led him, the most constitutionalist of all Indian politicians, to go for ‘mass action’, an exercise for which he had no skill, and in which he was outmanoeuvred by the wily Suhrawardy, whose intervention at the time of the great Calcutta killings had had disastrous consequences. Eventually, he had been forced to accept in 1947 the ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan, from which East Punjab and West Bengal had been carved out, that he had so contemptuously rejected in July 1944 on the eve of his inconclusive conversations with Gandhi. Jalal’s Jinnah was not the supreme politician of earlier accounts, but a man who had gambled and partly failed and had no choice but to collect his gains to avoid complete defeat. He had to constantly battle on three fronts, against regional Muslim leaders pursuing their own agendas, against the Congress leadership, and against the British, in particular the last Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, and in spite of his considerable intellectual powers, had not always proved equal to the task.
But, if Jinnah came out somewhat diminished from Jalal’s account, as a tragic and pathetic figure, the Congress leaders, including Gandhi, emerged in a frankly unfavourable light. Jalal’s view was that they were the ones who had actually chosen partition by their refusal to accept the prospect of a diminished centre, which alone could have been the basis of a compromise with the Muslim League. By lashing out equally at all the major actors (Mountbatten was not better treated by her), Jalal helped discredit the approach ‘from above’ which had dominated the field in the previous period.
Excerpted with permission from
Pakistan: the contours of state and society
Edited by Soofia Mumtaz, Jean-Luc Racine and Imran Anwar Ali
Oxford University Press, 5 Bangalore Town, Sharae Faisal, Karachi-75350 Tel: 021-4529025.
Email: ouppak@theoffice.net
ISBN 0-19-579780-9
275pp. Rs425
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