PANDIT Nehru had all the time for Josh Malihabadi, but there was some particular matter he asked the revolutionary poet to consult Maulana Azad on. The two were very different Muslims. Josh wrote fiery anti-colonial poetry to rouse the Indian masses, and also had a weakness for the epicurean delights the great Persian poets had celebrated. Azad became India’s first education minister after beginning as a religiously orthodox associate of Gandhiji, sharing his technique of blending religion with political purpose.

Josh, against Nehru’s friendly protestations, migrated to Pakistan, where he died a self-confessed stranger. Maulana Azad opposed partition vehemently and he, too, died a stranger in his country, let down by colleagues who subverted a British plan he backed to keep India united.

Josh waited in Azad’s office, but with no sign of the meeting happening, left a classic note on the desk. “Kya zaroori tha khoon khaulana? Phir kisi aur roz maulana!” (You, maulana, have annoyed me enough/ Waiting any longer was seriously tough.) Who was this maulana who so riled Josh?

Controversy erupted last week and apologies were tendered when a poster framed a collage of Congress leaders from which Maulana Azad was missing. The banner, announcing the 85th plenary session of the Congress last week, read: “137 years journey of ideas.” Azad’s absence set off familiar anxiety and accusation among Muslims. The organisers responded with a mea culpa, and restored his photo in the collage.

A journey of ideas would remain incomplete in its quest if filtered through narrow expediencies.

There were other issues with the poster; crucially, the fog of selective memories. The poster’s tag of ‘137-year old journey’ masked the fact that Gandhi joined the marathon only three decades after it began. Tilak, Gokhale, Ranade, Nauroji, among others, steered the party before Gandhi waded into the journey of ideas. The plenary picture told a host of disputed stories. Gandhi, Nehru, Sardar Patel, Ambedkar, Subhash Bose, Sarojini Naidu, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao were on the top. Pictures of Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi, party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi came at the bottom. They all, each one of them, merit independent discussion, including their differences and similarities. Is there a 137-year-old Congress idea?

A journey of ideas would remain incomplete in its quest if filtered through narrow expediencies. Ambedkar figured in the Congress panel when he was never a member of the party. The Dalit icon was a member in Nehru’s cabinet, but so was Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, the Hindutva advocate. How did Bose part ways with the Congress and why is his picture there and not Jayaprakash Narayan’s or Kripalani’s? What triggered the exits? Were some pictures at the plenary restored to reclaim them from the BJP’s nearly successful falsification to gain legitimacy, and in the melee did Azad get left out? Clarify truthfully.

Azad had lived in Calcutta for years, where he observed nationalist leaders successfully mixing Hindu rituals with the freedom movement. It was the potent efficacy of the brew that found him borrowing from Gandhi’s political capital to invest in the Khilafat Movement, the pan-Islamic campaign. The idea was to woo Indian Muslims to Congress. Jinnah opposed the Khilafat call and admired Kemal Ataturk’s nationalism sans religion in state structures.

An unresolved dispute rages on, however, as to how an avowedly secular leader like Jinnah became, or allowed himself to be cornered into becoming, a champion of Muslim separatism. The journey of ideas remains incomplete without an across-the-board discussion on the parting. Eminent historians from the subcontinent need to jointly resolve the Rashomon riddle of the partition.

Azad was an abstemious Muslim with roots in orthodoxy. Josh was anything but. Eclectic views such as that of Josh were not Azad’s favourite companions. Jaswant Singh, in his book on Jinnah and partition, offers insight into this facet of one of Gandhi’s closest colleagues.

Nehru, averse to Jinnah, called for direct mass contact with the Muslim masses to challenge the League’s elitist base. But there was a bind. Nehru wrote to N.A. Sherwani chiding him for a request for maulvis for his election campaign, but “this disapproval did not extend to making Sherwani give up all such assistance of the ulema”. This is where Azad was summoned into action, says Singh. “The Congress also should not have felt the need to use Maulana Azad to win Jamiat-ul-Ulema-i-Hind to its side, for, after all, what did maulvis have to do with an approach that based itself upon ‘socioeconomic solidarities, unimpeachable secular credentials and radical programmes’, as according to Nehru, for example, [found] in Spain, or elsewhere in Europe?”

Azad would forever rue the partition and how his friends subverted the 1937 electoral alliance with the League, and later the Cabinet Mission proposal for a federated India. In today’s terms, it would nearly be the same deal that Nehru would later use to secure Jammu and Kashmir — an autonomous status for three proposed Indian zones, which would make up the federation. Defence, finance and communication would remain with the centre, precisely the ties with Jammu and Kashmir which Pakistan disputes and Hindutva rejects.

There were factors beyond Azad’s ken in 1947. Journalist Swaminathan Aiyar says Indian industrialists who made fortunes during World War II because of scarcities were unhappy with Liaquat Ali Khan as finance minister in the Nehru-led 1946 interim government. Khan presented a supposedly socialist budget with high taxes to claw back inequitable gains made during the war. “Gujarat’s textile industrialists, friends and supporters of Patel, castigated this as a Muslim League attack on them, disguised as socialism. This added to Patel’s growing feeling that cohabitation with the Muslim League was not possible.”

Aiyar says the Gujarat industrialists were being communal. “Parsi and Muslim industrialists were hit by high taxes too. Patel should have shrugged off Liaquat’s budget as a headache inevitable in power sharing. That did not happen.” There is more, therefore, that clouds Congress’s ideational journey than Azad’s briefly missing portrait or Josh’s parting shot.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2023