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Alternative to Partition: Muslim Politics Between the Wars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Ayesha Jalal  and
Anil Seal
Ayesha Jalal
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Anil Seal
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

When the British came to power in India, it was certainly not in the face of the organized resistance of Islam. Yet the British Raj came to its end among political and social convulsions in which Hindus and Muslims cut each other's throats and large populations were shunted across the new frontiers of a sub-continent, now divided into two nations on the basis of religion. Events of such magnitude have encouraged historians to seek explanations of matching significance which may account for the growth of Muslim separatism. This article is concerned with the period of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties, before the onset of the end game when the communal quarrel burst out in deadly earnest. Explicit rival-ries between the communities tended to exist at two main levels, the level of organized politics at the top where Hindu and Muslim elites were rivals for influence with government and eventually for the control of government itself, and the level of mob violence in the streets. This article is concerned with organized politics at the top, although it does not deny the existence and importance of tensions at the base. Its main emphasis will be upon the provincial stage, in particular the Muslim majority province of the Punjab. In the period before 1919 the development of Muslim politics suggested that a specifically Muslim separatism orchestrated by the United Provinces had emerged upon the all-India stage. But the coming of the reforms reversed the situation of the preceding decades, and there was less incentive for Muslim politicians in the United Provinces to claim to be the spokesmen of Muslims in the nation.

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Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 1981 , pp. 415 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 This is not to deny that the hold of traditional Islam was powerful, particularly at the level of popular religion. But Hindus and Muslims had frequently to co-operate with each other in the affairs of local society, and networks of patron and client, and their factions often cut across the apparent solidarities of religious affiliation. However much of it may have been susceptible at the base to the cruder appeals of religion, Indian Islam had made its accommodations with the local environment.Google Scholar

2 Khaliquzzaman, Choudhry, Pathway to Pakistan (Lahore, 1961), p. 74.Google Scholar

3 See Robinson, F. C. R., Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces, 1860–1923 (Cambridge, 1974), chs 8 and 9.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., pp. 11–15; in 1921 there were 6,481,032 Muslims in the U.P. in a total population of more than 45 millions, or 14.28 per cent, Census of India, 1921, Pt II (Calcutta, 1923), pp. 40–3.Google Scholar

5 See Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, pp. 15–23.Google Scholar

6 This is not to deny that the hold of traditional Islam was strong, particularly at the level of popular religion, among men of a lesser sort, the artisans of the townships of northern India.Google Scholar

7 Treating religious communities as separate political interests followed naturally from the British view of the Indian past. When the passion for social enumeration was exported to India, the censuses came to lump together, into artifically broad categories, people who often had next to nothing in common. But once the category of being a Muslim (or indeed any other category such as a landlord) had been raised to importance in the distribution of government favour and patronage, it was natural enough for men to step forward to claim to represent the interests the British believed to exist.Google Scholar

8 See Robinson, F. C. R., ‘Municipal Government and Muslim Separatism in the United Provinces 1883 to 1916’, in Gallagher, John, Johnson, Gordon and Seal, Anil (eds), Locality, Province and Nation (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 69–121.Google Scholar

9 Muslim landlords, men such as Kunwar Jamshed Ali Khan, the Nawabs of Baghpat, and of Chhatari, Khan Bahadur Kunwar Inayat Ali Khan, Fazlur Rahman Khan, and from the Eastern Divisions and Oudh, Talukdars, such as Nawab Mohamed Yusuf and the Rajas of Salempur and Pirpur and Jehangirabad were elected throughout the twenties and early thirties. See Page, , ‘Prelude to Partition’, unpublished Oxford D.Phil dissertation, 1974, pp. 8–10.Google Scholar

10 In Oudh, for example, there were only about 268 Talukdari estates, but they covered two-thirds of the area of Oudh, and paid about one-sixth of the total revenue of the United Provinces, i.e., more than a crore or ten million rupees.Google Scholar

11 See Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. I, Survey (London, 1930), p. 64, The Zamindars of Agra were less well organized, and there were fewer Muslims among their ranks, but they too began to organize, specifically as landlords, and since 1914 they had an Agra Zamindars' Association, with headquarters in Allahabad. But Peter Musgrave's work suggests that historians need to be as critically alert about the category of ‘landlords’ in discussing U.P. politics as they are beginning to be about the category of Muslims.Google Scholar

12 See Pandey, G., The Ascendancy of the Congress in the Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34 (Delhi, 1978) ch. 2, for a general survey of conditions in the U.P.Google Scholar

13 During non-cooperation, the Raja of Mahmudabad as Home Member had the job of jailing many of his former Young Party associates. Jehangirabad helped Government to rally opposition to Abdul Bari, his wife's spiritual leader or pir. Many Muslim magnates in the U.P. threw their weight behind the Aman Sabhas or security leagues to combat non-cooperation; and many of the big landlords devoted themselves to organizing a landlord's lobby.Google Scholar

14 So Chhatari became a minister from 1923; was Home Member in 1926 and in fact acted as Governor of the Province in 1928. Another leading Muslim landlord, Nawab Yusuf was a minister without a break from 1926 until the election of 1937. See Page, ‘Prelude to Partition’, p. 12, fn. 1.Google Scholar

15 In the latter nineteen-thirties Jinnah and the Muslim League attempted, by other means, to return to the position that had existed before the reforms of 1919, when U.P. Muslims had successfully pretended to speak for Muslims in India as a whole. Jinnah's strategy between 1939 and 1947 will be studied in Ayesha Jalal's forthcoming work.Google Scholar

16 Under these Mughal emperors, Lahore for a time was the capital of the empire and the base from which the Mughal armies looked towards central Asia. See Hardy, P., The Muslims of British India (Cambridge, 1972), p. 4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 In 1921, Punjab's 20.6 million people were divided into 11.4 million Muslims, 6.5 million Hindus, 2.3 million Sikhs, Census of India, 1921, Pt I, Vol. II, pp. 40–3.Google Scholar

18 Indeed it was the failure of Ranjit Singh's successors in the Lahore Durbar to keep control over an army, popularly recruited, democratically run, and powerfully rooted in the rural localities, which was the main reason why the British reluctantly were forced to fight and beat this army and to annex the Punjab—at least in part at the invitation of its notables.Google Scholar

19 Those who paid Rs 25 or more land revenue had been enfranchised and so also were the officially appointed Lambardars which added some 58,000 to the Punjab rural vote; the veteran sepoy, that most loyal of collaborators, was also given the vote and this added another 160,000 to the electorate.Google Scholar

20 Men such as Chaudhuri Lal Chand who was Minister of Agriculture in 1924, and Chaudhuri Chothu Ram who replaced him in the post.Google Scholar

21 Men such as Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana whose son was to become prime minister of the Punjab in 1942; Feroz Khan Noon, who was educated at Wadham, later married a young Australian, and was successively minister for local self-government in 1927, for education in 1931, Indian high commissioner in London in 1936, and chief minister for the Punjab after Partition in 1953, and Sikander Hayat Khan, revenue member in 1929, acting governor in 1932 and the first premier of a self-governing Punjab in 1937. This survey of Punjab after the 1919 Act is based on Page, ‘Prelude to Partition’, ch. I.Google Scholar

22 Punjab Legislative Council Debates, IV, 15 March 1923, p. 1318, quoted in Page, ‘Prelude to Partition’, p. 43.Google Scholar

23 When Fazl-i-Husain's policies were censured in council in 1923 the vote split, uncharacteristically, on communal lines, with Muslims and officials supporting Fazl-i-Husain, and the Hindu Jats who usually worked with him joining the Hindu and Sikh members in voting against him. see Page, ‘Prelude to Partition’, pp. 46–7.Google Scholar

24 Statutory Commission, Vol. I, Survey, p. 208.Google Scholar

25 It was an error for W. W. Hunter to argue in his account of The Indian Musalmans of 1871 that Muslim backwardness was a consequence of British rule, and that the condition of the Bengali Muslims applied equally to Muslims in other parts of India.Google Scholar

26 John Gallagher, ‘Congress in Decline’, Locality, Province and Nation, p. 280.Google Scholar

27 Ibid.

28 Central National Mahommedan Association, Octennial Report, 1917–1924, p. 61, quoted in Broomfield, J. H., Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-century Bengal (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 255.Google Scholar

29 Gallagher, ‘Congress in Decline’, Locality, Province and Nation, p. 275.Google Scholar

30 According to the agreement, known as the Bengal Pact, Muslims would be represented in the legislative council; they would keep their separate electorates and get representation in line with their population, which was more than the Lucknow Pact had given them. Muslims had less than a third of the appointments in the public services. So Das promised them that when Congress ruled Bengal they would get more than half—fifty-five per cent—of the jobs and up to eighty per cent until they had reached that level. In local bodies, Muslims would get sixty per cent of the seats, they would be allowed to kill cows, and they would not have to put up with Hindus playing music outside their mosques. The Bengal Pact of 1923 won Das and his Swarajists twenty-one Muslim seats when they entered the second council, enough reinforcements to make dyarchy unworkable.Google Scholar

31 In its turn the Swarajist Party in Bengal not only took on a more Hindu but also a more aristocratic, high caste, zamindari colouring: big zamindars now rallied in force to the Congress to meet the threat of an amendment of the Bengal Tenancy Act which would have given occupancy rights to their tenants. In contrast the Muslim ministries forced through a Rural Primary Education Bill in 1930; they brought in communal reservation of seats on local bodies and introduced legislation to relieve peasant indebtedness.Google Scholar

32 Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. I, Survey, p. 29.Google Scholar

33 See Hasan, Mushirul, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916–1928 (New Delhi, 1979), ch. 8.Google Scholar

34 Sir Malcolm Hailey to Sir Arthur Hirtzel, 15 December 1927, Hailey Papers, 118 quoted in Page, ‘Prelude to Partition’, p. 148.Google Scholar

35 Ibid.

36 Fazl-i-Husain to Sir Malcolm Hailey, 22 September 1928, Hailey Collection, MSS. EUR. E220/23, I.O.L., and quoted in Ahmad, Waheed (ed.), Letters of Mian Fazl-i-Husain (Lahore, 1976), p. 57 (henceforth: Letters).Google Scholar

37 ibid., pp. 56–9.

38 Note by Fazl-i-Husain, enclosed in Irwin to Wedgwood Benn, 28 August 1930, Halifax Papers 6, quoted in Page, ‘Prelude to Partition’, p. 203.Google Scholar

39 Fazl-i-Husain's influence over Irwin is shown by the tenor of the Government of India's Reform Despatch of September 1930. It conceded much more of the Punjab's demand than Simon had. It proposed to retain separate electorates and weightage for Muslims in the Hindu majority-provinces, but also to give the Bengali and Punjabi Muslims the majorities to which their population entitled them. It did not recommend outright statutory majorities, but favoured a scheme by which the Muslims would get a predominance in line with their numbers, if not an actual majority of the seats. Muslims should be encouraged to secure their majorities by winning some of the special seats allotted to such interests as labour, the universities and the landholders. Here was Delhi's attempt to rescue some of the benefits of a supra-communal stance which had worked so well in the Punjab and elsewhere during the nineteen-twenties.Google Scholar

40 Note by Gilbert Laithwaite, 6 November 1931, Templewood Collection, MSS. EUR. E240/65., I.O.L. Among these ‘younger section’ were such men as Mian Mohammed Shafi, Shafaat Ahmad Khan, and the Aga Khan, all leading lights of the All-India Moslem Conference.Google Scholar

41 The Hindu Mahasabha and the ‘tyrannical method’ of the Congress during the civil disobedience movement had led Sapru to doubt whether there was any ‘true Nationalism in India’, and whether India was ready yet ‘for the rule of numbers’. Sapru to Iswar Saran, 12 November 1930, Sapru Collection, I, S.18, quoted in Moore, R. J., The Crisis of Indian Unity 1917–1940 (Oxford, 1974), p. 146.Google Scholar

42 Fazl-i-Husain to Shafaat Ahmad Khan, 22 December 1930, Fazl-i-Husain Papers (Shafaat File). The authors wish to acknowledge the courtesy of Mr Azim Husain who gave access to these papers. Also quoted in Letters, p. 116.Google Scholar

43 See note 39.

44 Sir Muhammed Iqbal, the famous poet-philosopher turned politician, spoke for the urban Punjabi Muslims who had been given short shrift under the régime of the agricultural oligarchs of the Unionist persuasion. The All-India Muslim League, of which he was the president, was as yet not in a position to press its own independent line. To maintain the semblance of Muslim unity, throughout the late nineteen-twenties and the early nineteen-thirties, the League's sole contribution to Muslim politics appears to have been its reluctant endorsement of resolutions passed by the Muslim Conference. However, it was already becoming the organ of those discontented with the Muslim conference, a trend which Iqbal hoped to encourage.Google Scholar

45 See Sir Muhammed Iqbal's speech at the twenty-first Session of the All-India Muslim League, 29 December 1930 in Jamil-ud-Din, Ahmad (ed.), Historic Documents of the Muslim Freedom Movement (Lahore, 1970), p. 132.Google Scholar

46 Ibid., p. 127. Iqbal maintained that only by conceding the importance of communalism could Muslims get a proper sense of responsibility, and this would help ‘deepen the patriotic feeling’.

47 Ibid.

48 Iqbal's speech tended to be ignored by the Muslim politicians, but it did inspire a student at Cambridge to coin the word ‘Pakistan’. The student, Chaudhri Rahmat Ali, yet another Punjabi Muslim, sketched Out a scheme for an independent Muslim State in north-western India to the Muslim delegates at the Round Table Conference. Capital ‘P’ for the Punjab: ‘A’ for Afghanistan or for those whose interest in Afghan was understandably weak, ‘A’ stood for the Indian Afghans, in other words the North Western Frontier Province; ‘K’ for Kashmir. Others thought of it as a land of the pure or the holy. The University of Cambridge in its time has produced many peculiar theoretical concepts, ranging from Cranmer's Theology of the English Reformation to the Jesus style of rowing; among its concepts is the idea of Pakistan. But not surprisingly Chaudhri Rahmat Ali, who is buried in an unmarked grave on the Newmarket Road, was brushed aside and his scheme dismissed as a ‘student's scheme’ which was ‘chimerical’ and ‘impractical’.Google Scholar

49 Fazl-i-Husain to Irwin, 6 July 1931, Letters, p. 159.Google Scholar

50 Even though this did not meet the full Punjab Muslim claim, and although it was likely to be condemned by other interests, this, after all, Fazl-i-Husain philosophically commented, was the ‘fate of all efforts at a fair settlement’. Fazl-i-Husain to Irwin, 24 August 1931, ibid., p. 185.

51 Fazl-i-Husain to Nawab Sir Muhammed Ahmad Said Khan of Chhatari, 2 November 1931, ibid., p. 199.

52 Fazl-i-Husain to Dr Alma Latifi, 14 October 1931, ibid., p. 194.

53 Lothian to Fazl-i-Husain, 27 May 1932, ibid., pp. 222–4.

54 Fazl-i-Husain to Lord Lothian, 6 June 1932, ibid., p. 226.

55 Fazl-i-Husain to Shafaat Ahmad Khan, 2 November 1931, ibid., pp. 202–3.

56 See Communal Decision 1931–2 (Cmnd 4147 of 1931–1932), p. 7, reproduced in Tomlinson, B. R., The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1929–1942, The Penultimate Phase (London, 1976), p. 19.Google Scholar

57 London had wanted to give the Bengali Muslims less than the Award actually gave them, and the Governor of Bengal had agreed. But the Viceroy had told the Secretary of State that all-India interests demanded that the majority-province Muslims, even those of Bengal, be appeased. If they were not satisfied, he feared the spectre of noncooperation by Muslims would be added to the threat of civil disobedience by Congress.Google Scholar

58 Fazl-i-Husain to Jogendra Singh, 8 May 1933, Letters, p. 284.Google Scholar

59 The Aga Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 10 May 1933, ibid., pp. 285–6.

60 In fact he was trying to safeguard the Communal Award by allowing negotiations with the Hindus and Sikhs to go forward, much as the Award had hoped; he thought a communal agreement in the Punjab was in line with Muslim Conference policy.Google Scholar

61 Fazl-i-Husain to Shafaat Ahmad Khan, 19 June 1933, ibid., p. 305.

62 Fazl-i-Husain to Shafaat Ahmad Khan, 28 June 1933, ibid., 312.

63 Treated in a favoured and distinct way by the British, the Punjab had maintained a strong sense of identity throughout the century of British rule. This emerged clearly in the policy of the Unionist Party, in Fazl-i-Husain's attitude in the critical constitutional negotiations of the nineteen-thirties; it was to appear again in the attitude of the Punjab political leaders towards Jinnah and the League; and it is clear that this distinctive and strongly particularist attitude had dominated the politics of Pakistan since its creation.Google Scholar

64 Fazl-i-Husain, 30 August 1935, in Ahmed, Waheed (ed.), Diary and Notes of Mian Fazl-i-Husain (Lahore, 1976), pp. 168–9.Google Scholar

65 Fazl-i-Husain to Aga Khan, 16 December 1933, Letters, pp. 331–2. Nor was Fazl-i-Husain impressed by the Aga Khan's warning that the Conservatives in Britain, particularly the Diehards such as Churchill and Salisbury, would welcome signs of Muslim discontent with the Award and that Samuel Hoare ‘would be disgusted at us for letting him down by our incompetence and inability to leave well alone’. Aga Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 21 January 1934, ibid., p. 342.

66 Aga Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 13 August 1935, Fazl-i-Husain Papers (Aga Khan File); also quoted in Letters, pp. 429–30.Google Scholar

67 Shafaat Ahmad Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 7 November 1935, Letters, p. 470.Google Scholar

68 Ibid.

69 Fazl-i-Husain to Abdullah Khan, 23 September 1935, ibid., p. 467.

70 Shafaat Ahmad Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 30 November 1935, ibid., p. 474.

71 This meant demanding a status for the Muslim majority provinces at least as autonomous as the Indian States would have under a federation; and the Indian Army should be changed from an all-Indian to a territorial force.Google Scholar

72 Aga Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 13 August 1935, Fazl-i-Husain Papers (Aga Khan File), and Letters, pp. 431–5.Google Scholar

73 Ibid.

74 Sir Zafrullah Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 15 April 1936, Fazl-i-Husain Papers (Zafrullah File).Google Scholar

75 Malik Barkat Ali to Fazl-i-Husain, 4 April 1936, Letters, pp. 509–10.Google Scholar

76 Ibid.

77 ‘Your know perfectly well that the Punjab is the key of the Indian Muslim politics’, Fazl-i-Husain told the Aga Khan; ‘[h]ence the importance of strengthening the Punjab with a view to give a lead to Muslim India’; to break Jinnah's parliamentary board, Fazl-i-Husain needed election funds; and the Aga Khan, who had recently had some winnings at Ascot, immediately sent money to his old Unionist ally. See Fazl-i-Husain to the Aga Khan, 22 June 1936, Letters, pp. 596–7.Google Scholar

78 Sikander Hayat Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 1 May 1936, Letters, p. 528. Although Fazl-i-Husain feared that Jinnah had ‘blundered into the [Punjab] arena very much to our prejudice’ in fact, Jinnah failed to get any support from any section of the Unionists and even the discontents in the Ittihad-I-Millat, refused to co-operate with him and in fact withdrew from the League's parliamentary board.Google Scholar

79 Quoted in Azim Husain, Mian Fazl-i-Husain: A Political Biography, 1966, p. 311.Google Scholar

80 Hailey to Jagdish Prasad, 12 September 1933, Jagdish Prasad Papers, New Delhi, quoted in Gallagher, ‘From Civil Disobedience to Communism’.Google Scholar

81 As one influential U.P. Muslim had written to Fazl-i-Husain in 1931, the impact of the civil disobedience movement and the increasing politicization of the U.P. peasantry, had shown that the old policy of relying upon Government to protect Muslim property was no longer enough, ‘so even those Muslims who have so far been with the Government will go against it or lose all influence with the public.’ (Mushir Husain Kidwai to Fazl-i-Husain, 3 April 1931, Letters, p. 129.)Google Scholar

82 Shafaat Ahmad Khan, Fazl-i-Husain, 15 June 1936, Fazl-i-Husain Papers (Shafaat File); also in Letters, pp. 586–7.Google Scholar

83 Ibid.

84 Aga Khan to Fazl-i-Husain, 14 January 1936, Letters, p. 481.Google Scholar

85 In the U.P. the League won twenty-seven seats; in Bombay it won twenty and in Madras, ten.Google Scholar

86 Even then, Jinnah had far less control over these provinces than is usually assumed—a theme to be developed in Ayesha Jalal's forthcoming work.Google Scholar

87 Ahmad Yar Khan Daultana to Fazl-i-Husain, 13 April 1936, Fazl-i-Husain Papers (Daultana File).Google Scholar