‘Another India’ By Pratinav Anil, Accuses The Congress Of Marginalising The Muslims During The First 30 Years After Partition
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By A.
Faizur Rahman
24 May 2023
In 1951,
Muslims constituted 9.8 per cent of India’s population of 361 million. Put
differently, about 35 million Muslims stayed back after rejecting the idea of
Pakistan. But was their faith in a non-theocratic India politically or
economically fructuous? No, says the historian Pratinav Anil, a lecturer in
history at the University of Oxford.
At
the Feroz Shah Kotla Mosque in New Delhi on July 18, 2015. | Photo Credit: R.V.
Moorthy
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His latest
book, Another India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority,
1947–77, is a totalising narrative about “the communal prejudice that lay under
the carapace of Congress secularism” during its unbroken 30-year rule from
1947. In this period, declares the book, the state behaved like “an
Islamophobic agency”, keeping Muslims out of the bureaucracy and sometimes even
removing them en masse from public positions on suspicion of being “Pakistani
fifth-columnists”.
Another
India: The Making of the World’s Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77
By
Pratinav Anil
Hurst
Publishers UK
Pages:
432
Price:
£25
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In 1977,
Muslims accounted for 11.4 per cent of the country’s population but constituted
only 4.5 per cent of the judiciary, and 4.4 per cent and 6 per cent of the
Central and States’ civil services, respectively, apart from being underrepresented
in banking and the constabulary. They were, however, overrepresented in prisons
and among riot victims, with the result that fewer Muslims made it to Nehruvian
legislatures than to any other Parliament before 2014.
This
disempowerment was brought about by the clever use of a whole gamut of
constitutionally unassailable stratagems. One of them was the process of
delimitation, through which the boundaries of electoral constituencies were
fixed or altered to suit the majority community.
This
discriminatory process politically weakened Muslims to such an extent that one
of the Sachar Committee’s recommendations in 2006 was the establishment of “a
more rational procedure for delimitation of constituencies” to improve the
chances of Muslims getting elected to Parliament and State Assemblies.
Congress
also used its dominance in the Constituent Assembly to exclude from the
Constitution all political safeguards, including separate electorates, that
Muslims had secured with the devolution acts of 1909, 1919, and 1935. Even the
reservation of parliamentary seats was denied to them. And, “making a mockery
of minority representation and the popular will”, the first-past-the-post
electoral system (which Anil contemptuously describes as “the handmaiden of
majoritarianism”) was adopted in place of proportional representation.
Anil
recounts how Patel manipulated “nationalist Muslims” and sycophantic rebels
from the Muslim League such as Tajamul Hussain and Begum Aizaz Rasul—who
behaved like “Patel’s poodle”—to give up all political safeguards for their
community in the interests of the nation.
And when
Abul Kalam Azad and Hifzur Rahman demanded at least reservation, Patel used
Hussain and the Begum to censure them for trying to isolate the Muslims from
the general community. Indeed, the political asphyxiation of Muslims in the
Constituent Assembly prompted Azad to call it “my new prison”.
“Riots Galore”
Another
shocking revelation in Another India traces the “go to Pakistan” taunt to
September 1947 when Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel told Mahatma Gandhi that the “vast
majority of the Muslims in India were not loyal to India” and as such, it would
be better for them “to go to Pakistan”.
To stay
back, they “should try win over the goodwill of the majority”. But “if they
persisted in their old ways, the establishment of a purely Hindu raj was
inevitable”. This was Govind Ballabh Pant, the first Chief Minister of Uttar
Pradesh who “purged the state’s services of Muslims and oversaw bans on
anti-RSS protests”.
Anil
marshals these statements to excoriate the Whig histories of postcolonial
India—evident in the academic writings of Mushirul Hasan, Ashutosh Varshney,
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Ramachandra Guha—for dogmatically eulogising Nehru and
his stalwarts as “characters in a morality play” forever “rallying to the
defence of minorities”.
The fact is
that in the Nehruvian period riots were routine, occurring almost every five
years. And it was under the Congress’ watch that a staggering 800,000
Muslims—one in 50 Indian Muslims—were forced to go to East Pakistan in 1964
after the “most violent Hindu-Muslim conflagration of postcolonial India” which
happened in Bengal following the theft, in December 1963, of the “Mue-e-Muqaddas”
(holy hair of the Prophet) from the Hazratbal shrine in Kashmir.
Anil
provides a table titled “Riots in Nehruvian India, 1954-1963” to show that in
the “riots galore” during Nehru’s tenure, Muslims made up a staggering 82 per
cent of the fatalities and 59 per cent of the injured. The “planned and bloody
affairs”, he says, were organised “almost with the precision of a watchmaker”
to make political capital out of the resulting religious polarisation.
Jawaharlal Nehru with Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. | Photo Credit:
Wikimedia Commons
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In Uttar
Pradesh, for example, the Jana Sangh polled 10 per cent of the votes in 1957,
17 per cent in 1962, and 22 per cent in 1967, not too far behind the Congress’
32 per cent. Clearly, the Jana Sangh’s prospects brightened at the Congress’
cost. For both parties then, says Anil, “if uniting Hindus meant vilifying
Muslims, so be it. So it was that the Congress let riots run their course.”
Illegal Immigration
The
“illegal immigration” of Muslims from Bangladesh into Assam and beyond was yet
another “Islamophobic dog whistle”. The Congress used this bogey to
propagandise that Pakistani nationals were infiltrating India to convert local
Hindus to Islam.
The
deportation campaign that followed this disinformation saw the vicious
transmogrification of “go to Pakistan” into “sent to Pakistan”, as thousands of
genuine Indian Muslims were expelled to the newly created Muslim state.
Citing
official figures, Anil reveals that in Nehru’s second and third terms, over
35,000 “Pakistani nationals” in Assam were either deported or given notice to
leave the country. Likewise, some 23,500 were deported from Tripura and about
40,500 from West Bengal.
Before
being sent to Pakistan, the Muslims were usually driven out of their homes to
makeshift camps on the border “like herds of cattle”, and forced to “sign papers
declaring falsely that they were Pakistanis”, when many of them not only had
the right papers, but also appeared on Indian electoral registers. “It was
their faith that marked them as suspect,” says Anil, tellingly.
He
describes Nehru’s reluctant suspension of deportations in December 1962 under
the Foreigners Act as “too little, too late”, because six months after the
suspension his government was still evicting “one Muslim every three minutes”.
Muslim Response
The Muslim
response to the challenges of Islamophobia and Hindu nationalism came from
three categories of actors: the nationalists, the communalists, and the
notables.
The
attitude of “nationalist Muslims”—mostly Muslim Congressmen—was expressed in
three ways: they conflated India’s progress with that of the Congress; shielded
their party from criticism by blaming the communalists (“Muslim nationalists”)
for Partition; and placed the constitutional protection of sectarian sharia
above the community’s political rights. Backing them to the hilt were the Ulama,
especially those belonging to the Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind, a branch of the Congress
in all but name.
Topping the
list of “communalists” were socio-political parties such as the IUML, the
Majlis-e-Mushawarat (MeM), and the Jamat-e-Islami Hind. Anil describes the
formation of the MeM in August 1964, six months after the Hazratbal riots, as
the first bold manifestation of Muslim agency in independent India against the
anti-Muslim bias of Congress.
The
“notables”, of course, were elitist (Ashraf) Muslims such as Mutawallis (custodians
of Waqf properties), Waseeqadars (princely pensioners) and Waaqifs
(dedicators of properties for Waqf), who used their aristocratic agency to
feather their own nests in the guise of working for the community’s economic
development.
Even the
movement for Aligarh Muslim University’s autonomy, alleges Anil, was in reality
an attempt to secure the class interests of the Ashrafs by presenting them as
community concerns.
Robbed
Of Agency
However,
despite its painstaking research, Another India suffers from a major
inconsistency. It insinuates that “nationalist Muslims”, to appear loyal,
better their career prospects, and focus attention on protecting the Shariah,
surrendered their political agency to help Congress dilute the constitutional
rights of Muslims.
But Anil
himself lays out a long list of Congress’ Islamophobic acts, which, he says,
left little room for Muslim agency. It includes, apart from the aforementioned
facts, the misuse of preventive detention laws against Muslims leaders; “the
mass pogrom in the Deccan” which resulted in the massacre of between 27,000 and
40,000 Muslims, and Nehru’s suppression of the Sunderlal Report that brought
this fact out.
Even the
tallest “nationalist Muslim”, Azad, had no real independence. As a figurehead
president of the Congress his correspondence was often vetted and ghost-written
by Nehru. When he displayed some independence and criticised Nehru for
rejecting the Cabinet Mission Plan, and Mahatma Gandhi for betraying the
nationalist cause by agreeing to partition India, an angry Mahatma Gandhi wrote
to Nehru seeking the replacement of Azad with “more manipulable Muslims”.
Mahatma
Gandhi and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Archives
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Eventually,
he was forced to resign and “make way for a younger man” just as Mahatma Gandhi
wanted. In a telling description of Azad’s impotent reaction to his
cold-blooded marginalisation, Anil writes: “He resigned himself to his fate, a
venerated has-been, a man without agency.”
As for Muslim
Congressmen of lesser stature, the “insufferable” Hindu Congressmen routinely
insulted them and doubted their loyalty. Cars of prominent Muslims, including
lieutenant governors and excise commissioners, and other high-ranking Muslim
officials of the Secretariat were regularly stopped and searched by the police
for arms.
It is
unimaginable, therefore, that a handful of “nationalist Muslims” could have
defeated a majoritarian onslaught of this kind to secure their community’s
political rights. They had no option but to meekly accept the tradeoff offered
by Congress: the protection of Muslims’ cultural and religious rights in lieu
of their political rights. Had they pressed for their political rights, they
may have ended up losing even their cultural rights.
It was this
psychotic angst that robbed the “nationalist Muslims” of their agency and
inculcated in them what Anil calls “a tendency to mute their demands and
privilege party discipline and loyalty over all else”.
In fact,
Azad feared so much for the vulnerable Muslims that he advised them to totally
give up politics and “live as loyal citizens”. Interestingly, Anil agrees that
loyalty in the context of Partition could only be a demonstration of
submission, not a sign of agency.
Troubling
Questions
Another
India’s iconoclastic assessment of postcolonial history raises some troubling
questions too.
Was the
idea of composite nationalism, which Azad invoked along with Jamiat
Ulama-i-Hind in support of the Congress’ secularism, a conceptual farce because
Congress used secularism only as “a rhetorical strategy” to legitimise its
rule, as Anil argues?
Was Azad
right in holding the Congress more responsible for Partition than the Muslim
League because he realised that his own upper-caste party saw the political
advantages of letting a large number of Muslims “go to Pakistan”?
It is worth
noting that Dr B.R. Ambedkar, in his 1941 book Thoughts on Pakistan, wanted
Hindus to concede Jinnah’s demand because, without Pakistan, India would have
to contend with 65 million Muslims, while after its creation, that number would
fall to 20 million, thus greatly reducing the proportion of Muslim to Hindu
seats in Central and provincial legislatures, which would further fall once
weightage was cancelled.
However, by
August 1947, the Muslim population had crossed 100 million. But only around 35
million remained in independent India. In other words, Partition saw to it that
over 65 million Muslims were rendered non-Indian in a manner that was most
unmerciful and unceremonious. Was this staggering purge engineered by the
Congress to establish Hindu upper-caste hegemony in India?
H.M.
Seervai, one of India’s greatest constitutional experts, wrote in Partition of
India: Legend and Reality that what India needed was a Constitution that would
have kept the country united by securing for Muslims “all that Pakistan would
give them without the drawbacks and hardships of Partition”.
But, the
Constitution that ultimately resulted, according to Anil, was “forged by the
improbable entente between Jacobinism and Hindu traditionalism”, and therefore,
it could not retain the political safeguards that Muslims had secured before
Partition.
Was Azad,
then, right again in arguing that in a divided India with a centralised and
unitary government Muslims would be “left to the mercies of what would become
an unadulterated Hindu raj”?
There is
enough evidence in Another India to answer all the aforementioned questions in
the affirmative. This makes the book a devastating demolition of the myth
created by dominant historiography that Nehru was the “generous and magnanimous
torch-bearer of secularism”, and that Muslims were so immensely satisfied with
constitutional and Congress protection that they simply did not require a
politics of their own.
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A. Faizur Rahman is the
secretary-general of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought.
First published in Frontline magazine.
Source: The
Muslims Who Stayed Back: Review Of ‘Another India’ By Pratinav Anil
URL: https://newageislam.com/books-documents/india-pratinav-congress-muslims-partition/d/129839
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