The Muslims and partition. (partition of India)(includes bibliography) Francis Robinson. 

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 History Today Ltd. (UK) 

The partition of india at independence in 1947 into the sovereign states of India and Pakistan is one of the more important events of twentieth-century world history. It was a shameful end to the most important project in Britain's imperial enterprise. More important it was a tragic experience for the hundreds of thousands of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who were killed in the communal slaughter which accompanied the process and for the nearly 15 million who were made refugees. Over the past fifty years India and Pakistan have been in a state of constant hostility, fighting three wars in 1947-48, 1963 and 1971, and during the last decade fighting low-intensity wars over Kashmir and the drawing of boundaries in the high Himalayas. 

When an event is bound up with the founding narratives of three of the world's more populous states and the pride in achievement of a fourth, historiographical positions are likely to be hard fought. That said, any explanation of partition must address two issues: (1) why many Muslims were reluctant to join the Congress, the party of the Indian nationalist movement, and (2) why this fact led to a surgical division of the land. 

In any explanation of 'Muslim separatism' following elements should play a part. Some weight should be given to Islamic values. There is a tendency for some Muslims to organise on a community basis whenever they go into politics. At the level of religious belief there are powerful drives for communal action. God told Muslims through the Prophet Mohammad that they were the 'best community raised up for mankind'. God revealed to Muslims the best way to live if they hoped for salvation, and that involved living within the community and being subject to its law. The idea of community action for community ends has a seductive resonance. However, for a good number of Muslims the idea of community was more a rhetorical flourish than a psychological fact. 

Weight should certainly be given to Muslim revivalism. From the beginning of the nineteenth century Indian Muslims, in common with Muslims elsewhere in the world, were in the grip of various movements of revival and reform. These came to intersect with the problems of coping with the meaning of Western power and Western knowledge. There was considerable cultural and intellectual ferment as Muslims in different social and intellectual situations fashioned ways forward. Various movements were founded -- those of the Deobandis, Barelvis. Ahmadis, Jamaati-Islamis and Tablighi-Jamaatis -- which have come to have worldwide significance. In India they tended to draw firmer distinctions between Muslim practice and that of the Hindu world around them; the outcome was to sharpen the Muslim sense of identity. 

But it was not just Islam which was challenged by Western power and knowledge: so was Hinduism, the faith of the great majority of Indians. Hindus also experienced a cultural and intellectual ferment, and came to have a sharper sense of their identity. Some hailed British rule for supplanting 'Muslim tyranny'. Muslims were accused of robbing Hindus of religion, wealth and women. They were the outsiders in India, not Hindustanis. The relics of Muslim power, such as mosques in Hindu holy places, were 'wounds in the heart'. In northern India Hindus and Muslims began to rub up against each other more abrasively, particularly as the former demanded an end to the slaughter of cows (cheap food for Muslims but holy for Hindus) and the replacement of the Persian script in government by the Hindu Nagri script. The presence of Hindu revivalists tended to inhibit the nationalist movement when it sought compromise with the Muslim League. 

Recent research, much influenced by Edward Said's Orientialism (1978), has focused on how the British constructed knowledge about India, and the ways in which this construction not only influenced British governance but also Indian ideas about themselves. From the very beginning of the serious study of India, Warren Hastings and the orientalists around him -- Jones, Halhed, Wilkins -- thought of India in terms of Hindus and Muslims, tending to seek classical texts to guide them in government and the administration of justice, rather than grappling with the complexities of the Indian present. When the British came to place a framework over India's past, they divided it into Hindu, Muslim and British periods. When from 1871 they began their decennial census of the Indian empire, they tabulated its peoples under religious headings. For much of the nineteenth century, moreover, this tendency to interpret Indian society in terms of religion was reinforced by the committed Christian beliefs of Indian administrators and the presence of many missionary organisations. 

That the British understood Indian society in terms of its religious divisions was always an important prop of the nationalist accusation that Indians were divided, and India ultimately divided, by British policies of divide and rule. There is a smidgeon of truth in these accusations, although British policies are better understood as a series of pragmatic responses to a changing political environment rather than a conscious policy to divide. 'Nothing', declared one leading administrator in the late nineteenth century, 'could be more opposed to the policy and universal practice of our government in India than the old maxim of divide and rule ...' 

At this time the British felt Muslims to be the greatest threat to their rule. They had failed to reconcile the former rulers of India to their government; the Mutiny uprising of 1857 was seen to confirm this. In 1870 they decided that the safety of the Raj demanded that they find ways of attaching powerful Muslims to their side. This policy was developed just at the time that Saiyid Ahmad Khan was striving to reconcile his co-religionists to Western knowledge and British rule. His initiatives received much official encouragement. Arguably his Aligarh College would never have been founded, and may not have survived, but for government support which ranged from land made available at derisory rates to personal donations from viceroys. His All-India Muslim Educational Conference, which from 1886 drew Muslims together from all over India for the first time, operated within a framework of government approval. He himself was given the most unusual distinction, for an Indian at the time, of being knighted. 

Many factors -- Islamic values, religious revivalism, British understandings of India and British techniques of rule -- helped to establish an important step along the road towards India's partition. We should note, however, that such roads rarely run straight and that different groups of Muslims found the platform suiting their interests at different times. Initially supporters were the landed and government service classes, mainly from the UP, the supporters of Saiyid Ahmad Khan. By the First World War they were increasingly young professional men from the same province -- lawyers and newspaper editors. In the 1920s the platform was virtually deserted; Muslim landlords joined landlord parties, some young professionals joined the nationalist movement, others left politics altogether. Towards the end of the 1920s as, further devolution of power came to be discussed, Muslims crowded back onto the platform again. But many soon lost interest when they found it to be dominated by a view of the future favouring Muslims of the Punjab. 

In December 1930 the poet-philosopher, Muhammad lqbal, sketched out this view when, as President of the Muslim League session at Allahabad, he proposed the creation of a Muslim state in the north-west of India. This subsequently inspired a Cambridge student, Rahmat Ali, to give it a name 'Pakistan' derived thus: 'P' stood for the Punjab, 'A' for Afghanistan or the North-West Frontier Province, 'K' for Kashmir, 'S' for Sind and 'tan' for Baluchistan. It translated as the 'land of the pure'. 

In 1937 the Muslim League did not appear to be a major player in Indian politics. By 1946, however, it most certainly was. In the general elections of that year it won over 90 per cent of the seats reserved for Muslims. Its President, Jinnah, now known as the Quaid-i-Azam (Great Leader), had the support of the vast majority of India's Muslims. Any explanation of the partition of India must be able to explain this transformation of the League's position. 

One key factor was the impact of the Second World War. It meant that the British were eager to seek Muslim support, in part because half the Indian army was Muslim and in part because the nationalist movement was opposed to the war and any Indian involvement in it. The League had little political clout, yet it was the only serious All-India Muslim party, so the British turned to it. 

Note should be taken of the mistakes made by the Congress. After its great victories in the 1937 elections, it behaved in a triumphalist fashion, asking too high a price of League members to be included in a coalition government in the UP, hurting Muslim sensibilities by forcing Muslim children to sing the song 'Bande Mataram' with its message of hate for Muslims, and threatening Muslim culture in general. Then, it made the further mistake of letting go the levers of power. In 1939 all the Congress governments resigned in protest against the Viceroy's declaration of war on behalf of India. In 1942 the Congress responded to the Cripps offer by launching a full-scale rebellion against the British, the Quit India movement. The outcome was that all the Congress leadership and 60,000 workers were sent to prison for the rest of the war. The League was given a free hand. 

Finally, there was the outstanding leadership abilities of Jinnah. He was masterly as the builder of the League as a political organisation, masterly as a political strategist and without equal as a negotiator. Few liked him; few doubted his integrity; everyone respected him. 'Of all the statesmen I have known in my life -- Clemenceau, Lloyd George, Churchill, Curzon, Mussolini, Mahatma Gandhi', declared the Aga Khan, 'Jinnah is the most remarkable'. 

All these factors came together to create the League landslide at the polls in early 1946. But we should not think that this made partition inevitable. In its Pakistan resolution, the League had resolved: 

... that no constitutional plan would be 

workable in this country or acceptable 

to the Muslims unless it is designed on 

the following basic principles, viz., that 

geographically contiguous units are 

demarcated into regions which should 

be so constituted ... that the areas in 

majority, as in the North-Western and 

Eastern zones of India, should be 

grouped to constitute Independent 

States in which the constituent units 

shall be autonomous and sovereign. 

It was not clear whether these 'States' were to be separate from India or formed within a federal India. This was a lack of clarity which Jinnah found helpful and worked to maintain. In 1946 a delegation of Cabinet Ministers to India proposed an ingenious solution to the Pakistan problem. There were to be three tiers of government at independence, the first to be formed out of the existing provinces, the second to be formed out of separate Hindu and Muslim federations of provinces (a Hindustan and Pakistan), and in the third, the central government, representatives of these federations would come together on an equal basis to deal with defence, foreign affairs and communications. On June 6th, the League accepted the plan. On June 22nd, so did the Congress but at the same time it refused to support the interim government which was to put the plan into effect. 

From this point partition became increasingly inevitable. There was deadlock and growing civil disorder. A Labour Government in Britain was keen to leave india as fast as possible; every extra day that British troops remained added to British debt. In February 1947 Mountbatten was sent out as Viceroy with a brief to pressure the politicians into agreement. Mountbatten quickly saw that Britain could only withdraw by transferring power not to one government, but to two. He also saw that it would not be possible to leave the large Hindu and Sikh minorities of the Punjab and the Hindu minority of Bengal under Muslim rule. The partition of India would also mean the partition of these provinces; thus the League had its two-nation theory played back against it. Jinnah was most unhappy to accept what he termed a 'truncated or mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan', but eventually on June 3rd, 1947, he did, with a nod of the head. On August 14th, in Karachi, he was installed as Governor-General of the British dominion of Pakistan. Whatever his reservations, it seemed he had won a glorious victory. 

There are some significant ironies in the making of partition. A common view would be that the Congress bitterly opposed the mutilation of Mother India. However, Congress did have a hand in the process itself. In the complete edition of his autobiography, India Wins Freedom, the Muslim member of the Congress high command, Abul Kalam Azad, makes it clear that of its other three members, Vallabhbhai Patel was positively in favour of partition before Mountbatten arrived, Nehru was quite quickly persuaded, and Gandhi accepted the inevitable. Patel and Nehru were keen to take over a strong central government and relatively weak provinces. Patel wanted strong central government to hold the new state together; Nehru was keen to put Soviet style five-year plans into effect. The Cabinet Mission plan patently did not supply strong central government. 

When the Congress in effect rejected the proposals, Jinnah's plans were in tatters. In the remaining thirteen months leading up to independence, he worked to minimise the consequences of his defeat. Partition happened because, in the circumstances., the Congress leaders wanted it, not because Jinnah desired it. 

The final irony was that Pakistan was built on a claim for a separate nationality for Muslims. Yet Pakistan's creation left one third of the subcontinent's Muslims in India, where they would have to subsume their Muslim identity within a greater Indian identity. 

FOR FURTHER READING: Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom; the Complete Version (Orient Longman, 1988); Mushirul Hasan, Nationalism and Communal Politics in India, 1916-1928 (Manohar, 1979); H.V. Hodson, The Great Divide: Britain -- India -- Pakistan (Hutchinson, 1969); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1985); V.P. Menon, The Transfer of power in India (Orient Longman. 1957); David Page, Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control 1920-1932 (Oxford University Press, 1982); Francis Robinson, Separatism Among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces' Muslims 1860-1923 (Cambridge University Press, 1974). 

Francis Robinson is Professor of the History of south Asia at the University of London. His latest book is The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World (Cambridge, 1996).