India, Bharat and Pakistan

Title: India, Bharat and Pakistan – The Constitutional Journey of a Sandwiched Civilisation

Author: J. Sai Deepak

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2022 (First)

ISBN: 9789354353017

Pages: 616

 

The traditional accounts of India’s freedom struggle make us believe that Muslim League raised the demand of Pakistan with the Lahore Declaration in Mar 1940 and thereby creating the Two-Nation theory. It then grew so strong in the coming years as to receive acceptance even from Gandhi a few years later. As a result, the country was partitioned in 1947. This argument posits that the Two-Nation theory was a political idea put forward by the Muslim League, which was a political party. However, it was not difficult for discerning readers to shred this popular, comforting and infantile fiction to pieces with a little application of common sense. This book attributes the theory as a purely religious one having its origins in the minds of a few bigoted men after the disintegration of Mughal Empire by the middle of the eighteenth century. It is a fundamental principle in Islam that asks its followers to reside in a country where the Sharia law is in place. If it is not, they have two options. One is to fight their way to power by overthrowing the rulers through a holy war and make Sharia rule the land. But if the ruling agency is very powerful, this may not be possible and the believers are then exhorted to migrate to a country where Islamic law is in place. When Mughals ruled India in their prime, the entire land lay under the yoke of Sharia and offered the perfect abode of domicile for Muslims. With the decline of the Mughals, the Marathas, Jats, Sikhs and Rajputs assumed dominance in North India. Islamic revivalist movements came up in this period as a response to this loss of political power which grew into prominence under different guises in the coming centuries. Muslims were pacified under British ascendancy after 1857, but as soon as democratic reforms began to be implemented, they feared Hindu oppression owing to their superior numbers. As far as religious principles went, the British were at least People of the Book, while Hindus were ‘despised polytheists’. The Two-Nation theory thus originated from the reluctance of pious Muslims to live under Hindu rule which came into being in the eighteenth century. This book is the second in the trilogy on India’s constitutional development written by J. Sai Deepak and asserts that the Two-Nation theory cast its shadows on every political development such as the partition of Bengal, establishment of separate electorate for Muslims and the Khilafat Movement. The first volume was reviewed earlier in this blog.

 

What makes Sai Deepak stand out from the crowd of authors who had handled this subject earlier is his original thinking which found the real origins of the Two-Nation theory to the collapse of the most powerful Muslim empire in India – the Mughals. After its disintegration, the Islamic scholars sought solace in going back to the fundamentals of the religion and to revive it thereby. Shah Waliullah Dehlawi is the most prominent cleric of this period who propounded the bigoted tenets of Wahhabism which he encountered during his stay in Arabia. He exhorted the Muslims of the subcontinent not to integrate into society, since contact with Hindus would contaminate their Islamic purity. He urged them to see themselves as part of a global Ummah (religious community). He mandated them to follow the customs and mores of the Prophet. He was such a Sunni hardliner that he allowed Shias to celebrate their festivals in public but only with strict moderation. The Hindu infidels were not even permitted this somewhat shard of a privilege. Waliullah hated India, his homeland, so much that he invited the Afghan warlord Ahmed Shah Durrani to invade India to teach the infidels a lesson. In his letter, he detailed the strengths and weaknesses of Marathas and Jats. This was how the Two-Nation theory sprouted in India.

 

The author then lists out the religious movements that spread in all parts of the country like wildfire. The Faraizi Movement in Bengal founded by Haji Shariatullah in the 1820s was a violent organisation. Atrocities against Hindus spread in Bengal as its consequence, including destruction of temples and idols. Under Syed Ahmed Barelwi’s lead, Muslims in Bengal joined pan-Indian networks to fight common enemies such as the Sikh kingdom in Punjab. With Wahhabi influence, it became a practice in some Muslim families to earmark a portion of their earnings for contribution to jihad or to send their men to participate in it at least for a few months. Wahhabi thought was taken forward by other schools such as Ahl-i-Hadith, Deobandi, Barelwi, Nadwah and Aligarh movements.

 

Clubbing the Aligarh Movement with other hard-line religious associations may surprise some naïve souls. It is true that Aligarh was the only place where Islamic teaching was juxtaposed with modern Western learning, but the religious axis on which it turned was the same as the others. The combined effect of Syed Ahmed Khan and Jamal al-Din Afghani was the simultaneous growth of Muslim nationalism and pan-Islamism. Khan openly professed that Muslims are a separate nation in India and his reconciliation with pan-Islamism did not bode well for India. Liberal thinkers attribute all the blame for religious unrest in India to the ‘Divide-and-Rule’ policy of the British. Here, Deepak makes a sagacious observation. To blame the ‘Divide-and-Rule’ policy is to wistfully and willfully ignore uncomfortable and ‘unsecular’ facts. The British policy succeeded only because there were serious, pre-existing and irreconcilable religious, cultural, linguistic and civilizational fissures between the two communities. We were divided and they ruled.

 

The partition of Bengal was the definite moment in which the Muslim nation first asserted itself. This critical episode is given a fitting coverage in the book. The partition was more on religious lines than administrative convenience as the newly formed province of East Bengal and Assam was having a Muslim majority and became a centre of consolidation of Muslim interests and the point of convergence of Muslim organisations from across the country. Muslim associations in the new province celebrated Oct 16, 1905, the day on which the partition was officially declared, as a day of rejoicing. Congress and other Hindu organisations strongly opposed the measure and the agitation continued till it was partially withdrawn in 1911. However, Bengali Muslims stayed away from anti-partition protests and remained loyal to the British. Meanwhile, the British introduced reservation for Muslims in government jobs in the new province. Ulemas toured the province with incendiary speeches that led to widespread attacks on Hindus, especially women. This was a dress rehearsal for the ethnic pogrom against Hindus unleashed in 1946-47 in the same regions. When the partition was annulled, Bihar and Orissa was separated from the parent province. Now, the unity of Bengal was ensured, but the entire province then became one with a Muslim majority.

 

While the Bengal partition produced a physical shape of the Muslim nation, the 1909 Morley-Minto reforms outstretched its vicious tentacles with separate electorates for Muslims. This sordid chapter also finds prominent mention in the book. While all other minorities such as Christians, Parsees, Jews and others were treated as members of the general electorate, Muslims as a community was offered a separate electorate. In this manner, Muslim separatism was constitutionally cemented in the political psyche of India. Not content with that, Muslims were also given more seats than their population numbers warranted in view of the ‘historical and political superiority of Muslims’. The Congress, especially its moderate faction, had taken colonization as a time for beneficial political apprenticeship and wanted to present a united front to Britain to secure self-government. Naturally, they were willing to make critical concessions to Muslim demands to keep them along. The Muslim League realized this weakness early on and exploited it to the hilt. Deepak establishes that appeasement of the Muslim League was entrenched in Congress well before Gandhi took centre-stage. Jinnah assumed an amphibian role at this time by becoming a member of both Congress and the League and put his membership of the Congress to good use of Muslim community by softening the opposition within Congress to separate electorates for Muslims.

 

Another major contribution of the book is its categorical establishment that Gandhi was not the originator of Congress’ Muslim appeasement. It started right from that party’s birth in 1885 and went into overdrive after Muslim League’s formation in 1906. At least in one instance, it went far more than the League was willing to go – on the issue of the fate of the Turkish sultan who was also the caliph of Muslims who was defeated by Britain and its allies in the First World War. Gandhi’s rise as a national leader was significantly owed to the Khilafat Movement. His agitation against the Rowlatt Act too was made possible due to the support of the Khilafatists. This was the first time Muslims came out on the warpath after 1857, but unfortunately, it was for a cause not even remotely connected to India’s destiny. In fact, its pan-Islamic objectives threatened the national aspirations of India. Maulana Muhammad Ali declared that he will assist the Afghans if they invaded India. This open threat alienated a sizeable cross-section of Hindu supporters. Within no time, the Khilafat agitation changed track and turned into forced conversion and ethnic cleansing of Hindus, especially in Malabar in 1921. The horrifying fact was that the Khilafat leaders refused to condemn the brutal atrocities even after they were widely published by the Press. Maulana Hazrat Mohani, who was one of the founders of the Communist Party of India (CPI), informed in a meeting that ‘since the Moplahs suspected their Hindu neighbours of colluding with the government, they were justified in presenting the Quran to the Hindus. And if the Hindus became Musalmans to save themselves from death, it was a voluntary change of faith and not forcible conversion (p.469). This was how the Khilafat leaders actually justified the murder, rape and forced conversion while the Congress leaders continued to keep their eyes firmly shut.

 

Another idea this book conveys is the longevity of the fundamental Indic consciousness that animates the Indian communal being. Indic consciousness was able to produce society-based institutions and individuals who constantly and uncompromisingly advanced the Indic civilizational cause and space in the two waves of Middle Eastern and European colonialism. This ability preserved the Consciousness then but is now dulled and stifled under the third wave of colonization, namely, under the Nehruvian Marxist/post-colonial establishment which even refuses to acknowledge the Middle Eastern colonialism which ravaged the country perhaps much more detrimentally than the British.

 

This book is rather huge even though it covers only the period from 1905 to 1924. It is a worthy follower of the first book of the trilogy – India that is Bharat – in content, but rather less enjoyable due to the frequent and very long extracts from speeches, books, memorials and debates. At least a quarter of the book is filled with verbatim reproduction of speeches on 1909 reforms and the Khilafat. This is very tiring for the reader as the author seems to have taken a temporary leave of absence and left the readers to deal directly with the jargon and vocabulary of politicians who lived more than a century ago. The book consistently uses the terms Bharat/Bharatiya for India/Indian which proclaims its firm mooring to Indian, er, Bharatiya consciousness. The author also emphasizes the Hindu roots of Sikhs and how fanatical Muslims treated both as the same. The unseating of the Khalsa kingdom of Lahore was a sworn objective of Wahhabi extremists in the early half of the nineteenth century. This is especially valid as the Khalistanis are now hand in glove with the Wahhabis.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star