[Muslim leaders profiled in this book: Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Iqbal, Muhammad Ali, Jinnah, Fazlul Haq, Abul Kalam Azad, Liaqat Ali Khan, Zakir Husain]

    Do the eight lives [of the Muslim leaders studied in this book] say anything to us? Our times differ from theirs. As a result of the 1947 and 1972 divisions and the population flows that began in 1947, Hindus outnumber Muslims by 15 to 2 in India and Muslims similarly outnumber Hindus in Bangladesh and even more decisively in Pakistan. Yet on the subcontinent even small ratios translate into immense communities. If Hindu-Muslim incompatibility is proved and incurable, we should expect large numbers to be separated by walls or hurt by gunfire. Any light that the lives shed on the Hindu-Muslim question is therefore relevant.

    Not synonymous with Hindus but largely representing them, Congress was, we saw, ungenerous in that crucial year, 1937. Blindness lay behind its failure to give Muslims a visible share in its ministries. It did not realize that Congress rule could be taken as Hindu rule by the bulk of the qaum. This blindness was not new. We saw in Sayyid Ahmed's story that as far back as the 1880s most Hindus associated with the founding of Congress were unaware of Muslim fears of one-man-one-vote.

    If Congress in 1937 was "a powerful organization which did not suffer from any lack of arrogance,"/1/ as Rajagopalachari, then Congress's Premier of Madras, was to confess in 1965, we can also fairly accuse Jinnah of making excessive demands in the period between 1939 and 1947. As Wavell, not unsympathetic to him, said of Jinnah in 1946, "I think he has [312] been too unyielding."/2/ His insistence on a bar against Congress's Muslims and his claim to Assam and the Hindu-majority portions of Punjab and Bengal were unreasonable positions; they damaged the cause of Hindu-Muslim understanding.

    If arrogance (Congress's) and extremism (the League's) were hurtful, so was partisanship. Few on either side transcended the divide. From being an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity Jinnah withdrew into the qaum. Even Gandhi, who said that one of his functions was "to unite parties riven asunder,"/3/ was only spasmodic in his strivings for a Hindu-Muslim alliance. He dramatically promoted it, we saw, in 1919-22, but seemed to lose faith in it after the mid-twenties, and in 1929, with remarkable candour, he told Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, that "however much they argued, " Indian parties discussing the communal question "could not reach a policy which would be acceptable to all."/4/ In 1937, however, he expressed his regret that Jinnah had not used him ''as a bridge" between Congress and the League. To this Jinnah's reply was that Gandhi had identified himself with Congress.

    Though called an appeaser of Muslims by the Hindu group that disliked him for years and finally killed him, Gandhi was seen as a Hindu leader by the bulk of the qaum, not as a bridge, except during two phases: 1919- 22 and the last months of his life. Spelling out the qaum's perception of the Mahatma, Chaudhri Muhammad Ali writes:

That Gandhi, or any other Hindu leader, did not harm the individual Muslim, or actually served him loving care, was irrelevant to the political issue. It could not justify the exercise of (Hindu) political power over Muslims. ...Gandhi had some admirers and partisans among the Muslims, but the more he praised them, the more they were looked upon as traitors./5/

There was no constructive statesmanship or compromise. No Hindu admitted that a Muslim could possibly have a grievance or any other reason for mistrusting the 'democratic' predominance of the Congress; [113] no Muslim would admit any possibility of justice or fairness from Hindu hands./6/

    Likewise, despite the 1947 killings, Liaqat could speak in 1949 of "the great record of tolerance" of Muslim nations in times past, and of the "tolerance envisaged by Islam, wherein a minority does not live on sufferance but is respected."/7/ The confidence, in other words, rested on Hinduism's finest thought or on Islam's finest age, on what sages once composed and a Prophet envisaged, not on what ordinary mortals were designing or doing at the time. Judging their own community by its highest ideals, both Hindus and Muslims nonetheless judged the other community by its lowest deeds.

    Personality conflicts intensified these general weaknesses. Jinnah, we saw, felt that Gandhi had ousted him from the centre of the national stage; later Gandhi was to feel that Jinnah barred him from the stage before which the qaum sat. Sectionalism is strengthened when a gifted man is deprived of a nationwide role and does not forgive.

    Congress's inability to speak in an Indian rather than a Hindu idiom gave a fillip to separatism. Most members elected in the elections of 1937 belonged to Congress; most Congress ministers were Hindus; deliberately or unconsciously, they presented their Hindu face. The fasts of their guide, the Mahatma, his use of the term Ram Rajya for the ideal society of the future, the description by some ministers of schools as temples of learning, the singing, at government functions, of songs that were patriotic to the Hindus but sounded Hindu to the qaum's ear, and the use by ministers of Sanskritized Hindi--these were part of a Hindu idiom that lent some credibility to the League's cry of Hindu rule.

    This effect was not foreseen. The aim of Congress's exercises was not to beat the Hindu drum but to touch or stir the average man. A Hindu metaphor or song was capable of having this effect on three citizens out of four; the Indian Hindu, like the Indian Muslim, was responsive to messages possessing a religious flavour. But the exercises resulted in per-[314]suading the fourth citizen that one-man-one-vote would lead to a Hindu state.

    It may be asked whether this has any bearing on today's India, where four out of five are Hindus and only a fifth of the population can find a Hindu idiom strange. Yet a fifth of the Indian population is still a large and growing quantity of human beings, to whom our constitution guarantees the rights enjoyed by the majority. The building up of metaphors and motifs that can affect them as well as the Hindu majority is surely a matter of importance.

    What is called for is an idiom that bears an Indian rather than a Hindu (or Muslim, Christian, Sikh or Buddhist) stamp while yet being in harmony with the values of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism; and one, moreover, that can stir the average citizen as deeply as religious motifs stir him. It is of course a major challenge, but not one that those who care about India's unity can afford to evade. It is beyond our present scope to enlarge on this challenge or propose ways of meeting it.

    If our study teaches Hindus in politics or government to consider their metaphors with greater care, and to weigh how Muslims might perceive them, it also suggests that Muslims need not regard every recourse to a Hindu motif as a sign of religious imposition. To do this suited the League's strategy but Hindu-Muslim understanding suffered. Thanks to the League's sustained rhetoric about Hindu rule, the bulk of the qaum failed to see that Congress's Hindu idiom was primarily intended to touch Hindus and not to Hinduize Muslims. Much of it was spontaneous and could have been accepted as such. To tolerate the other man's religious idiom may be as important a need as the building up of a non-religious all-India idiom.

    Another lesson is that, rhetoric notwithstanding, separatists often want a division of power rather than separation. Jinnah's conviction that Pakistan was entitled to Assam and the Hindu-majority portions of Punjab and Bengal, his disappointment at the departure of Hindus from Sind and his unhappiness at their suffering showed that a say in the subcontinent's affairs was more his goal than the qaum's separation. He knew that complete separation was impossible, and so it turned out. The divorce he obtained with rare skill and tenacity was partial: about 40 per cent of India's Muslims remained in India after Pakistan was formed, and the 60 per cent who separated could not leave the neighbourhood. The problem of cultivating Hindu-Muslim understanding did not disappear. Even if warmth is deemed unattainable, a working relationship within and between the nations is indispensable.

    [315] We saw, too, that Hindu-Muslim unity was a jealous mistress, exploding when Indians tried to embrace another goal, even a goal as noble as that of liberty. In 1924 Gandhi and Jinnah separately noted that Hindu-Muslim unity was a pre-condition for independence. Jinnah said that the "one essential requisite condition to achieve Swaraj is the political unity between Hindus and Muslims,"/8/ while Gandhi wrote: "I see no way of achieving anything in this country without a lasting heart unity between Hindus and Mussalmans."/9/

    However, though unity had not been achieved, Gandhi initiated mass movements in the early 1930s and again in the early forties. These movements may have brought independence nearer; they stirred and united "nationalist" Indians, including a section of Muslims; still, they alienated the bulk of the qaum; and more than once the Raj sought to justify its continuance by citing the qaum's attitude. What was true of India vis-a-vis Britain may have some relevance today to the subcontinent vis-a-vis the super powers. Co-ordination among the nations of the region may be the wisest way to keep the super powers out; individual moves widen the Subcontinent's gulfs and can draw in the super powers.

    Our study does not show that the Raj created the Hindu-Muslim divide. Though often acting wrongly, Britain was not the author of Indian divisions. Muhammad Ali's statement, "We divide and they rule," which he made in London in 1930, was the truth. Gandhi's view, also given, a year later, in London, that the Hindu-Muslim "quarrel is not old [but] is coeval with the British advent"/10/ was an idealisation of India's pre-British past. Amending his thinking, Gandhi said in August 1947:

The British Government is not responsible for partition. The Viceroy has no hand in it. In fact he is as opposed to division as Congress itself. But if both of us, Hindus and Muslims, cannot agree on anything else, then the Viceroy is left with no choice./11/

    This claim was not valid either. Three members of Britain's cabinet no doubt spent three trying months in India in 1946, but the ministers failed to propose, let alone impose, an unambiguous compromise. Rejecting Pakistan and also rejecting a unitary India, they outlined a loose federation with a large "Pakistan" area that might have been a solution; but they allowed, indeed encouraged, both Congress and the League to misinterpret their proposal. The League was prompted by them to accept the loose [316] federation ''as a step on the road to Pakistan," while Congress was advised to "accept" their scheme with "its own interpretation." What the "wise men" proposed was one thing, what the League accepted another and what Congress agreed to a third. Yet H.M.G. accepted these "acceptances," scarcely an inspiring "unite and quit" performance.

    Even Wavell, despite his belief in a "masculine" and "blunt" approach/13/ and his unhappiness with the methods of Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps, was in the end a party to the exercise. Moreover, as he admitted in his diary, he was "perhaps wrong...not to press Jinnah more strongly about a Congress Muslim from the very start./14/ Wavell's feelings had been hurt, as he again admitted, by Congress's Quit India movement launched in the middle of the war with Japan, when he was Commander-in-Chief in the region; the hurt affected his impartiality. We learn from this episode that it is hazardous when administrators or arbitrators employ ambiguity to announce "success" or allow hurts to influence their judgement. You don't have to be an alien ruler to make such mistakes.

    Congress and the League were free, of course, to settle on their own. They did not. A lack of trust was the main reason, but a lack of channels also proved crucial. No friendly broker, Indian or British, asked Jinnah if he would give up Pakistan if he obtained a large semi-sovereign Pakistan, or Gandhi, Nehru and Patel if they would concede such a Pakistan if Jinnah agreed to a significant centre. There is no proof that the two sides would have agreed on this basis; equally, there is no evidence that such a compromise was ever spelt out, considered and rejected.

    Our study also discloses the pitfalls that accompany nationalism, whether linked to Islamic, Indian or British impulses. Muhammad Ali's wrath against Britain over Turkey and the Khilafat blinded him to the opposition within Turkey to the Khilafat. The Turks, not the British, destroyed the Khilafat; thereby they also robbed Muhammad Ali of his platform. The effect of his inability to see clearly has been well described by Muhammad Habib:

Mr. Muhammad Ali's masterpiece was his "Choice of the Turks." I read it with tears and faith as an Aligarh undergraduate and it was not till the rise of Kemal Pasha that I discovered that his facts were completely wrong and that the fall of the Turkish leaders whom he supported was not worth a tear./15/

    Two successful alliances were conceivable: a Congress-League alliance that could have ended the Raj, or a Congress-Raj alliance that would have isolated the League. Dislike and mistrust prevented both and what remained was a choice between continuing conflict and a settlement involving all three sides.

    The lives [of the eight Muslim leaders studied in this book] do not point to any clear relationship, direct or inverse, between so-called Islamic fundamentalism and Hindu-Muslim friendship, confirming Muhammad Ali's perception that "it is not the love of our religion that makes us quarrel, but self-love and petty personal ambition."/16/ Of the eight the two who most leaned on the "fundamentalist" side were Iqbal and Azad. Purism and separatism seemed to grow together in Iqbal but he was never hostile to communal harmony. With more romance perhaps than realism, he saw a Muslim homeland on the subcontinent as a territory peopled by a homogeneous dynamic Muslim race; and he saw it too, as Liaqat also did, as a laboratory for Islam; but it is hard to describe Iqbal as anti-Hindu.

    As for Azad, he was, in practice, the strongest advocate of Hindu-Muslim partnership. Also, he claimed Qur'anic sanction for his views. In his understanding, pure Islam allowed Muslims to cooperate freely with all monotheists, including Hindus, and encouraged them to seek the spirit, and not just the letter, of Islam's injunctions.

    The least religious of the eight, Jinnah, was the one to show the most passion for a Muslim homeland, but after obtaining Pakistan he reverted to his belief in the normalcy of Hindu-Muslim co-existence. Fazlul Huq's oscillations between separation from Hindus and partnership with them had little to do with the extent of his orthodoxy as a Muslim.

    We saw that members of the qaum did not automatically like, or think like, one another. The Huq-Jinnah, Jinnah-Azad and Azad-Zakir equations were all tense; and the Huq-Jinnah friction preceding and following the Lahore resolution was the first warning of the stress that would divide the Muslim land, or lands, the two jointly demanded in 1940. At least three of the eight--Iqbal, Huq and Jinnah--had marital difficulties. Taking the eight together, we could not, while looking at their [318] lives, look at their wives. Except for Liaqat's wife Raana and, while she and her husband were together, for Jinnah's wife Ruttie, the women were generally invisible. What significance this may have was outside the scope of our study.

    The lives neither deny nor assure Hindu-Muslim compatibility, though it is significant that at one time or another each of the eight believed in it. They speak alternately of tension and trust between Hindus and the qaum. They speak, too, of mistakes, others' and their own, of injuries taken and given, victories won and missed, doors slammed shut and others unexpectedly opening, of griefs and joys, of hardness and tenderness, of the fist and the moist eye, of long days and nights in prison and long applause from the faithful, of quantities of sweat and of blood, of goals attained and satisfactions denied. They tell of human weaknesses and also of Sayyid Ahmed's sagacious head, Iqbal's songs of genius, Muhammad Ali's heart-on-a-sleeve, Jinnah's backbone of steel, Huq's store of sympathy, Azad's mind of courage, Liaqat, content at number two, and Zakir the gentle. Reflecting on these qualities, some Hindus may, God willing, find themselves moving closer to Muslims than they were, even as the writer of these pages did.
 

1. R. Gandhi, The Rajaji Story, p. 337.
2. Moon (ed.), Wavell, p. 368.
3. Merriarn, Gandbi vs. Jnnah, p. 31.4. See Wolpert, Jinnah, p. 111.
5. Muhammad Ali, Emergence of Pakistan, p. 145.
6. Moon (ed.), Wavell, p. 311.
7. Afzal (ed.), Speeches, pp. 231-2.
8. Merriarn, Gandbi vs Jinnah, p. 40.
9. Ibid., p. 47.
10. Round Table Conference proceedings, quoted in Wolpert, Jinnah, p. 128.
11.Quoted in Menon, Transfer of Power, p. 382.
12. Moon (ed.), Wavell, p. 352.
13. Ibid., p. 314.
14. Ibid., p. 313 and p. 494.
15. Introduction by Habib in Moin Shakir, Khilafat to Pakistan (Kalamkar, New Delhi), p. xii.
16. Iqbal, Mohamed Ali, p. 38.

For full bibliographic citations, see pp. 319-322 in the text.