BOOK REVIEW :
Jaswant Singh: Jinnah, India – Partition – Independence
Rupa and Company, New Delhi 2009, pp 669, price Rs. 695.
A Reasonably accurate account of Indian history during the period Post World War II to the Partition of India and Pakistan.
By: Dr. R.M. Pal
Editor of PUCL Bulletin, Dr. R.M. Pal is a former editor of The Radical Humanist and former President of Delhi State PUCL. He has co-edited with Mr. G.S. Bhargava the volume Human Rights of Dalits, Gyan Publishing House, New Delhi, 1999 proceedings of a conference held in Chennai organized by the National Human Rights Commission in collaboration with the Dalit Liberation Trust, Chennai. The initiative for this conference was taken by Dr. Pal. Dr. Pal has also co-edited with Mrs. Meera Verma as another writer the volume Power to the People, the Political Thought of M.K.Gandhi, M.N. Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan, 2 volumes, (New Delhi: Gyan Books, 2007).
Mr. Mahi Pal Singh is a human rights activist and President and General Secretary of the Delhi State branches of the Indian Radical Humanist Association and People’s Union for Civil Liberties respectively .
This is a book which all RSS and BJP activists should read to know the history of India of the relevant period leading to Partition. BJP leaders have taken objection to the book mainly for two reasons:
that Mr. Singh considers Jinnah a great man,
that Mr. Singh criticizes Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, who is by national consensus a great leader who unified the country.
Mr. Arun Jaitley and Mrs. Sushma Swaraj of the BJP are the most vocal ones in criticizing Mr. Singh. I have known Mr. Jaitley since his student days in Delhi University. He had a liberal education (he is a law graduate from Delhi University). He was very active in PUCL. He hardly ever missed a meeting of the Delhi PUCL. There were a few Marxists in the Delhi PUCL and Mr. Jaitley was very close to one of them. Later, after the emergency imposed by Mrs. Gandhi came to an end and the Janata Party, of which Jaitley was an important member, came to power, Mr. Jaitley declined to join the Janata Party ministry. He told me one day that he would like to practice law under the guidance of people like V M. Tarkunde. It is at that time I felt that the BJP should have a young man like Mr. Jaitley as its leader. Today people like Mr. Arun Shourie want the RSS to activate the BJP. I feel strongly that this is not the correct recipe for the BJP to become strong in electoral politics in India. It is only young people like Mr. Arun Jaitley who can revive the party.
I could quote at length from Mr. Singh’s book that Jinnah got Pakistan without much effort but this review article would tax the patience of readers and editors of magazines to whom I’m planning to send this lengthy review for favour of publication. Let me however, start with a quotation from the book under the title Sunset of the Empire: The Lahore Resolution 23rd March 1940) – A Retrospect:
From a negative construct one can scarcely extract a positive product. The seeds of a vivisection of India having been sown, ceaselessly year after year, as much by us (Hindus and Muslims) as by the post second world war, enfeebled the British for they did, of course, divide to rule, but we also divided ourselves, what else could follow but a destructive break-up?
I would then quote from Mr. Singh’s account of the AICC Meeting:
R.C. Majumdar, in Struggle For Freedom, has expressed that in the course of his talks with party leaders Mountbatten was convinced that there was absolutely no prospect of an agreed solution on the basis of the Cabinet Mission plan, and that the partition of India on ‘communal lines was inevitable’. He succeeded in convincing both Patel and Nehru and gradually Congress leaders veered round to it. Azad, Moseley, and many others have condemned both Nehru and Patel on this account, and held them up as the real authors of the ill-fated Partition of India. But before denouncing Patel or Nehru and describing them as mere dupes of ‘wily Mountbatten’s clever maneuvering’, it is only fair to remember that the Congress had unanimously [also] passed resolutions, directly or indirectly conceding Pakistan, in 1934,1942,1945, and March 1947. Gandhi and Nehru had also referred to partition contingency as a very possible one.
The AICC meet of 14-15 June 1947 was held to adopt a resolution accepting the Mountbatten Plan of partition, as announced on 3 June. At this meeting, there were several voices of dissent raised against this proposed partition. Amongst such speakers was Chothram Gidwani from Sindh who was called to Delhi, on 14 and 15 bitterly criticized the solution as a total and abject surrender to the ‘blackmailing tactics of violence resorted to by the Muslim League under Jinnah’. Amongst others of the Congress leadership that spoke were for example. Purushottamdas Tandon, who firmly stood out against the resolution till the very end, in a voice charged with emotion, shared his anguish with the delegates: This ‘Resolution is a counsel of weakness and despair. The Nehru government has been unnerved by the terror tactics of the Muslim League and an acceptance of Partition would be an act of betrayal and surrender. Let us rather suffer the continuation of the British Rule a little longer than sacrifice our cherished goal of a United India. Let us gird up our loins to fight, if need be both the British and Muslim League, and safeguard the integrity of the country’. The loud applause that greeted Tandon’s speech gave a note of warning to the Congress leadership. Of all the other interventions in this fateful meet, remarkable were those by Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan. In Lohia’s own words, ‘barring us two [himself and Jayaprakeash Narayan], Mahatma Gandhi and Abdul Gaffar Khan none spoke a single word in opposition to partition’.
‘Pandit Nehru told Michael Brecher, his biographer, (in 1956, the reasons for accepting the Partition of India): ‘Well, I suppose it was the compulsion of events and the feeling that we wouldn’t get out of that deadlock or morass by pursuing the way we had done; it became worse and worse. Further a feeling that even if we got freedom for India with that background, it would be very weak India; that is a federal India with far too much power in the federating units. A larger India would have constant troubles, constant disintegrating pulls. And also the fact that we saw no other way of getting our freedom-in the near future, I mean. And, so we accepted it and said, let us build up a strong India. And if others do not want to be in it, well how can we and why should we force them to be in it? However, as R.C. Majumdar comments, Pandit Nehru came nearer the truth in a conversation with Mosley in 1960, when he said: “The truth is that we were tired men, and we were getting on in years too. Few of us could stand the prospect of going to prison again and if we had stood out for a united India as we wished it, prison obviously awaited us. We saw the fires burning in the Punjab and heard every day of the killings. The plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.”
Since Mr. Jaitley and other BJP stalwarts, have taken objection to Mr. Singh’s reference to Sardar Patel, let me quote M.N. Roy whose writings on the subject have been totally ignored by Jaswant Singh. M.N. Roy was an objective intellectual. Roy’s biographer, Prof. Sib Narayan Ray has mentioned that Roy at one stage submitted to the Viceroy a list of names of leaders (or those) who should be invited by the Viceroy to form an interim government in Delhi, to which the British could transfer power. Even though Roy was very inimical to the Brahmanical religion, he included the name of the founder of Hindutvavad, Savarkar in that list. It is important to mention that the BJP and RSS activists don’t read M.N. Roy though Roy acted in a non-partition manner in the matter because he put national interest above personal biases. Roy writes about Patel as follows:
On his 74th birthday Nationalist India has done honour to the man who has been correctly described as the master-builder of her destiny… The integration of the States is the least of the Sardar’s achievements, although it is rated so very high. After the departure of the British, the princes were like helpless orphans. They had no option but to bow to their fate, and the Sardar certainly made it easier for them by his generosity at the cost of the Indian people. All this talk about bloodless revolution is sheer nonsense. It is equally an exaggeration to compare the Sardar with Bismark, although there may be much in common between the two men. If the de-facto leader of Indian nationalism is to be compared with any personality in European history, Machiavelli would be a more appropriate choice. How then can Sardar Patel be a follower of the Mahatma? And I believe that he is, as sincere as anybody else. The explanation is that Machiavelli was not a rogue and the Mahatma was a shrewd politician.
In any case, the fact is that there is none in the Congress to replace the Sardar. Therefore, on his 74th birthday, the thoughtful patriot should have been more anxious than prayerful. I remember that at the time of the Haripura Congress in 1937, a prominent non-political Gandhist wrote an article to speculate what would happen if the Mahatma preferred Samadhi to this world. Those who indulge in a similar speculation on the 74th birthday of Sardar Patel pay the highest tribute to him. I’m one of them.
…It is two weeks since the virtual leader of Nationalist India passed away, leaving vacant a position that he had held for thirty years… The fact, nevertheless, is that, if the Mahatma was the Father of the Nation, it was his great discipline who conceived the idea of organizing a totalitarian party as the instrument for the establishment of an authoritarian State, both behind democratic facades… Therefore, Sardar Patel was the dictator of the party in power, and as such dominated the Government, though formally occupying the second place.
Could Sardar Patel have had his way also on the Kashmir issue, India would not be today spending 50% of her revenue on its military budget. I do not know what Sardar’s attitude to the Kashmir issue was but I am inclined to believe that it was as realistic as his attitude towards partition. Nevertheless, once the dice was cast by the gamblers’ ‘Megalomania’, the Sardar had no choice but to play the game, but one could be sure that he launched the stupidity clothed in the glamour of the popular hero. Mr. Singh perhaps needs to write another book, by quoting from various authorities about the partition and the role that Congress leaders played, to answer his critics in the BJP. I may however quote a few such authorities.
Let me start with M.N.Roy.
Roy wrote an editorial in his weekly, Independent India, by way of paying homage to Jinnah after his death. Jinnah was the most maligned and misunderstood man and experiences had made him bitter and it was very largely out of spitefulness that he pursued an object, the attainment of which placed him in the most difficult position. Jinnah was not an Angel but he was temperamentally not a professional politician. Being a man of outstanding merit he could not remain a backbencher. Unfortunately his coming to the front rank of politics synchronized with the de-secularisation of nationalism, which doubtful development introduced communalism in politics. The responsibility for that fateful turn in the political life of the country must be judged by history. But ever since then, politics became a game of wits for Jinnah. Successful in that game, thanks to his own cleverness, he won the opprobrium of being a henchman of imperialism. The fact, however, is that, if distrust and hatred of the British were the hallmark of patriotism, Jinnah was always as staunch a patriot as any other patriotic Indian. The more that fact was willfully ignored by his opponents, and he was maligned and misrepresented deliberately, the more was Jinnah naturally embittered, and spitefulness became the motive of his politics. But even then his ambition was not to gain political power but to avenge the wrong which he believed had been done to him. Once India was divided, he would sit back in his chair with the sardonic pleasure of having outwitted his opponents. There was something Mephistophelian in Jinnah’s politics.
There is another authority which Mr. Singh has failed to refer to. This is the latest biography of Jinnah by an English man, Hector Belithe. I have, however, read only a review of the book written by Mr. Balraj Puri under the title “Clues to understanding Jinnah” (published in the Economic and Political Weekly, March 1, 2008). Mr. Puri has quoted fairly extensively from the book. I give below a few quotations from this review. In a press conference in Delhi in July 1947, when one of the reporters asked Jinnah, “Will Pakistan be a theocratic or a democratic state?” he answered, “Get that dirty nonsense out of your head.” The reporters were so furious that all of them walked out. Lord Wavell told the author the story of the ex-President of America, Hoover. When he came to India he wished to see Gandhi and Jinnah. While Gandhi drove to call on Hoover, Jinnah said that he expected Hoover to come to him.
One Mr. D. Peel, an English man (of Lahore), told the author Belithe that Jinnah had three ambitions:
1. to become the highest paid lawyer in India,
2. to marry the most beautiful girl in India,
3. to become the President of the Congress.
Mr. Peel said that Jinnah’s interest in the Muslim League, his later opposition to the Congress and his desire to establish Pakistan were the outcome of the denial of his third ambition.
Mr. Singh’s book should be read in the context of what M.N.Roy and Jinnah’s biographer Belithe have written. Jinnah had always deeply resented Congress leaders. The turning point in his career had come after the 1937 elections when Congress refused to share with him and this Muslim League the spoils of office in the Indian provinces where there was a substantial Muslim minority. Jinnah was a man of towering vanity and he took Congress’s action as a personal rebuke. It convinced him that he and the Muslim League would never get a fair deal from an India run by the Congress. The former apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity became the unyielding advocate of Pakistan, the project he had labeled an “impossible dream” barely four years earlier.
Another historian, Lal Khan writes in his book, The Crisis in the Indian Sub-Continent: Can Partition be Undone! :
A more improbable leader of India’s Muslim masses could hardly be imagined. The only thing Muslim about Mohammad Ali Jinnah was his parent’s religion. He drank, ate pork, religiously shaved his beard each morning and just as religiously avoided the mosque each Friday. God and the Koran had no place in Jinnah’s vision of the world. His political foe, Gandhi, knew more verses of the Muslim Holy Book than he did. Jinnah had been able to achieve the remarkable feat of securing the allegiance of the vast majority of India’s Muslims without being able to articulate more than a few sentences in their traditional tongue, Urdu.
Jinnah despised India’s masses. He detested the dirt, the heat and the crowds of India. He delighted in touring India’s Muslim cities in princely processions, riding under victory arches on a kind of Rose bowl style float, preceded by silver-harnessed elephants and a band booming out “God save the King” because, Jinnah observed, it was the only tune the crowd knew. Jinnah had only scorn for his Hindu rivals. He labeled Nehru a Peter Pan, a “literary figure” who “should have been an English professor, not a politician”, “an arrogant Brahmin who covers his Hindu trickiness under a veneer of Western education.” Gandhi to Jinnah was “a cunning fox”, “a Hindu revivalist.” Jinnah never forgot the sight of the Mahatma in his mansion, stretched out on one of his priceless Persian carpets with his mudpack on his belly.
This was one of the greatest tragedies of the Indian History, Maulana Azad writes in his book, India Wins Freedom, and I have to say with the deepest regret that a large part of the responsibility for this development rests with Jawaharlal. His unfortunate statement that Congress would be free to modify the Cabinet Mission Plan reopened the whole question of political and communal settlement. Mr. Jinnah took full advantage of his [Nehru’s] mistake and withdrew from the League’s early acceptance of the Plan.
In most of the works on Partition, Gandhi is portrayed as the crusader of unity. Azad, his close associate and the former President of Congress, in “India Wins Freedom” said about Gandhi’s position on Partition:
“But when I met Gandhiji again, I had the greatest shock of my life to find that he had changed. He was still not openly in favor of Partition but he no longer spoke so vehemently against it. What surprised and shocked me even more was that he began to repeat the arguments which Sardar Patel had already used. For over two hours I pleaded with him, but could make no impression on him”.
Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was India’s quintessential politician. He was an oriental Tammany Hall boss who ran the machinery of the Congress Party with a firm and ruthless hand. Patel had a well-earned reputation for ruthlessness. In his days as a practising lawyer, he was passed a cable announcing his wife’s death as he was pacing the floor of a Bombay courtroom summing up his case for the jury. He glanced at it, thrust it into his pocket, and continued his peroration. The incident formed a part of the legend of Vallabhbhai Patel and was indicative of the man. Emotion, one of his associates once observed, formed no part of his character. He was probably the most reactionary leader of Congress and was the first man in India to fall for Lord Mountbatten’s idea.
When Lord Mountbatten suggested that Partition might offer a solution to the present difficulty, he found Sardar Patel receptive to this. In fact, Sardar Patel was half in favor of Partition before Lord Mountbatten appeared on the scene. He was convinced that he could not work with the Muslim League. Azad describes the role of Patel in “India Wins Freedom”: “It would not perhaps be unfair to say that Vallabhbhai Patel was the founder of Indian Partition.”
Patel was very amenable to Lord Mountbatten’s charm and the power of his personality. Privately Mountbatten always referred to Patel as a walnut – a very hard crust outside but soft pulp once the crust was cracked. Azad continued:
I was surprised when Patel said whether we liked it or not, there were two nations in India. He was now convinced that Muslims and Hindus could not be united into one nation. It was better to have one clean fight and then separate than have bickering everyday. I was surprised that Patel was now an even greater supporter of the two-nation theory than Jinnah. Jinnah may have raised the flag of Partition but now the real flag bearer was Patel.
When Patel was convinced, Lord Mountbatten turned his attention to Nehru. Again according to Azad:
Jawaharlal was not first ready for the idea and reacted violently against the idea of Partition. Lord Mountbatten persisted till Jawaharlal’s opposition was worn down step by step. Within a month of Mountbatten’s arrival in India, Jawaharlal, the firm opponent of partition had become, if not a supporter, at least acquiescent to the idea. I have wondered, writes Azad, how Jawaharlal was won over by Lord Mountbatten. He is a man of principle but he is also impulsive and amenable to personal influences. I think one factor responsible for the change was the personality of Lady [Edwina] Mountbatten. She is not only extremely intelligent but has a most attractive and friendly temperament. She admired her husband very greatly and in many cases tried to interpret his thoughts to those who would not at first agree with him.
Indian writers writing on India’s partition do not refer to two important things like
the massive human rights violation, thousands of women raped, millions displaced and living in refugee camps;
this devastation could have been prevented by Gandhi if he and the Congress had accepted Jinnah’s one demand, that the Muslim ministers in the cabinet in Delhi be selected by the Muslim League, i.e., by Jinnah. If this demand were accepted India would not have been partitioned.
Prof. Bhikhu Parekh in his book Gandhi’s Political Philosophy’ in one chapter has given an account of Lord Wavell’s meeting with Jinnah & Gandhi:
Seeing that Jinnah was adamant, Gandhi argued that respect for feelings and opinions of those involved demanded that at least a plebiscite should be held in the Muslim majority areas. In the Punjab, for example, non-Muslims made up nearly 47 percent of the population and, as the 1937 elections had shown, not all Muslims shared Jinnah’s views. Jinnah summarily dismissed Gandhi’s proposal on the grounds that it presupposed the liberal-individualist view of democracy he had already rejected. Only Muslims were entitled to decide their future, and the rest must either stay on as a minority or emigrate. Self-determination as he understood it was a ‘national’ not a ‘territorial’ concept, he observed.
For his part, Gandhi was not prepared to budge an inch from his basic position that the Congress represented the Muslims as well. Lord Wavell told him in a personal interview that the ‘only stumbling block’ to the settlement was the inclusion of a nationalist Muslim in the interim government. He conceded that the Congress had the ‘undoubted right to nominate a nationalist Muslim’, but suggested that since Jinnah was obstinate, there was perhaps no harm in waiving it. Gandhi replied, ‘One may waive a right, one cannot waive a duty’. The following day in a letter summarizing their conversation of the previous day, Gandhi wrote to Wavell:
You recognized fully the reasonableness of the Congress position, but you held that it would be an act of high statesmanship if the Congress waive the right for the sake of peace. I urged that if it were a question of waiving a right it would be a simple thing. It was a question of non-performance of a duty which the Congress owed to non-League Muslims.
Mr. Singh in his book opens up new questions like: Could partition be avoided? Is it or is it not a fact that Jinnah outwitted all the politicians including Gandhi in India on the question of partition and succeeded in establishing the largest Islamic state?
My review article may be read in the context of recently published book The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan, Yale University and Penguin, 2007, by Yasmeen Khan, a book backed by massive scholarship and massive research. The main thesis of the book is that the partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political freedom and a future free of religious strife. Instead, the geographical divide effected an even greater schism, exposing huge numbers of the population to devastating consequences. Thousands of women were raped. At least one million people were killed and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes to live as refugees. It was the bloodiest events of de-colonization in the 20th century. My thesis (I have written about this aspect elsewhere in my article in Mainstream) is that Gandhi could have stopped this devastation.
(I am grateful to the author of the book Crisis in the Indian subcontinent: Can Partition be Undone? by Mr. Lal Khan & his publisher Aakar Books, New Delhi, for making it possible for me to quote what Mr. Azad wrote in his book India Wins Freedom.
I am also grateful to Prof. Rajeev Verma, former Professor of English Literature at the University of Delhi, my daughter Sangeeta Mall and my young friend Mr. Mahi Pal Singh for giving a number of suggestions. However, I am responsible for the views expressed in this review article).