The Great Partition (10 page)

In the short-term, the reversal in the League's dismal electoral fortunes in the North East and North West of undivided India by 1946, and Jinnah's new popularity in these regions, were the indispensable trophy that allowed Jinnah to press ahead confidently with the Pakistan demand. This may appear, at first glance, to be deceptively straightforward: a Muslim party won lots of votes in Muslim-dominated areas. But there was nothing at all inevitable about this and the increase in the League's new popularity broke through the regional barriers that had blocked the expansion of a centralised Muslim party in the past. On a case-by-case basis Jinnah attempted to bring the League's imprimatur to regional politics by making pacts with local politicians, enrolling well-revered
pirs
and spiritual leaders and using the popularity of pre-existing local campaigns. It was a feat of extraordinary political brokerage but also meant bringing together tenuously linked interests and groups. Perhaps the most striking feature is the great differences from place to place among League supporters and the diverse rationales for becoming a Leaguer.

The British watched the results with a view to forging a representative, central body to which it could legitimately pass the baton. From the vantage point of bureaucrats collating results in the imperial capital the results seemed obvious. Any future state would have to take account of the strength of support for the League and Congress and these parties were anointed the legitimate heirs to imperial power. The battle over the precise contours of a free India looked as if it was going to be a two-horse race. As Penderel Moon, a senior government secretary and one of the sharpest political insiders in Delhi at the time, wrote in January 1946, ‘It is now abundantly clear that the Pakistan issue has got to be faced fairly and squarely. There is no longer the slightest chance of dodging it.’
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The League had won its seat at the negotiating table.

In all of this, though, there was a vital element missing: the ideas of freedom and the meanings that people attributed to the intense debates over a future dedicated to
swaraj
or ‘Pakistan’ (in the most literal interpretation of the word, as life in the land of the pure) had been lost. British administrators unquestioningly accepted that the League and the Congress had become pugilistic and polarised because Islam and Hinduism were such incompatible religious doctrines – and the vitally important reasons why these parties had become so alienated from one another were left unexamined and disregarded as fundamentally uninteresting. The British thought in terms of territory. The grey margins between territorial nationalism and other forms of patriotic, emotive expression – not so easily linked to land – remained imperial blind spots.

Fervent public displays of anti-colonial sentiment in post-war India help to explain the frenzied British scramble to depart from the Indian subcontinent. As the British government began to negotiate its withdrawal from South Asia in late 1945 and the early months of 1946 the political parties – the Congress and the League – that would replace the imperial rulers had been decided, but far less thought had been given to the shape of the state or states that would inherit the empire or to the meaning of the mass support for these parties. Meanwhile, the narrow electorate in the general elections of 1945–6 blocked the participation of millions of Indians from electoral politics and necessarily pushed political demonstrations into the streets and marketplaces where the disenfranchised were determined to have a hearing. The newly installed provincial governments, if they intended to keep in control of this powder keg, evidently would have to enact popular legislation and ensure that they protected the rights – or even the safety – of their constituents. The conditions were ripe for raised expectations of freedom, localised and community interpretations of its meaning, and wildly improbable millenarian dreams. Absent from the official British discussion, and from the League and Congress (which had an interest in keeping their appeal as broad as possible) was any real thought regarding these thousands of divergent expectations and how they might be met in one, single constitutional settlement. This would prove a fateful oversight.

Passing through the lanes of the North Indian city of Aligarh in the spring of 1946 nobody could have been in any doubt about the intensity of feeling over the question of Pakistan. The word ‘Pakistan’ was daubed on front doors, pictures of Jinnah could be seen pasted on walls, and green and white tinsel and League banners were suspended across the narrow alleyways of the old city, where metalworkers and artisans produced locks, scissors and tools for the rest of the subcontinent in their workshops facing on to the streets. In local mosques and on street corners Muslims heatedly debated the demand for Pakistan while vocal members of groups such as the Jamiat-ul-Ulema's loud rejection of the idea sometimes led to street fights with their co-religionists. The small city, a few hours' drive to the east of Delhi, founded on the site of an old Mughal
qasbah
would have been indistinguishable from many other small cities in the Gangetic plains, sitting squarely in the Hindustani-speaking hinterland where the Pakistan demand was at its most intensely bitter, apart from the fact that, across the railway tracks in the wide open spaces of the civil lines, the soaring rooftops of Aligarh Muslim University could be seen.

Created by Syed Ahmed Khan in the nineteenth century, Aligarh Muslim University was intended as a place to blend Islamic instruction with the demands of the encounter with the western world, an institution that would impart all the manners and educational benefits that an English public school could offer to well-heeled Muslims. Here, enthusiastic support for both the League and the Pakistan demand had been a long-standing feature of university life, dating back to the earliest years of the Second World War. As Jinnah's self-described ‘arsenal’ of Pakistan, Aligarh University students were at the cutting edge of pro-Pakistan thinking, and they retrospectively claimed the credit for founding the state. In early 1946, the League leadership was energetically courting their support, and when leaders such as Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan, a future Prime Minister of Pakistan and university old boy, visited the college they were given rapturous receptions. League leaders were carried aloft on the shoulders of students, who set crackers on the railway lines to welcome them.

The university was well known for having a large Muslim League membership but this was now spreading to the town, where enthusiasm for Pakistan was steadily building. Women organised pro-League meetings and encouraged donations of jewellery for the League's cause while their husbands and sons used printed leaflets, persuasion, processions and placards to bring Pakistan into existence. By the spring of 1946, with the League's victories in the elections confirmed, the whole campus was in a frenzy of Pakistani fever and academic work had been abandoned in favour of political activism. There was consternation and outspoken opposition from some on the campus. At the same time, non-Muslims in the town started to become nervous and looked to their local politicians to protect them from this nebulous and repetitive Pakistan demand.

In Aligarh, in the atmosphere of violent rhetoric, rumours of trouble and the visible drilling of students, suspicion between communities increased. Could Muslim administrators still be trusted? The president of the Aligarh City Congress Committee asked for arrangements to be made for people to register crimes at the local Congress office, rather than the local police station, because the latter was in a ‘Muslim part of town’. Political organisations that campaigned for ‘Hindu’ rights started to attract large numbers, meeting in public places and circulating petitions that called for protection from the university on their doorstep. A retaliatory and accusatory tone crept in. The relationship between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ was stretched to breaking point in March 1946. A riot erupted less than a week after noisy celebrations marked ‘Pakistan Day’ and the League's electoral success in the province. A few Aligarh students buying cloth from a local Hindu cloth merchant quibbled over the price of a bolt of fabric. An altercation broke out, a crowd formed. In the arson attack that swiftly followed at least four people burned to death and the thatched market area of the town was left in ashes.

The Congress government, now in power in the provincial ministry based in Lucknow, lashed back, passing punitive collective fines on numerous local Muslim inhabitants – who said they knew nothing about the whole business – and launching a party-political inquiry into what had taken place. Over time, this became a bitter local dispute between the provincial League and the Congress. Nehru was one of the few politicians who could see the dangers of the alienation of the Congress ministers in the province from the local populace of the city and, after receiving complaints from poor local ‘Nationalist Muslims’ about the levy, he urged the provincial government to deal with the situation differently in case ‘they are driven against their will into the Muslim League’.
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The risk was, just as Nehru perceived, that Congress and League politicians would start playing up to their core constituents even more, colour their speeches with religious language and stop offering olive branches to the other community. The fines were a direct parody of colonial thinking and simplistic religious assumptions were being made about the multifarious inhabitants of Aligarh. The danger was they could become self-fulfilling. This was, unfortunately, exactly what happened. In the city of Aligarh, a frightening level of polarisation was developing among some of the leading public figures and by the end of the year, the Aligarh University Student Union leader was claiming publicly to have killed Hindus with his own bare hands.

Aligarh had a particularly charged atmosphere in 1946, but some of the changes taking place there, in one small town, offer a window on to the wider breakdown of state power that was occurring that year all over North India. The unexpectedly spectacular victory of the League in the elections had heightened the call for Pakistan. ‘Ours is grim determination,’ swore Jinnah. ‘Nobody should be under any delusion about our stand for the establishment of Pakistan at any cost, whatever the opposition.’
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The victory emboldened Jinnah's supporters with a new confidence and amplified the demand. Hundreds of the newly elected League legislators gathered together in April in the quadrangle of the Anglo-Arabic hall in Delhi to cheer their success, under the carapace of a green and white tent strung with banners, bunting and flags printed in swirling Urdu and English scripts. One read: ‘The road to freedom lies through Pakistan’ and the other, ‘We are determined to fight till the last ditch for our rights in spite of the British or the Congress.’ The world's press were starting to take note and photographers packed the front row. Impassioned speeches followed one after another. Begum Shah Nawaz called for Muslim women to encourage their husbands and sons to take up arms for Pakistan if the British tried to establish a united Hindustan. Telling the story of a visit to a grieving mother in the Punjab whose son had been stabbed to death by a militia group, she claimed that the woman had told her that she was happy to have given her son to the nation. ‘Muslim women were prepared for all sacrifices,’ the begum announced, ‘and were prepared to be put to the test.’
³
The crescendo came with Jinnah's own closing speech: ‘Is Britain going to decide the destiny of 100 million Muslims? No. Nobody can. They can obstruct, they can delay for a little while, but they cannot stop us from our goal. Let us, therefore, rise at the conclusion of this historic convention full of hope, courage and faith. Insha'Allah we shall win.’ It was rousing stuff but the fine details – and the meanings of this Pakistan for the Muslims of South Asia – had been deliberately and conveniently evaded and ignored.
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Nonetheless, League membership figures continued moving steadily upwards. Membership had rocketed from just 1,330 card-carrying Leaguers in 1927 to an official membership of two million claimed by 1944. During the Congress leaders' time behind bars, the League had had the chance to swell and as Jinnah himself admitted, ‘The war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise.’
⁵
The numbers alone do not tell the whole story. By 1946, even taking into account important exceptions, the League had the popular backing of South Asian Muslims in the urban centres and even in large chunks of the countryside: some Punjabi Leaguers were so confident of their support that they called for a universal franchise in 1946.

Jinnah became – as had Gandhi and Nehru – for many of his supporters an ideal type and was hero-worshipped by millions who endowed him with the characteristics of a saviour. Passionate supporters, both men and women, sent him presents and adoring fan mail, including cards, telegrams and letters of congratulation, cigar boxes and attar of roses, different maps of Pakistan carved in wood, and donations ranging from significant lump sums to the pocket money of young children. Stall-holders outside post offices sold postcards and postal envelopes stamped with Jinnah's portrait and League mottoes. Followers begged him to take the protection of bodyguards. ‘Pray let no chance be taken in guarding your person, the greatest single asset of the Muslim nation,’ wrote one.
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Jinnah fuelled this personal adoration and was unassailably ‘the sole spokesman’ of the League, which was equipped with a remarkably over-centralised and undemocratic internal structure, with budgetary and decision-making powers firmly in Jinnah's own grip. For many of these Leaguers, Pakistan became much more than the sum of its parts or the territorial outline of a nation state: it meant personal identification with a cause which was increasingly expressed in black and white terms.

Crucially, though, anti-Congress feeling and heartfelt support for Jinnah and the League did not necessarily translate into support for Pakistan as we know it today with its current borders and boundaries. The Lahore Resolution, passed at the annual Muslim League meeting on 23 March 1940 and identified by Pakistanis as the foundation stone for their state, is not much of a guide. It pinpointed the Muslim desire for a more loosely federated state structure, calling for a collection of independent states with autonomy and sovereignty. There was a lack of knowledge or concern about Pakistan's actual territorial limits. Jinnah himself seems to have prevaricated in his understanding of Pakistan as a separate, sovereign nation state distinct from India. It seems more likely, in the early days of the constitutional negotiations, at least, that he was rallying his supporters in order to extract the best possible deal from the British for the League, and would have settled for a federal solution if it guaranteed a firm element of decentralised power in the hands of Muslims.
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Among Jinnah's supporters, what Pakistan meant was even more opaque. Many did not think primarily of Pakistan as a territorial reality at all, and when they did, they wishfully hoped that large tracts of India would be included in it. The talismanic word ‘Pakistan’ was used strategically to rally supporters and the League achieved impressive and emphatic endorsement across India. Yet few knew what this Pakistan would mean, and absolutely nobody knew what its construction would really cost.