This message was prompted by a passing remark in the article, 'Sri Ramakrishna's Message For Today' by RK Dasgupta (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/uttorshuri/message/1699). The writer repeats a common perception that Mohammed Ali Jinnah pursued the creation of a "Muslim state" (often used to mean an Islamic state) as a post-British settlement in south Asia. While this was obviously not Professor Dasgupta's main focus, the remark triggered a few thoughts that some on this forum may be interested in, especially as it relates to the political history of Bengal.
As many of us may know, the Muslim League used the Lahore Declaration of 1940 to introduce the idea of homelands for Muslims in parts of the Indian subcontinent where they were the majority. However, the declaration was a rather vague affair and did not detail its implications in practical terms. At various points in time during the 1940s, Muslim Leaguers even spoke of "states" of Pakistan, suggesting that there were various possibilities under consideration. The options were therefore: (a) two independent Muslim-majority states, one in the north west and and one in the east, carved out of the Indian sub-continent; and (b) what we ended up with--a single independent state comprising two distant locations on the map.
So what did the declaration mean for Bengal? This is where it got interesting. As late as the spring of 1947, Jinnah, and even Mountbatten, were closely following the proposals of Husayn Shaheed Suhrawardy, Sarat Chandra Bose and Abul Hashem for a united Bengali state (comprising west and east Bengal, bits of Bihar and most of Assam). Jinnah was not opposed to the plans and one can take this to mean that, even at that late hour, his eventual vision of Pakistan was yet to take shape.
The Suhrawardy/Bose/Hashem proposals did however meet with opposition from Hindu Bengali elites. Many were, perhaps reasonably, concerned at the prospect of being out-numbered by Muslims in a 'greater' Bengal (and possibly, as some Kolkata-based newspapers warned, outnumbered in a Muslim-dominated Pakistan). This concern was reinforced by the experiences of 1946-47, during which time Muslims controlled the provincial assembly. Muslim Bengalis, for the most part, were more supportive of the united Bengal proposals (although non-Bengali Muslim elites active in Bengal politics, like Kwaja Nazimuddin, opposed them as they favoured a separate Pakistan above other options).
Ultimately, the prospect of a united Bengal didn't get very far off the ground. It came too late in the day to take root and constructive discussions that were under way to provide for the fair political representation of the two communities were stopped in mid track. The reason for this was not Jinnah but the Congress Party, India's main party of independence. It opposed the proposals vehemently because it opposed any partition of India. The British, who could have taken a stand, chose to back off because the proposals did not have the support of Gandhi and Nehru. This paved the way for Jinnah's scenario to gain currency, because it resonated with Muslim attitudes. His offer seemed clear enough at the time: instead of a united Bengal made up of roughly equal numbers of Hindus and Muslims, why not opt for a province made up of Muslim-majority east Bengal as part of something called Pakistan?
All of this happened rather quickly in the spring of 1947. The British shipped over Cyril Radcliffe and within six weeks he had carved up the sub-continent on communal lines by applying a powerful combination of surgical precision, haste and ignorance. Anomalies abounded. India received the Muslim-majority district of Murshidabad because it insisted on controlling the Hooghly-Bhagirathi channel that feeds Kolkata. East Bengal (it only changed its name to East Pakistan in the 1950s) received Hindu-majority Khulna. On 15 August 1947 the people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, then as now a tribal-majority region, raised the Indian flag and sang Bande Mataram, thinking they were Indian. It took a day or so for the news to reach them that they were Pakistani. In Sylhet, a plebiscite resulted in the upazilas of Sylhet sadar, Habiganj, Sunamganj and Karimganj voting to join Pakistan. Moulvi Bazaar voted by a narrow margin to join Assam in India. The final dispensation for Sylhet swapped Karimganj for Moulvi Bazar. The Radcliffe "Award" also produced nearly 200 enclaves--chunks of Indian territory in East Bengal and vice versa. The project was a cartographical disaster that has had profound consequences for the human and ecological geographies and economy of the north east of the sub-continent. Throughout these dealings, Jinnah remained somewhat aloof.
This account of events suggests that Jinnah manouvered a way towards the Pakistan outcome without always knowing what he was manouvering into, and that he developed his thinking even while other scenarios were being openly considered. As such he acted with the same opportunistic instincts one expects all politicians to exhibit. Oddly enough, the momentum he achieved for Pakistan was probably aided by the Hindu-dominated press in Kolkata because it kept the spectre of Muslim domination simmering away during the months and years, even when the Muslim League remained unclear over what Pakistan meant.
So back to the basic question: does persuading the majority of Muslim Bengalis (and some Hindu Bengalis) to join the Pakistani experiment mean that the Quaid-e-Azam wanted it to be a "Muslim state"? The answer would appear to be "No." While it was not always clear what Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be, he probably understood what he didn't want. Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a Mumbai-groomed lawyer of westernized sensibilities and, I imagine, wished the Pakistan state to share his gregarious--some would say secular--approach to public life. The Pakistani flag today bears testament to this inclination. On it, a block of white precedes the verdant green, symbolizing a commitment to religious minorities living with a Muslim majority. While the subsequent history of Pakistan has failed, and failed badly, to deliver on this, one can argue that the record does not necessarily detract from Jinnah's intentions.
I think we can absolve Jinnah from any personal intention to invent a Muslim or an Islamic state out of Pakistan, even though he argued for a state made up mainly of Muslim peoples. His problem was that, unlike India after 1947, Pakistan's only meaningful signifier for holding itself together was religion. So that's what he hung his hat on. As we now know, religion does not offer enough to hold a multi-national state together.
It's a pity Jinnah didn't live long enough to see this for himself.
11 February 2008
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2 comments:
Jinnah's idea of Pakistan was based on the premise that it would be a Muslim-majority state, a POLITICAL distinction, NOT a religious one.
Any analysis that confuses the two, says that Pakistan was to be a 'Islamic' state or that Jinnah intended 'Islam' to hold different people under the banner of Pakistan together, dies its own death.
As late as early 1947, Jinnah was in discussion with Mountbatten to have 3-states post-British withdrawal; India, Pakistan and a united 'Bengal'. That Nehru & Mountbatten conspired to chop Bengal into two & lump one half with Pakistan cannot be blamed on Jinnah.
Dear Sid, Thanks for your thoughts. I would tend to agree that the Congress in general and Nehru in particular shot down any final settlement that involved a united 'Bangistan'. One could argue that this was the weakest of all the proposals on the table at the time. The Muslim-dominated Bengal legislature of the decade leading up to Partition more or less put paid to its prospects, having given urban and Hindu Bengal a foretaste of something it was in no hurry thereafter to repeat.
On your distinction between the political and the religious, well, while I agree with you I am not sure one can make such a tidy distinction between the two. At the turn of the 20th century, elite Muslim Indians were quite aware that they were at least a generation behind Hindu India in its capacity for agitational and identity-based politics. The situation by the 1940s was different. Muslims had tasted power at the state level. The idea of Pakistan was not driven by liturgical or spiritual interests, but political. As such, Islam became a signifier of political interests in which the actual exercise of faith became secondary to the idea that that faith was somehow at threat from minority status. That, as you observe, is a political proposition, not a religious one. Thanks and regards.
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