Beyond The Lines – By Kuldip Nayar

Beyond The Lines – By Kuldip Nayar is an account of the seventy year history of India from an honest journalist’s perspective. He had been a vocal critic of the Congress ever since Indira’s rise and has not been very kind towards BJP. Many of the views presented are unpalatable to leftist intelligentsia in India. 

Here are excerpts from the chapter- THE NEHRU YEARS The Road to Partition

On Cabinet Mission

To the Mission’s surprise, Nehru spoke about a plebiscite in the border districts as if his party had already accepted the idea of division. Jinnah also mentioned partition, and told a Punjab Hindu delegation that in his scheme of things Ambala would not form part of Pakistan. Azad, still the Congress president, was on a different wavelength. He ruled out both Partition and a unitary structure. His thesis, which Gandhi had approved, was that a federal constitution would give full autonomy to the provinces and transfer all subjects to them except defence, foreign affairs, and communications.

I believe Patel’s suspicion was that Azad and Nehru were in league and would bypass him. Even during the Cripps Mission in 1942, he was tormented by similar thoughts. C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, a distinguished scholar from south India, with whom I briefly worked on a committee on Hindu temples to ensure their proper administration, told me that Patel ‘interpreted the Cripps Mission as an organized stunt by Nehru to get himself into the forefront so that he could become the prime minister of India’.

Azad’s meeting with the Cabinet Mission was discussed threadbare by the Congress Working Committee (CWC) when it met on 12 April 1946. Members voiced their doubts over the federal structure. Gandhi came to Azad’s rescue and silenced the critics by saying that a federal solution alone could work in a country of India’s size and diversities. When Patel said that subjects like currency and finance should be in the hands of the Centre, Gandhi intervened to say that it would be in the interest of the provinces to have a unified policy in such matters but it was not necessary to include such subjects in a compulsory central list. 

Jinnah reacted sharply and blamed Nehru for repudiating the grouping of provinces and the limited Centre, the ‘basic form’ on which the scheme rested. He made the All-India Council of the Muslim League change its earlier resolution by rejecting the proposal. He accused the Mission of ‘bad faith’ and the Congress of a ‘pettifogging and haggling attitude’. When I met Azad many years later, he held Nehru responsible for Jinnah’s reversal. In chaste Urdu, Azad said: ‘Woh tala jo kabhi khul nahin sakta tha Nehru ne uski chabi Jinnah ke hath main de di [Nehru gave to Jinnah the key of the lock which could not be opened].’

Jinnah gave a call for Direct Action, not against the British but as a show of strength on the part of Muslims as the Congress had treated their demand with ‘defiance and contempt’. He argued the Congress was not willing to accept even the proposal conceding only a ‘limited Pakistan’. This was false propaganda because the Congress had come round to accepting the Cabinet Mission plan, but after raising doubts that made Jinnah wary. That might have been why, when Mountbatten offered a partition proposal a year later and asked Jinnah whether he would accept some links with India, he said: ‘I do not trust them now.’

When asked whether Direct Action would be violent or non-violent, Jinnah said: ‘I am not going to discuss ethics.’ Direct Action was undertaken only in Calcutta and that too merely for a day (16 August 1946). The Muslim League government in Bengal declared a public holiday on that day, despite warnings and protests by the Opposition. The League organized a ‘grand rally’ over which Chief Minister Shaheed Suhrawardy himself presided. Bands of Muslim League National Guards forced their way into Hindu areas and asked for subscriptions, sometimes as much as Rs 1,000. Returning from the rally, the League’s National Guards began looting Hindu shops for not paying subscriptions or not responding to the League’s call for a hartal on that day. Hindus and Sikhs were attacked and the entire event appeared to have been pre-planned. 

Soon Calcutta was engulfed in a communal riot, with Hindus and Sikhs retaliating against Muslims. Parts of the city were reduced to rubble. Over 5,000 people lost their lives in less than three days in what came to be known as the ‘great Calcutta killing’, a phrase coined by the Statesman, the influential British-owned newspaper. Jinnah laid the blame on the Cabinet Mission, the Congress, and Gandhi. Surprisingly, Jinnah found no fault with his National Guards who had pledged themselves before the carnage ‘to strive for the achievement of Pakistan and glory of the Muslim nation’. The Statesman laid the blame on the British governor and Chief Minister Suhrawardy. ‘Arson, looting, murder, abduction of women, forced conversions and forced marriages are everywhere and by every investigator spoken of as the characteristics of lawlessness.’ 

At this juncture Suhrawardy sought Gandhi’s intervention. The latter’s reply was that the future of Bengal could only be decided by the joint will of the Hindus and Muslims in the state. Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, a Hindu Mahasabha leader from Bengal, who joined the central cabinet after Independence, met Gandhi to oppose the whole idea of a sovereign Bengal state. Even then the Congress and the League in Bengal came to a tentative agreement that if and when a Greater Bengal came into being, ‘every act of its Government must carry with it the support of at least two-thirds of the Hindu minority in the executive and the legislature’. This was intended to allay the fears of Hindus who would be in a minority in a United Bengal. 

Punjab, which was also partitioned, saw no similar move to unite the state. One reason was that the state had neither a Rabindranath Tagore nor a Nazrul Islam to bind the people through poetry, culture, or language. There was nothing like Punjabi nationalism to string together Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. In comparison, Punjab’s great poet, Iqbal, was himself the author of the idea of Partition. The Punjabi language, even though spoken by the people as a whole, was written differently by the three communities: in Arabic (Urdu) script by the Muslims, in Devnagri (Hindi) by the Hindus, and in Gurmukhi (Punjabi) by the Sikhs. The only culture attributed to Punjab was ‘agriculture’, a disparaging remark that still is thrown at Punjabis.