The Muslims of North India Were Reduced to Being the Orphans of Partition

Another India, a book by Pratinav Anil which deals with the making of the world’s largest Muslim minority, is a welcome addition to the literature of post-partition India looked at through the prism of the largest and most consequential minority. Anil is a lecturer in history at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University who professes Marxist leanings.  

The book examines how the Muslim community was, in the words of the author, “abandoned” by the Muslim leaders in the Congress. The time span for this study is from 1947-1977, going from the cataclysm of partition, the high noon of Nehruvian India to the excesses of the emergency and Sanjay Gandhi. It deals with the role of persons who were commonly termed as sarkari Muslims, those that the Congress chose to give importance to, and what their agenda was – leaders such as Maulana Azad, Humayan Kabir, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Zakir Husain, Fakruddin Ahmed and others. It is a book rich in humour and anecdotes which centres around the usual institutions – Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia, and the distinguished landed families of North India, invariably tracing their relationship to the Nehrus and how they benefitted from this.  

The Muslim leadership in the Congress in many respects poses a very easy target – many of the leaders came from aristocratic backgrounds, Oxbridge, Aligarh and in most cases were misfits in the new India. They had lost their land, their language was consigned to the dustbin of history, and in a fundamental sense, their loyalty was always in question. They were largely powerless and their key role was to secure largesse or at any rate protect traditional institutions like Waqfs, educational institutions, etc. from state encroachment through party connections and pull. We will come to this agenda later on, as I think that Anil is a bit unfair to these hapless politicians. Let us remember that all elites are in some shape or form self-serving and the Muslims were not unique in this.

Anil excels in debunking the mythology that the Muslims never had it so good as under Nehru – matters such as riots in Nehruvian India were all too pervasive. As he puts it, accounting for just under a tenth of the national population, they made up 82% of the fatalities and 59% of the injured. Another example of state brutality towards Muslims was the forced expulsion, particularly from Assam to East Pakistan at gunpoint; some 35,000 Muslims “confessed” to being Pakistanis and were deported. These are some of the most salient issues which come up and the failure of the Congress Muslims to deal with these depredations on their community. But this must be seen in the context of the then Congress party.  

Unlike Nehru, the Hindu right, which populated the Congress leadership in the North, did not see the continuing presence of Muslims in India as an affirmation of a secular India. Sardar Patel, for all his public and private utterances, was content to deal with the least Muslims as possible, and encouraged the migration of Hindus from Pakistan and was keen on expelling Muslims to Pakistan irrespective of their desires. This is well documented. He was even initially against India claiming Kashmir as he saw this would increase the number of Muslims that India would have to deal with. It is this dichotomy of perceptions towards the minority which has bedevilled the Congress from partition until the Hindu right which emerged in the 1980s in a new and no-nonsense avatar.  

To some extent, the reason for this effete leadership – which was in an apparent time warp – was the fact, which Anil dilates on in his book and which he correctly attributes to the sterling work of Paul Brass who points out that prior to partition, the Muslims of UP were relatively dynamic, there was a higher degree of urbanisation amongst young Muslims than Hindus and this led to disappointment as many educational positions had been taken by Hindus in colleges. This led to the formation of Urdu-speaking institutions where these Muslim migrants from the hinterland could join. Anil refers to the case of 100,000 Urdu-speaking Muslim students emigrating from the countryside to cities where there existed only 20,000 places in Hindi medium institutions. This meant that the balance of 80,000 students would create Urdu ones. These students from Urdu-speaking institutions were ready fodder and a vote bank for the Muslim League. This was demonstrated in the 1937 election, when the League was able to secure half the votes from this constituency and nearly 71% in the 1946 election. In other words, as Anil correctly surmises, this community had metamorphosed into a nation by 1947.  

This separatist feeling, to a large extent, had been accentuated by policies of the Congress Government post-1937 in the United Provinces, particularly the introduction of the Wardha Scheme of education into around 16,000 schools. Whilst identified with the Mahatma, in practice, according to Anil, this system of education “turned primary schools into centres of Hindu traditional learning”.   The fact that the Congress government under its education minister Dr Sampurnanand felt confident to introduce this educational system without any discussion in a state where 25% of the population were Muslims was for many in the community a harbinger of things to come. It also put the nationalist Muslims on the back foot as it was very difficult to distinguish Congress rule from the dreaded Hindu Raj that the League ranted about.  

When people ask where was the Jan Sangh and the Mahasabha at that time, most of the work of the Hindu right was undertaken by such Congress worthies as Pant, Sampurnanand, Tandon and others – who in the words of Joya Chatterji operated autonomously from Nehru. If one were to accuse the Muslim grandees who comprised the Congress leadership of a self-serving agenda, I do not think there was much more they could get done and neither could their great patron, Pandit Nehru who was personally horrified at the conduct of his partymen in UP. In relation to the anti-Urdu policy, he was constrained to comment, “If my colleagues do not agree I cannot help it.” 

The fact was that the middle-class, upwardly mobile Muslim elite had largely migrated to Pakistan and left a huge vacuum which was filled by the Congress Muslims who were drawn from the landed class or were academics; and this perhaps is the most plausible explanation for this ineffectual leadership, apart from the curse of the majoritarianism and the fact that Muslims were spatially distributed in a way that made any Muslim party inconsequential in electoral terms. So, many Muslim Congressmen were beholden to the Congress for their seats and positions. You rarely bite the hand that feeds you.

Where Anil has a point is the fact that many of these Muslim politicians, upset with the Congress, did not consider forging alliances with other communities such as the Dalits in the way that Asaduddin Owaisi appears to be doing and partially succeeding. Perhaps that kind of thinking was something these conservative Muslims could not conceive of at the time; it was only a decade or so before they were entrenched in the ruling UP elite, revelling in a common culture with their Hindu raja friends and Pandits like Saprus and the Nehrus, who were part of this Urdu-Persian speaking hegemony. Many of the Muslim leaders who succeeded in this class were deeply religious and that also debarred them from reaching out to other communities as they were beset by religious parochialism.  

The reality which Anil appears to downplay is the very real dynamic of partition and its geographical and cultural consequences, on the two largest culturally self-sufficient provinces, the Punjab and Bengal were divided, causing the elevation of the cow belt and UP in particular and its impact on the notion of national identity. With the simulacrum of a Hindu, Hindi-speaking majority, as being the putative identity of the Indian State, the Muslims of North India were reduced to being the orphans of partition. This was not the case before, as some of the most radical and important reforms were implemented by Muslim politicians such as Liaquat Ali Khan – who introduced probably the most radical budget India has ever seen. Fazl ul Haq of Bengal introduced land reforms and an inclusive educational agenda in the 1940s and 1950s which explains the recent performance of Bangladesh as a rapidly growing export hub. Sheikh Abdullah introduced radical land reforms in Kashmir and dismantled the vestiges of Dogra rule. So it would be wrong to identify Muslim politicians as only protecting Muslim religious interests and a self-serving agenda as they have been caricatured, and that unfortunately remains the takeaway of Anil’s book.  

Javed Gaya is a Bombay high court lawyer who is currently writing a book on the historical, geographical and political impact of partition on India and the wider sub-continent, particularly with reference to the Indian Muslims and other minorities.