Events & Issues
New Delhi, 27 August 2009
Who Created Pakistan?
NO SIMPLE, STRAIGHT
ANSWER
By Durga Das
(Controversy rages once again over the question: “Who created Pakistan”,
thanks to the sharp countrywide reaction to Jaswant Singh’s glowing tribute to
Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Given below is the authoritative answer provided by the
late Durga Das, founder of INFA and formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Hindustan
Times, in his seminal memoirs “India
from Curzon to Nehru & After.” India’s third President, Dr Zakir Husain,
described these memoirs in his foreword as “Indian history seen from the
inside.”)
Who conceded Pakistan?
Some name one person, some the other. But, in point of fact, there is no
simple, straight answer.
Both the Congress and the Raj for their own reasons were
keen on maintaining a united India.
But both were walking the slippery path of winning the support of the third
side of India’s
power triangle: Muslims. Whitehall
unconsciously first planted the seed of partition by conceding separate
electorate and communal representation, in Minto’s words, to the Muslim
“nation.”
Following the outbreak of World War II, which caught the
Congress unprepared for its political repercussions, Gandhi was the first to
concede to the Muslims at the Ramgarh Congress session in 1940 the right of
separation as in Hindu joint family. He suggested the setting up of a
Constituent Assembly based on adult franchise and proposed that the Muslim
members be allowed to decide whether they wished to live separately or as
members of a joint family. Gandhi’s offer was essentially a move in the
political game of outbidding and outwitting the British.
The British outbid Gandhi in August 1940 when Leopold Amery,
through Viceroy Linlithgow, placed in Jinnah’s hands a veto on advance to
self-government. This was done both to ride over the period of war and
checkmate the Congress. But it had the effect of fixing a pointer to the road
to partition.
When Japan
entered the war towards the close of 1941 and its warships appeared in the Bay
of Bengal, C.R. (C. Rajagopalachari) got his followers in Madras
to pass a resolution formally conceding the claim for Pakistan made by the League in its Lahore resolution of
March 1940. Although adopted to enable the formation of a national government
to resist the Japanese, the resolution was repudiated promptly by the AICC,
which reaffirmed its faith in a united India.
Nehru came next, when American pressure made Chruchill
dispatch Cripps to India
with a proposal that envisaged partition as a possibility and gave political
content to the veto placed in Jinnah’s hand. The Congress Working Committee
rejected the Cripps offer but, in a resolution drafted by Nehru, it formally
conceded for the first time the principle that it did not believe in keeping
within the Union any area against its
expressed wish.
The drift towards partition thereafter received
inadvertently a push when Bhulabhai Desai and Liaquat Ali entered into an
agreement providing for equal representation to the Congress and the League in
the reconstituted Cabinet. Gandhi blessed the proposal but Wavell transformed
it into an equality between Muslims and caste Hindus --- as against equality
between two political entities. Gandhi then disowned the pact, but the damage
was done.
Rajagopalachari now intervened with Gandhi’s blessings to
resolve the deadlock by offering the matter of partition to be settled by a
referendum. In essence this gave concrete shape to Gandhi’s plan vaguely
enunciated at the Ramgarh session as a tactical move.
Wavell almost succeeded in preserving the unity of India in
co-operation with the Congress with his plan for a wartime coalition. But his
effort was frustrated at the eleventh hour when Jinnah received the secret
offer of “Pakistan on a
platter” from his friends in Whitehall and in Delhi.
Nehru, Patel and Prasad next acknowledged and endorsed
Jinnahs’ two-nation theory in March 1947, by advocating in a resolution adopted
by the Congress Working Committee the division of the Punjab
into Muslim-majority and Hindu-majority areas. This was done by the three
without consulting Gandhi, who reacted sharply and considered this to be an
hour of great humiliation.
When Mountbatten found himself running into a blind alley
around May 1947, be came up with his partition plan and informally consulted
Nehru, who gave his consent to it. As Mountbatten himself stated in his Nehru
Memorial Lecture: “……Nehru realized that this would mean a much earlier
transfer of power even though it were to two Governments and left a good chance
for the essential unity of India to be maintained.”
Patel was the first to accept the partition plan at the
formal conference of national leaders convened by Mountbatten on 2nd
June. Indeed, he gave it his wholehearted support. As Home Minister, Patel had
realized that the drift towards partition had gone beyond the point of no
return and chaos could be prevented only by conceding Pakistan. If
this meant a break with Bapu, he was willing to pay the price – as indicated by
him to me in his candid talk.
In the final analysis, the Congress leaders and the party as
a whole were too weary to carry on the struggle any further and were, in their
heart of hearts, anxious to grasp power and enjoy its fruits without further
delay. As Badshah Khan told me in Kabul
in 1967 in so many words: “Some of my colleagues in the High Command did toy
with the idea of going ahead with the fight. But the majority accepted the view
that they might then miss the bus. In the next election in Britain, it was
feared, the Labour might be thrown out of office and the diehard Tories voted
back to power….”
Unknown, at the time, Churchill played a key role in the
creation of Pakistan.
Following the outbreak of the war, he realized that India
could not be held indefinitely and, as revealed by King George VI in his book,
His Life and Reign, decided “to give up India to the Indians after the
war.” Churchill and his colleagues decided, at the same time, to save what they
could out of the wreckage and it was this conviction that lay behind the offer
to Jinnah of “Pakistan
on a platter.” Pakistan
was expected to give them a foothold in the sub-continent.
Attlee and his colleagues in the Labour Party did not agree
with this policy and earnestly attempted to maintain a united India, however
fragile its federal structure. But the compulsion of events went beyond the
control of the main British and Congress actors in the final scene of the
freedom drama. And destiny helped Jinnah. ---INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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