by ZAHEER MASANI
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as “Mahatma” or Great Soul (right) with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, also known as “Quaid-e-Azam” or Great Leader in 1944. PHOTO/Getty Images
“Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.” Imagine those famous words spoken “at the stroke of the midnight hour”, not by Jawaharlal Nehru as leader of a partitioned Indian republic, but by Mohammed Ali Jinnah as premier of a confederation of the whole subcontinent. The new state is an independent dominion, like Canada and Australia, with the British monarch as king-emperor. It has a weak central government and strong, autonomous provinces like undivided Punjab and Bengal. Its constitution is based on the British government’s Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 and accepted by both the predominantly Hindu Congress and the separatist Muslim League.
To persuade Jinnah, already dying of tuberculosis, to abandon his largely tactical demand for Pakistan, an independent state carved out of India’s Muslim-majority provinces, Mahatma Gandhi has given him the premiership of a coalition government at the centre. Nehru, whose arrogance and insistence on the top job had alienated Jinnah, has been slapped down in a realignment of the Congress leadership: Gandhi joining forces with anti-Nehru conservatives like Sardar Patel and Chakravarty Rajagopalachari (Rajaji). Nehru had been collaborating closely with Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, sent as viceroy by the new Labour government to “cut and run” as quickly as possible. But the Nehru-Mountbatten axis is seriously discredited by a scandal about Nehru’s affair with Lady Mountbatten, including insinuations that the bisexual ‘Dickie’ was a willing participant in a menage a trois.
Mountbatten is packed off home in disgrace, while his perspicacious predecessor, Lord Wavell, returns as viceroy, resuming negotiations for a more gradual transfer of power to a united subcontinent. This slowly results in a new national unity coalition between Jinnah and the Congress conservatives. With Jinnah as his Muslim prime minister, Rajaji, a Hindu Brahmin, in due course succeeds Wavell as the first Indian governor-general of the newly independent dominion.
Hindu-Muslim tension, ratcheted up by the Pakistan demand and the Congress opposition to it, now subsides. Jinnah’s main powerbase, the influential Muslim minority of India’s central Hindi belt, is delighted with the new power-sharing deal. For them, Pakistan was always a tactical rather than a practical demand, because it would uproot them from their homes in a partitioned India. The two largest Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab are equally pleased, because they remain undivided with powerful, devolved governments of their own. A year later, Jinnah dies, and his successors as leaders of the Muslim League, lacking either his charisma or ambition, accept the role of second fiddle to the Congress. Gandhi’s gamble has paid off, and he lives happily on for another decade, instead of falling victim to a fanatical Hindu assassin.
Is this just a far-fetched, counterfactual scenario born of nostalgia and wishful thinking? Or could it have become a reality if the partnership of Clement Attlee, Lord Mountbatten and Nehru hadn’t rushed through a premature transfer of power to satisfy their own personal and ideological ambitions? The historical evidence suggests that there was no inevitability about Partition and that the key decisions were rather finely balanced.
It’s something of a myth that independence was won by direct action and that Partition was the inevitable price exacted by a colonial power determined to divide and rule. Effective independence was implicit in the constitutional reforms of the Raj in 1909 and 1919, well before Gandhi launched his civil disobedience movement. The Congress was knocking at an open door: the real point at issue was how to introduce parliamentary democracy in a subcontinent so diverse and largely illiterate.
The central problem with elected legislatures was to safeguard the interests of the Muslim minority, still rooted in its feudal past and fearful of domination by the more successful Hindu business and professional elites. The solution accepted by a reluctant Congress was to have separate electorates for additional, reserved Muslim seats. What had still to be resolved was how to guarantee Muslim representation in newly devolved governments in the provinces and eventually at the Centre.
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