An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

  Such divisions were heightened not just between religious communities, but even within them. Thus the British can be largely blamed for the creation of previously non-existent Shia-Sunni tensions within the Muslim population of Lucknow. Prior to the British annexation of Oude (Avadh), the two sects had lived in harmony under a Shia nawab, whose celebrations of the Shia festival of Muharram had included Sunnis and Hindus as well in a public affirmation of his people’s fraternity. Once the British had deposed the nawab in 1856, the unifying symbol of the throne was lost, and the relationship between the ruling Shia nobility and the non-Shia subjects of the kingdom (Sunnis and Hindus) irrevocably transformed. The exaggeration by the British of communal identities now embraced sectarian differences between the two Muslim sects.

  As the scholar Keith Hjortshoj recounts: ‘By 1905, religious rhetoric between Shias and Sunnis had reached such heights that Sunnis in Lucknow did not join in the Marsiyah elegies during Muharram, but instead recited a praise of the first three Caliphs called the Madhe-Sahaba. Shias responded with Tabarra curses upon the Sahaba.’ Shia leaders also managed to persuade the British government that Sunni practices during Muharram were largely irrelevant, so the British enacted strict laws against practices by Sunnis that could be offensive to Shias. Before long the British had decided to authorize separate Shia and Sunni processions to commemorate Muharram.

  The British-sponsored Shia-Sunni divide in Lucknow is one of the clearest examples of how the British encouraged differences, and how Indians sought to create communities that the Raj would recognize and to which it would give political weight. This occurred, as it happened, at the very time when various political groups were competing for space in the expanded Indian representation announced for the viceroy’s and governors’ councils under the Minto-Morley Reforms. ‘When the British authorities assumed responsibility for banning or approving commemorations, arbitrating disputes, and regulating procession routes,’ Hjortshoj has explained, ‘they transformed religious differences into public, political, and legal issues. And so they have remained.’

  Far from promoting Indian political unity, British policies identified, accentuated and legitimized such divisions. One can lay not only a Hindu–Muslim divide at their door, but also credit them for giving legal definition to a new political division between the Sunni and Shia communities.

  The British-promoted cleavage also divided the Muslim community. A prominent Deobandi cleric who opposed the communal polarization promoted by the British and fought against the League’s Pakistan project, Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani, wrote passionately to a co-religionist as late as 1945:

  Muslims have been together with the Hindus since they moved to Hindustan. And I have been with them since I was born. I was born and raised here. If two people live together in the same country, same city, they will share [a] lot of things with each other. Till the time there are Muslims in India, they will be together with the Hindus. In the bazaars, in homes, in railways, in trams, buses, lorries, in stations, colleges, post offices, jails, police stations, courts, councils, assembles, hotels, etc. You tell me where and when we don’t meet them or are not together with them? You are a zamindar. Are not your tenants Hindus? You are a trader; you don’t buy and sell from Hindus? You are a lawyer: don’t you have Hindu clients? You are in a district or municipal board; won’t you be dealing with Hindus? Who is not with the Hindus?

  The creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the horrors of Partition that eventually accompanied the collapse of British authority in 1947.

  A SAINT AMONG SINNERS

  The great Indian opponent of the British Raj, Mahatma Gandhi, opposed colonial rule in an unusual way: not by violence but by the strength of moral force. Gandhi’s life was, of course, his lesson. He was unique among the statesmen of the twentieth century in his determination not just to live his beliefs but to reject any separation between beliefs and action. Gandhi was a philosopher who was constantly seeking to live out his own ideas, whether they applied to individual self-improvement or social change: his autobiography was typically subtitled The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Truth could not be obtained by ‘untruthful’ or unjust means, which included inflicting violence upon one’s opponent. The means had to be worthy of the ends; if they were not, the ends would fail too.

  To describe his method, Gandhi coined the expression satyagraha, literally, ‘holding on to truth’ or, as he variously described it, truth-force, love-force or soul-force. He disliked the English term ‘passive resistance’ because satyagraha required activism, not passivity. If you believed in Truth and cared enough to obtain it, Gandhi felt, you could not afford to be passive: you had to be prepared actively to suffer for Truth. So non-violence, like many later concepts labelled with a negation, from non-cooperation to non-alignment, meant much more than the denial of an opposite; it did not merely imply the absence of violence. Non-violence was the way to vindicate the truth not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self. It was essential to willingly accept punishment in order to demonstrate the strength of one’s convictions.

  This was the approach Gandhi brought to the movement for India’s independence and it worked. Where sporadic terrorism and moderate constitutionalism had both proved ineffective, Gandhi took the issue of freedom to the masses as one of simple right and wrong and gave them a technique to which the British had no response. By going beyond the councils and the meeting rooms he seized the public imagination. By abstaining from violence the Mahatma wrested the moral advantage. By breaking the law non-violently he showed up the injustice of the law. By accepting the punishments imposed on him he confronted his captors with their own brutalization. By voluntarily imposing suffering upon himself in his hunger strikes he demonstrated the lengths to which he was prepared to go in defence of what he considered to be right. In the end he made the perpetuation of British rule an impossibility.

  In this, Gandhi was embodying what the doughty nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai had propounded in 1905: ‘The British are not a spiritual people,’ the Lala had said. ‘They are either a fighting race or a commercial nation. It would be throwing pearls before swine to appeal to them in the name of the higher morality or justice or on ethical grounds. They are a self-reliant, haughty people, who can appreciate self-respect and self-reliance even in their opponents.’ (Despite this insight, Lajpat Rai was himself killed, aged sixty-three, by repeated blows to the head by the stave of a British superintendent of police, James A. Scott, while leading a peaceful, non-violent protest against the British in 1928.)

  As the non-violent Indian nationalist movement gained traction, public sympathy and international attention in the 1920s and 1930s, with Gandhi seizing the world’s imagination through his satyagraha, his fasts and the Empire-defying Salt March, the British felt obliged to grant improved measures of self-governance through the Government of India Act, 1935. Even then, however, the franchise was extended to less than 10 per cent of the population and, as before, Indians voted not as citizens of a single country but as members of different religious groups, with Muslim voters choosing Muslim members from a reserved list—a further confirmation of divide et impera. Separate electorates were part of the British attempt to thwart Mahatma Gandhi’s mass politics, which for the first time had created a common national consciousness not just among the educated elite who had formerly dominated the Congress but amongst the general public he had successfully mobilized.

  The British decision to declare the community then known as ‘Untouchables’ (today as Dalits, or more bureaucratically as ‘Scheduled Castes’) to be a minority community entitled to separate representation, distinct from other Hindus, in a new category called the ‘Depressed Classes’, was seen by Indian nationalists as a ploy to divide the majority community in furtherance of imperial interests. Dalits, in turn, saw the nationalist movement as do
minated by the same ‘upper’ castes that had long discriminated against them, and Dalit leaders like Ambedkar, a brilliant constitutional scholar who had risen from hard-scrabble poverty by sheer dint of merit, embraced separate electorates as a means of asserting their right to choose their own representatives.

  The Indian National Congress, led by Mahatma Gandhi, was already opposed to separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, since it saw the practice as designed to promote a sense that they were separate communities whose interests were somehow different from the general mass of Indians. Still, the Congress could not formally oppose separate electorates for fear of antagonizing minority groups while the British were busy stoking minority fears of Hindu domination if and whenever self-government came to India. The Congress, therefore, confined its opposition to the principle that separate electorates were wrong and unnecessary but could only be abandoned with the consent of the minorities.

  However, the British attempt to separate the Depressed Classes was of a different order, since it was the first time that separate electorates were being proposed within a religious community, and the strategy of fragmenting Indian nationalism and breaking the incipient unity of the Indian masses was clearly apparent to Congress leaders. Gandhi demanded that the representatives of the Depressed Classes should be elected by the general electorate under a wide, and if possible universal, common franchise, and undertook a fast unto death in 1932 that riveted the nation and compelled the British and the Dalit leadership to give in. Under a political compromise, known as the Poona Pact, that year separate electorates for the Depressed Classes were abandoned but additional seats were reserved for them in the provincial and central legislatures—an increase from 71 to 147 in the former and to 18 per cent of the Central Legislature.

  (Interestingly enough, the leader of the Dalits who clashed with Gandhi over the issue, Dr B. R. Ambedkar, went on to serve after Independence as chairman of the Drafting Committee for India’s Constitution, and ensured that his country would have the world’s first and farthest-reaching affirmative action programme for his community. Though separate electorates were dropped for good, 85 seats in independent India’s 543-seat lower house were reserved for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, as were a quota of places in government service and universities—guaranteeing not just opportunities but assured outcomes.)

  If the Dalits did not end up with separate electorates, the Muslim League found it difficult initially to profit from them. ‘The ambassador of Hindu–Muslim unity’ was not an appellation destined to endure for Jinnah. Disdaining the populism and the mass appeal of Gandhi, Jinnah had retreated to his law practice in England, only to return, after a long political sulk, as the leader determined to take the Muslim League towards separatism. Jinnah began to claim that India’s Muslims represented a nation unto themselves: ‘We are different beings,’ he declared in barefaced denial of his entire upbringing, career, social relations and personal life. ‘There is nothing in life which links us together. Our names, our clothes, our foods—they are all different; our economic life, our educational idea, our treatment of women, our attitude to animals… We challenge each other at every point of the compass.’ For the Savile Row-suit-wearing, sausage-eating, whisky-swilling Jinnah to go on about clothes and food was a bit rich, as was the reference to women’s habits coming from the lips of a man who had been famously indulgent of his young wife’s scandalously ‘bold’ attire.

  But the political choice had been made to accentuate difference, and that is what the Muslim League leader set out to do. He sought to establish the League as the ‘sole representatives’ of India’s Muslims, but Muslim voters, inconveniently enough, demurred, voting for Muslims of other political allegiances, including, most gallingly, for Muslim members of the Indian National Congress, as well as for the League.

  The 1937 elections saw the Indian National Congress being elected to rule eight provinces; the party won an astonishing 617 of the 739 ‘general’ seats it contested, and even 25 of the 59 seats reserved exclusively for Muslims. Several other parties, and 385 Independents, also won seats. Trailing a distant second to the Congress was the Muslim League, which failed to win even a plurality of the seats reserved for Muslims, winning just 106 of the 1,585 seats at stake and failing to take control of any province. The domestic political contest, it seemed, had been decisively settled in favour of the inclusive, pluralist, multi-ethnic party, the Congress.

  But those who saw it that way had spoken too soon. The Congress’s victory was far from determinant. Though the elections involved some 15.5 million voters and marked a significant step forward in the creation of representative governance, most key powers were still retained by the viceroy, and no elections were held to the central government, which continued to be run by him. This was deliberate: alarmed by the growing popularity of the Congress, the British counted upon what the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, called ‘the potency of provincial autonomy to destroy the effectiveness of the Congress as an all-India instrument of revolution’. The hope was to give the party’s provincial leaders enough of a taste of the loaves and fishes of office to wean them away from their national leadership and give them a personal stake in collaboration with the Raj. The electoral system was also stacked in favour of rural representation in order to get more landlords elected whose interests would diverge from the socialist programmes of the Congress’s national leaders.

  So much of the talk of self-government was hollow, and its hollowness was confirmed when it was the viceroy, and not the elected representatives of the Indian people, who declared war on Germany on behalf of India in 1939. This promptly precipitated the resignation of the elected Congress ministries, in protest at not being consulted on such a vital matter. The pretence of developing responsible political institutions in India was laid to rest. And soon a rough beast, in Yeats’ immortal words, arose amid the Muslims of India, slouching towards a new Bethlehem to be born.

  STUMBLING TOWARDS ARMAGEDDON

  To the surprise of both their supporters and their critics, the Congress ministries in the nine provinces had conducted themselves as able stewards of the governmental system of the British Raj. For the most part they did little to dismantle oppressive British laws, and in some cases proved as zealous in arresting radicals as the British themselves had been.

  Meanwhile, both during his party’s electoral setback and then when the Congress opened the window of opportunity by resigning its ministries, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the increasingly hard-line leader of the Muslim League, had proven to be a skilled tactician, making up for the League’s defeat in the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal by in effect co-opting the victorious leaders there (Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan of the Unionist Party and Fazlul Huq of the Krishak Praja Party, respectively) onto the League platform. The Congress itself was riven by infighting. Its acceptance of office had both alienated its left wing and made it vulnerable to largely specious charges of imposing ‘Hindu majority rule’ on the Muslim minority.

  Ironically, when war came, the viceroy would have found ready support from the Congress, whose leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, had declared that in any conflict between democracy and fascism, ‘our sympathies must inevitably be on the side of democracy… I should like India to play its full part and throw all her resources into the struggle for a new order’. Nehru’s abhorrence of fascism was so great that he would gladly have led a free India into war on the side of the democracies, provided that choice was made by Indians and not imposed upon them by the British. But when Germany’s invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 led Britain to declare war upon it, Indians noted the irony of the English fighting to defend the sovereignty of a weak country resisting the brute force of foreign conquest—precisely what Indian nationalists were doing against British imperialism. So Britain would fight Germany for doing to Poland what Britain had been doing to India for nearly two hundred years.

  Nehru blamed British appeasement for the fall of Spain to the fascists, the betrayal of Ethi
opia to the Italians, and the selling out of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis: he wanted India to have no part of the responsibility for British policy, which he saw as designed to protect the narrow class-interests of a few imperialists. Despite his stated antipathy for fascism and the Nazis, Nehru saw no reason why Indians should be expected to make sacrifices to preserve British rule over them. How could a subject India be ordered to fight for a free Poland? A free and democratic India, on the other hand, would gladly fight for freedom and democracy.

  Under his direction, the Congress Working Committee adopted a resolution making this case (while rejecting former President Subhas Chandra Bose’s demand that civil disobedience be launched immediately). Nehru made no secret of his own anti-Nazi views; all he wanted was some indication from the British government of respect for his position so that India and Britain could then gladly ‘join in a struggle for freedom’. The Congress leaders made it clear to the viceroy that all they needed was a declaration that India would be given the chance to determine its own future after the war. The Congress position was greeted with understanding and even some approval in left-wing circles in Britain, but though he would have found allies in the anti-fascist Congress governments in the provinces and amongst Congress legislators in the Central Assembly, Lord Linlithgow did not so much as make a pretence of consulting India’s elected leaders before declaring war on Germany on behalf of India. Instead, he turned to the Muslim League for support.

  The Congress had, in fact, hoped for a joint approach on the war issue with the League. The viceroy’s statement in October 1939 emphatically rejecting the Congress position, however, prompted the working committee, with Nehru in the lead, to order all its provincial ministries to resign rather than continue to serve a war effort in which they had been denied an honourable role. The decision was taken on a point of principle, but politically it proved a monumental blunder. It deprived the Congress of their only leverage with the British government, cast aside the fruits of their electoral success, and presented Jinnah with a golden opportunity. He broke off talks with the Congress—declaring the day of the Congress resignations a ‘day of deliverance’—and turned to the viceroy instead.