The Shadow of the Great Game

by Narendra Singh Sarila

  The year of the Mutiny, 1857, marked a watershed. Until then the Muslim was Britain’s enemy number one in India. Thereafter, the British identified a new enemy, namely, the growing Indian middle class, who were imbibing Western ideas of democracy, and a majority of whom happened to be educated Hindus. This change in British perceptions encouraged many Muslims to clutch the proffered British hand of friendship and bury the old hatchet. Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–98) was the most prominent Muslim to represent this view. He exhorted the Muslims to ally themselves with their old enemy and distance themselves from the majority community. (He was knighted by Empress Victoria.) It is worth noting that a British Member of Parliament, John Bright, had, as early as 1858, suggested the break-up of the Indian Empire and placing some parts under Muslim control. The notion of ‘divide and rule’ had come rather naturally to the Imperial power. With British help Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, in 1877, founded the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, about 100 km southeast of Delhi. The declared aim of this institution was ‘to produce an educated upper class of Muslims who might lead their people out of despair and ignorance towards humanism and intelligent government’. The course content and the teaching patterns at the Aligarh College under its first principal, Theodore Beck, were Muslim centric. They had a profound influence on the Muslim elite who flocked to this college from all over India.

  After Sir Syed, the Agha Khan donned the mantle as spokesman of Anglo–Muslim cooperation. He was the leader of a Shia sect of traders (incidentally, the same sect into which Jinnah was born) who were spread over many parts of the British Empire and were dependent on British protection. By frequently visiting England – he lived on the French Riviera – and deploying his considerable diplomatic talents, and not the least because of his love of the favourite British sport of horse racing, Agha had achieved an entrée into the highest British political and social circles. In his book India in Transition, he has described the position of the Muslims of India under British rule at the end of the nineteenth century as follows:

  The average Indian Muslim looked upon himself as a member of a universal religious brotherhood, sojourning in a land in which a neutral government with a neutral outlook kept law and order and justice…. While his allegiance was to Queen Victoria his political self-respect was satisfied by the existence of the Sultans of Constantinople and Fez and of the Shah and Khadive [a title equivalent to lord] of Tehran and Cairo [respectively]. The fact that the British Government was a mainstay support in the diplomatic arena of the independent Mohammadan States was naturally a source of continued gratification to him.7

  It was the Agha Khan, who, in 1883, first put forward the idea of separate electorates for Muslims, i.e., that a certain number of seats in every election should be reserved for Muslim candidates and the Muslim electorate should vote exclusively for these Muslim candidates, as against ‘the principle of election pure and simple’. Under such a system Muslim candidates would not be required to seek support from people belonging to other religions or to pay heed to the interests of their non-Muslim compatriots. The normal elective process is one of the best ways to bring about harmony among antagonistic groups as it knits together people by making them politically interdependent. The setting up of separate electorates, on the other hand, is a sure way to tear people politically apart.

  The Muslim League Party was launched by the Agha Khan and some landlords of Bengal in 1906. On 1 October of that year, the League petitioned the viceroy for the introduction of separate electorates for Muslims. The deputation received a hearty welcome from Lord Gilbert Elliot Minto and the viceregal staff. Lady Minto noted the development as follows: ‘Nothing less than the pulling back of 62 million of people from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition.’8

  The young Jinnah was not impressed by either of these two currents: neither the continuing jihad against Christian Britain nor the one of befriending the British at the expense of India’s majority community.

  I got a glimpse of the young Jinnah from M.C. Chagla, who was for nearly two decades, i.e., up to the end of the 1920s, Jinnah’s junior in his legal firm in Bombay and a collaborator in the Muslim League. Chagla later became the chief justice of the Bombay High Court and on retirement an ambassador and a foreign minister. Chagla said that Jinnah rose in his profession and acquired wealth by the sheer dint of his hard work, discipline and a burning passion to shine and prove himself in any task he undertook, although outwardly he remained taciturn, detached and aloof. He was oversensitive to anyone slighting him. His integrity was beyond reproach. He moved mostly in the company of rich Parsis* who were more Europeanized than other Indians. He spoke neither Urdu nor Hindi and addressed public meetings in English, even if the crowd did not understand a word of what he was saying. Jinnah was not a practising Muslim. He never read the Quran or performed the Haj; he did not follow the Quranic precepts of prayer. He did not abstain from drinking alcohol or eating pork, taboo for Muslims. He saw himself as a modern, secular man. Chagla’s references to Jinnah’s ego and his ambition to be always number one give a clue to his later metamorphosis.

  Jinnah reacted strongly against the League’s demand for separate electorates for Muslims describing it ‘as a poisonous dose to divide the nation against itself’.9 However, after such electorates were introduced, he did not hesitate to contest elections to the Imperial Legislative Council from the reserved Muslim seat for Bombay. In 1910, he became the first non-official Muslim to sit on that body. Jinnah’s participation in public affairs as a representative of the Bombay Muslims brought him in touch with Muslim politics for the first time. The experience that he gained here fired his imagination in the direction of dominating Muslim politics and he joined the Muslim League in 1913. His aim at that time was to ride two horses – those of the Congress Party and the League at the same time – in order to establish a cooperative relationship between the two. ‘Cooperation to [sic] the cause of our motherland…should be our guiding principle’, he told his supporters.10

  Jinnah was the leading light behind the forging of the Lucknow Pact between the Muslim League and the Congress Party in 1916. Under this pact, the Congress accepted reservation of seats for a certain percentage of ‘Muslim members’ in each of the Provincial Legislative Councils in return for the League’s general support. This understanding avoided a Hindu–Muslim rift in the wake of the introduction of separate electorates. He advised the Muslims not to be ‘scared away’ by ‘your enemies’ from cooperation with the Hindus, ‘which is essential for the establishment of self-government’.11

  Jinnah’s difficulties with regard to the Congress Party began soon after Gandhiji returned from South Africa in 1915 and assumed the leadership of that party. Jinnah was then thirty-nine and Gandhiji forty-five. Until then the Congress Party had at the forefront leaders who, like Jinnah, believed in fighting the British through constitutional means. Jinnah profoundly disagreed with Gandhiji’s policy of mass movements to arouse the masses to fight British rule, though, of course, through non-violent action. Jinnah believed that it was dangerous to play with the emotions of ignorant and illiterate masses. In his view, the advantage of bringing the weight of numbers into play against British power was not a sufficient ground to abandon gradualism and constitutional methods and risk ‘political anarchy and communal chaos’ as a consequence. To Gandhiji, on the other hand, the social, economic and moral uplift of the masses – a non-violent cultural revolution – was very important to achieve not only political goals but also freedom. Jinnah was astonished by Gandhiji’s rapid success at mobilizing people of all classes, castes and creeds, including Muslims, throughout the length and breadth of the country. But Jinnah stuck to his own formula.

  Jinnah soon found himself being squeezed out by Gandhiji not only from the Congress Party’s platform but also from that of the Muslim League, as the Mahatma successfully exploited Muslim sentiment against the dethroning of the Ottoman Sultan, the Khalifa, by Britain, after the First World War. Gandhiji’s objective was to
build bridges between the Muslims and the Congress Party by extending support to the former on this issue. Jinnah looked askance at a policy that gave a fillip to pan-Islamic sentiments and which, in the long run, might come in the way of genuine Hindu–Muslim cooperation. Jinnah had walked out of the Muslim League meeting that endorsed the Khilafat movement, saying it was against the constitution of the League to oppose the government’s foreign policy.

  Jinnah’s first clash with Gandhiji took place with regard to the policy of recruitment of Indians for the British Indian Army during the First World War. Gandhiji was helping with such recruitment on the pattern of his support to the South African Government in the Boer War, despite his opposition to the same government’s apartheid policy. ‘Seek yee first the Recruiting Office and everything will be added unto you’, he wrote to Jinnah.12 On the other hand, Jinnah’s position was made clear in his following statement: ‘I say that if you [British] wish us to help you to facilitate to stimulate the recruiting, you must make the educated people feel that they are the citizens of the Empire and the King’s equal subjects…. We want action and immediate deeds.’13 It is worth recording that during the Second World War, Gandhiji used Jinnah’s above argument to oppose recruitment, while Jinnah used Gandhiji’s aforementioned stand for urging cooperation with the British war effort. Was it the two men, or the situation, that had changed?

  In 1920 Jinnah wrote to Gandhiji that his ‘extreme programme must lead to disaster…. Your methods have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you approached hitherto, and in the public life of the country not only amongst Hindus and Muslims but between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even between fathers and sons’.14 This outburst came after the disagreement between Gandhiji and Jinnah had come out in the open at the December 1920 Nagpur Congress Party session. Gandhiji had spoken from the platform in favour of dissolving ‘the British connection’. Jinnah immediately objected that it would be impractical and dangerous to do so without a greater amount of preparation for independence. When he said ‘I appeal to you to cry halt before it is too late’, he was ‘howled down with cries of shame and “political imposter”’. When he argued back, referring to Gandhiji as ‘Mr Gandhi’, the audience yelled: ‘No; Mahatma Gandhi!’. Gandhiji, refused to intervene, and the boos, hisses and catcalls of the audience ‘drove Jinnah from the platform’.15 All these events took place in the presence of Ruttie, his young wife, who then hero-worshipped him and whom he had brought to Nagpur to acquaint her with the Indian political scene.*

  Ruttie was the beautiful daughter of a Parsi magnate of Bombay, Sir Dinshaw Petit. When Jinnah married her in 1916, she was half his age. He had wooed her for two years despite the opposition of her father, who happened to be his friend. She was irrepressibly vivacious, always looking out for new ways to amuse herself. Her husband’s rising stature in national politics was a fascinating game for her. Jinnah’s deep humiliation at the crowded 1920 Congress session was not what she was expecting; nor indeed he. It left a deep scar on the psyche of both. Once, when the newly married couple was asked to dine at Government House in Bombay at a time when Lord Willingdon (Freeman Freeman-Thomas) and Lady Willingdon occupied it, Ruttie had appeared in a rather low-cut French dress that somewhat exposed her bosom. As the guests settled down at the table Lady Willingdon asked one of the bearers to fetch a shawl, saying that ‘Mrs Jinnah might be feeling a bit cold’. On hearing these words, Jinnah bristled from across the table: ‘When Mrs Jinnah feels cold she will say so’, he retorted and got up from the dining table and both left the Government House.16 At Nagpur too both got up and left the pandal, the meeting’s enclosure.

  It must be said in defence of the howling Nagpur crowds that they did not take him seriously. Here was a handsome man, wearing a beautiful girl on his arm, a monocle dangling on the lapel of his London-tailored double-breasted suit, complete with matching two-toned shoes, addressing them in English. This image did not fit in with their idea of a committed leader whom they expected to wear swadeshi (home-spun) cloth, appear to practise self-abnegation and speak in Urdu or Hindi.

  Despite such provocations, Jinnah did not leave the Congress Party. He continued to attend its policy sessions, where he argued against the advisability of launching the mass satyagraha movement of 1921 that Gandhiji was planning in the wake of the general mood of anger and resentment at the extension of the Emergency Powers Act (the Rowlatt Act) beyond the war. This move had signalled Britain’s coercive intentions even after the unbridled massacre of innocent people by Reginald Dyer at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar in April 1919. Jinnah also protested against the British policy, but in a different manner. He resigned his seat on the Imperial Legislative Council, in the deliberations of which he had come to acquire considerable weight. He had already resigned from the Muslim League Party as a protest against its refusal to follow him in opposing the Khilafat agitation.

  The 1921 satyagraha, which had mobilized the populace beyond anybody’s expectations, was abruptly abandoned by Gandhiji from his prison (where he had been confined for sedition) after it resulted in violence in a place called Chauri Chaura (in UP), where twelve (some accounts put the number at twenty-two) police constables were burnt to death by a mob. One can well imagine Jinnah’s comment on the episode: ‘Inevitable, dear Chagla, inevitable.’ Gandhiji did not launch a mass movement for a decade thereafter, leaving constitutionalists such as Motilal Nehru, the father of Jawaharlal, to try their luck, while he himself concentrated on social problems such as village cleanliness and abolition of the caste system. Meanwhile, Gandhiji’s popularity continued to steadily rise all over India.

  Throughout the 1920s Jinnah’s alienation from the Congress Party continued apace. At the same time, his hold on the Muslim League in particular and on the Muslims in general also weakened.

  In 1924, as soon as Jinnah was elected to represent the Muslims of Bombay in the Legislative Assembly (inaugurated under the new constitution promulgated in 1919), he tried to forge a common front with the twenty-three independents in the assembly and the twenty-five members of the Swaraj Party led by Motilal Nehru and C.R. Das, who had entered the assembly despite Gandhiji’s policy of non-cooperation with the same. Jointly, these two groups could outvote the British official representatives and force the pace towards early self-government. However, C.R. Das’s death and Motilal Nehru’s reluctance to collaborate too closely with Jinnah, because of the Mahatma’s reservations about him, negated Jinnah’s efforts.

  In 1927 His Majesty’s Government sent out a commission headed by Sir John Simon (Clement Attlee, a future prime minister, was one of its members). This commission was boycotted by the Congress Party, as it did not include any Indian. Jinnah decided that the Muslim League, which he had rejoined by then, would also boycott the Simon Commission for the same reason. This gesture was applauded by Gandhiji.

  The Earl of Birkenhead (Frederick Edwin Smith), the secretary of state, wrote to the viceroy on 19 July 1928: ‘I should widely advertise all the interviews with Muslims.’ He added that Simon’s brief was ‘to terrify the immense Hindu population by the apprehension that the Commission...may present a report altogether destructive of the Hindu position, thereby securing a solid Muslim support and leaving Jinnah high and dry.’17

  In February 1928 an All-India-All-Party Conference was held in Delhi to suggest reforms – essentially, a single Indian formula – to take the wind out of Simon’s sails. Jinnah represented the Muslim League at this widely attended conference, which was presided over by Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, the president of the Congress Party. The conference agreed to demand ‘full responsible government’ and thus bypass those in favour of dominion status (like Jinnah) and those for outright independence (like Jawaharlal Nehru).

  On the issue of Muslim rights and representation, Jinnah had persuaded the Muslim League and some other Muslim leaders in 1927 to agree to give up separate electorates in return for the Congress Party’s acceptance of the followin
g concessions: (1) one-third (33 per cent) Muslim seats in the Central Legislature instead of the existing 27 per cent; (2) the separation of Sind from the Bombay Presidency; and (3) the recognition of North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan as separate entities with their own provincial legislatures (they were then being administered centrally). The acceptance of concessions (2) and (3) would enable Muslims to dominate governments in five British provinces (the aforementioned three plus Bengal and the Punjab). This formula was a major contribution by Jinnah to reduce communal differences. If Muslim candidates would have to get the support of non-Muslims to get elected as in a normal democracy, they would be forced to tone down, if not give up, emphasizing merely issues of Muslim interest. Such a development would bring national and economic developmental issues to the forefront. To begin with, the Congress Party welcomed this formula. However, at the All-Party Conference, the Congress Party leaders changed their stand and did not accept the concessions. Even a small increase (from 27 per cent to 33 per cent) in Muslim representation at the Centre was unwelcome to them.

  Thereafter, the Congress Party appointed a commission under Motilal Nehru to draft the salient features of a joint draft constitution, which eventually came to be known as the Nehru Report. This report proposed the abolition of separate electorates, without agreeing to the concessions suggested by Jinnah. Jinnah felt betrayed and refused to meet Motilal Nehru in an attempt to work out a compromise on the differences. For his part, Motilal Nehru saw no reason to yield to Jinnah because many members of the Muslim League had notified him that they were willing to accept the Nehru Report as it stood. In 1928 Motilal Nehru was angling for his son, Jawaharlal, to be elected as president of the Congress Party. This could also have been a reason why he wished to play safe with the Congress leaders, including Gandhiji. In fairness to Motilal Nehru, it must be stated that, because his hands were tied on the issue of the increase in Muslim representation at the Centre, he was willing to let separate electorates continue. But Chagla, representing Jinnah, a strong nationalist, prevailed upon him to demand joint electorates – a stand Jinnah repudiated. Thus began his break with Chagla.