On Partition-Hamza Alvi

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EPW Special Article November 2-9, 2002
Misreading Partition Road Signs
History does not retrace its steps. It is no longer useful to ask if the partition could have been avoided. The question is no longer important. The different perceptions of the shared history of India and Pakistan have, perhaps, contributed in some measure to create barriers of prejudice between the two nations. However, there are issues of history that need to be looked at again. This article attempts to highlight some of those contentious and often ill-understood issues. Offered here is an attempt by a sociologist-cum-social anthropologist to highlight some issues. It is not an alternative history.
Hamza Alavi
There are sadly many issues that stand in the way of a happier relationship between India and Pakistan. Hopefully we, the people of India and Pakistan, will find a way to resolve our differences to inaugurate a new future of mutual friendship. Our different perceptions of our shared history have, perhaps, contributed in some measure to create barriers of prejudice between us. What is offered here is only a modest attempt by a sociologist-cum-social anthropologist to highlight some issues that could be looked at again. It is not an alternative history. The roots of the movement that culminated in the creation of Pakistan lay in the 19th century crisis of the then dominant Muslim ‘ashraf’ (upper classes) of northern India, the descendents of the immigrants from central Asia, Arabia and Iran.1 The crisis was precipitated by the new Anglo-vernacular language policy of the colonial regime that displaced Persian, the ashraf language. Two different components of the ashraf were affected. The first of these was the class of state officials, who had to take to English education that was now needed for government jobs. We shall call them the ‘salariat’. In a society without industrialisation and professional management in the private sector, it was to the state, the biggest employer, that the demands of this class were addressed. The ‘salariat’ was closely associated with the new English educated professionals, especially in law for, parallel with the new language policy, a new statute law was enforced. The salariat and the new professionals (in law, medicine and other fields) shared a common education and the emerging Anglo-vernacular culture. They formed a relatively cohesive social stratum. In Gramsci’s language, they were an ‘auxiliary’ class; not the biggest class in numbers but the most articulate. They were at the heart of an intellectual ferment. Members of this group, not infrequently, were the sons (sometimes daughters too) of landlords or rich peasants, who could afford to put them through the higher education that they needed. This created close links between the salariat, the new professionals and the other classes.2 The Muslim salariat of the early 19th century, brought up on Persian rather than English, had begun to lose ground to the members of certain Hindu service castes who took to the English language more readily. The rivalry that ensued was not between all Hindus and all Muslims, but only between the Muslim and the Hindu salariats, the Muslim ashraf versus the Hindu service castes, such as the khatris, kayasthas and Kashmiri brahmins in northern India or the kayasthas, brahmins and baidyas in Bengal. The Muslim ashraf, therefore, began asking for safeguards and quotas in jobs for the Muslims. They were able to mobilise wide support in the society, especially through their organic links with the landlords and rich peasants. Religious ideology played no part in this nor did the rest of the Muslim and the non-Muslim society have any direct stake in the salariat politics. The Congress, speaking for the Indian salariat in general (and the Hindu service castes in particular), voiced demands for the ‘Indianisation’ of the services, when top jobs were the preserve of the British Indian bureaucracy. Another component of the ashraf were the ulama, religious scholars, who were steeped in Arabic and Persian learning and shari’a (Islamic) law. They too came from the same general background as the salariat and the new professionals. But their interests conflicted, especially with regard to their attitudes towards the English language and the scientific culture. Before, prospective members of the Muslim salariat would be educated in Persian and Arabic at their madrasas (religious seminaries). With the switch to English, that clientele dropped off. The more prestigious among the ulama would issue religious decrees (fatwas) and mediate in disputes between the members of the community. The introduction of the statute law, written in English, displaced this role. Not surprisingly, the ulama were militantly opposed to the English language, the culture of the rulers and, indeed, the colonial regime itself. They bitterly opposed the professionals, the salariat, and the Muslim educationists for accepting English education and western learning. The ulama and the mullahs were initially militant. They were subdued after the suppression of the National Revolt of 1857 and retreated into their seminaries. The Khilafat Movement led by Gandhi, who implanted the religious idiom in modern Indian Muslim politics, activated them again in 1918. There was also a third component of the Muslim ashraf, namely, the landlords, whose livelihoods were not affected directly by the new language policy. The Muslim and the Hindu landlords received government favours in return for their support. Some landlords, as individuals, did join the Muslim League or the Indian National Congress, possibly motivated by the problems faced by their kinsmen in the salariat or among the new professionals. This was not without their ha1ving to face pressure or sanctions from the colonial authorities for doing so. The Muslim salariat and professionals, looked down upon the poor Muslims, who were either urban artisans, notably weavers (the julahas) or peasants. Some of the ulama did reach out to the poor. But instead of grappling with their problems, all that they did was to whip them up into religious frenzies. In the United Provinces (UP), some lawyers from the julaha background did set up the ‘Mu’min Ansar Party’ and the ‘All-India Mu’min Conference’ but these had little impact on the national politics.3 Sir Syed Ahmad Khan pioneered the cause of English education as well as scientific thought amongst the Indian Muslims. The Muslim reformers elsewhere in India emulated his work. Muslim educational associations were set up everywhere. The ulama, hard hit by the impact of the new Anglo-vernacular language policy, were bitterly hostile to Sir Syed Ahmad’s movement. He was misrepresented and reviled by them in every possible way. His role and character have been grossly misrepresented in the Indian nationalist literature because of his opposition to the Indian National Congress. He deserves to be judged more objectively. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee has been highly acclaimed by some scholars as a pioneer of Indian nationalism.4 Despite its offence to the Muslim sensibilities, the Congress has adopted his song Vandé Mataram as an anthem. It is instructive to compare his views with those of Sir Syed Ahmad. Leaving aside, for the moment, Bankim’s violent hostility towards the Muslims, one aspect of his thought is quite striking. He had declared that the British were not ‘our enemies and we should not fight them’. Instead, he had stressed that the British possessed knowledge that ‘we should acquire if we ourselves were to progress’. Bankim (1838-94) was advocating a generation later what Sir Syed Ahmad (1817-98) had preached before him. Bankim’s classic play ‘Anandamath’ sets out his ideas. T W Clark describes it is the most important statement that Bankim made and offers a translation of the final chapter. 5 Satyananda, the hero, has killed in battle all the Muslim officers (Muslim soldiers having all fled). The British remained. At that moment ‘He’ (the voice of Satyananda’s Master, that of Bankim himself) orders Satyananda to cease killing for only the British are left. Satyananda is puzzled. “Why do you order me to cease?” he asks. To this ‘He’ replies: “your task is accomplished. The Muslim power is destroyed. There is nothing else for you to do.” Satyananda persists. “The Muslim power has indeed been destroyed. But the dominion of the Hindus has not yet been established. The British still hold Calcutta.” ‘He’ replies: “The Hindu dominion will not be established now”. At this, Satyananda exclaims: “My Lord, if the Hindu dominion is not going to be established now, who will rule?” ‘He’ replies: “The English will rule …Physical knowledge has disappeared from our land. … So we must learn it from the foreigners. The English are wise in this knowledge. And they are good teachers. Therefore, we must make the English rule. …Your vow is fulfilled. You have brought good fortune to your mother. You have set up a British government. …There are no foes now. The English are friends as well as rulers. And no one can defeat them in battle.” Bankim was advocating English education and accepting the British rule just as Sir Syed Ahmad had done earlier. Bankim is honoured while Sir Syed Ahmad is reviled for saying the same thing. This extraordinary difference reveals the intellectual biases underlying the Indian nationalist thought. There is, of course, a marked difference between Sir Syed Ahmad and Bankim in one respect. As Bankim’s admirer Clark notes, “Bankim’s references to Muslims are generally unfriendly, and in many places unmistakably hostile.” That stands in marked contrast to Sir Syed Ahmad’s attitude to the other community. Writing under the title ‘Bonds between Hindus and Muslims’, Sir Syed Ahmad says: “Centuries have passed that we two have lived on the same earth, have eaten the produce of the same land, drunk the water of the same rivers, breathed the air of the same one country. Hindus and Muslims are not strangers to each other. As I have said many times before, India is a beautiful bride and Hindus and Muslims are its two eyes. Her beauty demands that her two eyes shall be undamaged, whole (salamat) and equal”.6 That was his call for Hindu-Muslim Unity. We find no hostility towards the Hindus in his writings. In his social life too, he was free of communal antipathy. He had many close Hindu friends. On the occasion of the bismillah (an important rite of passage) ceremony of his four-year-old grandchild, he made the boy sit in the lap of his close friend Raja Jaikishandas, which was symbolic of their brotherly relations.7His disagreement with the Congress is quite another kind of matter. Sir Syed Ahmad based his opposition to democracy on a sociological argument. Whereas, he argued, the English society is made up of free-acting individuals, who are unconstrained by ‘community’ loyalties, in India, individuals are enclosed within institutionalised communities. In this political arena, they do not (cannot) act as free individuals for the society demands that they support candidates of their own community. A Muslim has to vote for a fellow Muslim and a Hindu for a fellow Hindu. That, he said, was a fact of the Indian culture. Therefore, until the society and culture became individualised (which may happen in time), democracy is unsuitable for India. Given the cultural imperatives that would mean a permanent majority of the Hindus over the Muslims. He concluded that for the time being, it was useful to have the British as neutral and impartial referees. He may be criticised for his faith in the British impartiality. But he felt that there was no alternative. Sir Syed Ahmad, unlike the generation of the Indian nationalists who came after him, had no idea of the exploitative and destructive impact of the colonial rule on India. Nevertheless, he was aware that the British Indian bureaucracy was racist, rude and arrogant. Himself a member of the ashraf aristocracy, he believed (naïvely) that it was the aristocratic birth and breeding that made the difference. He once said: “England is so far from us that we cannot verify if some of these rude bureaucrats are not really sons of naïs (barbers).” The pages of his journal Tahzib-al-Akhlaq are full of trenchant criticism of the British Indian bureaucrats who misbehaved towards the Indians. Maulana Mohammad Ali, in his presidential Address at the Cocanada Congress meeting in 1923, gave fulsome praise to Sir Syed Ahmad as a man of dignity and dealt (inter alia) with the charge of servility towards the British. He said: “A close study of his [Sir Syed Ahmad’s] character leads me to declare that he was far from possessing the sycophancy with which some of his political critics have credited him”.8 Sir Syed Ahmad is not above criticism. Occasionally, he derisively referred to the Bengal Congress’s ‘bhadralok’ politicians, who attacked him, as ‘babus’. But surely that was no more than political tit-for-tat! More serious is the matter of his conservative attitude to women’s education. For a man who had boldly taken on the conservatives on most issues, it is a great pity that he did not do better on this score. His views on this are quite unacceptable today. Finally, even worse, was his ‘aristocratic’ disdain for the non-ashraf and the poor. Referring to the membership of the viceroy’s legislative council, he expressed his deeply rooted class (caste?) prejudices when he said: “it is essential for the viceroy’s council to have members of a high social standing. Would our aristocracy like that a man of low caste or insignificant origin, though he may be a BA or MA and have the requisite ability, be in a position of authority above them and have the power of making laws that affect their lives and property?” He was, after all, a product of his class and his times. Sir Syed Ahmad is said to have had close affinity with Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who himself was a great thinker and a rationalist. It has been suggested that he was a regular reader of Roy’s writings (in Persian). Troll writes that “the personality and work of Ram Mohan Roy were a formative influence in Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s life… The parallels between the ideas and working methods of the two men could be mere coincidence, or the effects of a common historical situation or perhaps a result of Sir Sayyid being directly influenced by Ram Mohan Roy and his monotheistic Brahmo Samaj.”9 Sir Syed Ahmad, in turn, relates how, as a young boy, he looked with great admiration, and from a respectful distance, at the famous Bengali reformer, when the latter visited the Mughal Emperor in Delhi in 1830 (ibid, p 60). It might be said that with the social changes brought about by the colonial transformation of the Indian society and with the rise of colonial capitalism,10 rationalism and monotheistic ideas flourished all over India in the late 19th century. This was also, for instance, the case with the Prarthana Samaj of Ranadé and Bhandarkar in Maharashtra. These rationalist movements attracted the English educated upper classes of India. By the end of the 19th century, the newly educated Muslims began to make their concerns felt. Mohsin-ul-Mulk (Sir Syed Ahmad’s not so distinguished successor at Aligarh) arranged a meeting of Muslim notables with the viceroy on October 1, 1906 at Simla, where they represented the Muslim demands to Lord Minto. In the eyes of the Indian nationalists the mere fact of that meeting is a proof of a British conspiracy to entice the Indian Muslims away from the nationalist movement to pursue a policy of divide and rule. Unfortunately, this has had the effect of making the Indian nationalist historians impervious to all evidence of the material facts behind theMuslim movement. In his presidential address at the Cocanada Congress meeting, Maulana Mohammad Ali rashly spoke of the Simla delegation as a ‘command performance’. This was taken to mean that the Muslim movement was nothing more than a creation of the colonial government’s policy of ‘Divide and Rule’. It may well be that Mohammed Ali had uttered this phrase on an impulse, for which he was notorious. The Indian nationalist historians, with the rare exception of Bimal Prasad, have seized on Mohammad Ali’s passing (and misleading) remark as if it was a complete explanation of the Indian Muslim politics.11 The background to the 1906 delegation to the viceroy was an announcement by John Morley, the secretary of state for India, that his government proposed to introduce constitutional reforms in India. When Mohsin-ul-Mulk heard about it, he wrote to Archbold, principal of Aligarh College, who was then vacationing at Simla. In his letter, Mohsin-ul-Mulk emphasised the importance of the occasion and asked Archbold to inquire whether Minto would receive a delegation of Indian Muslims, who wished to put before him their views about the projected constitutional reforms. The viceroy agreed. That initiative, as Bimal Prasad has emphasised (and documented), came entirely from Mohsin-ul-Mulk; not even from Archbold, let alone the British. Mohammad Ali’s phrase ‘command performance’ was baseless and mischievous. When Mohsin-ul-Mulk got the green light from Simla, a Memorial was prepared and discussed with some Muslim leaders at Lucknow. The big issue of the day that concerned both the viceroy and the Muslims of the new province of East Bengal and Assam was the powerful ongoing agitation to annul the Partition of Bengal. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca and Nawab Ali Choudhury insisted at Lucknow that the Memorial should ask for an assurance that the Partition would not be annulled. But Aligarh was not interested in that issue, which was not even mentioned in the Memorial. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, therefore, refused to join the delegation although Nawab Ali Choudhury did. The viceroy too appears to have been disappointed that the Bengal Partition issue was not included in the Memorial. Minto took it up on his own bat. In his reply, he reminded “the Mahomedan community of Eastern Bengal and Assam [that they] can rely as firmly as ever on British justice and fair-play.” The delegation had asked for separate electorates and a fairer quota of representation in the viceroy’s council, his executive council, in provincial councils and on senates and syndicates of the Indian Universities. They had reiterated the demand for a Muslim University. They sought a Muslim quota in the government service and the appointment of Muslim judges on the Bench. These were all predictable demands of the Muslim salariat and professionals. In response, Lord Minto “promised … nothing, except sympathy.”12 So much for the ‘command performance’! A word about the separate electorates. The Muslim candidates in elections complained of difficulty in getting elected, even from Muslim majority constituencies. Due to the property and tax qualifications, Muslim voters were far fewer than their proportion in the population. The Simon Commission Report points out that in the ‘governor’s provinces’ of India, the average franchise extended to no more than 2.8 per cent of the population. This proportion was heavily weighted in favour of those who owned property. The Report says: “Adoption of property qualifications as a basis for the franchise gave a predominance and sometimes a monopoly of votes to certain classes of the population. …In the Central Provinces, the brahmin and the bania have in proportion to their numbers not less than 100 times as many votes as the mahar.” The report speaks of “the total exclusion of … the under-tenants in Bengal”. Separate electorates were a defence against such non-representation. Conversely, joint electorates would have the advantage of drawing minorities into the mainstream of political life. Separate electorates could be looked upon, at best, as a short-term remedy. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, sidelined by the Simla deputationists, tried to retrieve his initiative by calling a meeting (to coincide with the meeting of the Muslim Education Society) in Dacca in December 1906 to start an All India Muslim political association. On December 30, the All India Muslim League was founded. But, to his chagrin, the Aligarh-UP group, led by Aligarh’s Viqar-ul-Mulk, hijacked the new organisation by taking all the top posts in the executive committee, leaving Nawab Salimullah of Dacca high and dry again. The early Congress was not very different; its demands were similar, namely, (1) the Indianisation of the services and promotion of Indians to higher positions within the service; and (2) greater representation of Indians in governing bodies, such as the viceroy’s executive council. These demands were identical to those of the Muslim salariat and the new professional classes but applied in a wider context. Neither party really represented the urban and rural labouring poor. The so-called ‘mass politics’ that emerged after Gandhi, sought no more than to make the peasant speak in the name of the Congress. He did little to make the Congress speak in the name of the peasant. By declaring that the landlords were the ‘trustees’ for the peasantry,13 Gandhi put forward a philosophy that reduced the peasantry to zero. The Congress claim of a ‘mass basis’ is a myth. There was a basic similarity in the class bases and demands of both the Muslim League and the early Congress. The Muslim movement was not the only one of its kind in India.The Dravidian movement in south India was very similar to it.14 InTamil Nadu, the brahmins dominated the salariat and the professions. Although the Brahmins were three-four per cent of the population of the Madras Presidency, they monopolised the government services and places on the local boards. The non-brahmins, or the dravidians as they called themselves, rebelled against the brahmin dominated political and social system. Their sense of a separate identity was promoted by the discovery by the linguists during the first two decades of the 20th century that all four southern languages, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, formed a distinct, dravidian, linguistic group, quite independent of the northern Indian Sanskrit that came to the south with the brahmins.Thus grew a sense of the Dravidian identity. The birth of the Dravidian Movement is dated to November 1916, when an organisation was formed which eventually evolved into the anti-brahmin Justice Party. E V Ramaswami Naicker, who was known as the Periyar, initiated a Dravidian national movement with secessionist objectives. At the Madras session of the Muslim League, he was seated in a place of honour on the platform. His secessionist movement did not succeed as he was unable to rally people other than those of Tamil Nadu. But his movement transformed the politics of Tamil Nadu. The Muslim League, set up in 1906, went through far reaching changes from about 1910. A more radical generation of Muslim Leaguers had come up, very different in their mood. There was a shift too in the social base of the League. There was an increased participation in it from the more modest strata of the society. Far fewer of them were from the substantial landed families.“The great majority (of them) belonged to the class which occasionally had a small pittance in rents from land but, generally, in order to survive, had to find employment in service or the professions.”15 The Muslim League had found its enduring class base, even though some landlords (like the Raja of Mahmudabad) and also some businessmen played a part in it. Instead of government patronage, the new Muslim League earned its hostility. We are told that the Raja of Mahmudabad “became more cautious after governor Meston threatened to take away his taluqdari ‘sanad’ in 1916.” The centre of gravity of the Muslim League shifted away from the Aligarh conservatives to a relatively more radical leadership based in Lucknow, though the bulk of them were educated at Aligarh. By 1912, the energetic and radical Wazir Hasan, took over as general secretary. A new phase began in the political style of the League and it’s attitude towards the Congress. As Rahman puts it: “The growing number of young professional men in the ranks of the Muslim League helped to produce reorientations in the League’s relation with the Hindu community”.16 By 1910, the Muslim League Constitution was revised, bringing it in line with that of the Congress, except for the League’s commitment to separate electorates and weightage for the Muslims. There was by now a realisation in the Muslim League that they would not make much headway against the British unless they built a united front with the Congress. Calls for Hindu-Muslim unity were reiterated. The Muslim League looked for someone who could build bridges between the League and the Congress. Jinnah was the obvious choice. Although not a member of the Muslim League, he had participated, by invitation, in the meeting of the Muslim League Council in 1912, where proposals for a new (more radical) Muslim League constitution were formulated. Jinnah had made several suggestions that were accepted.17 Jinnah had a high standing in the Indian National Congress and was ideally placed to bring the two movements together. In October 1913, when Wazir Hasan and Maulana Mohammad Ali were in London to see the secretary of state for India (who, in the event, refused to see them), they took the opportunity to meet Jinnah. The two persuaded him to join the Muslim League and work for the Congress-League Unity. Jinnah agreed, provided that his commitments to the Congress would remain. Soon after joining the Muslim League in October 1913, Jinnah worked hard for the Congress-League unity, which was sealed by the Lucknow Pact and adopted at a Joint Session of the Congress and the League in 1916.18 By virtue of the Pact, the Congress accepted some Muslim demands, including separate electorates with specified province-wise weightage for the Muslims that proved to be controversial. The Muslim minority provinces, like UP, were given a bigger share of seats than that provided under the Morley-Minto Reforms. This was done at the cost of Bengal, which had a Muslim population of 52 per cent but was given a share of only 40 per cent of seats, and Punjab, which had a Muslim population of 54.8 per cent but was given a share of only 50 per cent. The United Provinces with a Muslim population of only 14 per cent was given a share of no less than 30 per cent. After all the UP elite were running the show. The justified criticism of the Lucknow Pact should not make us underestimate its achievements. It succeeded in bringing the Congress and the Muslim League together on a single platform to fight British Imperialism. It was the Muslim League and Jinnah who had initiated that bid for unity. Jinnah was a unifier and not a separatist, as generally suggested. He was to persist in that difficult role, despite setbacks, for a quarter of a century until the point was reached when, despite all his efforts, unity was no longer an option. The Lucknow Pact also covered shared demands of the Congress and the League vis-a-vis the colonial government. The pact sought a majority of elected members in legislatures. It demanded that in the provinces, four-fifths should be elected members and only one-fifth nominated, and that the members of councils should be ‘elected directly by the people on as broad a franchise as possible’. Likewise, it provided that four-fifths of the members of the Imperial legislative council should be elected. It demanded that half of the members of the governor-general’s executive council be Indians elected by elected members of the Imperial legislative council. Thus contrary to the popular opinion, the Lucknow Pact was not just about concessions to the Muslim League. It also spelt out the basis on which the Congress and the Muslim League could work together as close allies. The significance of the Lucknow Pact is greater than is generally supposed. The contentious part of the Lucknow Pact was its acceptance of separate electorates. Jinnah had always preferred joint electorates. At the annual Indian National Congress of 1910, he moved a resolution rejecting separate electorates for local bodies. But after he joined the Muslim League, having failed to persuade his colleagues to accept joint electorates, he acquiesced in what the party demanded. He was probably also influenced by the fact that after the Morley-Minto reforms had enacted separate electorates, senior Congress leaders were reconciled to the idea. As Bimal Prasad points out, in 1911 Gokhalé “again made it clear that in his opinion separate electorates for the Muslims were necessary in view of the failure of sufficient numbers of Muslims to get into the legislative councils…” (op cit, p 123). By the end of the first world war, there was a radical change in the Muslim movement, when the ulama were activated and brought centre stage. The Khilafat movement (1918-1924), in the hands of Mahatma Gandhi, torpedoed the new political dynamic of the joint struggle of the Muslim League and the Congress against the colonial rule that was set in motion by the Lucknow Pact. It also undermined the secular leadership of the Muslim League. Instead, it helped to mobilise one section of the Sunni ulama, namely, the hardliner Deobandis, on the basis of some false assumptions about the post-war ‘hostility’ of the British towards the Ottoman sultan, their khalifa. The movement capitalised on the pan-Islamic sentiments amongst the Indian Deobandi Muslims. These sentiments were centred on the role of the Ottoman Sultan as the ‘Universal Khalifa’. It ignored the fact that the Ottoman Sultan was not recognised as the Khalifa by the populist Barelvi tradition of the Indian Sunni Islam (arguably, the majority of Indian Muslims). The Barelvis, like the Arab nationalists, rejected the claims of the Ottoman Sultan to be the Khalifa on the doctrinal ground that he was not of Quraysh descent.19 The Khilafat movement got off the ground after Gandhi decided to take it over, becoming, in his own words, the ‘dictator’ of the movement. Leaders of the movement, like Abdul Bari of Firangi Mahal, Ansari, Shaukat Ali and Mohammd Ali, sought guidance from him for every action.20 It is difficult to discuss critically the role of Mahatma Gandhi, a man who became a saint. But until the end of first world war, Gandhi had yet to establish himself as a major Indian political leader. His early moves can best be understood in the context of his attempts to achieve that end. He became the undisputed leader of the Indian nationalist movement by the time he had finished with the Khilafat and the non-cooperation movements. Gandhi’s movement undermined the secular leadership of the Muslim League and, for the time being, established the mullahs in that place. Gandhi even helped the mullahs to set up a political organisation of their own (in 1919), namely the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Hind, which was reincarnated in Pakistan as the Jamiat-i-Ulama-i-Islam, the extreme hardliner fundamentalists who were instrumental in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thanks to Gandhi, the Khilafat movement implanted the religious idiom in the modern Indian Muslim politics for the first time. A key moment in that was when Ansari organised an invasion of the Delhi Session of the All Indian Muslim League in 1918 by the mullahs. Ansari, chairman of the AIML reception committee, convened a meeting of the ulama with the help of the seminaries at Deoband and Firangi Mahal, on the day preceding the AIML annual conference, without the knowledge of his Muslim League colleagues. They met at the Fatehpuri mosque in Delhi.21 At that meeting, mullah fanaticism was whipped up, preparing them for the take over next day. The mullah invasion of the League meeting (referred to, absurdly, by some authors as an advent of the ‘masses’) came as a surprise to the League leadership. When the resolutions about Khilafat were brought forward, it became clear that there was little point in arguing about the substantive issues with the mullahs. Jinnah, realising that, raised some legalistic and procedural objections. But he knew that the game was lost. To make his point he staged a walkout from the meeting. It was agreed that the Raja of Mahmudabad and Wazir Hasan would not walkout with him. They stayed behind to fight moves to remove them from their positions of president and general secretary of the AIML. Many of the mullahs drifted away after passing the controversial resolutions and the two league leaders were comfortably re-elected. Both resigned a few months later because they could not work with the mullah infested League. Directly, as a reaction to the Khilafat movement and the politicisation of religion, there followed in the 1920s a long period of the worst communal rioting that India had ever known. In 1924, the Turkish Republican Nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal abolished the Ottoman Khilafat. The Khilafat Committee, which for a time had become more influential than the League, disintegrated in total confusion. The political influence of the Ulama ‘declined swiftly’ and the Muslim League returned to its secular concerns. It must be emphasised that it was only after the partition that Islamic ideology began to be fostered in Pakistan; it was attributed retrospectively to the Muslim League to justify the claim that Pakistan was created to establish an Islamic state. The fact is that the rare attempts to place ‘Islamic ideology’ on the agenda of the Muslim League were firmly scotched by the leadership.22 The Indian Muslim movement was driven by the concrete objectives of the social groups that were involved, rather than by some abstract ideology. Jinnah soon reappeared on the Muslim League platform. According to Khaliquzzaman, “the time had come to reinforce the Muslim League as the Khilafat Committee was on its last legs. …We decided to invite Jinnah, who had attended only one meeting of the Council of the League in Calcutta in 1919, after his walkout in December 1918, to preside over the Muslim League session at Lahore in May 1924.”23 However, by that time the nature of the Indian provincial politics and the centre of gravity of power in the Muslim League had changed radically. When the Muslim League was set up, the League’s role was that of a pressure group to articulate the Muslim demands. The Montagu-Chelmsford ‘reforms’ completely altered the dynamics of Indian politics and brought about a shift away from the Muslim minority provinces (e g, the UP ) to the Muslim majority provinces, where the Muslims could form provincial governments. Under dyarchy, ministers now had some power, however limited, to dole out resources and jobs. Political leaders and parties were no longer confined to being just pressure groups. They could now dispense patronage. The influence of the salariat in the Muslim minority provinces declined. The Muslim majority provinces, Punjab and Bengal, notably the former, acquired a new importance. David Page offers an excellent account of this, especially of the emergence of the Punjabi dominance in the Indian Muslim politics.24 There was now a new logic to the role of political parties and politicians. What is not so widely perceived is that there were also shifts in the class base of Muslim politics, which was different in Punjab and in Bengal. The feudal classes were dominant in Punjab. The Punjabi Muslim, Hindu and Sikh landlords joined with the powerful biraderies (extended families) of the jat peasants of east Punjab (led by Choudhry Chhotu Ram) under the unionist Party. A remarkable man, Sir Fazl-i-Husain, who was from an urban middle classbackground but who understood the needs of the feudal classes, led that party. Sir Faz-i-Husain also made a point of patronising the very weak Muslim salariat in Punjab, especially those from rural background. The majority of the urban population in Punjab consisted of the Hindu salariat, professionals and traders, who were the mainstay of the Hindu Sabha. The Punjab Muslim League barely existed. Fazl-i-Husain allied with it also because it had its uses. He was a skilful, pragmatic politician who practised political accommodation as long as his basic interests were taken care of. Along with his feudal constituents, he was favoured by the colonial regime and this greatly strengthened his hands. Jinnah and Fazl-i-Husain and his Unionist Party, each had something to offer to the other. They entered into a tacit alliance, though they detested each other. It was a marriage of convenience. The Unionist Party was a secular, inter-communal regional party of the Punjabi landed magnates, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and the biraderis of the well-off Jat peasants of East Punjab.25 The Punjabi landed magnates were parochial and hankered after the autonomy of Punjab within the Raj. They were doing very well from the patronage of the colonial regime, to which they were completely loyal. Due to the fragility of their inter-communal and feudal alliance with in Punjab, they did not see any wisdom in extending themselves beyond Punjab because that would import problems into their comfortable set up. Jinnah’s Muslim League was a channel through which they could relate to the all India developments, but on the Unionist terms. Sir Fazl-i-Husain and his successor Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan made it a point to keep the Punjab Muslim League under their tight control. Jinnah badly needed the deal with the Unionists. He could not claim to be the spokesman of all the Indian Muslims if he could not say that Punjab was behind him. He needed the Unionists to announce that theirs was a Muslim League government. It mattered little if everyone knew that this was a fiction. He did not seek power over Punjab. His single concern was to legitimise the ‘representative’ role of the All India Muslim League.The Punjab Muslim League itself barely existed. As late as February 1940, Khaliquzzaman was to report that “we also discussed the formation of a Muslim League in Punjab” (op cit p 233). Some influential Unionists even dreamt of an independent dominion of Punjab. Sir Sikandar Hayat met Winston Churchill at Cairo in the summer of 1941-1942 (sic), as Noor Ahmad has reported.26 On his return, Sikandar Hayat told his cabinet colleagues that he had put it to Churchill that loyal Punjab deserves to be given the option of being an independent dominion or be included in an independent dominion with Sindh, Baluchistan and NWFP (provinces that Punjab could easily dominate). He said that he did not know if Churchill was persuaded of this but that it was significant that in his March 1942 proposals Churchill had included the option that provinces be allowed to opt for separate dominion status. Some Unionists expected that they would be allowed to form an independent Punjab ‘with Hindu and Sikh support’, for which Khizr Tiwana held on to his premiership to the bitter end. The picture in Bengal was quite different. Bengal was a land of (mainly Muslim) small peasants. When the East Bengal Muslim League was first set up in 1911, its leadership was in the hands of the Urdu/Persian speaking immigrant Muslim ashraf, such as the Dacca Nawab family, who were remote from the Bengal peasants. By the end of first world war , the more dynamic Bengali professionals, presumably from the rich peasant rather than the zamindar background, became the leaders. Amongst them was Fazlul Haq, who was to play an important role in mobilising the support of the rich peasants. The peasantry or the ‘praja’ ranged from quite large tenants (‘jotedars’), who had their land cultivated by sharecroppers (‘bhargadars’), especially in north Bengal, to small holders, often with tiny holdings, who predominated in the ‘Active Delta’ in the south. Virtually all sections of the overwhelmingly Muslim Bengal peasantry and the salariat, along with the urban poor, were badly hit by the economic conditions in the aftermath of first world war.27 The insertion of Bengali agriculture into the global economy, by virtue of Bengal’s dependence on jute as a cash crop, had made the province highly vulnerable to fluctuations in the market. These economic pressures brought about a radicalisation of the Bengal Muslim politics. There was an urgent case for reform of the tenancy laws. Following the province-wide agitationfor reform of theTenancy Act, the colonial government introduced a TenancyBill in 1923 to amend the Act. The radical element in the Bengal Muslim salariat leadership, with the jotedars and the small peasants, supported the Bill. But, sadly, the Congress-Swaraj Party, a Hindu zamindar dominated party in Bengal, successfully killed the bill. Despite its radical rhetoric, the Bengal Congress leadership shamefully backed the parasitical zamindars. By the late 1920s, Fazlul Haq and other new generation Muslim leaders plunged into mobilising the Bengali tenants. The Indian nationalist historians have played down the class aspect of the struggle (vis-a-vis Zamindars, mainly Hindus) and tend to represent the Bengali peasant struggle as a ‘communal’ issue. However, against the background of a ‘spontaneous’ praja (tenant) movement in the 1920s, the Nikhil Banga Praja Samity (All -Bengal Tenants’ Party) was organised by Fazlul Haq and the new political leadership. The Bengal Provincial Muslim League also came under their control. The Muslim Zamindars, hostile to this movement, together with some top professionals organised a United Muslim Party (with Suhrawardy as its secretary and Khwaja Nazimuddin as one of its stalwart members) to oppose it. Jinnah’s main concern, as in Punjab, was to maintain the claim ofthe All India Muslim League (and himself) to be the sole representative of the Indian Muslims. He tried to mediate between the two sides in the name of Bengal unity, but was unsuccessful. The Nikhil Banga Praja Samity changed its name in 1936 to the Krishak Praja Party and prepared to contest the 1937 elections. Zamindari abolition without compensation was at the top of the KPP manifesto. The KPP, with its petty bourgeois leadership, failed to mount a sufficiently strong campaign amongst the poor peasantry, and won only slightly more than 30 per cent of the seats. Their excuse was that the voting rules were too restrictive. That was not true for, in 1946, with the same voting qualifications, the Muslim League General Secretary, Abul Hashim, organised a landslide victory for the Muslim League. Under the 1935 act, a person who paid six annas (one rupee being 16 annas) under the Village Chowkidari Act was entitled to vote. That was a low limit that gave the poor peasants (but not the landless) the vote. In 1937, the landlords dominated the Muslim League, which won almost 30 per cent of the Muslim seats, with independents taking 35 per cent. The Muslim League then settled for a coalition government with the KPP, with Fazlul Haq as the Prime Minister. That was just about enough to sustain the claim that the AIML and Jinnah were the sole representatives of the Indian Muslims. Bengal was the only province where the Muslim League (under the Dacca Nawab family) got respectable results in the 1937 elections. It did quite badly elsewhere. When the Simon Commission was appointed, the Indian public opinion rejected it universally. Jinnah saw that as an opportunity for a united struggle against the colonial rule. After consultation with the Congress president, Srinivas Iyengar, he convened a meeting of 30 prominent Muslim leaders to consider the Muslim position on the future constitution. What emerged came to be known as the Delhi Muslim Proposals.28 To get over the main hurdle in the way of unity with the Congress, Jinnah used all his powers of persuasion to get his Muslim colleagues to accept joint electorates (which he himself preferred) on the condition that the Muslim representation in Punjab and Bengal shall be in accordance with the population and that in the central legislature the Muslim representation shall not be less than a third. This was also conditional on the acceptance by the Congress that (1) Sindh shall be separated from Bombay and constituted as a separate province; and (2) Reforms shall be instituted in the NWFP and Baluchistan to place them on the same footing as the other provinces in India. The package was to be accepted or rejected as a whole. Many Muslim leaguers, not unreasonably, believed that the joint electorates would work against them. Sir Muhammad Shafi, Fazl-i-Husain’s protégé, got the Punjab group to split the party and organise their own separate ‘Muslim League’ session in Lahore. Shafi rightly held that Jinnah had underestimated the opposition among the Muslims to the abandonment of separate electorates. Although most members of the League Council stuck loyally with Jinnah at that critical time, they had their reservations about this issue. Announcing the Delhi Muslim proposals, Jinnah himself acknowledged that “the overwhelming majority of Mussalmans firmly and honestly believe that (separate electorates) are the only method by which they can be secure”.29 Also, the Shafi League and the Unionists were not prepared to boycott the Simon Commission. Fazl-i-Husain was determined to isolate Jinnah but failed. The Delhi Muslim proposals were considered by the (Motilal) Nehru Committee, which was appointed in February 1928 by the Delhi All Parties Conference “to determine the principles of the constitution of India”. The committee recommended adult franchise with joint electorates. It also recommended the reservation of seats for the Muslims in the Muslim minority provinces, but not in the majority provinces (Punjab and Bengal), with similar reservation of seats for the Hindus in the NWFP where they were in a minority. The committee strongly recommended the separation of Sindh from Bombay and normal provincial status for the NWFP and Baluchistan. But at a convention at Lucknow in August 1928, where the Muslim League was not represented,30 the committee’s original recommendations were effectively reversed at the behest of the Hindu Mahasabha, which dominated the Lucknow meeting.31 At the subsequent 10 day Calcutta Convention in December 1928, a battle royal ensued between the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha over those issues. Sadly, despite its earlier support, the Congress did not honour its own commitments about Sindhh, Baluchistan and the NWFP. The Congress delegates just kept silent and watched the show. The Mahasabha vetoed further discussion of the proposal, on the ground that this was settled at Lucknow. The Muslim League, claimed Jinnah, was not represented at Lucknow. But, tragically (as one might now say with the benefit of the hindsight) the Congress went along with the Mahasabha, betraying the principles that the Nehru Committee had spelt out. The Hindu Mahasabha would sooner accept separate electorates than agree to the democratic reorganisation of the provinces. For Jinnah, this betrayal by the Congress was a terrible blow. He had staked all for the sake of unity and had even isolated himself from his Muslim supporters by abandoning joint electorates. The breakdown of his marriage at that time no doubt compounded his bitterness and sense of isolation. This was a turning point and the subsequent developments led inexorably to the final parting. After the failure of the Muslim League and the victory of the Congress in the 1937 elections, there was bitterness among the Indian Muslims at what they perceived to be the communal partisanship of the rightwing Congress ministries that were installed in the provinces. These factors came together to bring about a total collapse in Jinnah’s (and the Muslim League’s) belief in the good faith of the Congress and its independence from the Mahasabha, especially in matters concerning the Muslims. Now, faced with a situation in which the Hindu Mahasabha could wield a veto over the Congress decisions, Jinnah was bitterly disillusioned. The mood for cooperation and unity with the Congress gave way to one of hostility. The Indian Nationalist historians tend to explain these developments purely in terms of Jinnah’s personal ambition and his ‘intransigence’, which are taken as axiomatic. If we dispassionately look at Jinnah’s role in Indian history, what we find is his consistent pursuit of national unity on the basis of agreed demands, even at a grave risk to his position. The breaking point for Jinnah came with the betrayal at Calcutta, and there was no turning back. There was little hope left now of achieving any understanding with the Mahasabha dominated Congress, as far as the Muslim issues were concerned. Thoughts turned to the idea of a separate homeland. This was the climate in which the 1940 ‘Pakistan Resolution’ was passed. Its full implications are not obvious, especially in Pakistan. One can only be mystified by the fact that the Resolution says nothing about the shape that the centre would take. Some scholars believe that this was done to allow for some space for later negotiation. But what options were there? The future direction was ‘over-determined’ by the anxieties and concerns of the feudal barons of Punjab. For them, the Partition was the only acceptable option. The situation was already beyond the powers of even such a formidable negotiator as Jinnah. The die was cast. There were by now unmistakable signs that the British were well and truly on the way out. In their place loomed the spectre of the rule of the Congress Party, which was firmly committed to radical land reform. If the Congress came to power in Punjab and Sindh, it would break up the feudal structures there. The Cambridge educated Mumtaz Daulatana was the first to jump off the sinking Unionist ship in 1943. Others soon followed. Their option was to take over the Muslim League and work for the partition of India. The preoccupation of the feudal classes with the danger of land reforms, in case they were to find themselves under a Congress government,was confirmed to me in February 1951 in Dacca by Feroze Khan Noon, who was then the governor of East Pakistan. In the course of an informal conversation over lunch, to which he had invited me, when Nehru’s name came up in the conversation, he said to me: “Jawaharlal comes from a good family. But he has surrounded himself by communists. They are out to destroy the great landed families of India. Thank god, they cannot touch us here.” By 1945, most Unionists had moved over to the MuslimLeague in time to contest the forthcoming elections from their own constituencies. In Sindh, it was likewise. In October 1942, Jinnah had given his blessings to a ministry of big landlords, which was formed by Ghulam Husain Hidayatullah in the name of the Muslim League. That ministry continued. Jinnah despised and detested them all but he had no other option. It was the power of the landed magnates of the Indus plain and the powerful campaign in Bengal leading to the landslide victory in the 1946 elections that created Pakistan. Religious ideology played no part in this, as indeed, it had never done, except during the brief interlude of the Gandhi led Khilafat movement. The role of the ‘pirs’ (saints) of Punjab and Sindh in the elections has prompted some historians to jump to the conclusion that it signified the religious appeal of the Pakistan slogan. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pirs in question were big landowners in their own rights and had jumped on to the Muslim League bandwagon because they were concerned about the Congress’s plans for land reforms. However, due to their religious power, the pirs did instruct their followers to vote for the Muslim League candidates. There is a myth too about the ‘Aligarh students’ who travelled round Punjab and Sindh to mobilise the peasants for Pakistan. A group of Aligarh students did go round (some of whom I personally know). The landlords or their lawyers managed their tour. They would give a speech or two in district or sub-district towns. Only the very naïve, who have no idea of how the Punjabi and Sindhi feudal society works, will take this to mean ‘mass ncontact’. The picture in Bengal was very different. The Muslim feudal families had led the Bengal Muslim League since its inception. This was challenged by the rise of Fazlul Haq and the KPP, which had a base among the rich peasants. After the 1937 elections, the KPP and the Muslim League formed a coalition government. This was an ‘alliance’ of conflicting class interests. Fazlul Haq was soon isolated. By this time (in 1938), H S Suhrawardy, a minister in the government, had assumed the charge of the Muslim League organisation. In 1943, Abul Hashim, a man who professed a confused mixture of socialism and Islam, was elected as the party’s secretary. Suhrawardy and Abul Hashim played key roles in the unsuccessful attempt to create an united independent Bengal with the support of the Sarat Bose faction of the Bengal Congress and Jinnah. The Congress leadership vetoed the plan. During the 1945-46 elections, when Suhrawardy kept himself in Calcutta, Abul Hashim, organised an extraordinary campaign amongst the poor peasants of Bengal on economic issues. This resulted in a massive and unprecedented landslide victory for the Muslim League. Religious ideology played no part in it. In Bengal, the peasants, who were overwhelmingly Muslim, were enmeshed in the colonial (globalised) cash economy. Their immediate conflict was with the traders and moneylenders, who were overwhelmingly Hindu. It is a tribute to the Bengali Muslim League leadership, especially to Abul Hashim, who concentrated on the economic issues and did not allow the elections to degenerate into a Hindu-Muslim communal conflict – though in some places such incidents did occur. The issues that were brought to the fore in the election campaign included the peasant demand for settlement of the accumulated debt owed to the moneylenders. The people were also promised some protection from the traders who manipulated prices. There was also the demand for the abolition of zamindari without compensation, a promise fulfilled in 1951. Unlike in 1937, these elections reached down to the poor peasants. The Bengal Muslim League won 114 seats out of the 121 Muslim seats (as against only 39 in 1937). However, Abul Hashim had served his purpose for the powerful rightwing politicians. By February 1947, they appointed another man as acting general secretary of the League and Abul Hashim found himself in his village in Burdwan. The Dacca Nawab family was back in the saddle. The stage was now set for the partition. The East Bengal, Punjab and Sindh elections demonstrated that Islamic ideology did not play any part in the success of the Muslim League and the creation of Pakistan. Could the Partition have been avoided? This is a favourite question of our Indian friends. It is not a useful question anymore. History does not retrace its steps. We must look forward and ask ourselves what we can do to live in peace and friendship with each other. Address for correspondence: halavi@cyber.net.pk Notes 1 The Muslim ashraf were concentrated in UP and Bihar. With the decay of the pre-colonial state that they dominated (especially in the 18th century) and with the rising power and prosperity of Bengal under the East India Company (EIC), many Muslim ashraf migrated eastwards, and found employment in Murshidabad or with the EIC and settled down in West Bengal. They took with them their languages, Urdu and Persian. There were few Muslim ashraf elsewhere in India, except for Hyderabad under the Nizam. 2 A vivid picture of the divided family interests and relationships is portrayed, with great empathy, by (the late) Khadija Mastoor in her prize winning Urdu novel Aangan, which has been published in an English translation under the title The Courtyard, Lahore, 2001. 3 W Cantwell Smith, Modern Islam in India, London, 1946, pp 228-29. 4 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, London, 1986, Ch 3: ‘The Moment of Departure – Culture and Power in the Thought of Bankim Chandra’, pp 54 ff. 5 A translation of the relevant parts of Anandamath by T W Clark will be found in The Role of Bankim Chandra in the Development of Nationalism, in C H Phillips (ed) Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon, London, 1961, p 442 ff. 6 Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, ‘Hindu aur Musalmanon mein Irtibat’ (Bonds Between Hindus and Muslims), Maqalat-e-Sir Syed, Vol 15, Lahore 1963, p 41. 7 David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, Delhi, 1996, p 302. 8 The Indian Annual Register, 1923, Vol I, p 25. 9 C W Troll, Sayyid Ahmad Khan, OUP, Karachi and Delhi, 1979, p 18, note 75. 10 For the concept of colonial capitalism c f (1) Hamza Alavi, ‘The Structure of Colonial Social Formations’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol XVI, Nos 10, 11, and 12, Annual Number, 1981, (2) Hamza Alavi, ‘India: Transition to Colonial Capitalism’ in Hamza Alavi, Doug. McEachern et al, Capitalism and Colonial Production, Croom Helm, London 1982, also published in Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol 10, No 4, 1980. 11 Bimal Prasad has dealt with the story of the 1906 delegation objectively and accurately in Pathways to India’s Partition, Vol II, A Nation within a Nation, Dacca, 2000, pp 100 ff. Bimal Prasad’s three volume work – of which the third volume is elusive – seems to be one of the best studies so far done on the ‘Pakistan Movement’. Earlier, Francis Robinson also dealt with it in the same scholarly way in Separatism Among Indian Muslims, Delhi, 1993, pp 142 ff.12 Francis Robinson, op cit, p 147.13 Cf John R MacLane, Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, Princeton, 1977, ch 7, Congress and Landlord Interest, pp 211 ff. 14 Based on Eugene F Irschik’s Politics and Social Conflict in South India, Berkeley, 1969; and M R Barnett’s Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India, Princeton, 1976.15 Francis Robinson, op cit, p 177.16 Matiur Rahman, From Consultation to Confrontation, London, 1970, p 197. 17 S S Pirzada (ed), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents, Vol I, 1906-1924, n d (1969?), p 258-59. 18 For the Text of the ‘Reform Scheme’ (the Lucknow Pact), c f S S Pirzada (ed), op cit, pp 392-97. 19 See Hamza Alavi, (1) ‘Ironies of History – Contradictions of the Khilafat Movement’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed), Islam, Communities and Nation, Manohar, New Delhi, 1998, and (2) ‘Review Article on ‘Pan Islam in British Indian Politics’ by Naeem Qureshi’ in Pakistan Perspectives, Vol 7, No 1, January-June 2002, Pakistan Studies Centre, University of Karachi.20 M K Gandhi, Collected Works, Vol XV, Delhi, 1979, pp 63-64.21 A M Zaidi, Evolution of Muslim Political Thought, Vol II, n d, p 122.22 Such a move at an AIML conference in 1943 by one A H Kazi was Scotched and a Proposed Resolution about Islamic Ideology was not even moved. C f, S S Pirzada (ed), op cit, Vol II, p 440. 23 Choudhry Khaliquzzaman, Pathway to Pakistan, Lahore, 1961, p 76. 24 David Page, Prelude to Partition, OUP, Delhi, 1987, pp 114 ff. 25 A Model of this will be found in M C Pradhan, The Political System of the Jats of Northern India, OUP, Bombay, 1966; for biraderies of Punjabi Muslims c f, Hamza Alavi, ‘The Two Biraderis: Kinship in Rural West Punjab’ in T N Madan (ed), Muslim Communities of South Asia, Revised and Enlarged Edition, New Delhi, 1995. 26 Noor Ahmad, Martial Law Say Martial Law Tak (in Urdu), Lahore, 1967, pp 203-04. 27 Taj ul-Islam Hashmi provides an excellent account of conditions in the 1920s, When we find a radicalisation of Bengal Muslim politics in Peasant Utopia: The Communalisation of Class Politics in East Bengal – 1920-47, Dacca, 1994, pp 50 ff. 28 Indian Annual Register, 1927, Vol I, p 32 ff, for the Delhi Muslim Proposals; IAR 1927, Vol II, p 397 for Resolution on Hindu-Muslim Unity; IAR, 1928, Vol I, p 9 ff, for the text of the Nehru Report and an account of The All Parties Conference. 29 Indian Annual Register, 1927, Vol 1, p 37.30 Indian Annual Register, Vol I, 1928, Jinnah’s speech at the Calcutta All Parties Convention, p 124. At the time of the Lucknow meeting, he had not yet returned from Europe where he had gone with his wife, who was seriously ill. As Wolpert reports the young Chagla ‘accepted the Report’ at Lucknow on behalf of the Muslim League from Motilal. A friend of Jinnah, Chagla did not represent the League and held no office in it. 31 David Page, op cit, p 190.