THE LEAST OF THE MINORITIES
IN India today all non-Hindus are called minorities, and this in itself is an indication of their political status. The most significant thing about this usage is that it was in- troduced and is being continued precisely by those who swear that there is only a single nation in the country. The same men, however, accepted a partition of India whose only justification in principle was that the Hindus and the Muslims constituted two nations.
The Muslims of India are indeed a minority. The Hindus regard them as such, and they themselves do not think differently, though their leaders do at times declare that they are as good 'Indians' as the Hindus. I think it was a Bengali-Brahmin-Hindu professor of history and political science who first put forward the suggestion that the Hindu-Muslim differences in India should be settled on the lines of the recommendations for the protection of minorities put forward by the League of Nations.
But in terms of absolute numbers the Muslims are not a small minority, being just under forty-seven million in a population of 439 million. But judged by the position they hold in relation to their numerical strength they might be said to be the least of the minorities. Perhaps in the eye of their Hindu rulers they have even less im- portance than the Goanese Christians with Portuguese names.
Whenever in the streets of Delhi I see a Muslim wo- man in a burqa, the Islamic veil, I apostrophize her men- tally: 'Sister! you are the symbol of your community in India. The entire body of the Muslims are under a black veil.
The strongest impression that I got of their eclipse was at an evening party given by the ambassador of a Euro- pean country. There was a very large number of guests, and, of course, there was the usual forgathering of Hindu politicians, officials, and diplomats, who were either in the Islamic sherwani and pajama, or in the new buttoned- up coat and trousers. I recognized among the company a Muslim nobleman who in the British days had held very high office. Had it been old times everyone in that Hindu crowd, many of whom must have known him, would have gone up to him, made a deep salaam, and inquired if the Nawab Sahib's mizaz (mind or mood) was sharif (pure, untroubled). But that evening no one was talking to him. At least, whenever I saw him, I found him standing alone.
After chatting with some Arabs from Syria on the lawn I came back to the loggia, and found the Nawab standing against a pilaster with his arms folded on his chest. He was looking intently in front of him. At first I thought it was the laughing and gesticulating Arabs who were holding his attention with their exuberance. But it was not so, for his eyes were very much farther away-seeming- ly on the dark shrubbery behind the lawn which was shining under electric light. I wondered whether he was seeing the revenants of the former Sultans and Padishas of Delhi, for that site, before the British built their new capital on it, was an immense cemetery. That, too, was not the case, for the Nawab's eyes were completely vacant.
Then I remembered a cartoon in Punch. A vicar's wife had gone to see an old and crippled parishioner who was illiterate, and she kindly asked him how he managed to occupy the time, since he could neither get about nor read. The man replied: 'Well, Mum, sometimes I sits and thinks; and then again I just sits.' I thought the Nawab was trying to 'just sits'.
One thinks of the Poles as an unhappy people, whom history has treated and is treating very shabbily. But I do not consider that even their fate has been as tragic as that of the Muslims of India, not only in their present state, but even from the time the British ousted them from political power. At one stroke their position was then destroyed, for the only position they had in India was that of a dominant colonial minority ruling a large subject population. To this was added a deeper humiliation. Islam did not permit any Muslim to remain under the rule of un- believers, and since the beginning of Islam no large group of Muslims had ever passed under non-Muslim rule. This began with the European expansion from the seventeenth century onwards, and after the British conquest of India, the Muslims who had treated all non-Muslims in the Isla- mic states as Dhimmis, or tolerated unbelievers, to whom a second-class citizenship was given in lieu of a special tax, found themselves to be very much like Dhimmis themselves. They were only fellow-subjects of a Ferin- ghee Power with their former subjects, the Hindu kafirs.
In a sense their position was worse than that of the Hindus, because they were suspect in the eye of the new rulers. The British had taken over political power in India from the Muslims, and they assumed rightly that the community would remain disaffected and seditious, cherish- ing the hope of a revived spell of power. This position was worsened by the Mutiny. Though the rebellion was primarily military and the fighting power of the rebels was furnished mainly by the soldiers of the two high Hindu castes of Brahmin and Kshatriya of the Gangetic plain, belonging to the Bengal Army of the East India Company, the British saw plain Muslim political incite- ment and ambition, and the two Muslim courts of Delhi and Lucknow by what they had done justified the British suspicion. So, after the suppression of the Sepoy rebel- lion, the Muslims came under a darker cloud and were themselves corroded and eaten into by their own impotent disaffection. It was a great Muslim, perhaps the greatest Indian Muslim of modern times, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of Delhi, who began the rehabilitation of his community. In spite of being a Hindustani Muslim whose ancestors had serv- ed the Mogul court, during the Mutiny he had declared himself for the British, as indeed did all the Hindu and other Muslim leaders who were not bigots of the old order. After the end of the rebellion he took up the task of reconciling the Muslims and the British to each other, and the greater task of bringing round his co-reli- gionists to reform themselves and adopt Western educa- tion.
His reconciliatory efforts were twofold: on the one hand, he tried to prove that the bulk of the Indian Mus- lims had remained loyal to the British and therefore it was unfair to bold the whole community responsible for the doings of a part; on the other, he argued with his fellow- Muslims that so long as Islam and Islamic laws were res- pected by the British India could not be looked upon as a Dar-al-Harb or land of strife, in which it was the duty of the followers of Islam to oppose or even fight the un- believers who were their political masters. But the more constructive efforts of this great man were directed to- wards giving the Indian Muslims education on Western lines and to liberalize their hidebound beliefs and cus- toms. Already, there was a good deal of leeway to make up, for in respect of education in the modern sense, the Hindus had had a start of nearly fifty years.
Syed Ahmed Khan achieved remarkable success in all his aims, and by the end of the nineteenth century the British and the Indian Muslims seemed to be perfectly ready to bury the hatchet and even to co-operate with each other. This process was helped by the emergence of the Indian nationalist movement which both the Bri- tish and the Muslims regarded as a Hindu agitation. In the sphere of social, religious, and cultural modernization a number of Muslims appeared who were comparable to the Hindu reformers of the earlier half of the century, and who sought through study and writing to give a new form to the Islamic way of life without sacrificing its basic or essential features.
As the nationalist movement gained momentum' the British naturally looked to the Muslims as a counterpoise to the Hindus, and they began to treat the former with a partiality which almost amounted to pampering. The British felt all the more inclined to do so because the Muslims had already unambiguously detached themselves from the nationalist movement conducted by the Indian National Congress. When invited by the Congress lead- ers to join the organization, the Muslims refused to do so on the ground that if they did they would be submerged in the Hindu mass and lose their Islamic personality. Thus the entire tripartite political relationship in India of the British, the Hindus, and the Muslims took on a new appearance. The Muslims were rehabilitated and the Hindus in their turn came under suspicion. This was a subject of jokes among us Hindus, and I heard some of these in my young days. Many of our folk-tales were bas- ed on the theme of two wives of a king, one of whom was good and neglected and the other wicked and favour- ed. Our parents and elders used to call the Muslims the Favourite Wife.
But that did not mean that there was any genuine im- provement in the position of the Muslims as a community, though a larger number of Muslims secured jobs in the administration and a few basked in the sunshine of Bri- tish favour as a reward for Muslim 'loyalty'. From the very beginning of the nationalist movement the Muslim leaders felt that a new problem was emerging for them. The aspiration of the Hindus for political independence at once brought into their mind the question of their own position in India if the British left the country and it came under the rule of a Hindu majority. However dis- tant and even impossible that might seem to be at the moment, the Muslim knew that independence for India was bound to come one day, and in that event their future had to be safeguarded. It was all very well to make hay while the sun of British favour shone, but what was to be done when the inevitable rainy day arrived? All the strength of their position for the time being was depend- ent on the presence of the British. That position was bound to be undermined.
Even so they continued their opposition to the nation- alist movement, which they looked upon as Hindu, and when the first open agitation began in 1905, the Muslims sided with the British in Bengal and elsewhere. But this, they could consider only as a very short-term and oppor- tunistic policy, and very soon the need for a new strategy became obvious to them. They saw clear signs that the British were going to make political concessions to the Hindu nationalists. Therefore, to meet the situation that might arise and develop out of these concessions, the Muslims demanded a number of counterbalancing rights and privileges, and in this they were encouraged by the British authorities in India, including the Viceroy, Lord Minto. To secure their demands the Muslims formed a political organization of their own on the lines of that of the Hindus.
But even this could not be their long-term policy. For the moment the weightage given to them by the British against the Hindus seemed adequate, nevertheless the Mus- lims had sufficient political realism to perceive that the handicaps for their rivals would disappear with the Bri- tish when they abandoned India, and the Islamic order in India, if it were to survive, must learn to rely on its own strength. But, given the numerical disproportion between the Hindus and the Muslims in the country, this strength seemed to be wholly insufficient. In this dilemma the Muslims almost unconsciously fell back on the very basic principle of Islam, the brotherhood and solidarity of all the Islamic countries and peoples, and what favour- ed this trend was the emergence of a new Islamic nation- alistic movement, which was, of course, Pan-Islamism.
The first wave of the Pan-Islamic movement reached India in the last quarter of the nineteenth century with the visit of the leader of the Muslim Risorgimento, Syed Jamal-ad-Din al-Afghani. It roused great enthusiasm among the Indian Muslims. On the other hand, both Sultan Abdul Hamid II of Turkey and Nasir-ad-Din Shah of Persia had their special motives to exploit it. The Pan-Islamic sentiment became stronger and stronger in India from the Muslim fear of being submerged with the Hindus, and under its influence many Indian Muslims, even those of East Bengal who were overwhelmingly con- verts, hardly regarded India as their country and affected to be colonists from the Islamic Middle East. I still remember the answer I got from a Muslim of my own district (Mymensingh) when I asked him what fruit he consider- ed best and liked best. 'Dates of Iraq,' was the prompt reply! Of course, to me, this deliberate insult to the mango seemed both insufferable and ridiculous.
But the Pan-Islamic sentiment of the Indian Muslims, which was genuine, could not go with their opportunistic flirtation with the British for immediate advantages, and therefore very soon a conflict between the pragmatic Mus- lim policies and true Muslim loyalties made its appear- ance. This conflict remained latent until certain historical events forced a choice in favour of the sentiment.
As it happened, it was Czarist Russia from which came the first warning of the danger implicit in Pan-Islamism for British rule in India, which the local British, and more especially the British authorities, both civil and military, with their hostility to the Hindu nationalism and their in- terested partiality for the Muslims, were inclined to ig- nore. At the end of 1910 both Czar Nicholas II and Stolypin spoke to Sir George Buchanan, the British am- bassador in St Petersburg, about the danger. But Bucha- nan with characteristic British empiricism immediately ob- served to the Czar that it was rather with the Hindus than with the Mahommedans that the British troubles in India had originated. None the less, the British Foreign Office was not wholly indifferent to the possibility of danger, and Sir Arthur Nicolson, then Permanent Under- Secretary of State, informed Sir George Buchanan that Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London, had also left a series of questions with him and he had passed them on to the India Office to find out what steps the India Government was taking towards controlling and in- fluencing the instruction which was being given to the Muslims in India in their own schools.
The latent opposition between the true feelings of the Muslims and their opportunistic siding with the British came up to the surface with the Italian attack on Tripoli in 1911. Indian Muslims were shocked and in their anger
they expected the British Government to condemn the naked aggression. The Government of India with its pro-Muslim policy and sentiment at once addressed panic- stricken appeals to London. These seriously annoyed Sir Edward Grey, who said that at a moment when the British Government was making every effort to detach Italy from the Triple Alliance, these importunities of the Government of India were very unwelcome.
The Balkan war made matters worse. As soon as it began Sir George Buchanan wrote from St Petersburg: The position of His Majesty's Government will be a very difficult one. Their attitude will be watched with jealous apprehension both by His Mahommedan subjects in India and by the Russian public. The former will expect them to throw the weight of their influence into the scale in favour of their co-religionists in Turkey, while the latter will look to England, as a member of the Triple Entente, to support Russia in advocating the cause of the Balkan Slavs.
In fact, the Turco-Italian war and the Balkan war be- tween them largely alienated the Indian Muslims from the British, and exposed the artificial nature of the Anglo- Muslim liaison in India. Another step in the alienation was taken when Turkey entered the first World War on the side of Germany. Already, in the Balkan war, some prominent Muslims of India had gone to Turkey as medi- cal volunteers. Near my home town in East Bengal a fanatical Muslim priest even fenced in a plot of land and proclaimed it as the territory of the Caliphate, and was, of course, suppressed. During the first World War, however, no Muslim could actively take the side of Tur- key, but the whole Muslim community remained pro- Turk and violently anti-British.
This led them to another opportunistic move, an alli- ance (or misalliance?) with Hindu nationalism and the Indian National Congress. Jinnah, who later became the most fanatical champion of Muslim separatism in India, brought about a coalition of the Muslim League and Congress at Lucknow at the end of 1916. This combi- nation was finally cemented at the end of the war by the treatment of Turkey by the Allies, by the Treaty of Sèvres, and even more by the strongly pro-Greek policies of Lloyd George. As a result, the Hindu nationalist movement and the Muslim Caliphate movement worked hand-in-hand from 1919 to 1922, with equally unconscious cynicism on both sides, until the victory of Mustafa Ke- mal Pasha and the rejection of the Caliphate by the Turks themselves ended the movement on behalf of the institu- tion by the Indian Muslims, and put an end to the raison d'être of the artificial Hindu-Muslim co-operation. In fact, the treaty of Lausanne can be regarded as a definite landmark in Hindu-Muslim relations, and one of the worst Hindu-Muslim conflicts ever seen-the notorious Kohat riots took place a few months after its ratifica- tion by Great Britain..
Not only was the Caliphate rendered an out-of-date symbol for the Pan-Islamic movement by the victory of Turkey, the whole concept of the solidarity of Islam was undermind by the same historical event. The Turks eschewed both the Pan-Islamic and the Pan-Turanian movements, and took their stand on Turkish nationalism in Anatolia.
So far as I remember, Mustafa Kemal even expressed indifference, if not disdain, for any sympathy for his country from the Muslims of India. The other Islamic countries too, including the new Arab States and Iran, began to look upon themselves more as territorial nations than as an articulated group in a non-territorial society bound together by a religion. This deprived the Indian Muslims of the extra-territorial support on which they had reckoned in order to maintain their position as a community with a separate group per- sonality, and made them revert to their old policy of sid- ing with the British against the Hindu nationalists and demanding special rights and privileges for themselves in the new constitutions. Thus it happened that while in the Non-co-operation movement of 1920-22 the Muslims were with the Congress and the Hindus, in the next nationalist agitation, the Civil Disobedience movement of 1930-32, they sided with the British and in Bengal even sacked and looted Hindu houses in towns and villages. This earned for them a special weightage in the new Constitution which was created by the Government of India Act of 1935, and for the time being the Muslims secured more political power and influence than their numbers even in the Punjab and Bengal entitled them to. In the political set-up of Bengal more especially, the Hindus were reduced to the position of a permanent statutory minority, which finally helped the ruinous partition of the province in 1947. But the Indian Muslims could not also forget the pre- cariousness of their position. They knew that the artifi- cial weightage given to them could last only as long as those who had provided it, namely, the British, remained in India. With their going, which the Muslims regarded as inevitable, the guarantees conferred by them were also bound, equally inevitably, to become null and void. Thus the problem of protecting the interests of the Muslim community in the absence of the British arose menacingly. They could no longer think of themselves as a component of the non-territorial Islamic society, and there was no longer any possibility of ensuring their continued exist- ence as Muslims on the strength of extra-Indian support. In simple words, the Muslims of India discovered that by regarding themselves as a non-territorial nation they were now to be without any country for themselves.
It was in tackling this dilemma that the Indian Muslims hit on the idea of a partition of the country in order to give themselves the homeland they lacked by carving out a Muslim state from the historic, undivided India. When it was first put forward the idea was considered not only fantastic but even absurdly ridiculous. I assert this with confidence that not even at the end of 1946 did anybody in India believe in the possibility of a partition of the country. Yet within six months it was announced as a policy, and accepted as a proposal, and in less than three months from the announcement of the plan the monstrous and unnatural partition of India became a fact. The Hin- dus and the British alike foreswore the principle of unity of India which they had always professed. This was made possible by a combination of three factors-Hindu stupidity in the first instance and Hindu cowardice after- wards, British opportunism, and Muslim fanaticism. The most ironical part of the whole matter was the fact that the most fanatical and determined of the Muslim cham- pions of a Dar-al-Islam in India, the man who made a political impossibility a fact, was Jinnah, a man who had no deep faith in Islam as a religion, but treated it as a form of nationalism.
The creation of Pakistan was a windfall for the Mus- lims of India. But the artificial homeland which the Bri- tish thought it was their duty to bring into existence for the Muslims before they could leave India, but which really was the product either of British defeatism or op- portunism and discreditable on both assumptions, did not turn out to be a Promised Land for the Muslims. Much as I sympathize with this small and brave country, left in the lurch by the Great Powers in the interest of their own raison d'état, I would not yet compare Pakistan with that other small country, Israel, equally or even more un- fairly treated by the Great Powers. That country and people look towards the future and will always be a living reality: Pakistan can only look towards the past and re- main half-dead. Even from the moment it came into existence it became a source of anxiety, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment.
The immediate tragedy was that about one-third of the Muslims, equal to about half the population of the whole of Pakistan, had to be abandoned to the Hindus. These millions were an awful korbani, sacrifice, to Allah Akbar: the Lord checked the hand of Abraham, but not of Jinnah. On the Hindu side as well as the Muslim, the partition created an illogical and yet inescapable situation-each party gave up its legal right to protect co-religionists, but could not relinquish the moral burden of doing so. This left to both the countries the legacy of an absurd and futile irredentism.
Then there was the problem of survival for an unor- ganized country in the face of the implacable hostility of India. This was indeed a grave economic and admini- strative problem, and even a greater one in the military sphere. India held the pistol at the head of Pakistan, until, in 1954, the American alliance delivered the coun- try from that nightmare. Though it is very difficult to have reliable information on such matters, I think I am right in saying that at least twice, if not three times, be- tween 1947 and 1954, India intended to invade Pakistan and was deterred only by American and British remon- strances.
What came next was isolation from all possible helpers. The first plank of Indian foreign policy in the years im- mediately following independence was to isolate Pakistan from her natural friends, the Muslim countries of the Middle East, and also from Great Britain which in the light of the antecedents could be expected to side with the Muslim country. In both the aims India achieved remarkable success. The Arab countries, inspired more by nationalistic and anti-European sentiment than by Islam, thought that powerful India was more worth culti- vating than poor and weak Pakistan. Great Britain's conduct was worse. After inciting Muslim separatism in every way for more than half a century and making a substantial contribution to the impossible situation which led to the partition of India, the British statesmen thought that their duty to Pakistan was fulfilled with its creation and some moral support for its survival, and they were not prepared to give anything more substantial. After the abandonment of the empire in India there was no further reason to support the Muslims against the Hindus; on the contrary, much was to be gained by appeasing the new
Hindu state, which was likely to be a desirable associate in the so-called Commonwealth. Therefore, as regards Pakistan, the British attitude, though considered too par- tial by the Hindus, amounted only to an inane correctitude, which, given the ratio of strength between the two coun- tries, amounted in fact to a letting down of the smaller, poorer, and weaker state. This attitude on the part of the British Government virtually drove the government of Pakistan into the arms of the United States, and the al- liance formed against the will of a majority of the people of that country, is now regarded by its government as only a necessary evil, and nothing better.
I felt the injustice to Pakistan so strongly that I thought it my duty to take the side of that country in two articles published in 1954, one in the influential Indian newspaper The Statesman, and the other in The Times of London. In the first I scouted the idea that American aid to Paki- stan was a military danger to India. Among other things, I said that the decisive argument against assuming the possibility of an attack on India with the arms supplied by the United States was that such a result would defeat the very purpose for which American aid was being given. The United States in its own interest, or, to be quite frank, in the pursuit of its policy of containing the Soviet Union, was trying to create military strength in an area in which it did not exist. That very strength and the stability creat- ed by it was likely to be destroyed, and the power frit- tered away if Pakistan was to attack India. In the article in The Times, on the other hand, I attributed the anger of India at the alliance between the United States and Pakistan to the check given by it to India's policy of keeping the latter country weak and isolated. An Amer- ican journalist saw the article in London on the day he was flying to India and showed it to Mr Nehru as soon as he arrived. The result was described to me in vivid American diction, and I would only disclose that the man got what he deserved for his indiscretion.
But though the American alliance has saved Pakistan from constant bullying by India, it has not brought a more unclouded satisfaction than the bare assurance of survival. The United States, pursuing a policy of naked raison d'état wants as many as possible of the new states in Asia to be on its side, but the same raison d'état de- mands that the advantages should be all on the side of the United States, and that the whole series of alliances would be what the British in the early days of their rule in India called the System of Subsidiary Alliances. Therefore Pakistan could hardly hope for positive support for her claims against India, and if any hope of this kind was entertained at all it was bound to lead to disappointment, because it was as much, if not more, to the interest of the United States to gain the goodwill and friendship of India. As between the two countries, if India could at all be hooked, the United States would naturally attach greater importance to her. Perhaps it would attach even greater importance to an unhooked India, for since the war it has been seen to be the uniform policy of the State Department to ride rough-shod over the interests and sentiments of those allies who have been firmly secured and cannot break away, in order to buy up actual or potentially unfriendly nations at the cost of old friends. When even Great Britain and France were and are being subjected to this treatment, Pakistan could not hope for a less one-sided treatment. So, it can be said that the as- sociation with the United States has put an end to the in- ternational isolation of the Islamic state only in a negative sense. It can be added that if India were to align herself with the United States in any circumstances, the stocks of Pakistan were likely to fall lower.*
But bleak as all this is for Pakistan, what is even more sad for Pakistan than being only a pawn on the American side of the international chessboard is the isolation in time in the stream of history. Pakistan, unfortunately, is not a flowing river and cannot be one: it has to be only a lagoon by the very circumstances of its creation and by the strongest sentiment which is keeping it going, namely, the loyalty to Islam in a world in which Muslims no longer regard their old faith as the basis of their social and political life. This loyalty pins down the coun- try to a past-regarding outlook.
Yet Pakistan cannot give up Islam, or even relegate it to a secondary position. It has nothing else to stand on. Being poor in natural resources, it cannot even cover up a retrogressive historical evolution by maintaining the pretence or illusion of industrialization, as India is do- ing. Without its adherence to a lost cause the country itself will be lost, for there is nothing in it besides Islam which can resist the gravitation of the great mass of India and re-absorption in that country.
I hope this exposition of the emergence of Pakistan and its relations with India will not be thought irrelevant in this essay. In point of fact, the position of the Mus- lims of India vis-à-vis the Hindus is not a bilateral one. but trilateral, and the presence of Pakistan is an essential factor in it. A satellite to the Hindu order as the Muslim community of India is, even as such it is held in its hum- drum orbit only by the triangular equilibrium created by the gravitation of the two planets. If somehow this equilibrium is disturbed it is impossible to tell what might or might not happen.
Now I can pass on to describe the status of the Mus- lims in India. The Hindu attitude towards the Muslims of India has been throughout rather paradoxical, like that of the British to their subjects. It is a mixture of indif- ference tinged with contempt and an absurd fear. The fear was very much marked in the years immediately fol- lowing independence. In 1954 a high-ranking officer gave me a lurid assessment of the intentions of the In- dian Muslims, which was only an echo of the popular belief that if Pakistan made war on India the Indian Muslims would rise in a body and massacre the Hindus who were ten times their number. I was startled to hear this drivel coming from an officer and asked him if he really believed in such a possibility. He replied that he did, and when I still persisted in my scepticism he forgot his manners and observed, 'You are pitiably ignorant. I could not forget mine and retort, 'If I had been the Minister of Defence in India, I would at once had sacked an officer who could be so "jittery".
This fear has not wholly disappeared even now, but it is much less pronounced. After the two recent anti-Mus- lim riots in Madhya Pradesh (Central Provinces) and Uttar Pradesh (United Provinces), in which large_num- bers of Muslims were killed in retaliation for offences which could not be laid at the door of the Muslim com- munity as a whole, the Hindu mind has naturally been reassured, for it got a demonstration of the case with which the Muslims could be slaughtered. [In 1964 there was another demonstration.]
Today the general Hindu attitude to the Muslims of India is not actively hostile, though there is an emotional bias against them. There is not much occasion for this to come to the surface, however, and the Hindus feel generous enough to allow the Muslims to carry on their ordinary avocations and live peacefully. But there is vir- tually no social intercourse between the members of the two communities, no more than there existed in British days. Quite possibly, there is much less, except in the highest political and administrative circles, in which the Muslims are hardly Muslims. The Muslims in India in relation to the Hindus are for all practical purposes what some sociologists dealing with the Hindu social system have called an 'external caste'.
The Muslims themselves know it only too well. There is today a certain demure reserve in their behaviour which is in complete contrast with their former obstreperous- ness, and which could have created an impression of hypo- crisy if it had not been so transparently sincere and even tinged with melancholy. It clearly shows that they know their place in an India ruled by the Hindus. I would add that they are on the whole showing a great dignity and have no whining underdog air. Being fully aware that they are now the subjects of their former subjects, they do not like to make their lot harder to endure by squealing about it.
But it is slightly different with their leaders. It is not always possible for them to maintain the same quiet reti- cence. Speaking for their community they do sometimes assert that it is not on a footing of equality with the Hin- dus. However, they couple this mild protest with a loud protestation of their loyalty to India and their pride in Indian citizenship. They claim a better deal for the country's Muslims as unexceptionable and even fervent Indians. Naturally, in the dispute between India and Pakistan they have to take a rather too emphatic Indian line, which is the only facet of their social and political behaviour which seems to be self-consciously prudential. Still, even that deserves forgiveness.
If I were a Muslim I should certainly not have cared to live in India, just as, being a Hindu, I feel I should never have been at home in Pakistan, though I was born and brought up in what is now eastern Pakistan. There is something unnatural in the continued presence of the Muslims in India and of the Hindus in Pakistan, as if both went against a natural cultural ecology. Whether a person is Hindu or Muslim makes a substantial difference in both the countries, though the unnaturalness is less ex- plicit in India than it is in Pakistan.
Here I have to answer an obvious objection, which any- one at all familiar with the conditions in present-day India is bound to raise. If the Muslims of India are in eclipse in the manner I describe, how does it happen, it will be asked, that some of them occupy very high office in the Government of India and hold so many senior posts in the civil service? Fortunately, this objection is not as le- thal to my argument as it might at first seem, and I can answer it. I have, however, to distinguish between the political and the administrative position of the Muslims, and shall deal with the political position first.
It is the legacy of the Hindu-Muslim political colla- boration in the period between 1917 and 1922. When the artificial alliance between the Hindus and the Muslims came to its natural end through the victory of Turkish nationalism and the abolition of the Caliphate, some pro- minent Muslims whose hatred of the British was not weaker than their dislike for the Hindus, did not break with the Indian National Congress and go over to the separate Muslim political organization. Primarily, they were actuated by the feeling that by joining the Muslim organization they would have to show an opportunistically friendly attitude towards the British and in certain situa- tions even have to co-operate with them. They had been too good Pan-Islamists not to find even insincere siding with the British hateful. But there was also a second reason for their choice. During the period of co-opera- tion they had formed genuinely cordial and intimate per- sonal relations with the leaders of the Congress, especially with those who came from the Islamized Hindu circles of Hindustan, and the friendship weighed with many.
They did not indeed have ulterior motives in remaining with the Hindus and were influenced by sincere convic- tions. None the less, it did transpire that many of them reaped a good harvest in the worldly way in the era of independence on account of their choice. Some of them were at once given high offices by the Hindus, but not all of them lived to see the epoch in which their political choice could confer worldly position. Nevertheless, they left memories behind them, and they also left a number of their younger associates, who might be called shagirds (disciples) in the Muslim parlance, in the hands of their Hindu friends. It was like a dying father entrusting the safety of a minor son to a loyal friend.
It must be said to the honour of the Hindu leaders that they never abandoned their charges. On the contrary, they put them in offices in which they would never have dreamt of putting a fellow-Hindu with equivalent qualifications, unless subjected to a long course of bully- ing or toadying. Of course, there was a political motive in this generous treatment of the Muslims who were with the Congress. That organization claimed to be above caste and creed, and in proof of this claim the Hindu leaders had to give high posts to Muslims and Christians, and not many Muslims were there to serve a Hindu Gov- ernment even for the sake of glittering worldly prizes. So those who were ready were made much of, and duly re- warded.
One more explanation has to be added. The present political position of the Muslims is due also to the per- sonality of Mr. Nehru. He is, by social and cultural affi- liations, more a Muslim than a Hindu, so far as he is anything Indian at all. His family belonged to the circle of Islamized Hindus, and in the United Provinces those Hindus who had sophistication usually moved among the Muslims of the province, because they were more cul- tured, whereas the Hindu was somewhat of a boor. Be- sides, Nehru has no understanding of Hinduism and not even any liking for it. He is usually repelled by anything pronouncedly Hindu. This purely personal fact has cer- tainly contributed to the position of the Muslims in India.
A different reason, on the other hand, stands behind the presence of Muslims in the civil service and admini- stration. One of the things which have earned praise for us from the British and American patrons of India is the fact that when the nationalist leaders took over the gov- ernment of the country they did not dismiss the Indian officials who had served the British loyally till the end, and had even persecuted and imprisoned nationalists. I have heard it said that by not treating these men in the man- ner of the French and Russian revolutionaries, the Indian leaders showed extraordinary wisdom. Whether this view of the attitude is right or wrong, there is no doubt that no member of the old official order was punished for having sided with the British, and some of them were even given higher positions in the new administration. Among these were some Muslims. Most Muslims in the administration, of course, went over to Pakistan, but some chose to remain in India, and were for that reason even more favoured than the old Hindu officials. Moreover, in the higher ranks of the civil service, the Muslims did not differ essentially from their Hindu colleagues. They were all Anglicized men with no strong association or loyalty which could tie them to any of the two traditional orders. Irrespective of their religious and social antece- dents, these men formed one class, and in dealing with them one hardly had any feeling that they were either Hindus or Muslims. So the Muslims in the civil service did not get any differential treatment.
Thus the present position of the Muslims in the mini- stries and the civil service is due to a historical situation bequeathed by the British and unlikely to be continued or repeated. That is already more than plain, because it can be easily discovered that no new Muslim candidates are appearing for such posts, and none is in a probation- ary period. What has happened has happened, and it will soon be a thing of the past. In regard to the future it needs no very great prophetic insight to say that the Muslims, both out of their own choice and owing to the Hindu dislike of them, would not rise to high positions. In fact, most of them would prefer to lead a private life, instead of serving a Hindu regime in which they cannot feel at home and with which they are not in sympathy.
But I must also say that if the Muslims of India are now without prospects as a community and if they are in a sad position they must also bear their share of the res- ponsibility and not make the Hindus alone culpable. Our mistakes and follies come home to roost, and that is as true of national as it is of personal life. The mistakes that the Muslims committed during the decades of the nationalist agitation are now recoiling on them. When they were basking in the sun of British favour, they did not remember that one day that might cancel their right to Hindu favour.
I should like to elaborate this point. As soon as the nationalist movement got into its stride, the Muslim lead- ers began to play a curiously equivocal game, seemingly realistic and effective, but so only on a short-term assess- ment of their interests. The Indian Muslims hated the British with a hatred which was even more vitriolic than that of the Hindus, because it was they who had been de- prived of an empire by the new conquerors. Yet, when they found themselves wooed by the same conquerors as a counterpoise to the Hindu nationalists, they could not resist the inveiglement and struck the bargain, a very Faustian one.
For the moment even we Hindus thought that they had been shrewd and stolen a march on us. They knew that their own battle was also being fought by the Hindus, and that in the event of a British withdrawal from India their share of the spoils was assured. In the meanwhile, it was not only not necessary to make sacrifices for the Muslim cause as against the British, but even profitable to make the best of both worlds. This game, played with un- scrupulous boldness, succeeded for the time being and yielded all the immediate results expected from it. The creation of an independent state for the Muslims of India, or at all events for a majority of them, was the greatest achievement of the double-faced policy.
That has also been seen to be the only achievement. A colossal Machiavellian game of politics of the order at- tempted by the Muslims could not be played without grave moral and political risks, and the risks have now overtaken the Muslims completely both in India and in Pakistan. On the rank and file of the Muslims of India. the opportunistic liaison with the British had a disastrous effect. So far as the British were concerned, it left one section unweaned from the barren and rancorous hatred, and made another pine for the ruling nation's favours. The British were, of course, ready to show or even shower their favours so long as it served their interest to do so, but the Muslims forgot that the part of cat's-paw cannot be played, even if it is played with cynical opportunism, without being made, at one time or other, to pay the price.
In respect of the Hindus, on the other hand, the Mus- lims, being sure of British support, began to show an arro- gance and an enmity which were never justified by any regard for Muslim interests, and which earned them the undying hatred of the Hindus. It added a new edge to the old Hindu hatred of the Muslims. It can be said that in the epoch of the nationalist agitation the Muslims were not only provocative, but also openly aggressive. During the Civil Disobedience movement of 1930-32 the Muslims of East Bengal, to give only a few instances, looted Hindu shops in Chittagong, attacked Hindu houses in the city of Dacca, and plundered and burnt Hindu homes over a belt of some twenty miles in length and about ten in width in my own district of Mymensingh.
All this created a chronic and endemic violence which lasted till the partition of India. In Dacca, while the Muslims knifed Hindus whenever they found them help- less, the Hindu boys, even schoolboys of fifteen, sudden- ly went out of their houses and came back after a little while to enjoy their dinner with the recollection of a Mus- lim murdered in stealth. All of them behaved as if they were werewolves.
I shall relate an incident which I have on good author- ity. In Dacca, on the Wari side, the railway line runs through a residential area. One day, on it, a young and very handsome Muslim boy was found to be lying, ob- viously murdered by a Hindu. An elderly Hindu widow, who lived in a nearby house and whose son had been murdered by the Muslims, saw the body, walked up to the railway line with a chopper, and hacked away the head of the boy to keep it as a trophy. Could head- hunters or scalp-hunters do better?
This violence went on with rising tempo to its crescendo in 1946 and 1947, and led to the colossal massacre of 1946 in Calcutta, which frightened the Bengali Hindus into believing that partition was the only means of release from the Muslim nightmare. The resignation to partition was both foolish and cowardly, but at the moment it seemed to be the height of wisdom.
The Muslims are now expiating for their short-sighted arrogance, which makes me observe that whatever clever people might say in defence of unscrupulousness in poli- tics, and about its success, there is some power in the universe which sees to it that such cynicism does not pay, and that nothing but what is inherently right ever suc- ceeds. Define it as you like, as theodicy or the justice of history, it is there, irrespective of any name. We see the operation of that power in the sad fate of the Muslims of India, both in the Hindu and in the Muslim state. What gave them victory in 1947 was not the opportunistic policy of their leaders, but their fanatical devotion to a cause which was a lost one in history. So, there is no escape for them today from that lost cause, and still less from the intolerable burden of fighting to the last for a lost cause.
