Pakistan
1956: History
The following historical review was written by Professor
C. G. PHILIPS, Department of History, School of Oriental and African
Studies, and appeared in The British Commonwealth 1956 published
by Europa Publications Limited, London (1956).
See the Synopsis of Subjects on the left for other
items on Pakistan from The British Commonwealth 1956.
History (India and Pakistan)
From their modest trading stations on the coasts of
India the English East India Company in the eighteenth century was
drawn into the mainland by the collapse of the Mughal Empire. By
1784 the Company had created by force of arms a strong Bengal state
in the north-east and, with their policy sharpened by the world-wide
struggle against France, the British went on to dominate all India.
By 1825 British paramountcy was securely established
against challenge either from Europe or from within India. The Company
may have been the agent of conquest, but the whole strength of Britain
was committed, a fact to which formal recognition was given in 1858
by the transfer of Indians government from the Company to the Crown.
The British succeeded to a Muslim empire that had
rotted away through half a century of growing turbulence. Sustained
economic and cultural development had ceased, both among the Muslim
rulers and their Hindu subjects, and political morality degenerated
with the times. On this chaotic scene the Company gradually imposed
order and political unity, establishing standards both in law and
conduct which, although not always of the highest, yet were immeasurably
higher than those they replaced. With the spread of order came a
sense of security and the possibility of a recovery in agriculture
which to a country of peasants like India constituted the greatest
immediate boon that could be offered. These achievements were deliberately
sought by the British, but the most penetrating and widespread changes
came rather from the interaction of world forces which the British
conquest let loose in India.
For twenty centuries the economic life of India had
changed scarcely. The great bulk of the income of the country was
provided by the peasant working on the land and raising crops of
rice, wheat, barley, millets and pulses, oilseeds and sugar cane,
and it was the needs of this weak, small-scale agriculture on a
consumption rather than an exchange basis that determined the life
of most Hindus and Muslims who made up the population of about one
hundred millions. On this basis the Indian economy remained parochial,
primitive and slow-changing. Through the ages both Hindu and Muslim
rulers had been concerned rather with problems of land than of trade,
mainly because they drew the bulk of their revenues in the most
convenient form of land revenue, traditionally taken as one-sixth
of the crop, though on occasion it may even have been one-third
or one-half.
Through the East India Company, the British constituted
a ruling power with a vested interest in developing trade, and in
the nineteenth century British manufactures penetrated along the
main arteries of communication. India became part of the British
free-trade area and British trade was carried into the heart of
Indian life, disrupting the basic Indian cotton goods industry,
along with many of her old trades and crafts. Through the combination
of immense British political and economic power, India became a
vast dependent market; and her slow-changing economy was quickened
arid ultimately transformed.
Just as in trade so also in government India underwent
rapid change. After a period of hesitation, misrule and experiment
a system of district administration was evolved throughout British
India under the Company's Covenanted European servants (later to
become the Indian Civil Ser vice). Within each district the Company's
officers undertook three essential functions, to keep the peace,
to collect the revenues and to administer justice. Throughout British
India a rule of law obtained, and the European administration functioned
efficiently and honestly. During the anxieties of the conquest many
areas had been allowed to remain under native princely rule, but
in these, too, British residents were appointed and it was made
clear that European standards of administration were to be applied.
The Central Government itself reported direct to London, where Parliament
in a succession of Acts in 1773, 1784, 1793 and 1855 and 1858 had
laid it down that all government was subject to review in a spirit
of trusteeship.
It was inevitable that, through a British system of
administration, British ideas would exert a determining influence
on Indian policy. The ideas of Adam Smith are to be seen in the
policy applied by Cornwallis in settling Bengal, the aims of the
evangelicals and utilitarians are to be traced in the attempts to
Christianize Indians, and to abolish the Hindu practices of sati,
and female infanticide and to set up an efficient government. Mission
schools, too, were opened, and the Company encouraged education
through English and on British lines. But Indian life was built
on ancient, strongly-founded cultures whether Hindu or Muslim, and
although the new influences made the more responsive Indians question
their own superstitions they did not at once go on to accept, as
the missionaries had hoped, a Christian framework of life. But European
influences, which had already begun to revolutionize the political
and economic life of India, began also to change the very texture
of Indian thought and belief; and symptoms of unrest became evident,
taking violent expression in the great mutinies of the Indian sepoy
troops, in 1807 in South India and in 1857 in the north.
These unsuccessful outbreaks brought down the full
weight of British policy and administration on Indian society-a
process that was facilitated by the growth of quick communications.
The completion of the telegraph route in 1870 brought Government
in Calcutta more closely under the control of the London Government.
The development of the steamship and the opening of the Suez Canal
in 1869 brought India's economy into the world economy as a dependency
of Britain. The rule of law in India was reinforced by a rule of
economic law in which the advantages of policy, of capital, mobility
and skill lay with Britain. By 1870 within India itself, railways,
telegraph and postal services linked Calcutta, Lahore in the northwest,
Bombay and Madras, and where the railways went there the roads ran
to meet them.
The economic consequences of this revolution were
profound. Provincial economics were transformed into an Indian economy
with local prices giving way to all-India prices. Equally important,
heavy crops could be quickly transported abroad and Indian agricultural
products began to follow India's raw cotton into international trade.
Largely through British capital and initiative new crops were developed
and Indian tea, coffee, jute, oil and minerals assumed world importance.
The value of her exports rose from 23 million in 1855, to 53 million
in 1900, to 137 million in 1910. In India's import trade Britain
was dominant, providing, for example, the heavy engineering equipment
for the railways, and controlling the Indian market in Lancashire
cottons and even towards the close of the century further fortifying
her position by preferential tariff treatment.
British initiative and capital also contributed to
the growth of large-scale industry in India. The Bengal coalfield
was opened to facilitate the growth of railways, jute mills were
built around Calcutta, and cotton mills on the west coast around
Bombay. By 1900 British investments in India totaled some 400 million,
and British-controlled managing agencies guided most of the industrial
and commercial activity.
The great mass of Indians earned their livelihood
as peasant cultivators. Encouraged by British protective methods
of rule the Indian population began to grow rapidly from 206 million
in 1872 to 315 million in 1911 and 338 million in 1931. Great irrigation
schemes sponsored by the Government were insufficient to meet this
increase and a steady pressure on the soil began, which encouraged
a competitive bidding for land. Most Indian indigenous capital had
long been absorbed in land, a process which was perpetuated by the
British command of the industrial field; and the ignorant peasantry
began to fall into the hands of Indian moneylenders, who soon discovered
how to seek protection in the new systems of law. Government's protective
measures were not enough and only a countrywide scientific improvement
in agriculture to raise the peasants' income could have broken what
had become a vicious circle. This was energetically attempted at
the close of the century under Curzon's rule, but the parallel process
of teaching improved farming methods to an illiterate and reluctant
peasantry was difficult and slow of application; and Indian agriculture
therefore tended to remain backward and the peasant amidst rising
prices poverty-stricken.
Government, too, which traditionally found most of
its income from land revenue, remained impoverished and with famine
periodically striking the land every budget became in effect a gamble
in rain. The Government in social and economic policy therefore
tended to be cautious, but even so the political, economic and social
pressures of the west on India were great.
The growth of Government services and the employment
of Indians in the civil and legal services, the application of English
education in schools and universities, the rise of an Indian press
and of industry and commerce, all these led to the emergence in
the latter half of the nineteenth century of Indian middle classes
predominantly though not exclusively Hindu. With the spread of quick
communications they acquired a hitherto unknown class consciousness
and with it the power to make a united, countrywide response to
the Government's policies. From the start the great majority deliberately
copied and wholeheartedly admired the British, but there were groups
with divergent interests, both among the Hindus and the Muslims.
It was inevitable in a dominantly Hindu society, that the age-old
sentiment of Hindu nationalism should persist and that there should
be many orthodox Hindus who felt that western education despoiled
Hindu culture; and they were reinforced by all those who had had
a western training and yet were frustrated in their search for suitable
higher employment.
The Muslim upper classes had on the whole reacted
differently. On the one hand, looking back to their past glories
as rulers and on the other following a dogmatic, clearly defined
creed which constituted their whole way of life, they tended to
regard western education as inferior and meaningless. Revivalist
movements among the Muslims of both north-east and north-west India
took place but they were directed as much against Hindu interests
as against British rule.
The Muslim disinclination to interest themselves in
western learning cost them dear, and nowhere did this become more
obvious than in the public services, which only a century earlier
they had monopolized. In Bengal, for example, where the Hindu and
Muslim communities were broadly equal in numbers, the Muslims in
1871 held only 92 out of 773 appointments. From this swift decline
the Muslims were rescued by the remarkable endeavors of the famous
Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who- through the second half of the century did
not cease to urge and work for the cultural regeneration of his
community through education on western lines. Devoting his life
to this cause, he founded for this purpose a college at Aligarh
(1877) and by numerous tours and speeches began to make his community
turn round and face the future.
The future of British rule in India formed a problem
which perplexed the British Government. Earlier in the century at
the period of the conquest and of the pacification of India, British
spokesmen like Munro, Elphinstone and Macaulay had envisaged a time
when Britain would leave India. As Elphinstone said, "Education
for Indians is our highroad back to Europe." But with the re-conquest
of northern India during the Mutiny and the growing realization
not only of the economic value of India to Britain but also of the
weakness and disunity of Indian society, British policy became more
hesitant. On the one hand higher education plans and the policy
of creating a free press, which fortified the strength and the claims
of the Indian middle classes, were proceeded with; on the other,
admission to the senior posts in the Indian Civil Service was made
increasingly difficult for Indians; and an alternative line of policy
of opening the service to "young men of good family and social
position'* was soon abandoned as a failure. When a group of middle
class, western-educated Indians, calling themselves the Indian National
Congress, met in 1885 at Bombay to organize a native parliament,
which was to work for constitutional development, the Government
at first encouraged it, and then as the movement began to spread
through urban India, grew hostile.
During the governor-generalships of Ripon (1880-84)
and Curzon (1898-1905) the extremes of British political policy
were defined. Ripon wished to use the Indian middle classes in moving
quickly to some form of constitutional government. Curzon at the
other extreme denied that the urban Indian middle classes could
speak for the great majority of illiterate peasant cultivators.
It seemed to him that the Government and the Indian Civil Service
were better able to represent the Indian masses, and that the main
task of Indian government was to raise their standard of life rather
than to promote the political interests of the educated minority,
in short that the main immediate problem was economic, not political.
Although Curzon had in reality posed a false dilemma,
the growing divisions among educated Indians strengthened the position
of the Government. As the years passed and the constitutional agitation
in the National Congress achieved meager results, extreme Indian
groups emerged, drawing their strength on the one side from revivalist
Hindu movements like the Arya Samaj (1879) and the Ramakrishna mission,
and on the other side from a growing awareness of the achievements
of contemporary revolutionary movements in continental Europe. In
western India a Hindu Brahman, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, invoking the
power of violence, raised an extremist agitation against both the
British and the Muslims, and on the other side of India when Curzon
in 1905 sought for administrative I reasons to partition the province
of Bengal, the middle classes became alive with resentment and soon
showed that they had realized the power of organized propaganda
and demonstration; and the swadeshi and boycott movements aimed
at encouraging Indian against foreign trade were born. During the
agitation some Hindu-Muslim antagonism also developed and Muslim
political opinion showed signs of taking a line different from the
Hindu. The Congress claim to speak .for the whole of India was denied
not only by the British Government but also by Sayyid Ahmad Khan
and his Muslim followers who argued that in any constitutional form
of government for India Muslim interests would be permanently subordinated
to Hindu, an argument which crystallized in the formation in 1906
of the All-India Muslim League to defend Muslim interests.
By this time the British Government had become convinced
that political action was needed to take account of these new forces
and to strengthen the moderate elements in Indian politics. Hitherto,
putting aside the expressed claims of the constitutionalists in
the National Congress under G. K. Gokhale, they had taken the line
of avoiding any decision that would pre-suppose the development
of responsible government in India after the British fashion. By
acts of Parliament in 1861 and 1892, for example, Indians had been
given the right of advising the Government, and out of the Act of
1892 emerged the principles of election and representation, but
it was representation through special interests and not as in Britain
through the whole body of voters. In 1909 this line of policy was
continued in the Morley-Minto reforms which admitted Indians to
the Secretary of State's India Council in London, and to the executive
councils in India and which extended the representation of Indians
in the central and provincial legislatures, but representation was
based on the grant of separate electorates for the Muslims and other
communities. The Government took care to retain its official majority
in the central legislature, in order ultimately to ensure control
from London.
Before the reforms had been long in operation the
World War of 1914-18 broke out, and during the exertions and stresses
of this period India came of age both economically and politically.
She grew to be one of the leading industrial powers of the world,
not so much as in the past through the influx of British capital
as through the employment of Indian, mainly Hindu, resources, which
in the following thirty years began to dominate the Indian economy.
India, too, in these years raised the largest volunteer army in
the world, and her representatives at international conferences
began to realize the importance of India's position in the British
Commonwealth. These developments threw into relief the small part
Indians were playing in their own home government. The moderates,
too, who were still influential in the National Congress, had come
to the conclusion that the Morley-Minto reforms had taken them into
a political blind alley; and that some other road to responsible
government must be sought;
while the more extreme groups decided to strike out for themselves.
The British, impressed by the scale of India's war achievement and
by the fact that the war had in part been fought for national self-determination,
also re-examined their own policy and at the close of the war proclaimed
the objective of' "an increasing association of Indians in
every branch of the administration and the gradual development of
self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization
of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British
Empire".
This formed a major reversal of policy in that it
assumed that British India was a nation for which responsible parliamentary
government was feasible. Accordingly under an Act of 1919 a scheme
was devised to provide the constitutional means to this end. The
first aim, a responsible system of government, was to be achieved
by reorganizing the central and the nine provincial governments.
At the centre there was to be a legislature consisting of an assembly
and a Council of State with a majority of elected members, and,
side by side with it, a Chamber of Princes as a purely consultative
body. The Viceroy, however, remained responsible to London. In the
provinces the departments of Government were divided into two groups,
those "reserved" under the control of officials and those
"transferred" to Indian, ministers responsible to the
legislatures. The franchise for central and provincial legislatures
was much extended, though election still rested on the basis of
separate electorates. Indian constitutionalists welcomed the proposals
and expressed willingness to work them in the spirit they were offered,
but they were in a minority, for both in the National Congress and
among Muslim groups more extreme views by this time prevailed.
Indeed, the whole Muslim world within and outside
India was rousing itself. The defeat of Turkey, the rise of Arab
nationalism and Arab states in the Near East combined to create
on the one hand a Khalifat (Caliphate) movement for the restoration
of the defeated Sultan and on the other an awareness that some attempt
must be made to come to terms with the forces of the modern world,
especially those emerging from the West. In India Muslims began
more seriously than ever before to examine their political position
vis-à-vis the Hindus. Meanwhile the constitutionalists lost
control of the Indian National Congress, which soon placed itself
under the leadership of a new and little-known member, Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi. In his person the main impulses of a generation
of Indian religious revivalism and of political agitation came to
a focus, and within a decade, employing non-violent, non-co-operative
techniques which he had previously perfected in South. Africa, Gandhi
changed what had been essentially a middle-class constitutional
agitation into a mass revolutionary movement to drive the British
from India.
The aftermath of war had produced sporadic terrorism
throughout northern India, and the British attempt to bring it under
control gave Gandhi and the Congress the opportunity to oppose Government
and to threaten to destroy the new political experiment. A more
unfavorable beginning for the new system could hardly have been
devised. The constitutionalists had quitted Congress, and many of
them as ministers or members of the new legislatures strove earnestly
to work the proposals, but they lacked the backing of strong parties.
Indeed, apart from the Indian National Congress, the members showed
little tendency to organize themselves into strong parties and therefore
one of the essential conventions of the British method, the two-party
system, did not materialize. However, in this restricted sense,
the system was made to work, and many of the new ministers carried
through useful constructive legislation, and in all provinces and
states advantage was taken of the fiscal independence which India
had gained in 1919. Largely at Britain's expense, the new Indian,
mainly Hindu, banking and commercial interests, the Parsis and Gujaratis
of western India, the Marwaris of Rajputana, and the Chettiars of
Madras, consolidated their hold on India's industrial economy; and
great new managing agencies such as the Parsi Tata organisation
and the Hindu Dalmia and Biria concerns began to displace the British,
incidentally at the same time giving increasing financial and political
support to the National Congress.
Gandhi pressed on with his policy, persuading Congress
to define its aim as the attainment of self-rule, and discovering
in himself a genius for presenting his ideas in popular, symbolic
form. Feeling that the western world had little of value to give
India, particularly that industrialization was an evil, he sought
to develop India as a land of villages. His own simple life and
his set daily task of spinning cotton thread on the charkha or home-made
spinning-wheel, became the symbol of a free India and of the way
in which his countrymen, if they so willed, could get rid of the
British. Through the charkha he taught the wearing of homespun khaddar
cloth, and the use of India-produced, swadeshi articles. In politics
he developed his non-violent, non-co-operative methods to bring
the Indian masses into the struggle, and at his command thousands
defied the police and went quietly to prison.
At first Gandhi carried some of the Muslim groups
with him, but he was too much of a Hindu figure and the Congress
itself too obviously dominated by Hindu economic and political interests,
for this to continue long. Moreover, the Muslim community was beginning
to realize that in the political race it was already outdistanced.
Although by this time Indians formed a majority in the public services,
including the I.C.S., the Muslims were under-represented. In the
economic field 'Hindu interests were outpacing the Muslims, as was
revealed by the collapse of the Muslim Currimbhoy Textile Group
in western India. Symptoms of this growing sense of economic and
political competition were to be seen in the spread of communal
rioting, particularly in Calcutta, in the revival of the long quiescent
All-India Muslim League, and in the formation by Hindu orthodox
groups of a Mahasabha to press Hindu, caste interests, and to oppose
the Muslims. , Coincidently a proposal by a group of more moderate
politicians, both Hindu and Muslim, to abolish special electorates
was at once repudiated by the Muslim League.
This evidence of increasing discord, along with the
failure of the Act of 1919 to win general support, led the British
in 1928 to embark on a fresh examination of the whole political
system and future, and a British commission under Sir John Simon
was sent to conduct an inquiry. In its report it faced the situation
realistically. Starting with the assumption that the British could
not retrace their policy in India, it yet admitted that political
developments had not justified the faith inspiring the proposals
of 1919. But, in the hope that a greater challenge would evoke a
greater response, they proposed more and not less responsible government.
A federation was envisaged as the form of an All-India Government
and, as a means to this end, responsible government was to be introduced
into the provinces.
The Commission was promptly followed by conferences
of Indian representatives in' London, at which the Indian princes
indicated their readiness to enter a federation and the Indian National
Congress, through Mahatma Gandhi, continued to insist that it alone
represented all groups and parties in India. The inquiry was then
continued in parliamentary committees in London, finally culminating
in a new Act, passed in 1935, which engaged all Britain's political
energies and talents for months on end.
The Act, broadly speaking, followed the lines indicated
by the Simon Commission Report, and dealt with two main subjects,
the establishment of a federation and the creation of self-government
in the provinces of British India. The federation, however, was
not to come into being until a specified number of Indian States
had agreed to join.
The more important Indian princes had all along been
aware of the important strategic and constitutional position of
their states, and in any new system they were bent on maintaining
their own privileges. They felt, moreover, that the ruler-subject
relationship in their states formed a more satisfactory basis of
government than a quick rush into methods of responsible government
to which they were not accustomed. The National Congress had no
confidence in the Princes even though some of them as, for instance,
in Mysore, Travancore and Baroda, had shown by their modest grant
of representative institutions to their peoples and by their policies
for industrialization and education that they were far from indifferent
to western ideas of progress. The National Congress, however, kept
up political pressure by constantly threatening that when the British
had gone it would "have no patience with the Princes".
The latter therefore began to reconsider their promise to join the
Federation, and only prompt and strong advice on the part of the
British would, have brought them quickly into line. This was not
given, for the British, preoccupied in India by the struggle with
Congress and in the west by the rise of Hitler's Germany, did not
think it right to hurry the Princes, and the outbreak of the World
War of 1939 in fact interrupted the negotiations so that this part
of the Act of 1935 was never put into practice.
This failure to bring about the federation proved
to be important because it formed one of the factors opening the
way subsequently to the partition of India. Meanwhile the Central
Government remained as constituted in the Act of 1919, with the
Viceroy responsible to London.
The second part of the Act of 1935 which provided
for Indian self-government in each of the eleven provinces of British
India, was carried into effect. All the provincial ministerial departments
were to be transferred to elected ministers who were to be responsible
to the legislatures. The Governor of each province was to retain
powers to safeguard peace and protect the minorities. Lastly, the
franchise was extended from the seven million voters of 1919 to
about thirty-five million, including six million women and ten per
cent of the scheduled castes or untouchables. Separate communal
electorates were retained.
The Indian constitutionalists, who had already done
their best to apply the 1919 Act, again showed their willingness
to co-operate with Government, and the Muslim groups, though cooler,
also agreed to take part. But the Congress opposed the Act. They
were in no mood to cooperate with the British; and the nature of
their reaction may be perhaps best understood from the fact that
Mahatma Gandhi, as he later admitted, had not even troubled to read
its clauses. In particular. Congress objected to the proposal that
the Governors should retain certain "safeguards". However,
when in 1937 the time for the general election approached Congress
decided to take part "in order to combat the Act and seek the
end of it".
At this period two Indian political leaders came to
the front, Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Alt Jinnah. Nehru was the
son of a famous Congressman, Motilal, whose family, although Hindu
and Brahman, was western-educated. Nehru was sent to school and
the university in England. On his return he had early entered politics
as a supporter of Mahatma Gandhi and soon came to be acknowledged
as his right-hand man and likely successor, and with Gandhi's support
he became President of the National Congress in 1936 and 1937. It
was Nehru's privilege to bring into full action the political machine
which Gandhi had created. Jinnah, who came from a well-to-do Muslim
trading family in Bombay, had been sent to England, like Nehru,
to be trained as a lawyer, and on his return he, too, joined the
Congress. He later crossed over to the Muslim League but remained
adamant that co-operation with Congress was essential and that the
1935 Act could be worked in the provinces only through coalition
governments. On this political platform he fought the general election
of 1937.
Under Nehru and Gandhi the well-organized political
machine of Congress scored a great, countrywide victory, with clear
majorities in six provinces and a remarkable majority in the overwhelmingly
Muslim North-West Frontier Province. On this the Congress decided
to take office in these provinces, firmly rejecting Jinnah's plea
that they should form coalition governments.
This fateful choice, which formed a turning-point
in the modern history of India, arose directly from the nature and
strength of the Congress. It had Always claimed to be a truly national
organisation representing all classes and peoples of India, and
indeed its vast membership at this period, numbering three to four
million, and its working or governing committee was widely representative
of Hindu and some Muslim groups. Its success in 1937 was so sweeping
and so remarkable especially among Muslims in the North-West Frontier
Province that it could see no reason why it should not go On to
absorb the Muslim League, which anyway was. only one and not necessarily
the most important of a number of small Muslim parties.
In fact even in the eyes of moderate Muslims, like
Jinnah, the Congress was increasingly assuming the color of a Hindu
body, and its rejection of coalition government served to reinforce
the evidence of a Hindu superiority already evident in the, civil
services, in education and in the economy as a whole. Personally
humiliated by Congress's decision Jinnah turned to rally the whole
Muslim community behind the Muslim League, and the developing policy
of Congress played into his hands.
Although the 1935 Act envisaged the new provincial
governments as separate entities. Congress quite logically exploited
its own countrywide organisation in such a way that the provincial
ministries looked to the central Congress working committee for
inspiration and guidance; and it was significant that leading Congressmen
like Nehru and Rajendra Prasad chose to remain outside the provincial
ministries and to direct policy from the Congress headquarters at
Wardha.
The actual performance of the Congress ministries,
especially in the way they worked with the existing Civil Service,
in their firm maintenance of law and order and in their financial
management, was impressive. But under their rule relations between
the Hindu and Muslim communities rapidly deteriorated. Communal
riots increased in both frequency and severity. Muslims everywhere
objected in particular to the Congress's educational policy which
was based on Gandhian principles, and which they regarded as a challenge
to their own culture. General accusations were made that Hindu Congressmen
in office were discriminating against Muslims, and between 1937
and 1939 three Muslim reports, purporting to prove this, were published.
On a growing wave of Muslim fear, Jinnah and the Muslim League were
borne into the position of representing the great majority of the
Muslim community. The Muslim prime ministers of the Punjab, Bengal
and Assam, who previously had led their own separate Muslim groups,
joined the Muslim League, and for the first time, largely through
Congress's mistakes of policy, the Muslim League became an effective
political force.
Simultaneously Jinnah's own policy changed and from
supporting the 1935 Act he swung over to the view that any form
of parliamentary government in India based on English practice would
permanently subordinate the Muslims to a Hindu-dominated Congress.
In 1940 he declared "There are in India two nations" and
both he and the Muslim League, taking advantage of policies long
canvassed among extreme Muslim groups, finally put forward in March
1940 the demand for a separate, independent state to be called Pakistan
(meaning "Land of the Pure"), which was to include the
Muslim majority regions of the north-west and north-east of India.
With this declaration partition had become the fundamental issue
of Indian politics.
Meanwhile, in September 1939, the second World War
had broken out and Britain as on the previous occasion in 1914,
took India to war with her. Congress had anticipated this possibility
and, arguing that a country which was not itself free should not
be called on to defend freedom, they demanded independence as the
price of their co-operation, and when the British Government merely
reiterated the promise of Dominion status, the Working Committee
called all the Congress ministries out of office. The Muslim League
on its side offered the Government support only on condition that
Congress policies for India. should7 be rejected.
This state of political deadlock persisted throughout
the war, and whilst the fighting remained remote from Indians frontiers
no attempt to resolve it got very far. But when in 1941-42 the Japanese
armies advanced through Burma, the British hastily dispatched Sir
Stafford Cripps to India to make a new offer of independence to
take effect at the end of the war, if so desired with Dominion status,
and at the same time, with the Muslim position in mind, it was suggested
that any provinces which so wished might contract out of the new
state. But the Congress stood firm both against the idea of Muslim
separatism and for the policy of at once establishing fully responsible
government. With the Japanese on Indians door-step the British Government
felt unable to take this bold step. The Congress obviously felt
that a point of crisis had been reached. "'A post-dated cheque
on a bank that is obviously failing" was Mahatma Gandhi's description
of the Cripps offer, and to force the issue he called on Britain
to quit India under threat of a new non-violent campaign. The Congress
backed him, and the Government promptly interned the Congress leaders
but not before an outbreak of sabotage had cut the railway communications
of the armies fighting on the frontier. By the close of 1942 order
was restored, but the sense of frustration of Indians against Government
and of community against community was marked by a crescendo of
communal rioting.
The close of the war in Europe gave Britain a much-needed
breathing space and the accession to power in the late summer of
1945 of a new Labor Government and the collapse of Japan's war effort
produced a calmer situation in which the British cabinet sought
a final settlement of the India question. Aware that prolonged negotiations
might precipitate a catastrophic civil war they took the bold step
of sending to Delhi a mission of three cabinet members. Acting on
the long-held British assumption that the division of India into
sovereign states could be avoided while giving adequate protection
to Muslim interests, the mission were prepared to proceed at a fair
and feasible pace to this end, but both the Congress and the Muslim
League remained uncompromising.
Meanwhile, to show that Britain was serious in her
intention to transfer power, the Viceroy had been instructed to
bring the major Indian parties into an interim cabinet in which
all the cabinet posts were to be held by Indians. Protracted maneuverings
then followed in which first the Muslim League alone and then Congress
alone undertook to form the interim Government. Not until October
1946 were they both brought into a coalition government by which
time the struggle for power among the leading and middle-class Hindu
and Muslim elements had spread throughout their whole communities.
Rioting became widespread and within six months in Bengal and Bihar
alone over ten thousand people suffered violent death.
It soon became clear that the coalition government
would not work. The Muslim League revealed by its policy that it
had participated only in order to prevent the Congress from controlling
the central government, and when a Constituent Assembly was called
together to frame a constitution, the League refused pointblank
to take part and condemned the Assembly's proceedings as "invalid
and illegal. The British cabinet tried a new approach by inviting
India's leaders to London, but the Congress and the League were
unyielding in their mutual distrust.
Meanwhile in northern India civil strife mounted to
a climax. The worst-affected area was the Punjab where the Unionist
ministry's decision to ban private armies was seized on by the Muslim
League as their opportunity to take power. Attempts by the Hindus
and Sikhs to prevent this soon deteriorated into persistent rioting.
The towns of Amritsar and Multan went up in flames, the work of
the capital, Lahore, was brought to a standstill and roving armed
bands in the countryside fought pitched battles with the troops.
In an attempt to shock India's leaders into a sense
of responsibility the British Government declared that the transfer
of power must be- completed by June 1948, and to point the moral
a new viceroy. Viscount Mountbatten, formerly the Allied Supreme
Commander in South-East Asia, was sent out to wind up the British
administration. But the Congress and Muslim League did not yield
an inch; and the communal war in the Punjab continued and began
to spread to other parts of India.
Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru were profoundly shocked
especially when they saw for themselves these consequences of "India's
mad career of violence"; at the same time it was borne in on
the members of the Congress Working Committee that the political
unity of India could not be maintained except through widespread
civil war and the exercise of force. Moreover, the British had made
it clear that they would no longer accept the responsibility and
in the last analysis the Congress did not feel equal to it. Prompted
by their local parties in Bengal and the Punjab, they therefore
proposed in May 1947 the partition of the Punjab as a solution of
the struggle there. With this decision the partition of India was
brought into the realm of practical politics, and quick to seize
the advantage, the new Viceroy got the London Government to accept
this as a basis of negotiation, and persuaded the Congress, the
Sikhs and the Muslim League to come into line. Swiftly a plan was
drawn for the division of the Punjab and Bengal-in each of which
there were small Muslim majorities-the final decision being taken
by each Legislative Assembly. Boundary commissions were provided
to determine the exact frontiers, and the North-West Frontier Province,
in which Congress had a hold, and the Muslim majority district of
Sylhet in Assam were each to hold a referendum to decide their-
political allegiance.
Thankful that with this news the communal rioting
promptly fell to manageable proportions, the Viceroy pressed on
with great speed to complete the partition. By August 15th, 1947,
it was possible for the Houses of Parliament in London to decree
the birth of two new sovereign states of India and Pakistan, the
latter to consist of a Muslim majority state in the north-west,
including Sind and the Frontier Province, and of a Muslim majority
state in East Bengal including Sylhet. Both the new India and the
new Pakistan elected to become Dominions within the British Commonwealth
of Nations. These decisions together, although not representing
a complete fulfillment of British rule in India, constituted a remarkable
triumph for Britain's post-war policy in India.
As its first Viceroy, India nominated Viscount Mount-batten,
Pakistan named its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah and under them the
complicated task of dividing the powers, rights, assets, and not
least the Indian army and Civil Service was carried through. But
the task was made more difficult by a mass movement of millions
of Hindus and Muslims across the international boundaries, creating
a vast refugee problem.
In the political settlement the position of the Indian
princes was at first left undetermined. British paramountcy had
of course lapsed, and the Viceroy had advised them to seek association
with one or other of the two new states. Some, like Mysore and the
Rajputana states, for communal and geographical reasons promptly
joined India, others similarly placed like Bhopal, which yet had
a Muslim ruler, hesitated before following suit; and two big states,
Hyderabad and Kashmir, both holding key strategic situations, the
former athwart central India, the latter in the north-west, held
aloof altogether. But the Indian States' Minister, Vallabhai Patel
was determined, by a mixed policy of coercion and persuasion, to
bring these big states into closer relationship, and the declaration
by the Muslim Nawab of Hyderabad that he could accept nothing less
than an independent status, forced the Indian cabinet to assert
its authority by ordering the invasion of Hyderabad. There was little
resistance and Hyderabad soon came under direct rule from Delhi.
In Kashmir, the Maharajah, who was a Hindu ruling over a majority
of Muslims, leaned to India but hesitated to fate the final decision.
Communal strife had spread from India into the state and was intensified
by strong governmental action against the Muslims. Taking advantage
of this, Muslim tribesmen from the north-west invaded Kashmir and
moved on the capital Srinagar, whereupon the Maharajah acceded to
India. The Indian Government promptly flew in troops to save Srinagar
and drive the tribesmen out of Kashmir, and in reply Pakistan pushed
in state forces to prevent an Indian victory by force of arms. Military
stalemate was soon reached and a cease-fire, which came under United
Nations' authority, was arranged for January 1st, 1949. This left
the centre and south, including Srinagar and the upper Jhelum valley
and the province of Jammu under India's control. The military struggle
was not resumed but politically the future of Kashmir became the
great bone of contention between India and Pakistan.
Bound up with this problem was the control of the
headwaters of the great Punjab canal and river system of irrigation.
Planned as one great integrated system it .was inevitable that the
partition of the Punjab should give rise to difficulties, the more
serious because the livelihood and life of millions of people were
involved. Prolonged drought in West Pakistan in 1952 and 1953 brought
matters to a head, and the Pakistan press and people became convinced
that India intended to put Pakistan at her mercy by controlling
the Kashmir headwaters, and in the spring of 1953 Indo-Pakistani
tension grew until war seemed imminent. The timely intervention
of the International Bank which proposed to find a way of fairly
dividing the waters and, equally important, of generally enlarging
the irrigation system took this issue for the time being out of
politics. Pakistan, finding that neither the Kashmir problem nor
the headwaters question could be settled within the Commonwealth
began to look outside for support, and understandably sought to
reassure herself by a military alliance with Turkey and by seeking
military help from the United States. Simultaneously her domestic
political situation showed signs of deteriorating. Under the frustrations
of these early years the Muslim League itself began to fall apart.
It lost political control of East Bengal, and in West Pakistan,
the heart of its power, it was torn by the struggles between the
orthodox extremists and the more progressive Muslims. The army and
the civil service provided some stability, but whether Pakistan
was to develop into a progressive modern state or sink slowly to
the lower level of her fellow Islamic countries of the Middle East
seemed uncertain. Pakistan stands at the cross-roads.
India since 1947 has consolidated her position as
the most orderly, democratic nation in Asia. In the spring of 1952
she carried through the great experiment of a general election involving
175 million voters, a large proportion of whom were illiterate.
Two political trends became evident, the first that the National
Congress still possessed the confidence of the country, the second
that orthodox Hindu groups on the one side and the Communist Party
on the other hand gained an all-India and growing status. India's
boldness in political and economic experiment- the latter best seen
in a vast five-year development plan- was not matched in the social
sphere. In international affairs, through the personal contribution
of her Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, she took a line independent
of both the West and the U.S.S.R. At the United Nations she became
the focus of anti-colonial agitation. In the Commonwealth she became
the bridge for western and Asian opinion; and between Asian countries
she sought to develop the Commonwealth method of association. India
has become a power in international politics; but her domestic social
policy and her external relations with Pakistan have still to be
developed and strengthened if she is to prove equal to the international
responsibilities she has undertaken.
Professor C. G. PHILIPS,
Department of History,
School of Oriental and African Studies.
Source: The British Commonwealth 1956
With a Foreword by the Earl of Swinton P.C., G.B.E., C.H., M.C.
Europa Publications Limited, London (1956)
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