BRITISH RAJ AND COLONIAL DIFFERENCE
A set of uprisings against Company power, albeit across a limited geographic expanse in North West India, would lead to the eventual assumption of direct British governmental rule in India and the end of the Company’s administration in 1857.
The British Parliament’s hesitant attempts to control Company activity in India gave way to a wholesale alteration of the governmental structure thereafter. By transferring sovereign control to the Queen in Parliament, and extending the status of subjecthood to all Indians, the transitions in the structure of government seemed at least marginally responsive to Indian discontent with British rule to date. The Government of India Act 1858 effectively established that no extension of existing territory would be undertaken, no interference in religious matters would be made, no distinctions of caste or creed would be maintained in admission to service, ancient rights and customs of India would be respected and the ‘administration of the Government would be for the benefit of all the subjects’.[21]While these high-sounding salutary principles would be flouted time and again over the next 89 years, an altogether new system of governance was engineered. The 1858 Act contained formulae for a federal division of powers between existing and newer provinces, for the division between executive and legislative powers as well as adapting and reforming a civil service that had been established under Company rule. In quick succession a set of Acts to establish a uniform system for a higher judiciary,[22] a uniform policing apparatus[23] and others conducive to homogeneity of the governance function would also be passed.
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the 1858 Act was that it provided for a single and identifiable locus of sovereign authority. However, below the Queen, proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, there would be some elbowing for space between the Secretary of State for India, the Indian Legislative Council and the Governor-General as the institutions at the apex of the governmental order.[24] It was a tricky balance between dispersed and concentrated nodes of power.
The Secretary of State was often referred to as the ‘great white Mughal’ on account of the vast expanse of discretionary authority he exercised. The 1858 Act had also granted wide-ranging powers to the GovernorGeneral and made it compulsory to secure his assent for every enactment passed by the Legislative Council. The rather anomalous feature of executive ordinances was also first introduced under the 1858 Act, empowering the Governor-General to unilaterally proclaim law for all of British India.[25] Shortly after, by way of the Indian Councils Act 1861, the office of the Governor-General came to be associated with a council that allowed for the inclusion, by appointment, of Indians.The codified laws that had been suggested by law commissions in previous decades were resurrected in the early years of transition, and codes of civil and criminal procedure were enacted in 1858 and 1860. The Indian Penal Code was also passed into law, thus ensuring a mixed civil and common law system for the subcontinent.[26]
The rationalisation and systematisation of the law that was undertaken did not preclude official recognition of customary practices. Through enactments such as the Punjab Laws Act and Contract Act of 1872, valid custom was to be the basis of making awards in cases touching upon property transfer, succession, inheritance, and the like.[27] In the realm of personal law, which continued to be governed through religious codes, a strong preference had been shown for the testimony of a certain class of religious scholars and in the case of customary laws, the status of putative religious elders was sanctified.[28]
The idea that the 1857 Rebellion had been fostered by discontent at the disruptions to ‘traditional’ life had gained currency, and colonial policy-makers would play a dual game of incorporation and deference to tradition to maintain their control.[29] In the recruitment and appointment of Indians into the various services, a further dualism was expressed: the doors of the judicial branch would be opened wide, while the covenanted civil services would be retained as exclusively British for some time.
What this also revealed was the unspoken acceptance that the actual work of governing was being done at the sub-provincial, district level by someone akin to a mini-monarch. This was the district magistrate/collector in whom was vested the powers of magistracy, administrator, revenue collector and others.[30]These and many other features of colonial rule in India displayed to its subjects the operations of a fundamental rule of colonial difference. Just below the platitudinous benevolence of colonial government, the operation of assumptions about the civilisational and racial superiority of the colonisers particularly impacted those groups in India who had fostered hopes of being incorporated into governance. Thus, at first moderate and then increasingly more radical sets of demands and challenges to colonial rule were framed against the operations of the rule of difference.
A. The Uneven Spread of Nationalist Thought
When, after 1858, there was an incremental incorporation of Indians into state services, a cadre of young men, educated in the manners of Englishmen, were mainly recruited from the centres of old Company rule. These were mostly Hindu members of an ascendant middle class who had been influenced by liberal ideologies to the extent that they would both try to forge a national culture and to demand representative government.[31] This class came to be highly distrusted by British officials, who directed their attentions to renewing allegiances with what remained of a high landholding elite.
In 1885 the Indian National Congress (INC) was formed in Calcutta to raise what have been termed ‘moderate nationalist demands’ against the colonial government. These included the call for elected councils, ‘holding the civil service examination in India as well as England, separating the judicial and executive functions’ as well as decreasing the financial burden placed on India through the salt tax and home charges.[32] The notion of the continuing uneven nature of the relationship of the colonial government with its subjects would lead in the future to a more heightened anti-imperialism.[33]
From within the seams of this middle class disaffection a group consciousness amongst Muslims was also generated, one which worked in many ways with the categories of colonial knowledge production.
As has been noted, the British introduced a ‘framework of interpretation over India’s past’ that divided it into ‘Hindu, Muslim and British periods’ and ‘they tabulated its peoples under religious headings.’[34] In the latter part of the nineteenth century the British also preoccupied themselves with the relative strength of communities and publicly affirmed the perception that Muslims were falling behind on a variety of measures.[35] In turn, such a notion of decline became a preoccupation for those populations who had perhaps lost the most from the slow dissipation of Mughal power.The Muslims of the Central and United Provinces, where the rebellion of 1857 had played out, had initially been frozen out of governmental patronage. By 1886 Muslim communities in these regions had organised under the banner of the Aligarh movement to counsel Muslims to adopt western and scientific education. The founders at Aligarh and their adherents remained true to a view of remaining fundamentally apolitical but thereafter there was a marked generational transition towards greater political participation.
In 1892 the Indian Councils Act was passed as a response to the call for greater representation of Indians in government. Under this reform, elections were held for representatives, and amongst those contesting it was predominantly Hindu professionals who were the victors, many with Congress affiliations.
This sets the context somewhat for understanding how early anticolonial nationalists had internalised the notion of majority rule, partly through the protocols of assembly voting. This then ‘logically extended this idea of majority predominance to the larger political arena’.[36] While the INC came to be known as the party that represented Hindu-Muslim unity and a programme of official secularism, its membership was considered to be predominantly Hindu. Muslim aristocrats and landlords in the United and Central Provinces would thereafter propound the cause of separate electorates to forestall the powers of a majority Hindu populace and were in some ways offered official patronage as a counter to the reformism being demanded by the INC.
This form of early Muslim nationalism had little immediate traction in the other regions that would become part of Pakistan. Vast differences in modes of governance impacted heavily on receptivity to both secular and Muslim nationalist thought; where Muslims were in a majority, such anxieties were in any case not so great and these included all the regions that ultimately formed Pakistan.
The British policy of working with existing forces in Punjab after it became a province in 1849 ensured a broad-based loyalty and generally harmonious relations between religious communities. Colonial anthropology had determined that the populations of Punjab and the NorthWest Frontier were ‘martial races’ and fit for enlisting in the imperial army. In fact, the British relied upon Punjab as the ‘source for over half the recruits to their entire Indian army’[37] and this provided a wagebased subsidy to an untold number of families. Additionally, efforts to intensify agricultural production in the Punjab were complemented by statutes to safeguard against a pure monetisation of the land market, so that agrarian elites were more secure.[38]
In Sindh, a policy of non-interference by the British in the customary patterns of landholding created somewhat conducive conditions for inter-communal harmony at the elite level. A variety of organisations, both India-wide and more local, sought to organise and represent the large body of peasantry in the province, mostly along non-communal lines. Ultimately however, the disparity in representation by a middle class is what would dictate a move towards an alignment with the goals of Muslim nationalism in the province.[39]
In the North-West Frontier, the border with what would also later emerge as Afghanistan was not settled until the Durand Line was drawn in 1893.[40] For British administrative purposes the region of the Frontier was itself sub-divided into settled areas and what were termed the tribal agencies, most of which constitute the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in present day Pakistan.[41] The Frontier Crimes Regulation of 1901 (FCR) was promulgated as the highest law in the tribal areas. The FCR established the office of Political Agent as intermediary between the central government and the local populace and such administration was unchecked by any higher law.
In the appointment of Political Agents, distinctions were drawn between tribes considered loyal and the rest, who were termed ‘restive, combative’. It was a system of indirect rule but one in which the British retained the right to enforce loyalty, even by means of aerial bombardment when the subject population showed signs of rebellion. While such resistance was often self-consciously aimed at overthrowing foreign rule, the British preferred to see it as an expression of traditions of warfare amongst the Pashtun and therefore not politically motivated.[42] Hindu domination was not perceived as a threat and therefore political forces were far more syncretic in their merger of nationalist goals and religious identity.[43]The instability in Kalat/Balochistan was addressed by its promotion to the status of province of British India in 1877. This was only a fraction of the territory of current day Balochistan, much of the rest continued to exist as a princely state, but one which was subject to far greater political interference from the British than others. The Prince, or Khan of Kalat shared space in a system of divided sovereignty between himself and other tribal sardars under ultimate ‘British supremacy’. Interestingly the ready presence of heavy troops stationed in a custom-built cantonment in Quetta lent a very garrison-like quality to the British presence in Balochistan, a colonial legacy that carries on.[44] In the lead-up to 1947, there was a percolation of some leftist thought in these areas so that organised political activity was aimed as much at displacing sardars as at their colonial masters.[45]
B. Intensified Nationalism
In Bengal, the heartland of middle-class nationalist sentiment in the early years of the twentieth century, the British fanned the flames of hostility between Muslims and Hindus by contriving the partition of the province in 1905. Muslims residing in the eastern parts ‘were easily persuaded that they had much to gain from the new arrangement’: the creation of a Muslim majority province.[46]
Although quickly reversed, the announcement of the partition resulted in wide-scale communal riots and a continuing mutual disaffection amongst communities. The protest movements initiated in West Bengal quickly shifted the focus of their rhetoric from the fact of partition to a direct struggle against British rule at large. The truth of an existing Indian polity was aligned in some articulations to its missing vernacular essence. Organisations such as the Swadeshi movement also elaborated a thoroughgoing critique of the political economy of imperialism and simultaneously distanced themselves from the Anglicised middle classes, who were perceived as having always aided the British.[47]
Sporadic violence against the colonial government and a festering fear of more insurrectionary activity pushed the government towards accommodation on the demand for responsible government. The principle of direct elections to the provincial and imperial councils recommended by the 1909 Morley-Minto reports were incorporated in the Government of India Act of the same year. The 1909 reforms also introduced the innovation of separate seats and electorates for Muslims.
The concession of group representation for Muslims was also an attempt to moderate the temper of this new political sphere. The demand had arisen primarily from an alliance of important Muslim landholders who had founded the Muslim League in 1906. The British saw them as capable of being appeased by the retention of customary rights that they had long exercised, and therefore not threatening to British control over the subcontinent. Although courted by the League, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the renowned constitutional lawyer from Bombay, was not initially a member, even though he had first won public office through the system of separate electorates.
Through the First World War, relations between the colonial government and nationalists in India grew increasingly fraught. Alongside repressive legislation criminalising dissent,[48] the Government of India Act of 1919 broadened the franchise as well as the numbers of representatives to be elected. The Act also devolved greater powers to the provinces, but in doing so inaugurated the principle of dyarchy as an organisational tool for separating powers between the legislative and executive branch. Matters to do with revenue, finance, police and administration were reserved for nominated members of the legislature who were solely responsible to the Governor-General. Elected members of these provincial assemblies could legislate upon other matters of public works and welfare.[49] This was unsatisfactory for Indians broadly and agitational politics would gain ground in the coming years as Mohandas Gandhi assumed a more central role within the Congress party and in many ways helped to create mass support for the nationalist cause.
The year 1920 is interesting in bringing to the fore the contradictions that lay latent behind what may now seem like a teleological and certain realisation of distinct nations. The Khilafat movement was a wide-scale protest waged against the removal of the Ottoman Emperor, who had assumed the notional rank of Khalifa or ‘ruler’ over the global Muslim community. A campaign of civil disobedience or non-cooperation ensued, under the joint leadership of Gandhi and several distinguished members of the Indian Ulema (Islamic clerics).[50]
Continuing in his role of being to this point a proponent of a single civic identity for Indians across religious divides, Jinnah resigned from the INC in protest against the party’s support of the Khilafat movement. He objected to the tactic of non-cooperation with the elected councils of the time and broadly considered the movement dangerous for exciting the ‘irrational’ religious sentiments of the masses. Jinnah would distance himself from nationalist politics and Congress at a time when ‘the breach between Indian politicians began to widen’ in the late 1920s, and return to the fray in 1934 as a spokesperson for the Muslim cause after his services were sought by a constellation of forces within the League.[51]
Voted life-long leader of the Muslim League, Jinnah rejoined the field of constitutional negotiations between nationalist groups and the colonial government at a point when the issues at stake had been defined in a triangular fashion. Jinnah became from that point forward the voice of a Muslim minority seeking ‘sufficient’ representation at the centre of a federal state. Congress differed radically insofar as it now affirmed an absolute preference for a unified electorate but shared demands for the abolition of diarchy and for a strong federal government with the League. It additionally was looking for guarantees for self-government or at least formal dominion status for India. The British at this time were playing upon the disaffection between Congress and a Jinnah-led Muslim League, and their own interests were ultimately reflected in the nature of the 1935 Government of India Act.
The 1935 Act, in addition to defining the basis of provincial autonomy, had also granted a third of total representation to Muslims at the centre of this federal structure. Friends and collaborators, like the Unionist Party in Punjab, were awarded and somewhat content with greater autonomy in the provinces.[52] Control at the top was maintained by barring Indian representatives at the centre from legislating on some vital budgetary matters, foreign relations and defence so that extensive powers remained with the Imperial Viceroy.
In the elections held after the 1935 Act came into being, Congress achieved unprecedented success at the polls in Muslim majority and minority provinces. Separate electorates had not in fact established a ready-made constituency for the Muslim League. Instead, vigorous mass-contact campaigns with Muslims and the support of the Ulema as well as Islamist parties had ensured these Congress victories.[53]
C. Muslim Pluralism
It is important at this point to understand that even as the League eventually sought the mandate to speak in one voice for the Muslims of the subcontinent, the field was muddied not only by the proliferation of political positions but also by faith-based groups that did not offer a determinate stance on the relationship between religion and state. For instance, the two dominant schools within south Asian Sunni Islam, Deoband[54] and Bareilvi expressed radically different stances towards the nationalist and partition movements. The Bareilvis maintained an apolitical stance vis-a-vis the Congress-led rise of nationalist politics until close to Partition. The Deobandis on the other hand allied themselves with the Congress and counselled active participation for their adherents.
The antipathy of the Deobandis to the Muslim League and the Pakistani demand stemmed from a deep adhesion to the notion that they, as Ulema, would correctly guide members of the Muslim community. The idea that seemingly secular politicians such as Jinnah were seeking to represent the community in political terms challenged their priority in being able to ‘interpret religious law and guide Muslim public opinion’ through a ‘uniform religious ideology’.[55]
An additional number of Muslim groups were actively engaged in ‘staking out political positions’, including but not limited to the ‘Khaksars, Momins, Ahrar and Khudai Khidmatgar’.[56] Amongst these, the Khudai Khidmatgar (Servants of God) would have a continuing place of importance in the post-independence state of Pakistan. In contrast to the rampant stereotyping of the Pakhtun as fierce, as atavistic and as bound to Islamic orthodoxy, the most potent political force to rise in the Frontier in the lead-up to Partition was dedicated to non-violence, and framed its political programme in an Islamic idiom. The Khudai Khidmatgars would enter into alliance with the Congress from the start and their leader, Abdul Ghaffar Khan, be known throughout India as Frontier Gandhi.[57]
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