CONSTITUTIONAL END-GAMES

For historians of South Asia, particularly those with a formal, legalis­tic bent, the real meat of partition history is located in the years that Jinnah was articulating the demands of a Muslim community.

The Lahore Resolution propounded the idea that Muslims form a distinct nation, emanating from a distinct civilisation and that the issue of their being lumped into a territory as a numerical minority must be dealt with on the principle of self-determination. In addition, it called for the marking out of territory in which Muslims formed a contiguous majority, particularly in the North West and South East. The former of course contained the provinces of North-West Frontier, Sindh, Balo­chistan and Punjab, and the latter, the territory now called Bangladesh. This notion of providing faith-denominated populations the cover of political sovereignty introduced the idea of splitting provinces on the same lines.

Whether for the goal of equal representation or for a separate nation, the League was able to build mass support after announcing the Lahore Resolution. This support was unequally distributed around the subcontinent. While the League was a pan-Indian organisation, its outward extensions were quite loosely integrated into the strong centre controlled by Jinnah.

The Muslim majority province of Bengal became a representative field for the many tensions that inhered in the definitions of Muslim statehood. The first umbrella for Muslim party politics was provided by a peasant and tenant party that formed a coalition government with the Muslim League after 1935.^[59] The League itself was considerably more radical here than elsewhere, as it was forced to compete in a field where socio-economic interests were foregrounded.^[60] While Jinnah’s tendency was to periodically rein in the populism of the local league’s redistributionary sloganeering, the League’s strength here reflected its inclusionary agenda, which was not readily given such centrality elsewhere.^[61]

In Punjab, Jinnah was competing and oftentimes collaborating with the Punjab Unionists, who ruled that provincial assembly unbrokenly from 1937 to 1947. The Unionists sought a place at the constitutional table mainly to advocate for greater provincial autonomy. They were averse to too forceful a declaration about Muslim unity, given that their ability to control the Punjab dictated alliances with non-Muslim minori­ties in the province. While Unionists relied on Jinnah’s services as a representative of Muslim interests at the centre, they were also quick to abandon him when he traded in aspects of provincial autonomy in favour of the minority Muslim demand for stronger central govern­ment with a parity of representation between Muslims and Hindus. In the lead-up to 1946, the Muslim League under Jinnah sought Unionist support in part by abandoning aspects of a progressive socio-economic agenda.

As the League consolidated its political programme on the ideo­logical grounds of Muslim nationalism, global changes were auguring well for the broader demands of self-governance. The brewing of tensions in Europe and Great Britain’s involvement in the Second World War were of considerable importance.

It was against the swirling currents of alternate proposals, and with the failure of another constitutional conference in 1945 that the hard­ball stance of the Muslim League gained expression. In December of that year, elections were held and Jinnah campaigned hard for League victories. It was in these elections that the League, in its disorganised local units, sought and secured support by drawing on the allegiance of the faithful for the defence of Islam. While there was a wide- ranging syncretism to the Islam that its candidates could be seen to be professing, there was nonetheless a simple binary presented that a vote against the League was a vote to live in Kufristan⁶ This marked a stark departure from previous campaigns in which the issue of Muslim representation was tied to the material rather than moral uplift of the community. On a limited franchise then, the League took over power in Sindh, Bengal and for all intents and purposes, it seemed as though Congress had conceded the Muslim vote long ago.^[63] [64]

While Congress and League were still at war over what would be the dispensations post-independence, some of the widening political participation throughout the polity was expressing itself in a menacing way. The elite politics of the time had long recognised the spectre of violence that existed in its shadow. While the origins of communalist sentiment can be traced to the existence of violence and separateness that pre-existed even colonial rule here, there is no disagreement about the fact that the introduction of representative government as well as party politics hurried the articulation of the notion of distinct commu­nities and nations.

When the final round of British-mediated peace talks proposed the Cabinet Mission plan, a semblance of what Jinnah could have hoped for, ‘an adjustment of votes and of territorial division which would give a Hindu-Muslim balance’, seemed possible.^[65] Congress, although initially also supportive under the Presidency of Maulana Azad, turned its back on the possibility of a weak federal centre and the grouping of provinces into broad zones where a greater degree of power would be vested. In response to this failure, Jinnah called for a day of direct action in which Muslims would, in his view, protest peacefully for a recognition of their rights. What happened instead when many thou­sands gathered in Calcutta to hear the speech of the Bengal Leaguer, Nazimuddin, was the fomenting of hatred and the start of a spiral of violence that would spread to neighbouring Assam from Bengal and leave over 4,000 dead in the course of a few days.^[66] This would be only a mild precursor of the violence that was to ensue when the largest human migration in history would take place across a newly-drawn border.

VI.