History

KEY POINTS

·        The politics of the Muslim elite was driven primarily by a sense of deep insecurity.

·        The Muslim sense of insecurity was rooted in many factors relating to history, demography, lack of progress in English education.

·        Additionally, the shift of Indian politics from the northern and central India, where much of the Muslim elite were concentrated to Calcutta, Madras and Bombay dominated by the new English-educated Hindu elite exacerbated the situation.

·        The Muslim elite’s anxieties were centred largely on the demographic and, therefore, political disparity between Muslims and Hindus and the domination of India’s political and economic landscapes by the upper caste Hindu elite.

·        A landmark announcement in 1932 by British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald came close to removing these anxieties.

·        The British Prime Minister accepted Ambedkar’s arguments and awarded separate electorates to the Depressed Classes on lines similar to those for Muslims.

·        However, Mahatma Gandhi, who was seen as a leading advocate for Dalit rights, went on a fast unto death to persuade the British to repeal the award.

·        To him, the award was a ploy to divide Hindu society that he found unacceptable.

·        Gandhi’s extreme reaction to the award of separate electorates to the Dalits convinced the Muslim elite that Gandhi and the Congress were bent on not giving Muslims their due share in the future political arrangement in India.

·        Their reasoning was simple: if implemented, the Communal Award, as it was known, would have led to parity between caste Hindu and Muslim representatives in the legislatures, and the Dalits, who the Muslim elite did not find threatening and who they saw as potential allies against caste Hindus because of the common fear of upper caste domination, would have held the balance.

·        This would have precluded the need for demanding Partition and in all probability kept India united.

·        This argument sounds plausible because for most of the 1940s Pakistan was but a bargaining counter for Jinnah and the Muslim League.

·        It appears that Mahatma Gandhi’s stance on the Communal Award was responsible for increasing the Muslim leaders’ distrust of the Congress that made Pakistan an attractive option for them.

·        One could plausibly argue that Gandhi’s rejection of the Communal Award sent the message to the Muslim leadership that he and the Congress were more interested in promoting a monolithic Hindu bloc than in nurturing Hindu-Muslim unity or providing justice for the Dalits in the form demanded by Ambedkar.

·        This increased their sense of insecurity and finally led to the demand for a separate state comprising the Muslim majority provinces of British India.