On June 6, 1946, Jinnah and the Muslim League accepted the Constitutional Award. By doing this Jinnah in fact rescinded the Pakistan Resolution of March 23, 1940, passed in the Lahore Declaration, and abandoned the demand of partition of the subcontinent. Meanwhile, Congress presidency passed from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Jawaharlal Nehru in May 1946. Viceroy Lord Wavell saw it as an opportunity to accept Jinnah’s demand that the decision to nominate Muslim representatives to the interim cabinet be the sole prerogative of the Muslim League.
The Congress leaders could not arrive at a consensus to accept or reject the Constitutional Award. Reluctantly, after being pressurised by various quarters, they accepted it with conditionalities attached but refused Wavell’s invitation to join the proposed interim government. Their gamble was that it would be next to impossible for Wavell to appoint a cabinet led by Jinnah without the participation of Congress. Their calculations proved to be correct. Wavell withdrew his offer on June 16th. Jinnah was deprived of his life-long ambition to be the head of state of United India. Jinnah felt cheated by Congress leaders but also considered the attitude and actions of Cabinet Mission members to be treacherous. Nehru was jubilant at the crushing of his adversary’s fondest dream. On July 7, at a press conference after the All India Congress Committee (AICC) session, an overconfident Nehru threw a spanner in the works. He said that his party had only agreed to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s provisions, if it so wished, and the confederal units scheme would most likely not materialise at all. Dilip Hero, in his recent book The Longest August, assails Nehru for his role in instigating partition: “Nehru’s discreet, aggressive statement finally and irrevocably killed the scenario of a united, independent India. It led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award. This was the last in a series of landmark events — all of these wrought by the Congress Party — which culminated in the partition of the subcontinent”.
Commenting on these events, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, in his book India Wins Freedom, dedicated to “Jawaharlal Nehru, friend and comrade”, says the following:
“This was one of the greatest tragedies of Indian history and I have to say with the deepest regret that a large part of the responsibility for this development rests with Jawaharlal. His unfortunate statement that Congress would be free to modify the Cabinet Mission Plan reopened the whole question of political and communal settlement. Mr Jinnah took full advantage of his [Nehru’s] mistake and withdrew from the League’s early acceptance of the plan.”
In most of the works on partition, Gandhi is portrayed as the crusader of unity. Azad, his close associate and the former president of Congress, wrote about Gandhi’s position on partition: “But when I met Gandhiji again, I had the greatest shock of my life to find that he had changed. He was still not openly in favour of partition but he no longer spoke so vehemently against it. What surprised and shocked me even more was that he began to repeat the arguments, which Sardar Patel had already used. For over two hours I pleaded with him, but could make no impression on him.”
As the plains of Punjab and Bengal were being drenched in innocent blood from the post-partition massacres of communal frenzy, Gandhi, one of the chief architects of instilling religious venom into the politics of the subcontinent, chose the luxurious Birla House, the spacious mansion of the textile millionaire Ghanshyam Das Birla, his long-term patron and financier, to preach his “spiritual nonviolence” demagogy. Nehru described the situation in India that fateful August as “catastrophic conflagration”. Across the controversial Radcliff line, Governor General Jinnah was on a visit to Lahore in those turbulent times. His rehabilitation minister, Mian Iftikharuddin, and editor of the Pakistan Times, Mazhar Ali Khan, flew him over divided Punjab. He reportedly struck his forehead with his hand in a sign of remorse and said, “What have I done?”
With the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge of 1946, partition had become inevitable. The imperialists and their native stooges could not have risked a united subcontinent, as the struggle of independence would not have halted at the stage of national liberation. It would have pushed relentlessly forward towards social and economic liberation, overthrowing the rotten capitalism left behind by the British Raj to perpetuate imperialist plunder and the loot of the native bourgeois. Sixty-eight years later, the rulers of the South Asian subcontinent are still pursuing the same policies of hate and prejudice that led to the bloody partition of 1947. The masses have suffered. According to a UNICEF report, the health conditions of the masses are far worse today than they were during the imperialist occupation. This region has more than one-fifth of world’s population yet it holds more than 40 percent of the planet’s poverty. The ruling classes in India and Pakistan have failed to carry out the tasks of creating modern, industrialised nation-states. None of the tasks of the national democratic revolution have been completed. The bigoted fundamentalists of the world’s oldest religion, Hinduism, now rule the largest democracy in the world, India. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, the ruling classes use religion to coerce the toiling masses with terror and black reaction perpetrated by the Islamic fundamentalists.
The workers and youth of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh have time and again risen in revolutionary upheaval, cutting across religious and other prejudices of the past, and demonstrating class unity and the potential of the working classes to challenge and change the system. The absence of a genuine Marxist leadership embedded in the class led to retreats and the withering away of these movements. The masses have endured many betrayals. But as long as there are classes the class struggle will surge again and again. A victory in any country of the subcontinent will trigger revolutionary storms and upheavals in the whole region. Revolutions know no partitions and frontiers. A revolutionary victory can lay the basis for a socialist federation of South Asia that can end this suffering and misery. It will also undo the crimes of imperialism and their local toadies, who cynically carved the living body of the people and cultures with the history of common living for more than five millennia.
The renowned communist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote a long poem on August 15, 1947 on the morrow of partition, titled ‘Elusive Dawn’. The last stanza says the following:
“There has been no easing
of the full weight of night.
Parched eyes, aching hearts are yet
to find their moment of deliverance.
Move forward;
the destiny we seek has still not yet arrived.”
(Concluded)
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]