Daily Times

Official historians in India and Pakistan never missed an opportunity to paint elite, nationalist politicians as having led the “independence struggle”. The decisive role of the naval uprising and the revolutionary wave raging across the subcontinent was conceded by then Prime Minister (PM) Clement Attlee a decade later as a guest of P V Chakraborty, the governor of West Bengal. In his letter of March 30, 1976, Chakraborty wrote: “I put it straight to him (Attlee) like this: ‘The Quit India Movement of Gandhi died out long before 1947 and there was nothing in the Indian situation at that time, which made it necessary for the British to leave India in a hurry. Why then did they do so?’ In reply, Attlee cited several reasons. The most important was the revolt of the Indian national army and the Royal Indian navy, which made the British realise that the Indian armed forces could no longer be trusted to prop up the British. When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s movement, Attlee’s lips widened in a smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, ‘Minimal’.”
The true role of Gandhi and his ilk was clearly understood by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. In 1939, on the eve of the catastrophes of World War II he explained: “The Indian bourgeoisie is incapable of leading a revolutionary struggle. They are closely bound up with and dependent upon British capitalism. They tremble for their own property. They stand in fear of the masses. They seek compromises with British imperialism no matter what the price and lull the Indian masses with hopes of reforms from above. The leader and prophet of this bourgeoisie is Gandhi. A fake leader and a false prophet! Gandhi and his compeers have developed a theory that India’s position will constantly improve, that her liberties will continually be enlarged and that India will gradually become a dominion on the road of peaceful reforms. Later on, perhaps even achieve full independence. This entire perspective is false to the core. The imperialist classes were able to make concessions to colonial peoples as well as to their own workers, only so long as capitalism marched uphill, so long as the exploiters could firmly bank on the further growth of profits. Nowadays there cannot even be talk of this. World imperialism is in decline.”
Trotsky explained further that during the war, “exploitation of the colonies will become greatly intensified. The metropolitan centres will not only pump from the colonies foodstuffs and raw materials, but they will also mobilise vast numbers of colonial slaves who are to die on the battlefields for their masters. Meanwhile, the colonial bourgeoisie will have its snout deep in the trough of war orders and will naturally renounce opposition in the name of patriotism and profits. Gandhi is already preparing the ground for such a policy. These gentlemen will keep drumming: ‘We must wait patiently till the war ends and then London will reward us for the assistance we have given.’ As a matter of fact, the imperialists will redouble and triple their exploitation of the toilers both at home and especially in the colonies so as to rehabilitate the country after the havoc and devastation of the war. In these circumstances there cannot even be talk of new social reforms in the metropolitan centres or of grants of liberties to the colonies. Double chains of slavery — that will be the inevitable consequence of the war if the masses of India follow the politics of Gandhi, the Stalinists and their friends.”
The role of the Muslim political elite in the struggle for liberation from the British was no better than that of Gandhi’s clique. In the last analysis, independence was not won through a fight against imperialist rule but through agreements and rotten compromises at the top, in mortal fear of the growing unrest from below. But the ebb of the revolutionary upsurge of the workers and sailors allowed an opening for the religious question, which began to dominate politics. A generation earlier, Jinnah had warned Ghandi against mixing religion with politics. This man, who would one day be hailed as the father of Pakistan, had first been exposed to the idea at a black-tie dinner at London’s Waldorf Hotel in the spring of 1933. His host was Rahmat Ali, the Cambridge graduate student who had outlined the idea for a Muslim state in the subcontinent in his paper ‘Now or never’. He received a “chilly rebuff” from Jinnah. “Pakistan”, said Jinnah — at the time a staunch proponent of Hindu-Muslim unity – “is an impossible dream”.
A decade later, Jinnah presided over a party whose candidates pulled religious strings to win electoral contests. But the arc of Jinnah’s political trajectory merely augments that of Indian politics as a whole. Congress was largely a secular organisation in the first two decades of the 20th century. The emergence of Gandhi and putting religious sensibilities at the centre of politics gave rise to religious chauvinists and stirred up punishing, divisive and contentious passions. Fundamentalist Hindu organisations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sang were rarely present in the political mainstream before Gandhi. With Gandhi’s encouragement they fomented the notion of a Hindu nation. In periods of retreat of the class struggle, the ranks of these organisations swelled.
The elites of all religions also used this divisive religiosity for their interests and benefits. Muslim businessmen foresaw new independent markets, free from the competition of Hindu capitalists. Landlords hoped for the perpetuation of the zamindari system. To the orthodox on every side, a theocratic state was conceived in which officials and bureaucrats would find shortcuts to seniority. Such was the madness and lust for possessions during partition that the Islamic fundamentalists wanted the Taj Mahal broken up and shipped to Pakistan because a Moghul had built it. Hindu chauvinists insisted that the Indus River, flowing through Pakistan, should somehow be theirs because their sacred Vedas were supposedly written on its banks more than two millennia ago.
However, the trauma of partition could still have been avoided had it not been for the treacherous role of the leaders of Congress. The war radicalised the whole British population; the 1945 elections saw the defeat of Churchill and a landslide for Labour under Atlee. The left reformist Labour leaders were terrified of the prospect of the harrowing bloodshed and conflagration they foresaw in the wake of a partition of the Indian subcontinent on religious lines. On March 22, 1946, Clemente Attlee sent a Cabinet Mission to Delhi — Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and Albert Victor Alexander — to resolve the crisis of transition of power to native politicians and prevent the holocaust of partition.
The Cabinet Mission failed to come to an agreement with Congress and League leaders, and came up with its own Constitutional Award on May 16. This envisaged a united federal India, including the princely states, with a federal parliament in charge of defence, foreign affairs and communications, and provincial governments with wide powers. There would be three confederating units: A comprised of Hindu majority areas and sections while B and C would include the Muslim-majority northwestern regions and Bengal-Assam respectively. A constitution was to be framed for the three sub-federations, into which federal, independent India was to be administratively divided.

(To be continued)

The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and international secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at lalkhan1956@gmail.com