SIR, This has reference to Nandalal Chakraborti’s article ‘Was Jinnah secular?’ (The Statesman, 29 August, 2021). Jinnah, a liberal South Bombay lawyer with a Gujarati background that brought him into contact with Hindus, Parsis and others, came to recognise that Muslim rights would not be automatically conceded. M K Gandhi’s arrival from South Africa in 1915 resulted in a series of actions from the Congress with mass public participation, some of which were meant to unite Hindus and Muslims in civic action.
One such was the Khilafat movement (1919-23), which sought to insert India’s Muslims into the Turkish conflict with the West. Jinnah, who had marginal interest in such an issue, warned against religion mixing with politics, but was overshadowed by Gandhi. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, which Jinnah as a Congressman had opposed and for which he was booed by Gandhi’s supporters finally came to an end post Chauri Chaura in 1922.
In 1924, Lala Lajpat Rai wrote a series of articles on the “Hindu-Muslim problem”. Rai wrote that Hindus must oppose empowerment of Muslims because Muslims were planning to establish Muslim rule in India with help of foreign states. So as long as the Muslims insisted on separate electorates, the British would never leave India. Rai published his solution, “My suggestion is that Punjab should be partitioned into two provinces. Under my scheme, the Muslims will have four Muslim states.” Remember this was almost a quarter century before Partition and years before even the word “Pakistan” was coined. On 20 March 1927, Jinnah called an all-Muslim party meeting to discuss the possibility of giving up separate electorates and under what conditions Muslims would be willing to accept a joint electorate. These became known as the Delhi Proposals. The proposals were accepted by Congress, but were vetoed by the Hindu Mahasabha. The Congress succumbed to Madan Mohan Malaviya of the Hindu Mahasabha, who did not want Muslim majorities in Punjab and Bengal. In 1928, an all-parties conference resulted in the Nehru Report, authored by Motilal Nehru. This report took away the Muslims’ demand for separate electorates, replacing them with reserved seats, in proportion to their numbers. It rejected reserved seat for Muslims in Punjab and Bengal and made no reference about Jinnah’s demand of about one third representation to Muslims at the Centre. On 14 August 1929, Motilal Nehru wrote to Gandhi, urging him to work with the Hindu Mahasabha to sabotage Jinnah’s proposals. Jinnah in response to the Nehru report proposed fourteen points under which an agreement could be made. The same year,1929, the British announced that India could not have unrepresentative central government forever and that dominion status was the ultimate goal. The view of Indians were sought for this and was to be discussed at the Round Table conference to be held between 1930 and 1932. They did not produce any agreement and this resulted in the Communal Award of 1932. The next step was the Government of India Act of 1935. In 1937, elections were held under the new rules and crowing over the results Jawaharlal Nehru announced that there were two political forces in India, the Congress and the British government. Jinnah was open to cooperation, but Nehru insisted the Muslim League be dissolved. Congress ministers banned cow slaughter in the provinces they won. In 1940, feeling marginalised by the way Congress operated, the Muslim League resolved to resist any plan for a new constitution. Thus a resolution was made in Lahore in the same year where Jinnah announced that India’s Muslims were not a minority but a nation. In 1946 came the Cabinet Mission Plan. Jinnah felt Muslim interests had been provided sufficient safeguards in this plan and accepted it. But Nehru said that he was free to alter or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan once the British were gone. This effectively sabotaged the agreement and Jinnah backed out calling “Direct Action”. Had Congress not rejected separate electorates, Pakistan would not have happened.
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