It is definitely a tendentious article mixing fact and factoids in the usual manner of partisans of

Pakistan and ignoring Britains own games. I think I will attempt a series of responses rather than just
one to the issues and personalities in the article.
Nehru was of course somewhat somewhat unhinged. He began his career at the top like his grand
son and great grand son. He did begin by taking on Gandhi, and on being challenged very quickly
withdrew. It is not commonly known that Nehru JN unlike Nehru ML was unsuccessful in his practice
at Allahbad and at one stage Gandhi had been approached to offer him a paid appointment. This is
when Jinnah was India's highest paid lawyer. It is my suspicion that the only reason Nehru pere did
not take aboard Jinnah's fourteen points on the reaction to the Simon Commission was his desire to
have Gandhi make Nehru fils the next President of the Congress. Nehru's Discovery of India must be
read in the manner of the books American presidential candidates are expected to write such as the
Audacity of Hope-idealism and promise are the desirable qualities in any prospective national leader
and the Discovery is certainly imbued with them. Incidentally, whatever one may think of Nehru's
purple prose on Kashmir it expresses pretty well the effect the place on its lovers. Here is
Younghusband, a hunting fishing shooting type, an empire builder, on Kashmir:
He has a whole chapter on its beauties but I quote only one line- "....I lay entranced with its exquisite
beauty...but the the animals and soaring eagle may have been stone blind for all the impression of
beauty it left upon them. Clearly it is not the eye but the soul that sees...what might there not be
staring me straight in the face to which I am as blind as the Kashmir stags are to the beauties. The
whole panorama may be vibrating with beauties man has not the soul to see."
Nehru's failure to properly express the line of beauty in the writers view, his dislike of Jinnah or even
his blunders with regard to the Chinese post independence take little away from his role in building
India as a modern, secular and democratic republic. If India is not like Pakistan it is because of the
Nehru after independence who built the nation ethos even if one believes Ram Manohar Lohia that
Patel 'was the greater idealist of the two, although he did not leave behind him misleading trails of
high-souled effusions.'
I have no difficulty with the argument that Gandhi communalized politics, that he drove away the
greatest secularist of them all M A Jinnnah, that he was was wilful religious zealot who also could
not insisted that it was either his way or the highway, as we know from the resignation of Bose as
Congress President. (Bose was not the first Indian to qualify for the ICS as the article says. He was
perhaps first in the list of successful candidates).
Thus far I have no real problem with the article. I am not a fan of the Discovery of India and I find it
tedious enough, but I have to say it is less mythical than that the discovery of Pakistan that Aitzaz
Ahsan attempted in his Indus Saga. That one is a laugh.
The next installment will follow in the evening.
Coming to the middle part of the article-The errors and omissions of the Congress are well
documented. In the 20s and early 30s the AIML had become almost moribund. Which is why Liaqat
Ali Khan had to go to England to persuade Jinnah to come back to India and lead the Muslims. Jinnah
was probably suborned by British intelligence while in England. He told Durga Das who met him
there that he would be back sooner than thought. Khaliquzaman the author of Pathway to Pakistan
mentions that the idea of Pakistan was being discussed as early as 1938. After Nehru's blunders over
giving the Muslim League a share in the UP ministry and the failure of his mass contact movement
things did not look to good for Jinnnah and it is at that point that the divine intervention in the form
of the second world war came to Jinnah's rescue. He and Linlithgow now cooked up their scheme
whereby nothing would be conceded to the Congress unless the Muslim League assented. The
British and the AIML under Jinnah were collaborating in the British war effort hereafter particularly
after the quit India movement. That we know was partly because SC Bose had escaped and joined
the fascist cause. Gandhi and Nehru were worried and it would seem played right into the hands of
the Linlithgow and later Wavell. Jinnah as a collaborationist now was dictating terms, rejecting the
overtures Gandhi made and maintaining an enigmatic silence. Churchill is believed to have been
advising him at this stage as Alex von Tunzelman has noted in her book Indian Summer. The British
were using Jinnah and the League and this close camaraderie was expected to continue; except for
the fact that Churchill and the Conservatives were voted out at the end of the war. Jinnah expected
that the British would string Congress along till things played out the way he wanted. Unfortunately
that luxury was not allowed any longer.
The TNT which Jinnah adopted as a bargaining tool according to some, especially Ayesha Jalal, was
always a political tool never a tangible reality. Jinnah asked for the country to be split and in his
many speeches, in a reversal of his life's work as a proponent of secular democratic values played up
his theory of difference. The Punjab was communalized and won over with the help of the Pirs and
Maulvis whom the AIML actively courted. This led to a complete reversal in the fortunes of the
Unionist Party in the 46 elections but even then the League did not gain a majority. It was by then
living of the threat of violence as it demonstrated in the great Calcutta killings.
The Congress had rejected the Cripps mission as it eventually did the Cabinet Mission Plan because
the right of secession that Cripps allowed and the amorphous states that the CMP called into
creation would not have worked from the start, let alone for the decade that the CMP proposed.
At this stage Jinnah seemed to have shed all his principles. He was planning for an integrated
Pakistan but a weak India, with overtures to the princely states of Hyderabad, Travancore, Jodhpur
to leave Hindu India and either join Pakistan or seek independence. Jinnah would have been happy
for India to be further diminshed by the loss of West Bengal and Assam. From his point of view that
only enabled a stronger Muslim country in the East which would later merge with Pakistan in the
West.
Whatever the blunders of the Congress and especially Nehru, Gandhi or Patel the outstanding
feature of this period is the adamantine inflexibility of Jinnah. He bent over the CMP eventually but
only to ensure that the India created in Part A would be a weak friable sort of entity. Congress in my
opinion was absolutely right to reject it.
Partition of course did not solve the problem of the Muslims it was meant to succour, the ones
residing as minorities, and it wasn't the demand originally of the Muslims of the Punjab who were
persuaded to vote in its favour only after years of vicious communal propaganda. Sikander Hayat
Khan and his successor Khizr Hayat Tiwana were both opposed to the division of India; but not
Jinnah. He had invested his all in a big bluff and when the bluff was called he had no choice but to
accept his moth eaten state. He did make a play for Kashmir (despite denying that he knew anything
about the tribal invasion) and failed. One reads that on his deathbed Jinnah regretted what he had
achieved but it was too late then. British apologists, who can still be found in the form of Alastair
Lamb and Perry Anderson should shed more light in the devious games their own race played in the
division of India. In particular they should focus on the need to control the army of India after
independence so as to counter the USSR-Or the favourable balance of sentiment they hoped to
achieve in the middle east by creating Pakistan though as a counter to the loss of influence by
supporting the creation of Israel.
One feels sorry for the Khan brothers. Their Pakhtun followers did not want to join Pakistan and it is
arguable that had they remained with India then under the progressive leadership of the two
brothers the Pathans would have achieved a much greater degree of social, poltical, economic and
educational advancement than had been possible in Pakistan. British perfidy under Olaf Caroe is well
understood nowadays and his nudging the Pathans towards Pakistan. Olaf Caroe was incidentally
also a cold war warrior sent to advise the US later in the 50s. Gandhi, Nehru and Patel did throw
them to the wolves.
In sum, though the Congress blundered, Jinnah became a victim of British intrigues and thought he
still held a full hand when the British had vacated the table and taken to a different sort of game.
They propped him because they thought they would continue to need him in a post war world
against the USSR. Albion proved perfidious once again.
More later, if you still have patience.
Later in the article Anderson abandons all pretension to scholarly neutrality. Within a month he
(Mountbatten) had decided that since the deadlock between Congress and the League could not be
overcome, partition was inevitable. Isnt that what the Muslim League had demanded in the Lahore
resolution? Didnt Jinnah till Baldev Singh in December of 46 that he would accept a Pakistan the size
of a matchbox? If Jinnah wanted a sort of confederation all he had to do was revive the 1916 Muslim
League Congress Pact that foresaw strong states and a weak centre. In any case his League was not
behind him on that one.
Witness how the author gratuitously attacks VP Menon. Pakistan was willing to remain in the
commonwealth, the Congress was not but to Anderson he is the villain for persuading Nehru to
agree to it. The answer came from the Father Joseph of the moment, V.P. Menon, a Hindu
functionary from Kerala in the upper ranks of the imperial bureaucracy, working on Mountbattens
personal staff and a close confederate of Patel, the organisational strongman of Congress. Why not
offer Indian entry into the Commonwealth to Mountbatten in exchange for a partition so point-blank
that it would leave Congress not only in control of the far larger territory and population to which it
was entitled by religion, but also in swift command of the capital and the lions share of the military
and bureaucratic machinery of the Raj? As a final sweetener, Menon suggested throwing the
princely states hitherto left inviolate by Congress, and nearly equal in size and population to any
future Pakistan into the pot, as compensation for what would be foregone to Jinnah. Patel and
Nehru needed little persuasion. If these assets were handed over within two months, the deal would
be done. Whatever does Anderson mean by a partition so point blank. Is that not what Jinnah
wanted? The princely states had to go to India or Pakistan, there was no concession in that, or
miracle performed. Ambedkar has shown that the doctrine of lapsed paramountcy is false. India was
the successor state, indubitably so. It existed at least as early as 1919 by being signatory to the
League of Nations convention. In 1947 continued as member of the UN; Pakistan needed admission.
How is it Menons fault, except that he upset Jinnah nationalists and their British supporters? It was
Menons formulation that produced the draft for Indias constitutional independence, but what was
the error in that?
Andersons narrative is equally flawed over the division of Punjab and Bengal. If the TNT is correct
Muslims must separate from Hindus, yes? But wait, Hindus must not separate from Muslims! Jinnah
is right to want a separate nation for Muslims where they are not dominated by Hindus but it is not
right for Hindus to accept the principle and want no part of a state dominated by Muslims. Congress
is at fault for wanting Punjab and Bengal according to the desire of the Hindus and Sikhs. Why did
Jinnah want Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan any way since they were a different nation? The Hindu
Mahasabha in Bengal actively opposed Sarat Chandra Boses suggestion. It was a communal
organization. What about the Muslim League? I have never understood the Pakistani narrative that
AIML is/was a secular organization. So, though the Bengalis should have been permitted a separate
country even if it was not allowed under the rules which governed the division of India, the same
principle was not to be followed in the NWFP where the Pakhtuns or Baluch did not want to be part
of Pakistan?
Bengal will be sacrificed on the altar of Nehrus all-India outlook? What a laugh! - Suhrawardy, a
proponent of Pakistan to run Bengal with Assam added on, later to merge with Pakistan and no
consultation with the Assamese? That is an argument that I read in the pro Pakistan authors. It was a
grievous error that Nehru is supposed to have committed. What harm did it do? There were no
Punjab style riots in Bengal anyway, so what is the problem? Congress did not want a referendum in
the Frontier because that would have opened the way for a referendum in Bengal. Pretty sensible
for India given the proclivities of Suhrawardy but tough on the Pakhtuns who lost their own chance
to be free or join Afghanistan.
The rest of the Raj was divided without even this iota of popular consent. But few estimates (of
the number killed) place it at less than a million. The number of those uprooted, fleeing to lands they
had never known, was anywhere from 12 to 18 million: the largest avalanche of refugees in history.
Indeed, but it was Jinnnah and the League that wanted India divided. The Pakistani narrative
continues to be that it is Congress fault that Punjab and Bengal were divided; whereas the fact is
that there was no way ever of the two staying as whole entities within Pakistan, except in the
imagination of Jinnah and the League. The Sikhs did start the violence just set off the partition
killings, but violence had been initiated in Punjab especially in North Punjab much before as a result
of the communalization of Punjab by the League all through 1945 and 46.
Perry Anderson loses it when he resorts to that old chestnut about Radcliffe gifting Gurdaspur to
India. Mountbatten had little difficulty getting him (Radcliffe) to change his boundaries to allot two
pivotal Muslim-majority districts in Punjab to India rather than to Pakistan: one controlling the only
access road from Delhi to Kashmir, the other containing a large arsenal.
It was not Mountbatten at all. Radcliffe merely followed the line that Wavell had drawn at least one
year earlier when he sent London a sketch on the division of Punjab should Pakistan come about. He
included Gurdaspur in India for the simple reason that Amritsar could not be accessed through any
other route from the Sikh areas considering that Kapurthala state which lay between the Indian
Punjab and the Sikh majority areas was Muslim majority. Gurdaspur provided the route.
Anderson continues with the obfuscation...when its time was up in the subcontinent British
imperialism did not favour partition. But when London and its envoy in Delhi decided they could not
prevent it, they made a human catastrophe of a setback to colonial amour-propre. The avidity of
Congress for an instant division was the local motive of the disaster. The only fault one can find
with Congress in those last days of the Raj is that it is did not accept Jinnahs terms. It did not accept
a postponement of the inevitable partition for a few years. That it grew tired of Jinnah obduracy and
his determination to obstruct and weaken every attempt to build a strong democratic secular India;
that it would not, after 7 long years of hostility and conflict with him give Jinnah further space and
time to continue with his arrogant rejection of a common destiny. The terms of the CMP that he
grudgingly accepted came without any guarantees of restraint in future, or any agreed meeting
ground of ideas on secularism or anything else of an economic, social or otherwise political nature.
Discussing the princely states Anderson as usual has his facts cockied.
In Junagadh, a peninsula lying across the water from Sind, whose prince opted for accession to
Pakistan, it (Congress) sent in troops to secure the state for India without further ado. Wrong, India
did not send in troops to Junagadh till after the Nawab had flown off to Karachi with his dogs, but
minus his wives. In fact he had sent in his troops to Mangrol and Babariawad, the two states
feudatory but independent who wanted to join India though ruled by Muslims. The rulers appealed
to India and she sent in troops to those two only. When they arrived in Babriawas and Mangrol the
Nawab abandoned Junagadh. India did not take it by force.
More tomorrow.
Junagadh and the Princely States in the Article-Anderson makes his polemical intent clear by
misquoting the facts .
In Junagadh, a peninsula lying across the water from Sind, whose prince opted for accession to
Pakistan, it (Congress) sent in troops to secure the state for India without further ado.

Wrong, India did not send in troops to Junagadh till after the Nawab had flown off to Karachi with his
dogs but minus his wives. In fact he had sent in his troops to Mangrol and Babariawad the two states
feudatory but independent who wanted to join India though ruled by Muslims. The rulers appealed
to India and she sent in troops to those two only. When they arrived the Nawab abandoned
Junagadh. India did not take it by force.

Within a few years, the Muslim Conference had become a National Conference, and by 1944 it had
adopted a social programme to the left of both Congress and the Muslim League, drafted by
communists within the party and envisaging an independent Kashmir as an Asian Switzerland. Its
position, however, was weakened first by collaboration with the maharajahs regime in the name of
support for the British war effort, and then by an unsuccessful attempt to redeem itself by
campaigning for his ouster, which landed Abdullah in jail in 1946.

Wrong again, it was the Muslim Conference that collaborated with the Maharaja under advice from
the Muslim League not the National Conference.
Sometimes Anderson is a creative historian.

In 1947 a blinkered legalism seems to have prompted Jinnah to the naive calculation that the right
of the Nizam to hold onto landlocked Hyderabad, in the middle of the Deccan, would be
compromised by any challenge to the right of the maharajah to dispose of Kashmir, as if there were
any realistic chance of the former not being absorbed by India, whatever the juridical niceties.

It was no blinkered legalism but a careful calculation by Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan. It is a matter of
record that Mountbatten conveyed Patels concurrence to Liaqat Ali to conceding J&K to Pakistan if
it would lay off Hyderabad. Liaqats response as recorded by Shaukat Hayat Khan was that Pakistan
would never surrender Hyderabad for the mountains of Kashmir. Anderson then continues.

Then a full-scale Muslim rising against Hindu rule exploded in the western borderland of Poonch. In
the Valley, where Indian arms had been quietly stockpiled, a battalion materialised from Patiala.

A regiment of Patiala State forces had indeed been requisitioned by Hari Singh but they were sitting
idle when Indian troops landed. Lt. Gen Sen mentions in his book on operations of his 301 Brigade in
Kashmir,Slender was the Thread that he was surprised to discover Patiala troops in Srinagar, but
they were not equipped to use the mortars in their possession. The Indian troop lift was in
opposition to the British Chiefs of the Indian army Rob Lockhart and after him Roy Bucher who both
tried to hold back the Indian Cabinet which eventually led to the replacement of Roy Bucher by Gen
Cariappa.
Perry Anderson entirely omits the planning and actions by the Pakistan government as detailed by
Maj Gen Akbar Khan in his Raiders in Kashmir, a book that I understand the Pakistan government is
trying to get rid of where ever it can lay hands on copies of it.

''Inflamed by reports of massacres of fellow Muslims in Punjab and UP, and backed clandestinely
also haphazardly and incompetently, without heavy weapons or regular command from Pakistan,
Pathan tribesmen poured down from the North-West Frontier towards Srinagar, killing and
plundering in their path, the maharajah fleeing to Jammu.

They were inflamed for loot and were told by Akbar Khan types that there was plenty to be had in
Kashmir. That is what induced them to raid Kashmir.
Anderson then goes on to the well worn threadThere was never any doubt where Mountbattens
sympathies lay.

Mountbatten did more damage to the Indian cause than can possibly be imagined. The connubium
that Anderson smirks about re: Edwina Mountbatten, operated to Indian disadvantage, first when
Mountbatten inserted the following sentence in his letter accepting Hari Singhs accession; AS SOON
AS LAW AND ORDER HAVE BEEN RESTORED IN KASHMIR AND HER SOIL CLEARED OF THE INVADERS,
THE QUESTION OF THE STATES ACCESSION SHOULD BE SETTLED BY REFERENCE TO THE PEOPLE.,
and second when he induced Nehru to go to the UN rather than just throw out the Pakistani
invaders and their Pakistani officers.
Mohammad Yunus, the nephew of Badshah Khan narrates in his memoirs that George Cunningham
governor of NWFP told Badshah Khan that one way to get into Jinnahs good books would be by
leading a tribal lashkar into Kashmir. And Akbar Khan writes in his book

Upon my seeking clarification of our military objective, the Prime Minister said that all he wanted
was to keep the fight going for three months which would be enough time to achieve our political
objective by negotiation and other means.

So much for the inflamed and spontaneous tribal invasion! Of course Anderson goes on repeating
that spurious claim first made by Alastair Lamb that the accession was spurious. That charge has
been refuted often enough so I wont waste space here. Needless to say an oral request is as good as
a written one. Even if the charge made by Lamb were to be true it detracts not an iota from the
legality of Indias or the Maharajas actions.

The Valley was handed to India on a British plate. On the contrary the British officers made every
effort to obstruct India. Messervy actually joined in Jinnahs efforts later. You need to read Maj. Gen.
KS Bajwas detailed history Jammu and Kashmir War to learn of the perfidy towards India of British
generals on both sides.

But the ex post facto assent of the maharajah himself summarily put out of the way once the
province was safely in Delhis hands was no better defence, since India had brushed aside princely
decision in favour of popular preference to take over Junagadh and Hyderabad.

Thats another load of nonsense. I have already explained Junagadh and the Maharajas accession
letter. Hyderabad had no choice. There was no third route available to the princes. It was either
India or Pakistan. The Nizam dithered, and was allowed to do so for over a year while the communal
situation got out of hand and money was given to Pakistan to fight the war in Hyderabad. Eventually
there was no choice but to remove him because he had exhausted all options available to him.

. Abdullah was a popular politician, then and later, in the Valley of Kashmir, but his National
Conference faced fierce competition from the Muslim Conference that had split from it, and neither
party had any mass organisation comparable to Badshah Khans Red Shirts, which had dominated
the North-West Frontier since the early 1930s. Yet when it came to a plebiscite in the NWFP,
religious identity trumped political allegiance, and the region voted for Pakistan.

Anderson is either joking or ignorant. The National Conference till quite recently had a massively
committed mass cadre. The Muslim Conference, exposed as toadies of the Maharaja had no place
left in Kashmir, though they did have support in Jammu till their departure for Pakistan. The only
support left in Kashmir was confined to constituencies of Srinagar where the Bakras held and still
hold sway. Badshah Khan boycotted the referendum but even then lost by less than one percentage
point. Who is Anderson fooling?

The concluding act of partition was a military conquest of familiar stamp: territorial expansion by
force of arms, in the name of national integration.
Rubbish! That is what Pakistan tried and failed to do. It had been stated by India that the Maharaja
was free to choose either country. The Maharaja dithered, Pakistan imposed an economic blockade
and then sent in invaders, India came to the rescue and has stayed ever since.

. On learning something of them, the figurehead Muslim congressman in Delhi, Maulana Azad, then
minister of education, prevailed on Nehru to let a team investigate. It reported that at a conservative
estimate between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims had been slaughtered in the space of a few weeks
after the Indian takeover and, Nehru, on proclaiming Indian victory in Hyderabad, had announced
that not a single communal incident marred the triumph. What action did he take on receiving the
report? He suppressed it, and at Patels urging cancelled the appointment of one of its authors as
ambassador in the Middle East. No word about the pogroms, in which his own troops had taken
eager part, could be allowed to leak out. Twenty years later, when news of the report finally
surfaced, his daughter banned the publication of the document as injurious to national interests,
faithful to her fathers definition of them.

Anderson should have put out details of the report that is accessible to him but not to the rest of us.
I have not heard of it, or of any report that so many were killed. It could be another one of the
factoids with which his article is shot through such as this one.

When modern nationalism started to take hold among Hindus, the British accommodated the initial
Muslim reaction to it with alacrity, granting separate electorates. But after that, no viceroy stoked
religious tensions deliberately. Is that the Pakistani narrative now? Wow!

During the Second World War, when Congress came out against participation in the conflict, the
League was favoured. But once the war was over, Britain sought to preserve the unity of the
subcontinent as its historic creation, and when it could not, tilted towards Congress far more
decisively than it ever had to the League. Popular conceptions in India blaming the creation of
Pakistan on a British plot are legends.

Even after the war when Churchill was still Prime Minister he was hatching mischief with Jinnah.
Durga Das the well known journalist and author of India from Curzon to Nehru and After was
friendly with Jinnah. He records that Jinnah told him in the lift of the Cecil Hotel in Simla during the
Conference in June 45 that if he remained firm on the demand (of exclusively representing the
Muslims and thus breaking the Conference) he would get Pakistan.' Hussain Imam attending the
conference as a leader of the Muslim League told one of the Secretaries at the Conference that a
member of the Viceroys council was advising Jinnah to stand firm.
In refuting Anderson it is not my intention to support the line put out by Congress on the evolution
of Pakistan, or the constructed narrative of official historians. Great blunders were committed and
enormous insensitivity displayed by Congress and its main actors. I have no doubt that Gandhis role,
whatever it may have done to get the masses involved, was detrimental to Indian unity and did
inject an undesirable religious element into national politics. Gandhi and Nehru did drive Jinnah
away. The question is whether Indias break up was inevitable?
Jinnah after fighting for most of his life for Hindu Muslim unity and for India abandoned his
principles and supported the Two Nation Theory, originally propounded by Hindu nationalists, seeing
it through to its bitter conclusion. One can agree that he must have turned bitter after decades of
near two decades of rejection-Twenty years is a long time. Pakistan did not however prove to be the
solution to the political problem of Muslims where they were a minority. Where they were in a
majority the problem was of an entirely different kind. How to negotiate power from an inevitably
Hindu dominated central government. The minority Muslims were left with less than they had
before, the majority Muslims with more than they could handle.
Ayaz Cheema If you retain the patience still to read this-Definitely the last one, unless Facebook
makes me break it up.
In his concluding analysis of the Hindu Muslim problem that led to the creation of Pakistan Anderson
finally lets us see the pair of blinkers he is wearing. His nose is pointed in a certain direction and that
is the only one he can see. To quote Anderson again;

. The practical necessities of rule might temper arrangements with the infidel much subsequent
idealisation surrounding figures like Akbar, as ruthless as the rest of his line in dealing with Rajput or
other native foes but there was never any doubt which religion had the force of the sword behind
it, or that sectarian clashes at ground level would punctuate the record, as in every premodern
society with more than one confession. Under the British the tables were turned, and it was plain
which community now had the upper hand. For Congress to believe that such deep legacies of
conquest and conflict, such sweeping inequalities of power and reversals of them, could be erased
with a mythology in which Congress was the natural offspring of Mother India, could only be self-
deception on a heroic scale. The consequence was a fatal partisan arrogance. What need could there
be to arrive at a modus vivendi with the Muslim League, when the party of Gandhi and Nehru
already embraced every part of the nation? Broadly, it was the persistent Congress claim to speak
for the whole country as the only alternative to British rule that precipitated the crisis and made
partition inevitable, the historian B.B. Misra has written. On this evidence, had it acted more
modestly and wisely, the subcontinent could have avoided the calamity of its division.

The idealization is neither subsequent nor a product of the Hindu mind. That narrative, of Akbars
secular bent, was written up by British historians. Its accuracy is testified by coeval events, not
subsequent idealization. Andersons critical faculties could have been put to more productive use if
he had tried to understand why Akbar is considered a villain in Pakistan, and Aurangzeb the hero,
and he would have learned something from deconstructing the legend that Pakistan was born when
Mohammed Bin Qasim invaded Sind.
Of course such deconstruction would have stemmed the free flowing prejudice pouring profusely
from Andersons pen, but it would have given a more accurate and modern perspective to his
backward looking view of 20th century India; only possible had he not been in thrall to the Pakistani
myth. His account is suffused with dated perspectives of Islamic domination, and the need for
Congress to have dealt with Jinnah and the AIML on that basis alone, not as 20th century citizens of
an emerging country. Congress did need to be more sensitive to Muslim sentiment, but should it
have bent backwards to accommodate the feudal Muslims view of his place in modern India?
I think not. BBC World puts out a rather inane program on weekends called Dateline London in
which a bunch of journalists analyse world problems. I havent watched it for some years now but I
recall a Pakistani journalist who would, whenever India Pakistan problems were discussed, object in
an anguished tone with,`but you forget, we ruled them for a thousand years. No one took notice
but he would insist that that was the key to the problem. Anderson has the same sort of attitude.
Anderson again;
It can be argued that no political force could have averted that division, so deep and so long-
standing were the differences, and latent antagonisms, between the two major religious
communities of South Asia. This was the position of the original advocates of Pakistan, and has
remained the stance of its spokesmen and rulers ever since, in a no less mythological and
anachronistic vision of two nations projected back to Mughal days or the mists of time For the
subcontinent was not just the theatre of two major, incompatible religious systems, but also their
associations with unequal political power, and to boot a recent dramatic reversal of the hierarchy of
dominance between them. Could a secular nationalism ever have successfully unified two such
communities of believers? That was the original goal of Congress, when it was still an elite concern.

So far so good, but then after bringing in Gandhi and Hindu revivalism into the discussion Anderson
puts the entire blame on Hinduism and Congress, as in;

The unitary India of his dreams died because the particularist religion of his forebears lived.
Congress could then only superficially be held responsible for partition, its successive blunders and
hauteurs becoming effects, not causes, of a rift that was bound to split the Raj once the British
left.Such a conclusion, however, is not more palatable to polite opinion in India than the alternative.
Confronted with the outcome of the struggle for independence, Indian intellectuals find themselves
in an impasse. If partition could have been avoided, the party that led the national movement to
such a disastrous upshot stands condemned.

Partition could have been avoided, but not just because Congress with Gandhi and his religious
obsessions failed to pay homage to Muslim revivalism. On its own the AIML was getting nowhere
with the common Muslim and needed Jinnah to spin a yarn. And Jinnah the consummate
professional then obliged with a narrative borrowed from Savarkar and Lajpat Rai.

If partition was inevitable, the culture whose dynamics made confessional conflict politically
insuperable becomes a damnosa hereditas, occasion for collective shame. The party still rules, and
the state continues to call itself secular. It is no surprise the question it poses should be so widely
repressed in India.

I have to say that the damnosa hereditas is that of the AIML and Jinnah and the debt is being paid by
Pakistan not Congress and India.
Historically, the larger issue ( of Hindu Muslim differences and their political consequence) could
be held undecidable. What is not beyond accounting, however, is something else. Whether or not
partition was bound to come, the plain truth is that the high command of Congress took scarcely any
intelligent steps to avert it, and many crass ones likely to hasten it; and when it came, acted in a way
that ensured it would take the cruellest form, with the worst human consequences. For even were a
scission of the subcontinent foreordained by its deep culture, its manner was not.

This is the same old Pakistani line camouflaged in Andersons verbiage-That Pakistan was inevitable,
but the violence of it was the fault of Congress, because it asked for the division of Punjab and
Bengal. The violence was in fact pre-ordained; it was an implicit threat in Jinnahs call for Direct
Action, and manifested immediately in Calcutta, and in Northern Punjab. It was threatened by the
League cadres in their slogans and in their actions. Anderson is just plain dishonest. It was always
going to be Pakistan or violence. In the event it was Pakistan and violence, because the Hindus and
Sikhs of Punjab and Bengal opted out of Pakistan. And though I am not an admirer of the Nehru
before independence I find the following just plain calumny, no more.

Nehru, not a spectator but an architect of the outcome, possesses no such exemption (of the
violence attending partition). Eager at all costs to enter his inheritance, confident that subtractions
from it would only be temporary, his record falls under another jurisdiction: the ethics of
responsibility.

So, it is not Jinnahs fault for wanting Pakistan, nor the fault of the League for threatening violence,
nor of its goons for starting it in Calcutta. It is Nehrus fault for calling Jinnahs bluff, for not paying
the debt that Britain owed Jinnah for his support in WW2, for not accepting Londons promissory
note to Jinnah in the form of the Cabinet Mission Plan, for seeing through the Churchill/Jinnah
intrigue, for refusing to let the fate of India and Indians be subject to machinations between the
imperialist power and religious feudalism. Most people would think he was astute in avoiding the
traps and pitfalls into which the British wanted to lead him and the Congress after in 1945 and after.
One reads that Pakistani schoolchildren read textbooks written up with a vicious anti Indian anti
Hindu perspective. Much the same description can be used for Perry Andersons article.

Perry Anderson takes as a given the Ashrafia narrative of a natural right to rule and is surprised that
Nehru failed to bow to it. Where Gandhi failed, and following him Nehru, was in failing to recognize
the aspirations of the rising Muslim professional classes to which Jinnah belonged and some of
whom wanted to work with Hindus in a freedom movement, but not in an overtly Hindu framework.
Jinnah, it may be recalled, was an admirer of the conservative Hindu Bal Gangadhar Tilak defending
him in the sedition case. His real hero was the liberal Gokhale. Gandhi returning from South Africa
with a halo captured the Congress and gave its politics an overt religous tinge and imbued it with his
own peculiar moral values, even berating Motilal Nehru once for drinking alcohol. What business of
his was it anyway, and it rightly drew a spirited response from Motilal.
Muslim grandeur and power had only ever resided in the Ashrafia (Syeds, Mughals and Pathans).
Muslim converts from Hinduism were not part of this elite group, and this includes converts from
Rajput, Jat and Brahmin groups. Kashmiri Muslims even today divide up into separate groups in
which the Mallahs are a class apart. No doubt the Ashrafia categorization did not hold too strongly in
Punjab, but it was rampant across the Jumna. The Ashrafia may have held the sort of opinion we
hear from Mr. Ayaz Cheema of a superior Muslim civilization conquering India. Common Muslims of
course clung to the illusion of Muslim superiority in much the same way as the lumpen element in
Hinduism subscribes to the RSS ideologies.

The Hindu Mahasabha operating from within the Congress in the 20s and early 30s prevented an
accommodation with the Muslim point of view even when articulated by someone as reasonable
and secular as Jinnah who was himself going against the grain of dominant Muslim League opinion in
seeking accommodation within Congress. He had succeeded earlier with the Lucknow pact of 1916
and for some years thereafter the Muslim League and Congress worked in close coordination. Things
fell apart after Gandhi gave support to the Khilafat movement aligning with fundamentalist Muslims
and later called off the non cooperation movement. Muslims had been encouraged to quit their
jobs, even migrate to Afghanistan (because it was improper to live in a Dar ul Harb which British rule
was supposed to be) during this honeymoon between Gandhi, the Hindu right(Swami Shradhanand)
and the right wing Muslim fundamentalists led by the Ali brothers. Jinnah had opposed
accommodation with Muslim fundamentalism, and when he criticized this policy at the Congress
Session in Nagpur, Gandhi's supporters hooted him off the stage. Jinnah then quit the Congress, but
he kept trying to cooperate with it, right up to the arrival of the Simon Commission in 1928 when he
tried to get the moderate Muslim viewpoint incorporated. Motilal Nehru who used to work closely
with Jinnnah and was drafting a report for the Congress failed him here because he was anxious to
please Gandhi, in order to have Jawahar Lal made the next Congress President. Jinnah had also
annoyed the Muslim Leaguers who found him excessively accommodating of the Hindu point of view
and it split in two meeting separately under Mohammad Shafi and Jinnah in its Calcutta session.
Thereafter Jinnah left India to practice in London. He was a lonely figure then shunned by Hindus
and Muslims. His wife had left him and she was dead by 1929. In the round table conferences he was
mostly ignored and his political career seemed to be over. The tragedy of partition lies in Gandhi and
Nehru even then not seeking to accommodate Jinnah. After the 1937 election Nehru could very well
have accommodated the Muslim League in UP because they had fought the election in cooperation
with each other. Khaliquzzaman for example was a Congressman lent to the Muslim League.
Congress then as now is purblind. In those days its eyes were firmly fixed on the horizon; nowadays
they are fixed on the family deities.
The Ashrafia were only Syed, Pathan, Mughal; everyone else was ajlaaf. This includes by definition
the Kashmiri Brahmin converts as well as the Punjabi Rajput and Jat. In practice however the
Ashrafia categorization did not operate in Punjab and Kashmir because the ruling Muslim chiefs
were quite often Rajput and sometimes Jat along with Pathan. In Kashmir as you know it is Syeds
and Pirs collectively described as Mallah versus other Kashmiris who themselves distinguish between
themselves and other occupational categories.
The Ashrafia operated in the Hindi heartland to distinguish those of foreign origin from the native
stock.