Muhajirs and the Nation: Bihar in the 1940s by Papiya Ghosh

Author:Papiya Ghosh [Ghosh, Papiya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138380349
Google: p60_wwEACAAJ
Goodreads: 49888824
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2009-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Badruddin Ahmed wanted the AIML to organise an All India Muslim Labour Union under the Muslim League.58

58 Ibid.; also see The Star of India, 31 May 1940 for the Munger Muslim League Conference resolution sympathising with the unemployed workers of the Munger Peninsular Tobacco factory and asking the management to arrive at a settlement.

Even as the Muslim League spread its organisational base in north Bihar and the Santhal Parganas, by around July 1938 there were reports of some Momins (the weaver community) moving away from it. This was visible when speakers at a Muslim League conference in Bihar in May 1938 asked Momins to ask their representatives in the Legislature to resign and make way for Muslim League representatives. The suggestion was strongly resented. In June, a Momin Conference in Darbhanga made a demand for half the Muslim seats, as well as a ministership to be allotted to the Momins. In July, meetings of Momins continued to dissociate themselves from the Muslim League.59 The League responded by giving more attention to subaltern Muslims and sponsored a conference of Kunjras (vegetable growers) at Bihar, and focused on winning back Momins to its fold.60 It was a contested field. If 50 Momins in Saran declared their support to the Congress, a meeting of 250 Momins in Darbhanga resolved that they had nothing to do with either the Congress or the Muslim League.61 In October 1938 several Momins held meetings dissociating themselves from the League in places like Ranchi, Arrah, Danapur and Darbhanga.62

59 Chatterji (1999, pp. 1411–13), Confidential, Patna, 8 June 1938 and Confidential, 5 and 25 July 1938.

60 Ibid., p. 1415, Extract from Chief Secretary’s Report for the second half of July, 1938, PS 16/1938, Patna, 5 August 1938.

61 Ibid., p. 1420, Chief Secretary’s Report for the second half of August 1938.

62 Ibid., p. 1427, Chief Secretary’s Report for the first and second halves of October, 21 October and 6 November 1938.

While the Muslim League leadership and its Pakistan movement were contested by the Abdul Qaiyum Ansari-led Momin Conference, the branch led by Latifur Rahman supported the Muslim League. A zamindar in the Gaya district, Latifur Rahman owned ‘about 52,000 acres of land’.63 He had participated in the non-cooperation movement and was general secretary of the Gaya Congress Committee for some time in the 1920s. Selected by Mazharul Haque to edit The Motherland, Rahman had worked for the publication at the Sadaquat ashram Congress headquarters in Patna.64 He later moved away from the Congress because, as he put it, ‘the days of unity were over’, and the ‘Muslim community as a group’ had come to stand ‘outside the Congress’.65 In 1936, Latifur Rahman decided to overcome the non-representation of the ‘Momin qaum’ in electoral politics by extending support to an existing provincial Muslim organisation and opted for the MUP when it was floated in 1935. He described his joining the party as a personal decision at the Chotanagpur District Momin Conference in April 1936, and recommended that the Momin community support it.66

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