Understanding The Muslim Mind by Gandhi Rajmohan

Author:Gandhi, Rajmohan [Gandhi, Rajmohan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184750720
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2000-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

When Congress declared that, despite H.M.G.’s ruling, Assam and NWFP were ‘free to act as they saw fit,’191 Jinnah demanded the scrapping of the Mission plan, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly—and Pakistan.

Ill and fatigued, he went through a nervous breakdown; for a while he was not permitted even to listen to the news on the radio. His health returned shortly after H.M.G. made a major move. On February 20, 1947 Attlee announced that Britain would ‘transfer power into responsible Indian hands by a date not later than June 1948.’ He added that H.M.G. ‘will have to consider to whom the powers of British India should be handed over, on the due date, whether as a whole to some form of Central Government or in some areas to existing provincial governments or in such other way as may seem most reasonable.’192 Wavell would leave, said Attlee. Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin to the King, would be Wavell’s successor.

‘This may lead to Pakistan for those provinces or portions which may want it,’ said Gandhi in a letter to Nehru.193 If Britain seemed ready to contemplate partition, Congress’s will to resist it had all but gone. Its experience of coalition was frustrating. Congress ministers could not fill a post or transfer an official without League opposition. Food was short in the land and strikes were frequent, yet polarization in the cabinet and in the bureaucracy blocked remedies. Nehru and Patel concluded that a smaller India in which they could act freely was preferable to a ‘united’ India that had tied their hands. Three days before the Attlee announcement, Patel told Wavell that ‘he was quite prepared to let the Muslims have the Western Punjab, and Sind and NWFP if they wished to join, and Eastern Bengal.’194

Attlee’s word that independence might be given to the provinces triggered a struggle for their control. Already running Bengal and Sind, and able to count on Baluchistan, the League was determined to obtain the Punjab and NWFP. An attempt it made to bring down Assam’s Congress ministry failed, but in the Muslim provinces the slogans of ‘Pakistan!’ and ‘Islam in danger,’ jointly raised, evoked an irresistible response. A League-led civil disobedience campaign undermined Dr. Khan Sahib’s Red Shirt-Congress ministry in NWFP, and a similar campaign in Punjab achieved more tangible results.

Unwilling any longer to be called a traitor to Islam, Khizr Hyat resigned on March 2. The next day the League leader in the Punjab Assembly, the Khan of Mamdot was asked to form a ministry. The Sikhs, who had supported the Khizr ministry, regarded this as the start of oppression; their leader Master Tara Singh called for action from Sikh youths; but the Muslim guards were also ready. Killings took place in Lahore, Amritsar, Rawalpindi and Multan, further weakening Congress’s opposition to partition.

The Calcutta killing of August 1946 had been followed by the loss of Hindu lives in Noakhali in East Bengal and of Muslim lives in Bihar and U.P. Terrible brutalities marked the deaths. It looked as if the price of a united India might be a civil war.

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