Liberalism in Empire by Sartori Andrew Stephen;

Author:Sartori, Andrew Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

5

Peasant Property and Muslim Freedom

If we consider the founding of Pakistan in 1947 as the single most consequential political expression of a self-identifiedly “Muslim” aspiration to collective self-determination in South Asia (whatever the ambiguities, contradictions and exclusions of that aspiration, and whatever the disappointments that the reality of Pakistan soon presented to those who had advocated for it), we will quickly arrive at a realization of the enormous historical significance of the apparently obscure Bengali agrarian politics of property. When Muhammad Ali Jinnah pressed his claims to be the “sole spokesman” for India’s Muslims in the final negotiations of the terms of British withdrawal, his position turned crucially on his ability to demonstrate that there was strong support for the Muslim League in the 1945–46 provincial elections.1 Bengal was home to the single biggest concentration of Muslims in the subcontinent, and without a good showing there, Jinnah risked being radically undermined. Yet Bengal had been a region that had rarely given Jinnah the occasion for much delight or comfort in the preceding decades. As a Muslim-majority region, the political concerns of its Muslim politicians were different from those of the central League leadership, whose center of gravity was firmly planted in the Muslim-minority regions of northern India.

In the first elections held under the 1935 Government of India Act, with an expanded franchise that reached much more deeply into the countryside, the Bengal Provincial Muslim League had won a smaller proportion of the Muslim vote than the Krishak Proja Party (KPP), a predominantly Muslim organization organized around the political demands of agricultural cultivators (krishak) and tenants (praja). Both won a smaller proportion of the vote than independent candidates. If the League won slightly more seats overall than the KPP (39 and 36 respectively), it was only because of a weighting in favor of urban electorates, where North Indian–identified Muslims predominated and where the League did very well (61.47% of the vote) in the face of an understandably weak KPP presence. Overall in fact, the League had garnered 27.1%, against the KPP’s 31.51%. In the countryside, where Bengali-speaking Muslims predominated, the League had done best in the Muslim minority regions of western Bengal, but had managed to win only 26.52% of the overall rural vote. This was hardly a resounding affirmation in the face of the KPP’s 31.78%, and its especially strong showing in the Muslim heartland of eastern Bengal.2 Yet in 1946, the Muslim League succeeded in capturing all six of the Muslim seats reserved for Bengal at the center, 115 out of 117 Muslim seats in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, 95% of the urban Muslim vote in Bengal, and, crucially, 84.6% of the massive rural Muslim vote.3 This victory established a necessary presupposition for Jinnah’s credibility in negotiating for a sovereign Pakistan on behalf of India’s Muslims.

There are many histories to this transformation in the fortunes of the Muslim League in Bengal. The KPP collapsed in the face of its inability to form a stable and effective ministry under Fazlul Haq’s leadership, driving many leading figures from its ranks into the League.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.