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Author: Tarun Kapoor
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December 11, 2006
Muslim League was nothing more than an elitist venture that used ordinary Muslims to satisfy the urges of political lords
A hundred years ago, the Muslim League was established in December 1906 at Dacca by a group of Muslim notables including Nawab Salimullah of Dacca, Raja of Mahmudabad, and Nawab Viquar-ul-Mulk of Aligarh who were keen to display Muslim loyalty to the British raj and extract concessions for themselves. Initially, the League germinated like a pressure group with a loyalist agenda, aiming to retrieve the lost ground for Muslim notables in the new power structure controlled by the British.
Ironically, the initial impulse on the part of these conservative Muslim notables was the pursuit of secular goals: Securing jobs and concessions - separate electorates et al for Muslims. It was only after 1910 with the advent of leaders like Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Syed Wazir Hassan that the League began to speak of 'self-rule' and was in tune with the liberal nationalist politics of that time.
To a great degree the man responsible for the initial moderation of the League was its most important leader, the charismatic and westernised pipe-puffing MA Jinnah. In fact, he was hailed as the flag bearer of Hindu-Muslim unity and was indeed, being one of the key architects of the Congress-League Pact of 1916.
But the advent of Gandhian mass politics in the 1920s rendered Jinnah's politics of the liberal elite consensus redundant. The emergence of new Muslim leadership during the Khilafat movement in the 1920s pulled the rug from beneath the League and upset all calculations of suave League gentlemen.
In fact, by the 1930s, when Congress was growing from strength to strength on the base of its "mass campaigns", the League had been reduced to a faction-ridden rump of its former self which was only galvanised whenever the British set up a commission or a conference to discuss the future constitutional arrangements centred around 'Provincial Autonomy' and 'Dominion status'.
A votary of liberal politics and a pleader par excellence, Jinnah was perhaps an unlikely Muslim in the strictly religious sense. However, bowing to political expediency, he transformed his public image towards the end of the 1930s and portrayed himself as the premier 'Muslim' spokesman, with the League as the 'sole' mouthpiece of Muslim interests in South Asia. Jinnah's key to success lay in his ability to thrive on sentiment and to develop it further. He used his skills of advocacy to the fullest before the ever-indulgent white rulers, who saw in him a more than useful counterpoise against Congress leadership.
Around this time, the League was given a dose of 'Islamisation' by Iqbal and other religious leaders, who not only gave it a larger picture and a blue print of the two-nation theory, but also cultivated the ethical mystique of 'Pakistan'. Though its precise geographical contours remained a bit vague till the last moment, nevertheless, in the decisive decade of the 1940s, the League was driven by a kind of messianic fervour to seek a "Homeland".
The 1940s in fact turned out to be an era of the League. Countless "missions" and conferences on the future of India gave the League a virtually permanent platform for hard bargaining. Calls for 'Direct Action' from Jinnah worked like magic especially where it mattered the most - Punjab and Bengal.
In Punjab, the Leaguers sold the idea of 'Pakistan' as a lottery to Muslim peasantry and created a mass base overnight stumping the Unionists - the Punjabi landlords who controlled the area that subsequently became the heartland of the new state - Pakistan. Their convincing electoral victory in 1945-46 only reinforced this.
But there was an inherent contradiction in the League; it had functioned in unison only in the light of opposition to Congress and the idea of united India, which it propagated, as a nightmare for the Muslims. Its overwhelming negativism became the real reason for its rapid decline, as it had no definite notions about the future.
Its 'westernised' leader - Jinnah, suffered from a perennial "liberal" hangover that was clearly visible in his famous first "liberal" oration to the Constituent Assembly in Karachi on August 11, 1947, wherein he drew up a secular picture of the future polity that must have caused more than a flutter among League members who were steeped in communal politics in the 1940s.
In fact, the entire process of constitution making in Pakistan was enmeshed in severe complexities and was inordinately delayed. Due to the early death of Jinnah in 1948, the League lost much of the early headway it had made. The "objective" resolution declaring Pakistan an Islamic state could be presented only six months after Jinnah's death by none other than his chief disciple Liaquat Ali Khan. Not surprisingly, the League lost control of the new state to Punjabis - the erstwhile Unionists who were in complete control of the military and bureaucracy. The Muslim League ultimately suffered a humiliating defeat in the elections of 1955 in Pakistan.
What is left of it is now beyond our borders except for a miniscule influence in deep down south - Kerala. The Indian Muslims whose fancy it had once caught are now however disenchanted with it. Even the Aligarhwallas who were once regarded by Jinnah as "The Arsenal of the League" don't make much of it now.
In the end, what the Indian Muslims zealously clamoured for was an affirmation of their distinctiveness and recognition of their nationhood; what they got instead was a geographical Partition of India and a division of their own "nation". More Muslims remained in India than chose to become citizens of Pakistan.
The Muslim League then turned out to be nothing more than an elitist venture that only used the ordinary Muslims to satiate the urges of the elite. This was to possess an "estate" of its own, perhaps a throwback to the old feudal mansabdari system under the Mughals, which they subconsciously never outgrew... But most poor Muslims who blindly supported its cause could never make it to or in the perceived paradise. They still await social and economic redemption.
(The writer is a Government officer and the views expressed here are personal)
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