The Muslim League And The Growth Of Communalism
Modern political consciousness was late in developing among the Muslims. As nationalism spread among the Hindus and Parsis of the lower middle class, it failed to grow equally rapidly among the Muslims of the same class.
As we have seen earlier, Hindus and Muslims had fought shoulder to shoulder during the Revolt of 1857. After the suppression of the Revolt, the British had taken a particularly vindictive attitude towards the Muslims and viewed them with great suspicion. But this attitude changed in the 1870s. With the rise of the nationalist movement, the British statesmen grew apprehensive about the safety and stability of their Empire in India. To check the growth of a united national feeling in the country, they decided to follow more actively the policy of ‘Divide and Rule’, to divide the people even along religious lines. For this purpose, they decided to come out as ‘champions’ of the Muslims and to win over to their side Muslim zamindars, landlords, and the newly educated. They also fostered other divisions in Indian society on the lines of region, caste and language.
In the rise of the separatist tendency along communal lines, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan played an important role. Though a great educationist and social reformer, Syed Ahmad Khan became towards the end of his life, a conservative in politics. He laid the foundations of Muslim communalism when in the 1880s, he gave up his earlier secular views and declared that the political interests of Hindus and Muslims were different. He preached complete obedience to British rule and when the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885, he decided to oppose it. He also began to preach that, since the Hindus formed the larger part of the Indian population, they would dominate the Muslims in case of the withdrawal of British rule. He urged the Muslims not to listen to Badruddin Tyabji’s appeal to them to join the Congress.
Though these views were unscientific and without any basis in reality as the Hindus and Muslims had similar economic and political interests, the communal and separatist trend of thinking grew among the Muslims due to certain factors.
This was to some extent due to the relative backwardness of the Muslims in education and trade and industry. Muslim upper classes consisted mostly of zamindars and aristocrats. Because the upper-class Muslims till around the 1870s were anti-British, conservative and hostile to modern education, the number of educated Muslims in the country remained very small. Consequently, modern western thought with its emphasis on science, democracy, and nationalism did not spread among Muslim intellectuals. Later, as a result of the efforts of Syed Ahmed Khan, Badruddin Tyabji and others, modern education spread among Muslims. But the proportion of the educated was far lower among Muslims than among Hindus and Parsis. Similarly, the Muslims had also taken little part in trade and industry. This enabled the reactionary big landlords to maintain their influence over the Muslim masses. As seen earlier, landlords and zamindars, whether Hindu or Muslim, supported British rule out of self-interest. But, among the Hindus, the modern intellectuals and the rising commercial and industrialist class had pushed out the landlords from leadership. Unfortunately, the opposite remained the case with the Muslims.
The educational backwardness of the Muslims had another harmful consequence. Since modern education was essential for entry into government service or the professions, the Muslims had also lagged behind the non-Muslims in this respect. When modern education did spread among the Muslims, the educated Muslim found few opportunities in business or the professions and inevitably looked for government employment which was also very few. In these circumstances, it was easy for the British officials to incite the educated Muslims against the educated Hindus. Syed Ahmed Khan and others raised the demand for special treatment for the Muslims in the matter of Government service. The British declared that if the educated Muslims remained loyal, they would be rewarded with government jobs and other special favours. Bombay was the only province where the Muslims had taken to commence an education quite early; and there the Congress included in its ranks such brilliant Muslims as Badruddin Tyabji, Rahimtoolah Sayani, A. Bhimji, and the young barrister, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
How Indian history was taught in schools and colleges in those days also contributed to the growth of communal feelings among the educated Hindus and Muslims. British historians and later, Indian historians described the medieval period of Indian history as the Muslim period and the ancient period as the Hindu period. These writers declared that all Muslims were rulers in medieval India and all non-Muslims were the ruled which was a great misinterpretation of the fact. This strengthened the fears of the minority and helped in the growth of communalism.
The founding fathers of the Congress realised that the welding of Indians into a single nation would be a gradual and hard task, requiring prolonged political education of the people. They, therefore, set out to convince the minorities that the nationalist movement would carefully protect their religious and social rights in the process of welding India into a nation. In his presidential address to the National Congress of 1886, Dadabhai had given the clear assurance that the Congress would take up only national questions and would not deal with religious and social matters. In 1889, Congress adopted the principle that it would not take up any proposal which was considered harmful to the Muslims by a majority of the Muslim delegates in the Congress. So many Muslims joined the Congress in its early years.
Unfortunately, while Extremism was a great step forward in every other respect, it was a step back in respect of the growth of national unity. The speeches and writings of some of the Extremists had a strong Hindu tinge. They emphasised ancient Indian culture but excluded medieval Indian culture. They identified Indian culture and the Indian nation with the Hindu religion and Hindus. For example, Tilak’s propagation of the Shivaji and Ganapati festivals, the terrorists’ oaths before goddess Kali, and the initiation of the anti-partition agitation with dips in the Ganga could hardly appeal to the Muslims. Since such actions were against the spirit of Islam, the Muslims could not be expected to be associated with these activities. Similarly, they found it hard to digest the exaltation of Shivaji or Rana Pratap not merely for their historical roles but also as ‘national leaders who fought against the ‘foreigners’. Bý defining Akbar and Aurangzeb as foreigners and Pratap and Shivaji as national heroes, both of which were false, the Extremists did a great disservice to Hindu-Muslim unity. In reality, the struggle between Pratap and Akbar or Shivaji and Aurangzeb was only a political struggle and not a religious war. Thus the Extremists gave a communal tinge to Indian history, though unintentionally. This was not only bad history; but also a blow to national unity
This does not mean that the Extremists were anti-Muslim or even wholly communal. Most of them, including Tilak, favoured Hindu-Muslim unity. To most of them, the motherland, or Bharatmata, was a modern notion, being in no way linked with religion. Most of them were more progressive in their political thinking. Even the revolutionary terrorists were more inspired by European revolutionary movements, rather than by Kali or Bhawani cults. But, the Hindu tinge in their political work and ideas remained. This proved to be particularly harmful as clever British officials took advantage of the Hindu colouring to poison the minds of the Muslims. The result was that a large number of educated Muslims either remained aloof from the rising nationalist movement or became hostile to it, thus falling easy prey to communalism. Even so, quite a large number of advanced Muslim intellectuals such as the barrister Abdul Rasul and Hasrat Mohani joined the Swadeshi movement and Muhammad Ali Jinnah became one of the leading younger leaders of the National Congress. The economic backwardness of the country also contributed to the rise of communalism. Due to the lack of modern industrial development, unemployment was an acute problem in India, especially for the educated. There was in consequence an intense competition for existing jobs. The farsighted Indians diagnosed the disease and worked for an economic and political system in which the country would develop economically which would then generate employment. However, much other thought of such short-sighted remedies as communal, provincial, or caste reservation in jobs. They aroused communal and later caste and provincial passions in an attempt to get a larger share of the existing, limited employment opportunities. To those looking desperately for employment, such a narrow appeal had an immediate attraction. In this situation, Hindu and Muslim community leaders and caste leaders, and were able to achieve some success, were helped generously by the British officials as a part of their ‘Divide and Rule policy.
Foundation of All-India Muslim League was Laid – [December 30, 1906]
The communal and loyalist tendencies among a section of the Muslims reached a climax in 1906 when the All India Muslim League was founded under the leadership of the Aga Khan, the Nawab of Dacca, and others. The Muslim League supported the partition of Bengal and demanded reservation for the Muslims in government services. With the help of Lord Minto, the Viceroy, it put forward and secured the acceptance of the demand for separate electorates. Thus, in the wake of Congress was taking up anti-imperialist economic and political issues, the Muslim League Caucho preached that the interests of the Muslims and the Hindus were different. The Muslim Leagues political activities were directed not against the British but the Hindus and the Congo. It thus played into the hands of the British who announced that they would protect the special interests of the Muslims. · The League soon became one of the main instruments with which the British hoped to fight the rising nationalist movement.
The British also encouraged the Muslim League to approach the Muslim masses and to assume their leadership. Though the nationalist movement was also dominated at this time by the educated town-dwellers, in its anti-imperialism, it was representing the interests of all Indians-rich or poor, Hindus or Muslims. On the other hand, the Muslim League and its upper-class leaders had little in common with the interests of the Muslim masses, who were exploited as much as the Hindu masses by foreign rulers.
This basic weakness of the League was soon recognised by the young, educated, patriotic Muslims who were more attracted by radical nationalist ideas. The militantly nationalist Ahrar movement was founded at this time under the leadership of Maulana Mohammed Ali, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Hasan Imam, and others. These young men disliked the loyalist politics of the Aligarh school and the Muslim League. Moved by modern ideas of self-government, they advocated active participation in the nationalist movement.
Similar nationalist sentiments rose among a section of the traditional Muslim scholars led by the Deoband school. The most prominent of these scholars was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was educated at the famous Al Azhar University at Cairo and who propagated his nationalist ideas in his newspaper Al Hilal which he brought out in 1912. Maulana Mohammed Ali, Azad and other young men preached a message of courage and fearlessness and said that there was no conflict between Islam and nationalism.
In 1911 war broke out between Turkey and Italy and during 1912 and 1913 Turkey had to fight the Balkan powers. The Turkish ruler claimed to be also the Caliph or religious head of all Muslims; moreover, nearly all the Muslim holy places were situated within the Turkish Empire. A wave of sympathy for Turkey swept India. A medical mission, headed by Dr M.A. Ansari, was sent to help Turkey. Since Britain’s policy during the Balkan War and after was not sympathetic to Turkey, the pro-Turkey or Khilafat sentiments tended to become anti-imperialist.
Unfortunately, with the exception of a few persons like Azad who were rationalists in their thinking, most of the militant Muslim young men also did not fully accept the modern secular approach to politics. The result was that the most important issue they took up was not political independence but protection of the holy places and of the Turkish Empire. Instead of understanding and opposing the imperialist policies, they fought imperialism on the ground that it threatened the Caliph and the holy places. Though this approach did not immediately clash with Indian nationalism as it did encourage the nationalist trend among urban Muslims, in the long run, it proved harmful, as it encouraged the habit of looking at political questions from a religious viewpoint.
Even though no organisation of Hindu communalists was formed in this period, Hindu communal ideas also arose. Many Hindu writers countered the ideas and programme of the Muslim League by talking of Hindu nationalism and they declared that Muslims were foreigners in India. They also carried on a regular agitation for the ‘Hindu’ share of seats in legislatures and in government jobs.