Essay on Growth of Communalism in India during 1927-47

The fifth important development was the growth of communalism. Once again the elections for the legislative assemblies, organised on the basis of restricted franchise and separate electorates, had produced separatist sentiments.

Moreover, the Congress failed to win many seats reserved for the minorities it won 26 out of482 seats reserved for Muslims and even out of these 26 seats 15 were won in the

North-West Frontier Provinces though the Muslim League too did not capture many of these seats. The Hindu Mahasabha also failed miserably.

Moreover, the landlord and moneylender parties fared badly in the elections. Seeing that the Congress had adopted a radical agrarian programme and the peasant movements were growing, landlords and moneylenders began to shift their support to the communal parties.

They found that an open defence of their interests was no longer possible in the era of mass politics. It was now that the communal parties began to gather strength.

The Muslim League, led by Jinnah, turned to bitter opposition to the Congress. It began to spread the cry that the Muslim minority was in danger of being engulfed by the Hindu majority.

It propagated the unscientific and unhistorical theory that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations which could, therefore, never live together.

In 1940, the Muslim League passed a resolution demanding partition of the country and the creation of a state to be called Pakistan after independence.

The Muslim League propaganda gained by the existence of such communal bodies among the Hindus as the Hindu Mahasabha.

The Hindu communalists echoed the Muslim communalists by declaring that the Hindus were a distinct nation and that India was the land of the Hindus.

Thus they too accepted the two-nation theory. They actively opposed the policy of giving adequate safeguards to the minorities so as to remove their fears of domination by the majority.

In one respect, Hindu communalism had even less justification. In every country, the religious or linguistic or national minorities have, because of their numerical position, felt at one time or the other that their social and cultural interests might suffer.

But when the majority has by word and deed given proof that these fears are groundless the fears of the minorities have disappeared. On the other hand, if a section of the people belonging to the majority becomes communal or sectional and starts talking and working against the minorities, the minorities tend to feel unsafe.

Communal or sectional leadership of the minorities is then strengthened. For example, during the 1930s the Muslim League was strong only in areas where the Muslims were in a minority.

On the other hand, in such areas as the North-West Frontier Province, Punjab, the Sindh and Bengal where the Muslims were in a majority and, therefore, felt relatively secure, the Muslim League remained weak.

Interestingly enough, the communal groups Hindu as well as Muslim did not hesitate to join hands against the Congress. In the North-West Frontier Province, Punjab, Sindh and Bengal, the Hindu communalists helped the Muslim League and other communal groups to form ministries which opposed the Congress.

Another characteristic that the various communal groups shared was their tendency to adopt pro- government political attitudes.

It is to be noted that none of the communal groups and parties, which talked of Hindu and Muslim nationalism, took active part in the struggle against foreign rule. They saw people belonging to other religions and the nationalist leaders as their real enemies.

The communal groups and parties also shied away from the social and economic demands of the common people which, as we have seen above, were being increasingly taken up by the nationalist move­ment.

In this respect, they increasingly came to represent the upper- class vested interests. Jawaharlal Nehru noted this as early as 1933:

The bulwark of communalism today is political reaction and so we find that communal leaders inevitably tend to become reactionaries in political and economic matters.

Groups of upper-class people try to cover up their own class interests by making it appear that they stand for the communal demands of religious minorities or majorities.

A critical examination of the various communal demands put forward on behalf of Hindus, Muslims or others reveals that they have nothing to do with the masses.

The national movement firmly opposed the communal forces, for its commitment to secularism was always deep and total. Yet it was not able to fully counter the communal challenge.

In the end, commu­nalism succeeded in partitioning the country. How is this failure to be explained? One answer that is often given is that the nationalist leaders did not make enough efforts to negotiate with and conciliate the communal leaders.

Our view is the very opposite. From the beginning, the nationalist leaders relied too much on negotiations with the communal leaders. But it was not possible to conciliate or appease communalism.

Furthermore, efforts to appease one communalism invariably led to the growth of other communalisms in the form of a backlash.

Between 1937 and 1939 the Congress leaders repeatedly met Jinnah to conciliate him. But Jinnah would not make any concrete demands.

Instead, he put forward the impossible demand that he would negotiate with the Congress only if the Congress first accepted that it was a Hindu party and represented only the Hindus.

The Congress could not possibly have accepted this demand, for it meant giving up its basic secular nationalist character. The fact is that the more communalism was conciliated the more extreme it became.

What was required was not further appeasement but an all-out ideological political struggle against communalism. What was required was a massive campaign against communalism, a massive campaign of the kind that was carried on against colonial ideology since the 1880s.

But the nationalists did not do so, except sporadically. However, the successes of secular nationalism should not be under­rated.

Despite the partition riots and the resurgence of communal forces during 1946-47, India did succeed after independence in framing a secular constitution and in building a basically secular polity and society.

Hindu communalism did make deep inroads in society and even in the rank; of the nationalists. It remained a minority force among the Hindus.

While many Muslims were swept away by the tide of religious fanaticism and communalism during 1946-47, others stood like a rock against communalism.

The names of Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the firebrand socialist Yusuf Meherali, S.A. Brelvi the fearless journalist.

The historians Mohammed Habib and KM. Ashraf, Josh Malihabadi, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sardar Jaafri, Sahir Ludhianwi and Kaifi Azmi, the stormy petrels of Urdu poetry, and Maulana Madani readily come to mind.