Creating a new Medina

[Joe Shearer]

Creating a new Medina

The Hindu ArchivesHISTORIC MEETING: The only solution to India’s problem, Jinnah asserted, was ‘to partition India so that both Hindus and Muslims could develop freely and fully according to their own genius.’ (From left) Picture shows Jawaharlal Nehru, the Adviser to the Viceroy, Lord Ismay, Lord Mountbatten, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah at the historic conference in New Delhi in 1947 in which Lord Mountbatten disclosed Britain’s partition plan for India.

The only solution to India’s problem, he asserted, was ‘to partition India so that both the communities could develop freely and fully according to their own genius.’

(Venkat Dhulipala’s book , Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India, will be published by Cambridge University Press.)

I saw this interesting article in "The Hindu",

Thank you very much for this fascinating extract from The Hindu.

The issue of the events behind Partition, and the motives of Jinnah, of Gandhi, or of the other Congress leaders such as Nehru and Patel and Rajaji at one level, and regional leaders such as Sarat Bose or Suhrawardy at another level, is a vast subject, and has created its own cottage industry of historians and others who earn their professional earnings from the event. When we comment on it, it is best to be aware of much that has gone before. This, too, is part of that discourse. So let us see it in context.

What did Indians want? Quite clearly, from the 80s of the 19th century, there was increasing pressure for autonomy. Quite clearly, this movement, initially restricted to the elite, was enlarged and magnified into a mass movement by Gandhi in the 20s of the 20th century. That enlargement and magnification took out a large number of Congress leaders, such as Gokhale and Jinnah, who were very important up until that time. Suffice it to say that the vast body of Indian opinion which had been mobilised (an even vaster body was not mobilised) wanted greater self-rule, until the day came when the demand became independence.

Was that all? No, not so. There were dissenting opinions. There was opposition on the right and on the left. On the right, Savarkar articulated the Two Nation Theory and introduced the concept of India belonging to the Indic, those who culturally were rooted in India. This was a thin disguise for his religious orientation, and his dislike for a particular religion (he himself was reportedly and purportedly an atheist). The Hindu Mahasabha opposed any concessions made to the Muslims, and a small but toxic fringe element was built up over the decades that saw the more central Congress as enemies of the independent state to be.

On the other hand, still on the right, there was the opinion first articulated by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan of a similar nature, that Hindus and Muslims could not live together peacefully, hence that Muslims should seek separate and independent development. However, both this and the Hindu Mahasabha opinions were fringe elements to the main fabric of the movement and really didn't matter.

 

[SrNair]

we shouldnt have lead the war in afghanistan had it not been India's close ties with USSR. We didnt to become a sandwich between two powerful enemies. Afghans are no one's friends, they are narcissists.

And now what you got?
Millions of Afghan refugees , carving most of the Pak resources?
We support USSR but neither we allow their base in India nor they enforce us for it.It was a matured relationship.But somehow I cant say that in your case with Case.They gave you billions of dollars aid and made your leaders corrupt.There is a point arise where Pak leaders purposefully keep terrorism alive so they can siphoned
more US funds.
You can make friendship with nations of your own size .But beware about a relation with US or China or similar nations.They have resources so they can manipulate anything.

Yes He is right when he say we are better when you compare.....But you know when i look at it, i feel you may be one or 2 feet deeper in that Sh!t, But both nations are deep in it.....

India is developing, but our development is not uniform..... I remember one of my trip in early 2000's thru parts of andhra, orissa and chattisgarh......the difference between my place and those places were huge..... I was really upset and sad looking at the living condition of those places....That trip opened my eyes and changed my way of looking at development..... We look at India's development based on cities or states like, Maharashtra, Delhi, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, but we conveniently ignore the states like Bihar, Jharkand, Orissa, Arunachal and North east..(we have a thread on India's development in PDF, a quick look at that thread will give you a better idea) ... India will never be developed if we dont work on these states... and it will take decades to improve those states to bring to the level of other states.....

Similarly if we had to look at the development of Pakistan, one should look at the provinces like FATA, Baloochistan.....

But i agree with your point on the state of development till 90's..... Till 90's Pakistan was ahead in almost all the development parameters But one must not forget the influence of US support in this.... But i guess the we met each other in mid 90's in development, and once MMS took over as Fm minister, that is where we changed our gears......

It may create some doubt for us .Because in our state disparity is in least state.But globally there is always a huge disparity between developed areas and rural areas within the nations.That is why in China peoples from rural areas flow into Beijing or other like centres massively .Like the other state immigration in to our state.
Disparity is a grave problem.But our aim should be the upliftment of all peopls in India in to a common man status.

 

[nair]

we shouldnt have lead the war in afghanistan had it not been India's close ties with USSR. We didnt to become a sandwich between two powerful enemies

Well this was a prime example of what a nation should not do.... But Did pakistan or India learnt the lesson from it????? If you look at the incidents in past 2 to 3 years, One can confidently say We havent.......

It may create some doubt for us .Because in our state disparity is in least state.But globally there is always a huge disparity between developed areas and rural areas within the nations.That is why in China peoples from rural areas flow into Beijing or other like centres massively .Like the other state immigration in to our state.
Disparity is a grave problem.But our aim should be the upliftment of all peopls in India in to a common man status.

This so called "Disparity" is beyond your imagination, to know that you need to travel to the rural part of these undeveloped states..... those sad scenes are fresh in my mind even though a decade is passed.....

 

[Qaiser Ali Khan]

Well this was a prime example of what a nation should not do.... But Did pakistan or India learnt the lesson from it????? If you look at the incidents in past 2 to 3 years, One can confidently say We havent.......

Indeed, US and western hegemony pumps up day by day when we fight against each other. We need to be a part of the eastern block along with russia and china to counter the west.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Creating a new Medina

The Hindu ArchivesHISTORIC MEETING: The only solution to India’s problem, Jinnah asserted, was ‘to partition India so that both Hindus and Muslims could develop freely and fully according to their own genius.’ (From left) Picture shows Jawaharlal Nehru, the Adviser to the Viceroy, Lord Ismay, Lord Mountbatten, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah at the historic conference in New Delhi in 1947 in which Lord Mountbatten disclosed Britain’s partition plan for India.

(In his forthcoming book on the idea of Pakistan, the historian Venkat Dhulipala argues that Pakistan was not simply a vague idea that serendipitously emerged as a nation-state, but was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic state, a new Medina, as some called it. In this regard, it was envisaged as the harbinger of Islam’s revival and rise in the twentieth century, the new leader and protector of the global community of Muslims, and a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate. The following article has been excerpted from the book)


(Venkat Dhulipala’s book , Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India, will be published by Cambridge University Press.)


I saw this interesting article in "The Hindu",

This stable equilibrium, which concealed a great deal of internal activity within the Congress itself, was upset by the return of Jinnah from the UK. In the 20s, Gandhi had emerged swiftly as the major figure in the struggle for independence due to his enormous influence on the common masses, and due to his skillful use of a mixture of Hindu/quasi-Hindu practice with the politics of mass movements. He was a mobiliser par excellence, and gripped the imagination of what was then a thoroughly rural-dominated social structure. With the support of the farmer and the village communities, there was very little that the urban elite could do, although they had earlier led the Congress. Some of his actions were high-handed; his breach of trust over the Friends of India Society a particularly cynical action, which, among other things, thoroughly enraged both Jinnah and his mentor Gokhale. But that was quintessential Gandhi, determining what the truth was on a given day by his own judgement of what it ought to be.

The equilibrium was broken in two axes of movement, one through the influence of a returned, refreshed and revived Jinnah on national politics, and the other through the Hindufication of the Congress. Jinnah was earlier known as the foremost secularist of all, the darling of the elite classes leading the country's thoroughly constitutional conversation with the colonial administration regarding the devolution of power. He was ideally equipped to lead the charge, being himself of immaculate integrity and wholly unwilling to take condescension from anyone, including the colonial high and mighty (his passage of arms with Lady Willingdon is legendary). However, the Jinnah that returned from England in the late 30s was a different man, a man who had been through wrenching personal tragedy and professional disappointment, and had emerged determined to make his mark in a worthwhile way, with no compromises, only relentless pursuit of those worthwhile goals. He swiftly took charge of the rather disjointed activities of the Muslim League, then an aggregation of followers of the insufferable Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's elitist rubbish combined with the new emerging professional classes among Muslim Indians, and made himself the leader of the combine, with the unwavering support of the latter element. It was they, the 'salariat', who supported Jinnah most effectively and loyally, and it was the Rais element who let him down worst, not least after the formation of Pakistan, when they stole the country from right under his nose. But that came much later. He came to the fore at a time when the AIML was drifting along, inspired by mystical pronunciations by Iqbal or by completely zany ideas put out by random characters sitting in the UK and lost in their own cloud-cuckoo-land. He was an iconic leader, and even though his speeches, rendered in an immaculate English, was not understood by the majority of his listeners, he was quickly to become the personification of the Muslim yearning for at least equality.

It was this element of the common intellectual and cultural heritage of the Muslim Indian upon which many political leaders barked their shins. It was never forgotten by the Muslims, when the matter came up for discussion, and became a subject of their leaders' speeches, that they had been the rulers, and were facing rule by those whom they had ruled. This is a palpable falsification of history, but a natural one in the circumstances, and in no way more untrue than many of the legends distributed by the opposite camp of fringe elements. The fact remains that Muslims thought that if they could not get rule, and it was rapidly becoming clear that in the British system of voting and democracy, that is what they would not get, they should at least get parity: absolute equality. Those leaders who realised this and maintained this prevailed; those who lost sight of this or had the impunity to ignore it were discarded. In spite of the burgeoning numbers of the Bengali Muslim population, it was in no way possible for the Muslim League to drive out of its mind the minority (in the sense of less than parity, less than majority) status of the community.

 

[INDIC]

Our problems will never be solved until india accepts our sovereignty as a free country for Muslims. Her hatred against us from day one, which is mainly due to the ideology of Akandh Bharat, compelled us to undermine one another. Jinnah never has this idea in mind that Pakistan will become the center of world's top rank intelligence agencies with which ISI will have to fight the longest cold war in modern history. just yesterday, indian BSF shot down a simple villager on pakistani side from across the boarder, while pakistanies handed them over their BSF soldier alive the day before yesterday. Look at the difference in mentalities, we are sending happy unharmed soldiers and they, corpses. How can you assume that our countries will progress?

That's a broken record, you weren't going to get even an inch of Pakistan without the approval of Indian national Congress, the largest party of 1946 election. But I want to know how the partition solved the problem of Muslims in Hindu majority provinces, they are still the same as they used to be before partition.

 

[Qaiser Ali Khan]

And now what you got?
Millions of Afghan refugees , carving most of the Pak resources?
We support USSR but neither we allow their base in India nor they enforce us for it.It was a matured relationship.But somehow I cant say that in your case with Case.They gave you billions of dollars aid and made your leaders corrupt.There is a point arise where Pak leaders purposefully keep terrorism alive so they can siphoned
more US funds.
You can make friendship with nations of your own size .But beware about a relation with US or China or similar nations.They have resources so they can manipulate anything.


well you cannot analyze any historical event in isolation. there is a cause and effect relationship which we cannot neglect. About all these events, there is an inevitability. We needed money, cause we have weak economy. But i agree, we should not have stepped into war with USSR, but again, we had no other option. India was against us, Russia was against us and chaina was weak at that time. We need a strong friendly relationship with india, which seems impossible. Just the day before yesterday we handed them over a BSF soldier, healthy and happy and yesterday they killed a simple villager on our boarder. We need trust, which unfortunately is missing.

 

[scorpionx]

This stable equilibrium, which concealed a great deal of internal activity within the Congress itself, was upset by the return of Jinnah from the UK. In the 20s, Gandhi had emerged swiftly as the major figure in the struggle for independence due to his enormous influence on the common masses, and due to his skillful use of a mixture of Hindu/quasi-Hindu practice with the politics of mass movements. He was a mobiliser par excellence, and gripped the imagination of what was then a thoroughly rural-dominated social structure. With the support of the farmer and the village communities, there was very little that the urban elite could do, although they had earlier led the Congress. Some of his actions were high-handed; his breach of trust over the Friends of India Society a particularly cynical action, which, among other things, thoroughly enraged both Jinnah and his mentor Gokhale. But that was quintessential Gandhi, determining what the truth was on a given day by his own judgement of what it ought to be.

The equilibrium was broken in two axes of movement, one through the influence of a returned, refreshed and revived Jinnah on national politics, and the other through the Hindufication of the Congress. Jinnah was earlier known as the foremost secularist of all, the darling of the elite classes leading the country's thoroughly constitutional conversation with the colonial administration regarding the devolution of power. He was ideally equipped to lead the charge, being himself of immaculate integrity and wholly unwilling to take condescension from anyone, including the colonial high and mighty (his passage of arms with Lady Willingdon is legendary). However, the Jinnah that returned from England in the late 30s was a different man, a man who had been through wrenching personal tragedy and professional disappointment, and had emerged determined to make his mark in a worthwhile way, with no compromises, only relentless pursuit of those worthwhile goals. He swiftly took charge of the rather disjointed activities of the Muslim League, then an aggregation of followers of the insufferable Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's elitist rubbish combined with the new emerging professional classes among Muslim Indians, and made himself the leader of the combine, with the unwavering support of the latter element. It was they, the 'salariat', who supported Jinnah most effectively and loyally, and it was the Rais element who let him down worst, not least after the formation of Pakistan, when they stole the country from right under his nose. But that came much later. He came to the fore at a time when the AIML was drifting along, inspired by mystical pronunciations by Iqbal or by completely zany ideas put out by random characters sitting in the UK and lost in their own cloud-cuckoo-land. He was an iconic leader, and even though his speeches, rendered in an immaculate English, was not understood by the majority of his listeners, he was quickly to become the personification of the Muslim yearning for at least equality.

It was this element of the common intellectual and cultural heritage of the Muslim Indian upon which many political leaders barked their shins. It was never forgotten by the Muslims, when the matter came up for discussion, and became a subject of their leaders' speeches, that they had been the rulers, and were facing rule by those whom they had ruled. This is a palpable falsification of history, but a natural one in the circumstances, and in no way more untrue than many of the legends distributed by the opposite camp of fringe elements. The fact remains that Muslims thought that if they could not get rule, and it was rapidly becoming clear that in the British system of voting and democracy, that is what they would not get, they should at least get parity: absolute equality. Those leaders who realised this and maintained this prevailed; those who lost sight of this or had the impunity to ignore it were discarded. In spite of the burgeoning numbers of the Bengali Muslim population, it was in no way possible for the Muslim League to drive out of its mind the minority (in the sense of less than parity, less than majority) status of the community.

Brilliant post.

I just can wish I could write in the same way.But alas, it is beyond my capacity.

 

[INDIC]

On the other hand, still on the right, there was the opinion first articulated by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan of a similar nature, that Hindus and Muslims could not live together peacefully, hence that Muslims should seek separate and independent development. However, both this and the Hindu Mahasabha opinions were fringe elements to the main fabric of the movement and really didn't matter.

He said this after the famous Hindi-Urdu divide when he saw Hindus who were more than 80% of population in UP-Bihar aren't ready to use Arabic script for the Hindustani language and Hindus ready to fight court cases for Hindi in Devanagari script. The Muslim aristocratic group of United Provinces were always wary that Hindus were asserting their political power based on majority, that was also visible after 1937 elections. Thus they were the first one to spearhead for a Muslim homeland where they won't have to face the challenge to their aristocratic dominance.

 

[Qaiser Ali Khan]

That's a broken record, you weren't going to get even an inch of Pakistan without the approval of Indian national Congress, the largest party of 1946 election. But I want to know how the partition solved the problem of Muslims in Hindu majority provinces, they are still the same as they used to be before partition.

Of course it was a mutual agreement between congress and Muslim league. and Yes i agree, india should not have been dividend, division has weakened us. But on the other hand, what do you think of the muslims in india? Are'nt they under state persecution? i do listen to Akbar Owesi's speeches. I think what has happend, it should not have happened at all. Lets forget about the past and look towards the future.

 

[SrNair]

Well this was a prime example of what a nation should not do.... But Did pakistan or India learnt the lesson from it????? If you look at the incidents in past 2 to 3 years, One can confidently say We havent.......



This so called "Disparity" is beyond your imagination, to know that you need to travel to the rural part of these undeveloped states..... those sad scenes are fresh in my mind even though a decade is passed.....

It was the story of a decade earlier.But we cant imagine what would be its present condition.
And we can imagine its severity when we see the illegal immigrants in Kerala.
Such of level of disparity cant address with 67 years of time.Or we have to reform a 1000 years beliefs and condition.So we need time.or otherwise we have to sacrifice our democractic system. and should implement a chinese system.Can you agree with it?

 

[INDIC]

Of course it was a mutual agreement between congress and Muslim league. and Yes i agree, india should not have been dividend, division has weakened us. But on the other hand, what do you think of the muslims in india? Are'nt they under state persecution? i do listen to Akbar Owesi's speeches. I think what has happend, it should not have happened at all. Lets forget about the past and look towards the future.

You wrote mostly useless thing but never answer how partition solved the problems of Muslims of Hindu majority provinces which Muslim League once claimed for them. As I previously said, partition was best solution politically as Muslim League comprised of incompentent leaders not fit to sit in India's constituent assembly because they would have made negative contibution meant to cause delays, they even failed Pakistan's constituent assembly when all of it was dominated by Muslim League. Muslim League would have brought disaster for India's democracy, so I support partition political solution but not as an ideological solution.

 

[nair]

In reality Both nations are no way near the vision with which this nations were created......

but never answer how partition solved the problems of Muslims of Hindu majority provinces which Muslim League once claimed for them. .

 

[Joe Shearer]

Creating a new Medina

The Hindu ArchivesHISTORIC MEETING: The only solution to India’s problem, Jinnah asserted, was ‘to partition India so that both Hindus and Muslims could develop freely and fully according to their own genius.’ (From left) Picture shows Jawaharlal Nehru, the Adviser to the Viceroy, Lord Ismay, Lord Mountbatten, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah at the historic conference in New Delhi in 1947 in which Lord Mountbatten disclosed Britain’s partition plan for India.

(In his forthcoming book on the idea of Pakistan, the historian Venkat Dhulipala argues that Pakistan was not simply a vague idea that serendipitously emerged as a nation-state, but was popularly imagined as a sovereign Islamic state, a new Medina, as some called it. In this regard, it was envisaged as the harbinger of Islam’s revival and rise in the twentieth century, the new leader and protector of the global community of Muslims, and a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate. The following article has been excerpted from the book)


The only solution to India’s problem, he asserted, was ‘to partition India so that both the communities could develop freely and fully according to their own genius.’

(Venkat Dhulipala’s book , Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India, will be published by Cambridge University Press.)

I saw this interesting article in "The Hindu",

On the other side, within the Indian National Congress, apart from the fratricidal warfare which had broken out between the Moderates and the Extremists, there was another, insidious influence: the forces of the Hindu right wing, represented outside by the Hindu Mahasabha, had considerable access to the leaders, particularly to Gandhi, and used this influence mercilessly. The leader of this charge was the head of the Birla family, but there were others, the Jamnalal Bajaj family and their descendants, for instance, many others. So it was not just the external pressure of the Hindu Mahasabha, it was also the internal pressure from these Hindu-centric groups that moulded Congress opinion at certain points of time.

Was Gandhi vulnerable to this influence? Apparently so. At the best of times, his views about society were orthodox Hindu views, which explained away the cancer of caste with ameliorative statements and equivocation; which deplored untouchability but did nothing drastic about eradicating it; which thoroughly detested the Dalits and their leadership, and refused to countenance their differentiation from others, and thought nothing of blackmailing them into surrender, when Gandhi went on a fast unto death to force Ambedkar to give up his position of Dalit independence from caste Hindu political suzerainty. Did this affect his political views? It did. He was unwilling to recognise differentiated identity within the people of India. Just as he insisted, and made it a political dogma for the Congress to also so insist, that Congress represented all the people of India, and nobody from the Muslim ranks could stand out from the Congress and approach the British or deal with the British directly, he insisted that nobody from the Dalit movement, or from the Sikhs, or from the Tamils or Dravidians, or from any other sub-group of Indians could talk to the British.

This, broadly speaking, was the scenario at the end of the Second World War, when Attlee decided that the new Labour Party administration no longer wanted to run an Empire. This was when the British decided to send out Mountbatten, already well-experienced in that area as Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces in south-east Asia, as Viceroy, with a mandate to get the British out of India as soon as possible.

The stage was set for the photograph that appears at the beginning of this article.

 

[INDIC]

@nair Here I disagree with you. It was clear in the beginning that Jinnah's Two theory had nothing positive for the Muslims of Hindu majority provinces. Even Liaquat Ali Khan's 14% reservation for Muhajirs, can made only handful of Muslim migrating to Pakistan. After separation of Muslim majority provinces, it became India's responsibility to mend fractured communal harmony after the extreme damage Two nation theory and creation of Pakistan created.