Rarely has a more baffling problem beset the path
of any people than the communal problem in India today. That section of
opinion, of which the Muslim League is the focal point, poses the problem in
simple terms. The Muslims are a separate nation, and the problem is to
determine the position of this nation in India’s body-politic. They are a
separate nation, simply because they feel themselves to be one. Academic
dissertations on what is meant by a nation will not wholly help, to support or
rebut that opinion! Nor would it do to give it face value, for if the Muslims
feel themselves separate nation, they should have felt it all along. But it is
only recently that they have been claiming to be a separate nation. Previously,
there was the possibility of Muslims merging themselves in a common Indian
nationality. The decision now is that that possibility cannot be realised. The
contention is that, with the increasing withdrawal of foreign control, it has
been realised that Hindus and Muslims are apart as ever. Only a common alien
rule concealed their differences; only in the movement against that rule could
some sort of coalescence be found. Since the time, some years ago, where the
process of transferring power to Indians began, the incongruities between the
communities have been revealing themselves. Power has not been used in common
interest; it has tended to the domination of one community by another. Muslims
have been made to suffer politically, economically and culturally; they do no
longer feel themselves to be a part of the same nation as Hindus. Even before
there was any question of power, nationalism as represented by Congress
revealed its ideological background as Hinduism. The conception of the country
as Mother has been celebrated by Hindus in a celestial song; it is not,
however, subscribed to by Muslims. The burning torch carried from the venue of
one Congress session to another is an inspiration to Hindus, but idolatry to
Muslims. So there is nothing positive in common between them.
The momentum this feeling has gained is a measure
of its depth and spontaneity. It would not do to call it artificial. It is
elemental enough cause a mass upsurge. The argument is sometimes heard that the
leadership has wrought this feeling among the masses; it has not been a
spontaneous development. But so far as the fact of the masses being led by
their leaders instead of acting in their own initiative is true, it is equally
true of all parties in the present stage of India’s historical development.
That argument, therefore, does not take us far. For good or evil, the vast
majority of Muslims today feel that they are a nation apart from the Hindus.
Yet, it can be empirically deducted from historical
experience that the differences the Muslims feel need be no permanent bar to
their assimilation into one nation. While they last, however, they can easily
work to the cultural and political disadvantage of the community which, however
large by itself, is a minority in the country. It is possible that they have so
worked; it is equally possible that in Provinces where that minority is a
majority, the minority, though it is the majority in the All-India setting,
feels itself at a disadvantage. Such is the genesis of the movement for a
separate Hindu Province of West Bengal, an amazing anti-climax to the
anti-partition agitation which shook the Government, achieved its object, and
has since been regarded as the beginning of our national movement. These
differences claim to be decisive because they have not been subdued under
points of common contact, except temporarily and limitedly in opposition to
alien rule. They went under the leveling that foreign imperialism worked; the
feudal social organization that was maintained by imperialism, and secured a
social equilibrium in its day, concealed the inter-communal discord. So now,
when imperialism disappears and feudalism decays, the old differences have come
to the surface again.
It would be useless to minimize the fundamental
strength these differences have revealed. In their extreme manifestation, they
have overwhelmed even what have been regarded as fundamental values. The
sacredness of human life, the woman’s honour, the child’s claim to protection
at the hands of all, are set at naught. It would be a comparatively less
serious matter, were the responsibility for such assaults confined to a section
of society; what is horrible, yet true, is that in the context of communal
antagonism, the whole of society has been found guilty of the suppression of
these values. The majority of the people may not have been guilty of crimes;
but they have connived at them. To passively support crime is bad enough; to
fear to oppose it is worse. To kill somebody at Noakhali because somebody was
killed at Calcutta is justified on the principle of a tooth for a tooth; and
then killing in Bihar is rationalized as securing an equilibrium. If the
assassin is a goonda, what shall we call the educated intellectual who takes
upon himself to plead for an equilibrium of that nature? It is only realistic
to admit that communal antagonism is today all-pervading. All values of life
have gone under it. Basically, of course, it is due to fear, from which
paradoxically, though not unnaturally, even the majority community in a
Particular area is not found free. Even they get ready for imaginary attacks by
the other party: they are seen coming out of meetings of Defence Committees
with grave faces. A wholesale fear holds the community in its grip and destroys
its mental and physical balance. The communal aggressor emerges, in this
context, as the communal protector, and holds the community at his bidding. The
communal goonda is not a class apart from society. It is true that conditions
that were generated during the second world-war and after helped this
metamorphosis. The black-marketeer, the corrupt official, and the profiteer had
already destroyed the social balance. They had starved lakhs of people to
death. They had played havoc with women’s honour. Human life, woman’s honour,
and all moral and social standards lay low. Even what had been regarded as
accepted norms of right conduct were ignored. In this setting, nationalism that
had developed an elemental impatience at foreign rule tended to
totalitarianism, intolerant of even suspected opposition. Not unoften it laid
murderous hands on left-wing groups which, it thought rightly or wrongly, were
obstructing the country’s reconquest of political power. Freedom was thought of
in terms of power. Nationalism approximated to Fascism and sought to annex the
primordial enthusiasm created by the story of the Indian National Army. Muslim
desire for consolidated self-assertion had already been taking the field as a
rival nationalism. It banked upon the internal democracy of Muslim society to
mobilize the collective will of what it called the Muslim nation. It drew upon
the accumulated reaction to the exclusivist manners and customs of the Hindus.
Tinged thus with a fanatical spirit of jehad, it broke into the
nationalism that had reared itself on mere anti-imperialism. Hindu communal
reaction to that was inevitable; so came a straight clash. No wonder the clash
has affected our whole corporate life. It has left a deep mark on our personal
lives too. And so long as the differences are unresolved, the discord within
the body politic must indeed remain.
It is possible to think of these differences as
merely political. Inasmuch as politics affects our whole life, these
differences too penetrate into the inner core of our being. Yet, it is not
impossible to relegate them to their own sphere. One imagines that they could
be allowed to run their own course in politics, leaving the rest of our lives
alone and waiting to be adjusted such political chances as the communal
differences might bring about. One should think that there are important
factors to make that possible. These must offset the discord that seems so
overwhelming today. There is neighbourhood of centuries. There are the thousand
and one economic, ill bonds that entwine our daily lives. They determine the
pattern of our social existence. One would even take a life of co-operation
between the communities permanently for granted. Over and above it all, there
is the appeal of a common humanity, the permanent injunction of all religions
for good and neighbourly behaviour. They are in the background today,
nevertheless present and even insistent. These are factors that run counter to
differences that seem so vital today. If they cannot resolve those differences,
they might at least keep them in their place.
But their failure to do so is patent. Here, then,
is a tremendous problem. That is the problem Gandhiji decided to face at
Noakhali and then in Bihar. That is the problem Mr. Jinnah would solve by
exchange of population. Really that is no solution, but a confession of
inability to find a solution. Incidentally, it is a negation of Pakistan or
what Pakistan has been described to be. For Pakistan, in this context, would be
an unalloyed Muslim State. It has, on the other hand, been promised to be a
democratic State where the majority Muslims would have no special rights such
as minorities would not have. If that be so, agreement on a separate Muslim
majority State should immediately solve the problem. If exchange of population
is suggested by communal riots, it would cut across the argument that communal
riots would cease as soon as Hindus and Muslims decide to have separate States,
where, as the majority and the minority, they must continue to live together.
Hindus and Muslims have lived together under
monarchical rule and then under foreign imperialism. Is it to be supposed that
they cannot live together when they are free? The problem poses itself today in
such blunt terms. Mahatma Gandhi at one stage said that the minority may leave if
they are given compensation,–that is to say, if the majority want them to go
and facilitate their going. It is clear he does not consider it easy for the
communities to live together in the present setting. It is his opinion based on
experience at Noakhali. Not that it is complete or absolute, for the Mahatma’s
own experiment is not yet complete. But so far as it goes, it has to be taken
into account.
It need not indeed be absolute. For, still, over
vast parts of India, the communities are living together. They are so living in
spite of the fact that the country as a whole has received a shake-up, that the
very foundation of existence appears to have been shaken. Thousand and one
economic ties bind together the communities in their daily lives. There is the
danger that tragedies in a few places might colour judgment of the state of the
country as a whole. They would not indeed be so fearful, were they not
symptomatic of potential conditions throughout the country. But yet they are
not the only side of the picture. There is the common humanity which has
persuaded many a Muslim to save many a Hindu from the fury of their
co-religionists, and vice versa. Even that is not all. There are ties
that are capable of resolving the mortal combat into a final embrace. The
adversary whom I kill I do not despise. I acknowledge him to be my equal. In
that I fear him, I have respect for him; and, in another context, I may love
him. Communal hatred has also this quality of ambivalence. A special sense of
responsibility for saving a member of the other community reflects this quality
and is not, even now, altogether absent.
To what then is this hatred due? Certainly not to
religious differences, for these have been there through the ages and have not
stood in the way of the communities living together. It would be alive to say
that they were perpetually prevented by the Government from fighting each
other. No Government could have stood such a strain. The cause of the
estrangement between the communities must, therefore, be sought elsewhere.
Historically, it is traceable to the intimate contact into which the Hindus
came with western education, shortly after the beginning of British rule. That
gave them an advantage over the Muslims who kept themselves aloof from
everything English, out of sullen resentment at the loss of their political
power. The Hindus worked up their position of advantage in the services and
trades. They were employed by the foreign rulers also for collection of
revenue, so that the rent-receiving interests, even in the Muslim-majority
provinces, came to be largely Hindu. The Permanent Settlement in Bengal largely
consolidated Hindu landlordism which went together with the money-lending
business, the only source of credit in the village. Social and economic power
was accompanied by such infiltration of political power as in course of time
took place. Subsequently, however, under the inspiration particularly of Sir
Syed Ahmed, Muslims tried to make up the leeway. They took the path of
separation rather than competition, because religious differences came in handy
for that comparatively easy line of approach. Muslim desire for self-assertion
took the shape of a claim to a due share of the services and then of political
opportunities. Muslim separation thus grew in quantity, until a sense of
cultural difference from the Hindus resolved it qualitatively into a perception
of separate nationhood. It was reinforced by what was considered to be the
unbridgeable difference between Hindu and Muslim ways of life. The desire for a
separate homeland was a natural corollary.
This article is not concerned with the communal
problem as such. It is only a necessarily inadequate attempt to present the
inter-relation forces centred on that problem. It is easy enough to see that
separate National States are easier to desire than to achieve. For one thing,
there is no communal, or, if one would have it so, national territorial
demarcation. Separate States are possible in India only on a majority basis.
Even so, the unreconciled and powerful minority stands in the way of a separate
State. Exchange of minorities has been suggested as the way-out of this
impasse; but it remains an academic solution. The needs of the country’s
defence, communications, foreign relations, trade and commerce, militate
against separate States in India. These needs cannot be ruled out, because
India is geographically one and separate States within her borders do not
easily suggest themselves. But considering the position in which Muslim
nationalism stands today in Indian society, a solution on nationalist lines is
difficult to find except on the basis of separate States willingly coordinated
for common purposes. In the absence of such a solution, Indian society as a
whole has lost its balance and is a victim to a total unsettlement of values.
Today, Nationalism in India at once gives rise to,
and is confronted with, bi-national, even multi-national claims. These could be
by-passed only by a socio-economic revolution that could level down the
inequalities that feed, and are masked under, the contradictions of
nationalism. Only with socio-economic re-orientation could centripetal forces
win over the centrifugal. The Muslims refuse to live under what they consider
to be the political and economic power of the Hindus; in order to avoid living
under it, they want a State or themselves, and call upon their cultural
differences with the Hindus to reinforce their claims to such a State. A social
readjustment, such as would secure diffusion of power among the people at large,
would obviate the necessity for separation for which cultural differences are
an inadequate ground. Cultural exchange runs as a thread through Indian history
but has recently, under the impact of political differences, suffered a rather
artificial reverse. It is no use denying the resultant difference in the
psychological set-up which has indeed affected even social and personal
relations. Yet, the increasing and, by now, decisive impact of science upon
religion precludes the possibility of religion succeeding for any length of
time to prevent co-ordination of communities into a politico-economic purpose
reaching out to the rapidly shrinking world. In India today economics and,
therefore, politics are split up into cross-purposes. Hindus are landlords in Bengal
and capitalists elsewhere. Their economic domination appears to the Muslims to
be the domination of Hindus as such. The Muslims want to get rid of that
domination; the rising Muslim bourgeoisie requisition this separatist desire to
strengthen themselves. The fact, nevertheless, is that what domination exists
is over the people as a whole. Once it ceases and power passes to the people,
Muslims will have no reason to consider themselves suppressed by Hindus. But
that is exactly what the bourgeoisie leadership of both communities is
concerned to prevent. Nationalism here is caught in the net of its own
contradictions. It is unable either to admit the claim of its rival or to
by-pass it through a social revolution. It must then either admit separate national
entities or try itself out in a mortal conflict. In the former case the
national question will be relegated to the background, though not immediately
eliminated, thus permitting socio-economic questions, which are today sought to
be put off on the plea of national solidarity, to claim attention. In the
latter case the people will get increasingly tired of a conflict that endangers
their very lives and means of living,–such tiredness is visible already in
places where intense communal conflicts have occurred–and will, in the ultimate
analysis, find it necessary to pose socio-economic problems vitally concerning
themselves. Whatever course nationalism may choose or rather stumble upon,
Indian society that is split today by communal discord must await a social
revolution for the reestablishment of the human values which seem to be at a
low ebb today. Only a revolution can cut across and level down the
inter-communal antagonism that is deep-rooted enough to have rent asunder the
permanent values of life. Then will fellow-feeling and friendship come again
into their own; the neighbourhood of centuries will have developed, through
democratic re-orientation of society, into perception of a common existence.
Already within the process of the maturing revolution, communal discord is
being toned down. The struggle, for instance, of the working class for
tolerable conditions of life increasingly integrates the communities into a
common objective. When quantitatively it develops to the point of a qualitative
social change, communal division will have ended. The two-nation theory will
have lived out its day.
* This article was written before the division of India into India and
Pakistan. But the writer’s thesis continues to be valid. –Editor, Triveni.