Social Scientist

Frontier Gandhi: Reflections on Muslim Nationalism in India

Author(s): Aijaz Ahmad
Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 33, No. 1/2 (Jan. - Feb., 2005), pp. 22-39
Published by: Social Scientist
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3518159
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 Frontier Gandhi
Reflectionson MuslimNationalism in India

il Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, generally and lovingly known as Badshah

? Khan (more accurately 'Bachcha Khan' among the Pakhtuns), has
been something of a legend for people of my generation. Even in the
pantheon of the great leaders of the nationalist movement, he was
different and unique. Most of them, with the exception of Maulana
Azad, tended to be men of modern learning, while Azad traced his
lineage to theologians of the Mughal period and was himself an
erudite theologian, a scholar of Persian and Arabic, a great stylist of
the Urdu language. Most of them tended to come from the urbane
world of Calcutta and Bombay, Allahabad and Aligarh and
Ahmedabad. Jinnah and Nehru were barristers, and Gandhi himself
had not only studied law in Britain but had become a renowned
political leader in South Africa and already called 'Mahatma' by none
other than Smuts himself, before he returned to India at the age of 48,
in 1915. And, for all their hectic lives as practical politicians, Gandhi
and Nehru were compulsive writers, each leaving behind work that
has been collected-or is still in the process of getting collected-in
scores of volumes.
Badshah Khan, by contrast, came from the remote area of
Hashtnagar near Charsadda, from a zone of India that was not even a
full-fledged province at the time of his birth, and he was the product
of a village school; the highest formal education he ever received was
for one year as a day scholar at the Mayo College in Aligarh. Nor was
he a man of letters. He dictated an autobiography well after the
Partition and is reputed to have been working on another version
toward the very end of his life; for the rest, he just wrote letters and
gave some interviews and made speeches. In sharp contrast to Gandhi
or Nehru or Azad or Patel, he was a man of very large silences. He
lived for ninety-eight years, almost a century of his own, but there is
no Indian leader of his stature about whom we know so little. The
most authoritative of his biographies, by Tendulkar, was published
twenty-one years before his death; the most recent one, published
earlier this year by Rajmohan Gandhi, adds nothing of any
significance, except anecdotes from years not covered by Tendulkar.
And Badshah Khan was a man rooted in place, almost in the way
of peasants. About Maulana Muhammad Ali and Maulana Azad one
 Frontier Gandhi

knows the relevant biographical facts, but one does not think of them as >
coming from a particularplace; one thinks, rather,of Al-Hilal and Al-Balagh, N
of Comradeand Hamdard;of the KhilafatMovement; of them as leaders of >
Muslims and as leadersin the nationalmovement. One does not think even of
P)
Gandhi primarilyin relation to Gujarat,or of Jinnahprimarilyin relation to
Bombay,or Nehru primarilyin relationto Allahabad;as they became national
leaders and came to represent 'India', their local moorings kept receding in
the public imagination. The memory of Badshah Khan is, by contrast,
inseparablefrom his ancestralvillage of Uthmanzai and more generally his
beloved Northwest Frontier Province; call it Pathanland if you will, as he
himself did, or even Pakhtunistan.The one newspaper he established was
called Pakhtun.He founded an organization,the famous KhudaiKhidmatgar,
and amalgamatedit into the Congresssoon afterwards,so that the Frontier
Congress and the Khudaikhidmatgarcame to be one and the same thing but
it was strictly a Pakhtun organization, open to Pathans of all religions, but
distinct in its very make-up, unlike any other part of the Congress in the
country, with its own distinctive uniform and mode of internal organization,
and, for all its power and prestigewithin the 'settled'districtsof NWFP, it had
ambitions of expanding only into the Pakhtuntribalareasbut no ambition or
plan to expand into the adjacent Punjab or Baluchistan. In his close
associationwith Gandhi and his work with the CongressWorking Committee
he was a national leader, but for the rest he was preoccupied with the fate of
his own people, within India, and at times, across the Durand line, in
Afghanistan.From Gandhi, he took not only the creed of non-violence but
also a whole way of life; one cannot, for example, think of MaulanaAzad or
Jinnah going to live in the sweepers' colony of the Valmikis in Delhi, as
Ghaffar Khan repeatedly did, in Gandhi's company. And yet, his almost
mythical stature among the Pathanshe owed entirely to his own work, and
not an iota of it to his colleagues in the Indian National Congress, none of
whom ever had any base or staturewithin NWFP. When Nehru took his first,
and only, and rather ill-advised trip to NWFP, just before Independence, it
was strictly on GhaffarKhan'sinvitation, and he found himself in a place he
did not understand.
That is one side of the late Khan Abdul GhaffarKhan which I wanted to
foreground in the very beginning, and to some of it I shall return later,
especiallywhen I comment on his particularkind of nationalism. But I want
to come quickly to the very much later part of his life, to say that among the
leading figures of the Congress, he was one of the very few who were not
beneficieries of the formation of the Congress government after
Independence, or indeed of any kind of office-the pelf and power that
comes with office-before Independence or after. It has been a matter of 23
 Social Scientist

C some interest to me that he was often a member of negotiating teams at the

highest levels but never chosen as the Congress President, unlike other
(D Congress leaders of national stature. Perhaps his rustic ways made him
unsuitable, perhaps he was not well versed in the arts of diplomacy and
compromise, perhaps he was seen by much of the Congress High Command,
-_ though not by Gandhi, as just a provincial leader. He did not want to even
campaign for the elections of 1937 because he was apprehensive, quite
Z coriectly as it turned out, that the worldly temptations that come with the
,^-,q power of office would have a corrosive impact on the moral rectitude of the
"o Kliudai Khidtnatgar in case they won the elections. He was their undisputed
leader but when the time came to form the provincial government it was his
elder brother, Dr. Khan Sahib, who headed the ministry, as was to happen
again, in 1946. Indeed, such was the lure of office that Dr. Khan Sahib came to
have the dubious distinction of having headed two Congress ministries in
NWVFPbefore Partition, and then emerging as the Chief Minister of West
Pakistan after One Unit was formed in 1955. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was
by that later date a veteran of Pakistani prisons and was under house arrest
even at the moment when his elder brother took the oath of office. Badshah
Khan was deeply opposed to the dissolution of the four federating provinces
of (the then) West Pakistan into the One Unit and was horrified by his
brother's decision to accept governorship of that ill-begotten super-
province.NWFP was the most Muslim of the Muslim majority provinces in
undivided India, certainly in terms of numbers (93 percent in all) but also
perhaps in terms of traditional Islamic piety, and yet it was also the only
Muslim majority provinlce where the majority, and then the plurality,
remained with the Congress, until nearly the very end; until, that is to say, the
Congress agreed to the Partition plan without ensuring that the government
of the Khlidai Khiidmatgarwhich had won the 1946 elections would stay in
place as all other provincial ministries were to remain in place. This
achievement was owed entirely to Badshah Khan, who was to be one of only
tfur members of the Congress Working Committee (along with Gandhi,
Javaprakash Narayan and Rammianohar Lohia) who voted against the
Partition Plan. Many years later, Badshah Khan was to tell Tendulkar that
NMaulanaAzad who was sitting next to him at the time of that voting advised
him to join the Muslim League, that he was revolted by the suggestion, left the
room soon thereafter, sat down on the stairs outside, put his hands on his
head and uttered the same word twice, 'tobah.... tobah'.

I
Badshah Khan had despised the Muslim League all his life and oiily Gandhi
24
A24 could match his opposition to the Partition. This hostility was mutual, and
 Frontier Gandhi

Pakistani rulers were to keep him in prison for fifteen of the first eighteen >
years after Partition, often in solitary confinement. I have often wondered N

why he did not just stay on in India, where he would have occupied an >
immensely prominent and powerful position, free to do whatever he wanted,
occupy any position he wanted, take up any ministry he chose. And I am _
interested in the fact that this question is never discussed in the literature
pertaining to the life of Badshah Khan. In my own opinion, there are both
negative and positive reasons for his not even considering the option of
staying on in post-Partition India. The negative reason, if one wishes to call it
that, was the way he understood modern forms of political power and the
deep suspicion he had of people who come to occupy high office in modern
states as they are presently constituted. As I said earlier, he did not want to
campaign during the 1937 elections because he was afraid of the corrosive
effect that the formation of ministries would have on the moral fibre of the
Khudai Khidmatgar. After the experience of that ministry, he was to say at a
CWC meeting in March 1940, 'It is astounding the amount of corruption I
saw about me when we came to possess a little power.' Upon arriving in
Pakistan and becoming a member of the Constituent Assembly there, he was
to propose that with the creation of Pakistan the Muslim League had achieved
its goal and should now dissolve itself, to pave the way for the formation of
entirely new kinds of parties that will not take office but would devote
themselves to the service of the nation-a suggestion, I might add, that was
similar to the one Gandhi recommended to the Congress after Independence.
The idea of service to the people fell on deaf years, and ministers stayed at
those pinnacles of power where they had arrived. Many years later, when Hari
Dev Sharma interviewed him in Kabul in 1968 and asked him why he thought
Nehru accepted the Partition, one of the two reasons Badshah Khan gave was,
as he put it, 'the keenness to take power.' The next year, in 1969, when he
came to India for the Gandhi centennial celebrations, for the first time since
1947, much praise and hospitality was showered on him, and many people
asked him to make India his home, but, blunt and truthful as ever, he was to
say 'Even if I live in India for a hundred years, it will have no impact. No one
cares here for the country or the people.' By, 'no one here' he again meant
those who wielded political power. So, that seems to me to be the first reason
why he never entertained the possibility of just staying on in India once the
Partition Plan had been accepted and NWFP made a part of Pakistan. The
only thing independent India could offer him was high office and the power
that comes with high office, which is precisely what Badshah Khan did not
want.
I describe that as a negative choice only in the sense that it was a rejection,
a rejection of pomp and power, rejection of a life with luxury but without 25
 Social Scientist

S? purpose, the life in a gilded cage. But there was also what we might call the
C-4 positive choice, in favour of a purposeful life, a deeply rooted life, even though
9? a life that would inevitably entail much suffering. A Jinnah moving from
0i Bombay to Delhi to Karachi is easy to imagine. But a Badshah Khan choosing
<- to live the rest of his life away from Uthmanzai village and the Pathanland
3!_ generally would be impossible to imagine. And I use the term 'Pathanland'
advisedly; in his very old age, as years and years.1 of incarceration were to
0
Z combine with various illnesses to weaken the body immeasurably, an exile in
'< Afghanistan was at least conceivable, because, historically speaking, the
~o Pakhtuns are a divided people-divided between NWFP and Afghanistan by
a so-called Durand Line drawn by the British colonialists in 1893 on a map-
so that it was quite conceivable that he would die in a Peshawar hospital but
be buried in a little patch of land in Jalalabad, which is indeed what eventually
came to pass. But the life of a Union Minister in some posh bungalow in
Lutyen's New Delhi? THAT was unthinkable.
There is another way of putting it. Badshah Khan had two passions in his
life: the making of an independent, sovereign, secular, democratic, plural and
undivided India; and the freedom, autonomy and progress for his own
Pakhtun people. In the pursuit of one of these passions, the making of a
sovereign, undivided India he was defeated; the moment of sovereignty was
also the moment of division, and, in his judgement, his own colleagues had
failed their mission thanks to, as he put it, 'keenness for power.' But the
other-and in some ways the original-passion, in the service of the
Pakhtuns, remained. A divided India, a truncated India is not what he had
wanted; it was so much less than what he had fought for that he could have
abiding good will for it but could not now belong to it; in Pakhtunistan, he
belonged.
When the Congress accepted not only the Partition plan but also the idea
of a referendum in NWFP, Badshah Khan was horrified to learn that the
choice in the referendum would be between affiliation with India or with
Pakistan. He knew that the Congress leaders were no longer interested in
NWFP and Patel, with his characteristic sense of realpolitik, had already said
that 'NWFP would have to be written off.' Ghaffar Khan also knew that the
vast scale of the communal killings across the country, including parts of
NWFP itself, had strengthened the position of the Muslim League immensely
and there was little chance of the referendum being won in favour of an
affiliation with India when, even territorially, the NWFP would be separated
from the truncated India by the whole breadth of upper west Punjab. He
requested the Congress High Command to insist that an independent
Pakhtunistan be at least an option in the referendum but then discovered that
26
26 Nehru had already intimated to Mountbatten the Congress acceptance of the
 Frontier Gandhi

terms of the referendum. Disheartened, he instructed the Khudai Khidmatgar >

to peacefully boycott the referendum, so as to avoid unnecessary bloodshed N
which was inevitable if affiliation with India was to be advocated. Preparing >
for full amalgamation illto Pakistan, he further resolved that the Khudai 3
Khidmatgarwould now sever all connections with the Congress and would re- m_
emerge as an independent organization.

II
There seems to have been a brief period of great uncertainty for him when he
perhaps could not make up his mind whether he was to now struggle for
maximum provincial autonomy for Pukhtuns inside Pakistan, an
independent state of Pakhtuns this side of the Durand line, or a greater
Pakhtunistan comprised of NWFP, parts of Baluchistan and the Pathan lands
of Afghanistan. On the eve of the referendum, an enlarged meeting of all the
organizations under his leadership in NWVFPdid pass a resolution declaring
that 'a free Pathan state of all the Pakhtuns' shall be established, and Ghaffar
Khan's own statements over the next days and weeks repeated that resolve,
even though the word 'azad' in both the Urdu and Pashto texts left some
room for ambiguity since it could be interpreted either as 'independent' or as
'autonomous'. By February 1948, though, his membership of the Constituent
Assembly in India had been transferred to Pakistan and he duly took an oath
of allegiance to the new country and its flag, implying that he was no longer
thinking of a sovereign Pakhtunistan. He was to later say that if the respective
provinces of Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan were named after the majority of
the people who lived in them, it was logical that the land of the Pakhtun
majority be called not NWFP but 'Pakhtunistan'. He further argued that
provincialism could be best contained not through over-centralization and
restrictions on the aspirations of the constituent units but through maximum
autonomy for the federating units, so that no one feels coerced. In a profound
sense, Badshah Khan wanted within Pakistan a kind of autonomy for the
Pakhtuns that the majority of Kashmiris have always wanted for themselves
within the Indian Union, and he viewed the Pakistani state pretty much as
Sheikh Abdullah came to view the Indian state just a few years after he had
negotiated the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to India, rather than to
Pakistan. The Pakistan government of course kept Badshah Khan in prisons
for most of the years that he spent there, on charges of sedition. But it is
sobering to recall that the record of the Indian state is not very much better.
Even after the Congress had ditched the Pakhtuns in those heated months of
1947 when the Partition Plan was getting accepted and implemented, the
Congress government of Independent India did win the accession of Jammu
and Kashmir in the framework of Reslution 370 but the Indian state has been 27
 Social Scientist

C subsequently most reluctant to implement that Resolution in all its aspects. It

?would appear that the Muslim majority regions which were loyal to the idea
d) of a secular and composite India have not had an easy time of it-neither in
C India (Kashmir) nor in Pakistan (the Pakhtun lands).
t- It seems fruitful to reflect upon the kind of nationalist Badshah Khan was.
I shall come to the phrase 'Muslim nationalism' which I have used in my title,
/) but it is best to specify that he was not the least preoccupied with the sectional
Z Muslim interest and, in that sense, he could hardly be called a Muslim
oq nationalist. He was an unbending Indian nationalist as well as a very devout
~o Muslim, and he derived most of the values in his ethical and political
repertoire-including the ideas of anti-colonialism, democracy, self-
determination, and even non-violence-from Islam as he understood and
cherished it. But 'Islam' for him was a moral universe, not the name of a
political-or politically organized-community. For him, there were two
nations, the Indian nation, and, within it, the Pakhtun nation. In other words,
India was for him a multinational polity, and the smaller nations within this
larger nation were regional, cultural, linguistic, but not denominational.
Badshah Khan was not versed in modern political theory and did not speak
the academic language, nor was he a man of letters. So, one does not get from
him the politico-philosophical Ineditations of a Nehru or anything
resemlbling the RaimgarhAddress and politico-theological conceptions such
as IVWahdat-al-Adyan and Umnia Wahida, as Maulana Azad was to enunciate.
For Badshah Khan, the multi-religious secular Indian nation was a manifest
reality which required no justifications in terms of Islamic theology or early
Muslim history. And the perception that this secular multi-religious nation
was also a multi-national polity comprised of regional, linguistic nationalities
also implied that Muslims in the various regions were part of those regional
nationalites which were themselves multi-religious. Thus, the organization of
the Khudai Khidmatgar sought no recruits from outside the Pathanlands but
was open to Hindu and Sikh participation alongside the Muslim majority.
The regional diversity of Muslim communites in India was fully implied in
this notion, though, obviously, it was never theorized as such.
From Islam itself, Badshah Khan derived a certain kind of universalist
humanism, and he then combined this humanism with the local and the
particular, as was indicated in the oath that was taken by every Khudai
Khidtimatgar,which read in part: 'I am a Khudai Khidmatgar, and as God
needs no service I shall serve Him by serving his creatures selflessly... and I
shall treat every Pakhtun as my brother and comrade.' Significantly, there was
no mention of India or Muslims in the full text of the oath. Unlike virtually
any other Muslim leader of his time, he was indifferent to the whole grid of
28 separate electorates, communal awards, reservation of seats, provincial
 Frontier Gandhi

weightages, constitutional guaranties for religious minorities, or even any >

conception of Hindus and Muslims in India as fixed religio-political N
communities. He constantly referredto Islam as a source of ethical precepts
that were binding and from which even an enlightened political creed could 3
be derived, and he was deeply interestedin social and educationalreform,but _
he never adopted the rhetoric of 'we muslims can belong fully to India only
if...' For communal violence and Hindu-Muslim relations he offered not
constitutional but moral solutions: mutual dialogue and accommodation, a
spirit of love and sacrifice,work for peace and persuasion,the building of the
nation into an ethical community. When, in consequence of Mr. Jinnah'scall
for Direct Action, the GreatCalcuttaKillingsled to the answeringpogrom in
Noakhali and then the communal conflaggerationsin Bihar, GhaffarKhan
absented himself from the political tussles in NWFP and the momentous
discussions in Delhi, to join Gandhi in their tour of the riot-torn areas,in an
effort to put out the fires and help heal the wounds. For three and a half
months out of five leading up to the announcement of the Partition Plan he
was away from Peshawarand Delhi alike because he did not think that his
place was among those who were fighting and bargainingfor power while the
country was on fire.

III
As I just said, GhaffarKhan could be called a 'Muslim nationalist'only in the
narrow descriptive sense that he was both a devout Muslim as well as an
ardent nationalist.However, to the extent that he did not think of Muslims as
a nation or even as a fixed and homogeneous religio-politicalcommunity, he
was not even a Muslim communitarian,properly speaking. I have often
wondered why GhaffarKhan was so impervious to the idea of Muslims as a
religio-political community, a nation within a nation, which was in need of
particularconstitutional provisions to safeguardits unique interests in terms
of separate electorates, provincial balances and so forth. This had after all
been the staple of Indian politics, in its communal as well as nationalist
variants, since the closing decades of the 19th century and particularlyafter
the partition of Bengal and the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909. It has been
suggested that Muslims were in such an overwhelming majority in NWFP
that the spectre of 'Hindu domination', so palpable elsewhere in India,
especiallyin provinceswhere Muslims were in a minority, was simply absent
from the world of the Pathans. There is some truth in that suggestion but
what is strikingis that the total identification of the KhudaiKhidmatgarwith
the Congress never weakened even as communal violences across India kept
spirallingout of hand from the 1920s onward,at a scale so vast and persistent
that people in NWFP, and Ghaffar Khan in particular, could not have 29
 Social Scientist

C remained impervious to it. Badhshah Khan did not think of Indian Muslims
as a politico-religious community but he was surely not unconcerned with the
(D safety of his co-religionists elsewhere in the country, least of all when he
i himself was not only a provincial leader but part of the national leadership. I
think he made a sharp distinction between communal conflicts and violence
-- on the one hand, and the kind of constitutional arrangements that were being
L/') advocated as a solution to the problem. He seemed to have regarded
0
Z communal violence as just another kind violence, a disease sapping the
o%j human spirit, a barbarity that some persons practised against others, for
o0 which religious difference was used as a justification. As such, the ultimate
solution for him lay in the moral transformation of the whole fabric of
society, and no constitutional arrangments could by themselves guarantee
communal peace. Things like separate electorates and provincial balances
belonged, for him, in a different realm.
WNrhat was that realm? With this question, I draw somewhat closer to the
broader side of my topic, namely nationalism, and 'Muslim nationalism' in
particular. And my argument is that the Hindu-Muslim tussle over
proportions of representation in legislative assemblies, quotas in government
jobs, balance between Muslim majority and Muslim minority provinces etc,
belonged to a realm of elite politics to which Ghaffar Khan belonged neither
by temperament and conviction nor by class origin or class affiliation. And I
use the term 'elites' advisedly, for, as regard pre-Partition India and especially
the Muslim politicians of the upper crust in it, what we are examining is not
a class of consolidated modern bourgeoisie with its ideologies of juridic
equality of citizens, universal suffrage etc, but an amalgam of big landed
property and the emerging professional strata in the context of a colonial
society with very restricted franchise, nominated members of legislatures,
communally differentiated delegations etc, with the assumption that men of
property and professional standing are the natural leaders of their respective
communities, be it the community of religion, caste or sect. Separate
electorates, for example, paved the ground for intra-elite competition with
the aid of captive electorates and released these elites from the duty of
establishing political parties with clear-cut programmes of social reform that
were responsive to the material needs of their electorates, or of people at large.
It is really quite remarkable that none of those who rose to lead the Muslims
politically during the first half of the 20th century devoted themselves to the
kind of comprehensive educational and social reform that Syed Ahmed Khan
had envisioned and started to put in place during the latter half of the 19th
century. Jinnah never tired of speaking of Muslim culture but never built any
institutions for the progress of that culture, not even a school. Even Maulana
30 Muhammad Ali himself rose to the heights of popularity on the basis of
 Frontier Gandhi

superb journalism and legendaryeloquence, but even as a key founder of the >
Jamia Millia he was to later remark that he never regarded the Jamia as N
something permanent because the main objective was to conquer Aligarh >
itself; in the closing years of his tragic life, he seemed more keen to legitimize
the Turkish sultan as a caliph of all Muslims or to find a new caliph in the _
Hejaz than in the painstaking task of transformingMuslim Indian society
from the bottom up. In this whole range,then, from the narrow-minded,self-
seeking nawabs to the most devoted of the Muslim nationalist leaders, what
fell through was any preoccupation with the material transfomation of the
lives of ordinary,unprivilegedMuslims.
GhaffarKhan stands in sharpcontrast. Having been born at a time when
the whole of NWFP had less than a hundred school matriculates,he used the
meagre resourcesof his own education to build the first school in his village
and launched on programsof building more and more of such schools, and it
was this effort to contribute to the educational progress of his people in a
high-risk area for the British that first brought him in conflict with the
colonial authorities, landed him in jail and made a nationalist out of him.
Khudai Khidmnatgar, the organizationhe built, was itself conceived primarily
as a movement of social reform and public service for the transformationof
Pakhtunsociety, primarilyin its rurallocales. He spent so much of his life in
prison, both in colonial India and post-PartitionPakistan,that he could never
consistently work on his projects for educational progress and social
reform-but that's where his heart was.
I have dwelt at length on the life of BadshahKhanprimarilybecause that
is the very occasion of this inaugurallecture, but also because I consider his
life as a unique and exemplaryone in the annalsof Indian nationalism,and in
Muslim nationalism in particular. What, then, about this term 'highly
contentious and ambiguous term' 'Muslim nationalism?'As most of you
undoubtedly know, this term is used quite differently in India and in
Pakistan.Here, we use the term to referto that great mass of Indian Muslims
who regardand have alwaysregardedIndia as their nation and are as attached
to this nation as are people of other religious denominations. More
specifically, we use the term to refer to those Muslims who have actively
contributed to the very making of Indian nation and its nationalism,and who
have sought a positive alignment between Muslim particularity and the
generalIndian nationhood. This historicalnarrativeof Muslim nationalismin
India includes many famous names that we all know. On the other side of the
border, however, this same term 'Muslim nationalism'is used to referto those
lineages of politics that eventually culminated in the creation of Pakistan,
which is said to embody the very spirit of Muslim nationalism.My own usage
of the term is specificallyIndian, in the sense that the names that come to my 31
 Social Scientist

?-9 mind in this regard are those of Ghaffar Khan, Azad, Ansari, K.M.Ashraf,
Humayun Kabir and others. In the remainder of this lecture, however, I do
not wish to simply rehash, in summary, the narrative of Muslim nationalism
that Professor Mushirul Hassan has so painstakingly assembled over the years.
I want, rather, to detain you, somewhat provocatively perhaps, on the matter
of a difficult and contradictory figure who could plausibly belong to both
kinds of narratives, the kind that is usually assembled in India and the kind
~Z- that prevails in Pakistan, under the same rubric 'Mulim nationalism'-and I
SC"' obviously mean the figure of Muhammed Ali Jinnah, the once Aambassador
o0 of Hindu-Muslim unity who became the founder of Pakistan. This brief
reflection on Jinnah will obviously serve as something of a counterpoint to
my more ample reflection on Badshah Khan, as dialectical opposites,
considering that Jinnah was the very epitome of elite politics and its varieties
of nationalism, and what I want to argue is that Jinnah's eventual turn toward
separatist politics was always an inherent tendency in the kind of intra-elite
competition which had plagued histories of nationalism in colonial India. But
I should like also to give Jinnah his due.

IV
Before getting to Jinnah, however, I want to briefly state a point of some
theoretical import, with respect to the usages of the term 'nationalism'. In
India, we often use the term 'nationalism' simply in the sense of opposition to
colonialism and/or imperialism: the making of a soverign nation in
opposition to colonial autocracy and the defence of that sovereignty against
imperialist onslaught. In that specific sense, of course, nationalism can be
regarded unconditionally as a positive virtue. As a student of many
nationalisms around the world, most of which arise outside the context of
colonial occupation, I have come to the conclusion, however, that
nationalism should never be considered as a fully formed ideology, always
exuding the same political will everywhere, and reflecting the objective
interests of some pre-existing nation. Nations themselves are not entities but
processes, they come into being in specific historical circumstances and get
formed over a period of time, through great many contentions. What form a
nation shall take is not pre-given but arises out of the will, and clash of wills,
of those who set out to give this nation a particular character. Nationalism
arises as an ideological accompaniment of the practical projects for making
the nation itself, and because the people who are sought to be welded into a
unified nation are themselves diverse and heterogenous, with conflicting
social and economic interests, different groups fight over the meanings and
propositions of nationalism itself. India has a very old civilizational history,
-32 but in its national physiognomy India is also a very young nation and, in its
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present form, this nation is actually younger than myself-considering that I >
was born before 1947. It is quite implausibleto believe that when the Indian N
National Congresswas formed in 1885 Indiawas alreadya nation whose spirit >
this Congressembodied. Rather,the nation went through various phases and 3
processes of formation alongside the growth and actions of the national C
movement, and competing ideologies arose to capture the national
imagination in favourof one or another conception of this nation. That India
would be a secular nation is neither written in the stars nor is an inevitable
result of some primordial ethos of the Indian people. Secularism,as distinct
from religious tolerance, is strictly a modern virtue and the making of India
into a secularnation is a modern undertakingthat may well draw upon those
traditions of tolerance but is not reducible to those premodern traditions.
The secular, democratic characterof our nation is an achievement of our
particular nationalism, whereas most anti-colonial nationalisms did not
succeed in creating such a nation after independence from colonialism. My
brief remarkson Jinnahshould be heard within this perspective.
The question I wish to pose regardingJinnah is this: how did it come
about that a strongly modern and secular trend in Indian nationalism,
representedby Jinnahfor roughlya quartercentury,came eventuallyto adopt
a position which Indian historiographyregardsas Muslim communalism and
Pakistani historiography regards as Muslim nationalism? Or, to put it
differently, with respect to Indian historiography: we speak of Muslim
communalism, and we speak of the Pakistanmovement, and we often speak
as if the two were co-terminus or perhaps even identical, even though
histories of Muslim communalism in the proper sense, are much older and
more complex while the Pakistan Movement which arose after the Lahore
Resolution of 1940 was rathera novel phenomenon. Does the one necessarily
lead to the other, and where does Jinnahfit into all this?
Let me begin by rehearsingcertain facts. As most of you know, Jinnah
joined the Congress very early in his career and described himself as a
'staunch Congressman'while lampooning the Muslim League as 'this great
communal organization.' He then joined the League only in 1913 when
Maulana Azad and Maulana Muhammad Ali were also members and only
when Maulana Muhammad Ali, among others, had persuaded him that, as
Jinnah put it, the League itself was 'growing into a powerful factor for the
birth of united India.' He was contemptuous toward separateelectoratesas a
communal demand on the part of Muslim conservativesand as an instrument
of colonial policy not only to divide Hindus and Muslimsbut also to set up a
logic that would eventuallylead to a parting of the ways.
Similarly, his extreme distaste for the khilafat movement and loud
opposition to it was prescient. First,he understood the Turkishsituation and 3
 Social Scientist

L9 international politics rather better than the Khilafatist leaders, and therefore
?l described the Caliphate as aln exploded bogey' that was bound to collapse;
~) Jinnah predicted that the Sultan-Khalifa was likely to capitulate to the
occupying powers. In this, his position in 1920 was already much closer to
that of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk than to the positions of Maulana Azad and
others. Second, Jinnah argued that mobilizing the Muslim masses through a
A frenzied religious idiom on a baseless emotive issue would necessarily
Z strengthen the element of religious hysteria in Indian politics in very
dangerous ways, which would in turn undermine the secular basis of unity
o that he had helped create over the previous decade. Inter alia, Jinnah charged
that in throwing his entire weight behind the Khilafat movement and in
making this issue so important in the politics of the non-cooperation
movement, Mahatma Gandhi himself was buying Hindu-Muslim unity on
the cheap, for which the nation 'Hindus and Muslims alike' would have to
pay dearly in later years. It is from this standpoint that he resigned from the
Congress, not to occupy a separate communal position but from an all-India
nationalist and secular position which predicted the heigtening of religious
temper and deepening of communal divides. In retrospect, one can see that
the unremitting communal violence which followed the collapse of the
Khilafat movement during the 1920s was very much closer to what Jinnah had
feared than to what Mahatma Gandhi and Maulana Azad had set out to
achieve.

V
This is not the place to rehash that whole history of communal mobilizations
and killings of the 1920s, Jinnah's own 14 points, the Nehru Report, the
Round Tables, the Communal Award, and so on. Suffice it to say that this
whole period was one in which Jinnah perceived-and perhaps rightly
perceived-a narrowing of the horizons for the kind of strongly secular, truly
federal polity with a strong centre that he had envisioned during the 1910s,
before the Khilafat, in the service of a united India. The role of religion
generally, and in particular the role of communal forms of religious zealotry,
in Indian politics had certainly increased but Jinnah continued to believe, as
he put it as late as 1935, that 'religion should not enter politics.' He further
argued that the problem cannot be solved simply by positing good Islam
against bad Islam, good Hinduism against bad Hinduism, which only leads to
interminable discussions of an abstract nature and serves to accentuate the
religious element in politics, whereas the real task for politics, he argued, was
to minimize the role of religion by finding political solutions for those very
problems which have been communalized. As he put it, in that same speech of
34 1935, this is a question of minorities and it is a political problem... the
 Frontier Gandhi

minority (is) a separate element in the State, and that separate entity wants >
safeguards. Surely, therefore, we must face the question as a political problem. N

We must solve it and not evade it.' Within the terms of discourse shared by >
most people, on both sides of the communal/nationalist divide, this position 3
was unexceptionable, for, once everyone is agreed that Indian Muslims do 0_
constitute a unified religio-political community, characterized not by their
diversities but by an over-arching, all-Indic homogeneity, then the rest
follows, and the argument can even be used for the acceptance of the
Communal Award, which is what Jinnah was then recommending despite his
personal distaste for the Award. The problem, however, was with the very
discourse within which he operated, and he could not but continue to operate
within that discursive universe because of a deeper problem, namely that as
one who had left it he no longer had any leverage within the Congress while
his refusal to actually work among the Muslim masses on the real issues of
their material lives meant that he could only speak in the name of the
generality of Muslims but not on behalf of any particular economic class of
Muslims or even specific regional identity among them, as Badshah Khan, for
instance, could-for Pashtuns generally and, more specifically, the Pashtun
peasantry. So, Jinnah's own discourse became more and more reified, while
remaining within the confines of elite bargaining.
Within these severe limits, many of his positions were certainly sound
even though the terrain for action itself kept shifting as he went from one set
of proposals to another. He had always been opposed to separate electorates
for example, but these had been widely accepted and had become a fact of life
since 1909. Moreover, a series of reforms had given more leverage to Indians
on the provincial level but very little at the Centre, which was held firmly by
the British. The Congress could cope with the provincialization of politics
precisely because it was a mass organization of national proportions, reaching
tens of millions of people and going deep into the countryside. But Jinnah,
without a mass base of his own, could not counter this combination of
separate electorates and provincialization of politics when it came to Muslim
politics, precisely because separate electorates gave to overlords in the Muslim
majority provinces, especially the Punjab, not only captive electorates but
thanks to such electorates, strong bargaining counter with elite formations of
other denominations (Hindu or Sikh) on the provincial level; that was part of
the secret of success for the Unionists in Punjab, for instance, where Hindu
and Muslim notables could join hands. Jinnah was opposed to this whole
structure and kept hoping well into the 1930s that the Congress itself would
take strong positions against such arrangements while also working out with
him measures to protect what he perceived as the Muslim minority interest.
Again, the problem was that he himself commanded no mass organization, 35
 Social Scientist

S5 nor was he willing to immerse himself into grassroots work the way Gandhi
had done, so that throughout the 1930s Jinnah had no instrumentality of his
D~ own to get recognized as a powerful interlocutor by the Congress, or to
t counter the provincial overlords, or to use the separate electorates for his own
<- purposes.
As regards the modalities of governance, Jinnah argued for more leverage
k/3 for Indians at the Centre as well as restrictions on the fiscal authority of the
0
Z Viceroy, and he was also so opposed to several other provisions of the Act of
gim 1935 that he was willing to make common cause with the Congress if the
o Congress was willing to campaign against it. In the event, the Congress,
confident of its own increasing power and committed to a sustained strategy
of working toward gradual, incremental erosion of British power, accepted
the main thrust of the Act, and the elections of 1937 were held accordingly.
So, having no leverage of his own, Jinnah too went into the 1937 elections,
unenthusiastically, on a platform rather similar to that of the Congress and
closed off the Congress option, decisively, only subsequent to the formation
of the ministries when the Congress itself rebuffed his offer to become junior
partner in coalition government. Upon this reading, then, the famous
'parting of the ways' came neither with his resignation from the Congress in
1920, nor in 1928 after the Nehru Report and the rejection of his own 14
points, but a decade later, when the Congress had tasted the fruits of power at
the provincial levels and again decided that he was irrelevant for their
purposes. A powerful argument has been made that Jinnah had not shut the
door even then, and that the Lahore Resolution of 1940, deliberately vague
and contradictory in its wording, was itself a bargaining ploy for
accommodation with leaders of the Muslim majority provinces immediately
and with the Congress later. No less an authority than Maulana Azad seems to
have believed that the door was eventually shut only in late 1946, well after the
elections of that year. The irony of it is that Jinnah ended up placating
precisely those provincial overlords whom he had opposed so often, and,
lacking mass base among the Indian Muslims, whipped up precisely that very
religio-political hysteria and communal passion against which he had fought
through the earlier decades of his political career.
The narrative of events I have recited here, up to the unleashing of Direct
Action, in late 1946, does not suggest that Jinnah was much moved by
communal passions, although he did come to deploy communal rhetoric
increasingly after 1940. And, there is of course also the odd fact that
immediately after he had masterminded the creation of Pakistan on the basis
of intractable religio-cultural difference between Hindus and Muslims, he was
to declare that Pakistan was to be a secular, democratic polity. So, what we
36 have during the last decade of Jinnah's life is a man deeply divided between
 Frontier Gandhi

palpablememories of his own secularpast and the communal passions he had >
so deliberatelyunleashed in pursuit of political power. As the events of the N

1940s unfolded, his subjective secular temper became more and more >
abstract,less and less an element in the decisions he actuallymade, in building 3
the Pakistan movement. Six shifts of decisive magnitude I should like to _
emphasize here.
First, when the Second World War broke out, the British unilaterally
made India a party to the war, the Congress ministries resigned, and the
Britishturned to Jinnahas an instrumentwith which to counter the Congress,
they bestowed upon him a veto power over futurenegotiations on the issue of
Independence,thus bestowing upon him a staturewhich his actual following
in India, or among Muslims in India, did not warranteven remotely. This
enhanced stature of Jinnah was owed not to something he had achieved
himself but to a major shift in colonial policy. Second, Jinnahthen used this
enhanced stature to negotiate alliance and unity with the non-Congress
Muslim provincial leaders, many of them landed magnates and upper-level
professionalelite, who had been hostile to the Leagueuntil then but now fell
in line in view of the Britishrecognition of Jinnahas the 'sole spokesman' (in
Ayesha Jalal'sphrase) for Indian Muslims. Third, and in an even more cynical
and disastrous move, he now began to assemble a large number of Muslim
clerics under the League'sumbrella,to counter the Deoband ulema and other
religious figuresin the Congress,and therebyopened a vast front in which the
modern middle class elements of the League,representedby the bulk of the
Aligarhstudents for example, not to speak of Jinnahand his close colleagues,
continued to speak of the 'two-nation theory' in terms of a cultural
nationalism,on the European(specificallyGerman)model of secularcultural
nations, while the mass mobilizations of the Leaguecame to rely increasingly
on the God-talking petty clergy who adopted a frenzied rhetoric of a
religious,specifically Islamic, national particularity.Fourth, he reached out
toward the military-bureaucratic elite of Muslim origin as potential core of
the emergent Pakistani state (the most prominent of those pre-Partition
bureaucrats, Chawdhry Muhammad Ali, was to later become a Prime
Minister of Pakistan), while also reaching out to sections of the Muslim
literati, industrialistsand bankers (witness, for example, the founding of the
Habib Bank and the Dawn newspaper,as well as prominent positions of men
like Isphahani) to assemble the rudiments of that embryonic state. Fifth, he
presented the Congresswith virtuallyan impossible choice: between granting
to the Muslim elite a permanent and constitutionallyguaranteedproportion
of political and bureaucraticpower farin excess of the proportion of Muslims
in the Indian population as a price for achieving a united sovereign India, or
agreeingto the Partition. Finally,at a criticaljuncture, Jinnah,who had been 37
 Social Scientist

L-n
devoted to strict constitutionalismuntil then, deliberatelyprovokedviolence
?s in the form of what he called 'Direct Action.' The most strikingfeature of all
these choices was that each of them ran counter to the positions he had
tL previouslyheld (with some lapses of course).
roZ My sense is that in the closing decade of his life, Jinnahhad become not
nmorecommunal in personal conviction, but very much more cynical in his
o political calculationand action, readyto make all kinds of compromiseswith
Z other elite formationswhich he had triedto subdue in the past, and readyalso
^cII to unleashthe most rabid,nefariousand murderouselements in pursuit of his
~o objectives.The secret of it all seems to be that as a thoroughly elite politician
with virtual distaste for the common citizen, he had to either bow out of
history or play the games of elite politics to the finish. When the moment
came, he played the communal card with the same finesse and brilliance for
which he had been famous in his constitutionalist work, and he was willing to
risk a communal holocaust perhaps because, as an elite of elites looking down
upon elements of the political chessboard, the life of the common citizen,
whether Hindu or Muslim, had always been for him somewhat abstract-a
quautity over which the elites could bargain. There is also reason to believe
that by late 1946 Jinnah knew that he was dying of terminal cancer. It is of
course very difficult to determine with any precision what impact personal
factors of that kind have on public actions and calculations of a dying man.
Given Jinnah's immense egotism and sense of himself as the indispensable
redeemer of Muslim interests in the subcontinent, one could perhaps
speculate that his unleashing of the communal holocaust under cover of
Direct Action was something of a last dance of destruction in pursuit of a final
victory, in a race against time, before the Angel of Death came down to
terminate those turmoils of the heart.

VI
When I began planning this lecture and announced the title about a month
ago I had hoped to offer a reading of the pre-Partition days as well as some
extended comment on some turns that Muslim politics has taken during the
second half of the 20th century, and on the contests that have taken place
during this later period over the very terrain of Indian nationalism. In the
actual writing of this lecture, however, I seem to have narrowed it down to a
meditation on-and juxtaposition of-two lives: that of Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan, a man of rustic origins and deeply felt Islamic piety, for whom the
secular nature of an indivisible, multi-religious Indian nationhood was
simply self-evident; and that of Jinnah, the affluent barrister of Victorian
manners from Bombay, who traveled all the way from a passion for Hindu-
38 Muslim unity to a passion for separatistMuslim particularity,risking-and in
 Frontier Gandhi

deed, inspiring-communal killings in consequence of the latter passion. You D>

may call this, if you will, a parable of a nationalism from below, and a N
nationalism from above; a benevolent and enduring bigness of the heart, and >
a catastrophic narrowing of the moral vision; a secular nationalism of peasant
origins on the one hand, and, on the other, a slide from the secular to the m.

ethno-religious which is so common in separatist discourses of the

professional petty bourgeoisie in our time, across the world.The larger point I
want to make, however, is that I don't at all believe that the story of the
Partition can be told adequately in terms of a binary opposition between the
nationalist innocence of the Congress and the inherently communal Jinnah,
as we typically tell it in India; nor only in terms of great insensitivity and lack
of foresight on the part of the Congress which forced Jinnah toward Pakistan,
as even the more liberal sections of Pakistani historiography tells this tale. All
those are real facts, and such facts have undoubtedly had tragic consequences.
But we have to probe deeper into the very contradictions of elite discourses of
nationalism, on all sides, and realize that in those types of political
confrontations there is always the possibility that the various elite interests
would turn out to be irreconcilable and things would simply fall apart, into a
huge bonfire of ordinary lives, while the various would-be ruling classes ride
to power in their different locales.
Within this larger perspective, Badshah Khan again emerges as an
exemplary figure for our times, and for young and old alike. He carried his
village in his soul even as he traversed the length and breadth of the Indian
land, and thanks to his commitment to the peasantry, he never reconciled
himself to the interests of the landed magnates as Jinnah and his colleagues in
the Muslim League did. He was a militant anti-colonial nationalist but had no
dealings with the great magnates of the national bourgeoisie: neither the
Birlas and the Bajajs, nor the Dawoods and the Isphahanis. He was a devout
Muslim but never thought of Muslims as a separate political community. He
was also a devout Congressman but was horrified by the cavalier manner in
which the Congress sacrificed the aspirations of the secular-nationalist
Pakhtuns. And he thought of partitions, whether at the Durand Line or at the
Wagah-Attari border, as artefacts of the colonial legacy. It is no wonder, then,
that what was in the view of some leaders that glorious moment when India
finally rose to keep its "tryst with destiny" was, for Badshah Khan, a deeply
demoralizing moment of sheer catastrophe.

Aijaz Ahmad holds Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan chair at Jamia Millia Islamia,
New Delhi. 39