India: The Seige Within

By MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is among those who have made a significant impact on Indian society by their writing, whether as authors or editors. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the seminal newsmagazine, Sunday, in 1976 and The Telegraph in 1982, he revolutionized Indian journalism in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s he launched The Asian Age, a multi-edition daily that once again had substantive impact on the profession. He has also served as the Editorial Director of India Today, Headlines Today and as the editor of the Deccan Chronicle and the Sunday Guardian.
MJ, as he is popularly known, first entered public life in 1989, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha. He went back to media in 1993 and returned to the political area in 2014, when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and became the party’s national spokesperson during the 2014 campaign led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In July 2016, he was named the Minister of State for External Affairs by Prime Minister Modi.
His seven books have achieved great international acclaim: India: The Siege Within; Nehru: The Making of India; Riot-after-Riot; Kashmir: Behind the Vale; The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan and Blood Brothers, his only work of fiction. In addition, there have been four collections of his columns, reportage and essays.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Roli Books
• Release date: Feb 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9788193600979

Book preview

MJ Akbar is among those who have made a significant impact on Indian society by their writing, whether as authors or editors. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the seminal newsmagazine, Sunday, in 1976, and The Telegraph in 1982, he revolutionized Indian journalism in the 1970s and 80s. In the 1990s he launched The Asian Age, a multi-edition daily that once again had substantive impact on the profession. He has also served as the Editorial Director of India Today, Headlines Today and as the editor of the Deccan Chronicle and the Sunday Guardian.

MJ, as he is popularly known, first entered public life in 1989, when he was elected to the Lok Sabha. He went back to media in 1993, and returned to the political area in 2014, when he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and became the party’s national spokesperson during the 2014 campaign led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In July 2016, he was named the Minister of State for External Affairs by Prime Minister Modi.

His seven books have achieved great international acclaim: Kashmir: Behind the Vale; India The Siege Within; Nehru: The Making of India; Riot-after-Riot; The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity; Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan; and Blood Brothers, his only work of fiction. In addition, there have been four collections of his columns, reportage and essays.

OTHER TITLES BY MJ AKBAR

Blood Brothers: A Family Saga

Byline

Have Pen, Will Travel: Observations of a Globetrotter

Kashmir Behind the Vale

Nehru: The Making of India

The Shade of Swords: Jihad and the Conflict between Islam and Christianity

OTHER LOTUS TITLES

ROLI BOOKS

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First published in 2003 by

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Copyright © M.J. Akbar, 2003

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For Ammiji and Abbaji with love and gratitude

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. THE BIRTH OF PAKISTAN AND THE SURVIVAL OF INDIA

1. The Rationale of 1947

2. Mullah Power in Pakistan

3. Masters, Not Friends

4. The Believer

5. ‘Is the Weather Freezing?’

6. A Home for Gandhi’s Soul

7. The Rise of the Jailbird

8. The Man Who Changed the Map of India

9. The Roll-Call of Honour

10. The Great River

11. Past and Future

II. PUNJAB

1. The State of a Problem

2. An Old Fear

3. A Faith and Two Religions

4. Punjab versus Delhi: The First Sikh Homeland

5. The Identity Crisis

6. ‘Pagri Samhal, Jatta’

7. The Complex Minority

8. The Bargain Hunters

9. The Politics of Faith

10 Searching for Khalistan

11. Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale

12. Punjab: Death of a General

III. KASHMIR

1. Democracy in Paradise

2. Kings and Peasants

3. The Lion of Kashmir

4. Raiders of the Lost Cause

5. Nothing Proved

6. To Die an Indian

7. The Second Trial

8. Guilty till Proved Innocent?

9. ‘Glory to Mother Bharat’

10. A Phenomenon of Democracy

Index

INTRODUCTION

Carving up countries and kingdoms is as old as history. Boundaries, until quite recently, were no more than a measure of military strength or royal/national ambition. Partition was therefore the unsurprising fate of the defeated, or the merely unfortunate.

Before Europe set out to carve the world, it was busy carving itself up. The process was partially parallel; as some European powers seized the world, others tried to seize Europe. The logic of conquest in the tumult of nineteenth-century Europe often demanded partition. When wars were won by alliances, a division of the spoils became necessary. Victors supped on the vanquished, and sated themselves until their mistakes or miscalculations led to another shift in the balance of power, and perhaps role reversal. A country unlucky enough to be both strategically placed and weak, like Poland, was continually being redistributed in the name of someone else’s security. Maps were redrawn at great conferences or in secret deals, where greed, deceit, chicanery and maneuvering between kings and diplomats were far more complex than the comparatively straightforward encounters between generals on a battlefield.

The defeat of Napoleon, and the end to the havoc he created throughout Europe, released the energy of the victors for different, and dramatic, pursuits. The prevailing impetus of the age was empirical, in both the direct and implied senses of the term. Colonial rampage and expansion soon acquired a moral halo as victory fed notions of superiority which in turn were attributed to divine reward for earthly merit. The white man’s burden was easily nourished by sermons. Imperceptibly, the divine right of kings morphed into the divine right of races.

The two major victors of the Napoleonic wars were Britain and Russia. Whether because of the accident of geography, or the craft of good sense, they got out of each other’s way. Britain chose the sea routes to build her empire; Russia stretched towards the vast landmasses of the east and Muslim Central Asia. The pace of expansion echoed the sweep of Muslim armies in the seventh and eighth centuries and the Mongols of Chengiz Khan four centuries later.

France, understandably, withdrew from the race for the world, in which it had been heavily engaged before the Napoleonic storms; but later resurfaced to pick up parts of Africa and a nerve centre of South East Asia. Italy was too fragmented through the nineteenth century to be a world power. Spain stuck to the west of the Pope’s Line drawn in the fifteenth century to keep Spain and Portugal out of conflict with each other: Spain was assigned the Atlantic and Portugal the Indian oceans. Portugal consolidated her rich African colonies and Indian outposts.

Two European powers disturbed this comfortable distribution of the world. Austria and Germany sought their empires in Europe, leaving East Europe and West Asia to their World War I ally, the Ottomans of Turkey. As Austria waned in the nineteenth-century Germany waxed, united and energized. Germany’s ambitions sought space both to its east and west. It took two wars, the first a bit mistakenly called a world war, in the first half of the twentieth century for German ambition to self-destruct. The 1914–1918 war was bitter, costly, brutal and inconclusive because Germany, although defeated, was not ready to accept defeat.

Nor was the post-war world ready for a new order. America was as uncertain about the consequences of victory in 1918 as Germany was obstinate about her rejection of defeat. Britain, weakened, was yet to lose the arrogance of a nineteenth-century master race. The victors of World War I had no ideas beyond greed as they began to salivate over the carcass of the Ottoman empire and the colossal reserves of oil in the Arab and Persian deserts. It was still bright, but this was the evening light of the long English summer day. Winston Churchill might insist that the sun would never set on the British empire, but the vision of his class was impaired.

The British ruling class, a thin upper crust, could neither see the social upheaval created by the war at home, nor recognize the power of giants beginning to stir in the colonies. Mahatma Gandhi, with his acute eye, reached out to the British working class, even after boycotting their manufacture, and found a warm response. From their different perspectives, the workers of Britain and the enslaved of the colonies had one thing in common: both were hostile to the traditional British ruling class. Both wanted change. And both would get it at the same time, immediately after the World War II. It was not a coincidence that India became free when a Labour government was in power. Winston Churchill, after leading his country to victory in 1945, led his Conservative Party to a rout in the subsequent general election. He ruefully remarked, when given the Order of the Bath by the King for his wartime services, that he had been given the Order of the Boot by the people.

When the British got the Order of the Boot from India they did not leave without a reverse flick. It was called Partition. A reverse flick is always more subtle. It did not kill, but it tore off vital parts; and it left septic wounds that time failed to heal.

Partition, we have noted, was a price paid by losers in European wars. The idea was inversed by Europe’s victors when they began to colonize Asia and Africa. Partition was pointless in a colony, since the purpose was economic exploitation. The colonizers were not coy. Rabindranath Tagore, who preferred a poet’s unity between East and West rather than a revolutionary’s confrontation, could not but quote from a book that laid down the West’s colonial doctrines for Africa. I quote from Tagore’s famous essay, written in 1922, East and West:

The time has come when Europe must know that the forcible parasitism which she has been practicing upon the two large continents of the world – the two most unwieldy whales of humanity – must be causing to her moral nature a gradual atrophy and degeneration. As an example, let me quote the following extract from the concluding chapter of ‘From the Cape to Cairo’, by Messrs Grogan and Sharp, two writers who have the power to inculcate their doctrines by precept and example. In their reference to the African they are candid, as when they say, We have stolen his land. Now we must steal his limbs. These two sentences, carefully articulated, with a smack of enjoyment, have been more clearly explained in the following statement, where some sense of that decency which is the attenuated ghost of a buried conscience, prompts the writers to use the phrase ‘compulsory labour’ in place of the honest word ‘slavery’; just as the modern politician adroitly avoids the word ‘injunction’ and uses the word ‘mandate’. Compulsory labour in some form, they say, is the corollary of our occupation of the country. And they add: It is pathetic, but it is historic, implying thereby that moral sentiments have no serious effect in the history of human beings.

The British came to India when it was a ragman’s quilt and they patched as many pieces of it as they could. Goodwill played less part in the expansion of their empire than opportunity, and then the need to defend the economic gains of conquest. They used the wealth of India to conquer India; and the rewards of conquest were shared with home. The British were the only foreigners to rule India who had home leave; for those before them, India became home. Even if the Kushan, Turk, Afghan or Mughal was not born in India he died in India; if India was not his janmabhumi it was at least his mrityubhumi, and consequently the matrabhumi of his children. Before the British the wealth of any empire remained in the country.

There is a difference between those who came to India merely to loot, like Mahmud of Ghazni or Nadir Shah; and those who came to rule, whether the Kushans of eastern China or the Afghans beyond the Hindu Kush, or the Mongol-Turks of Central Asia. The British were unique: they fused the two, seamlessly. A statistic tells the story perhaps better than anything else: when the British began their march towards the north from Calcutta, by the end of the eighteenth century, India had 23 per cent of the world’s trade and Britain had 2 per cent. When the British left India in 1947 Britain had 23 per cent of the world’s trade, and India had 2 per cent.

There were many vicissitudes on India’s long journey towards freedom, and more than one question arise. What for instance if Mahatma Gandhi had not abruptly withdrawn the non-cooperation movement after Chauri Chaura in February 1922? The nation was in a rage for reasons both distant and immediate: Jallianwala Bagh had occurred in 1919; the Muslims were seething over the British occupation of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina (this was the real cause of the Khilafat movement) after the defeat of Ottoman Turkey; Gandhi had pulled off a joint Hindu–Muslim movement; the Congress and the Muslim League were at peace with each other; and the British were so war-weary that they could not prevent the independence of Afghanistan. At the very least India could have got dominion status on extremely favourable terms – and it would have been a united India. The most important consequence would have been Indian familiarity with the idea of democracy, and the process of elections, during its dominion status. Only the continued practice and experience of democracy in ever-increasing demographic circles could have exposed one of the great myths that formed the basis of the Muslim perception of nationhood. This should be called the Sir Sayyid Ahmad Myth.

It is perhaps unfair to Sir Sayyid to accuse him of ignorance of democracy. For democracy as we know it today was not familiar even to the Englishman: the House of Commons still reeked of rotten boroughs and purchased miniscule electorates. The irony, and the tragedy, was that Sir Sayyid, a child of the nineteenth-century, should become father of a twentieth-century miscarriage.

The birth of a son in an upper-class Muslim household in the first half of the nineteenth century was announced with a proud gunshot, if not cannon fire – to get the child used to the sound of firearms. When the midwife brought the infant to the men, a maulvi or a senior member of the family bent down and whispered the aazaan in the left ear and the kalimah in the right. Faith and fire were the Muslim birthright. Sayyid Ahmad Khan was born on 17 October 1817 into such a home in Delhi.

The British effectively stopped all pretensions to gunfire after 1857. It was Sayyid Ahmad’s destiny to change the priorities of a community that once bitterly resented British rule. The British, always wary of a jihad, thanked the man who turned the middle-class Muslim mind with a knighthood and a college.

His father was a Mughal bureaucrat, serving briefly as prime minister to the Mughal Emperor Akbar II in 1815. Sayyid Ahmad was brought up in the sprawling complex of houses that served as the home of his maternal grandfather, Khwaja Fariduddin Ahmad, in old Delhi. Courtesy, consideration, order, education (personally supervised by the patriarch in the evenings), religious observance, poetry, conversation (another fine art) and the pleasures of the street: such were the elements that spanned the sharif horizon. A well-known story mentions that Sayyid Ahmad was thrown out of home by his mother when he was eleven or twelve because he struck an old family domestic. He had to hide in an aunt’s house until he was allowed back – after formally seeking forgiveness from the servant.

His education spanned the norm of the age: his ustad, a traditional second father, was his maternal uncle, who taught him not only mathematics but also the fan, or skill, of archery, classical music, painting and, not least, the serious art of kite-flying. His uncle had written a treatise on making kites and on mixing the broken glass powder that gave the string its cutting edge. Sayyid Ahmad recalled another uncle, with even more élan, who would take him to the home of a Hindu friend, a patron of ghazals, music and the kathak of courtesans. There were also lessons in Arab-Greek medicine from a hakim.

A third uncle, however, proved more useful than these two dashing blades. He was the Sadr Amin at the court and prepared him for work in the government. Sayyid Ahmad’s first job came soon after his father’s death in 1838, as the Persian and Urdu secretary of an English judge in the Commissioner’s Office in Agra. Within two years he became a munsif. In 1846 he arranged for a transfer to Delhi to be with his mother; eight years later a promotion to Sadr Amin took him to Bijnore.

In Bijnore he witnessed the great mutiny that shook the heart of India. Whether out of humanity, or calculation, Sayyid Ahmad ended up on the right side. He saved British civilians from massacre. It is pertinent that Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s own family in Delhi, buffeted by that emotional storm, paid a heavy price for opposing the British. He was for a while so appalled and depressed at the state of Muslims after the Mutiny that he contemplated settling down in Egypt. He dismissed such an option as cowardice. Instead, he offered Indian Muslims a fresh route towards salvation. Cooperate with the British, he suggested, and add an English education to the intellectual legacy of the Persian and the Turk. He reasoned that English would provide Muslims with a modern and scientific temper; while the English would become their guardians in any confrontation with the Hindus.

He started the Scientific Society in 1864, specifically for the purpose of translating standard texts into Urdu. He was bewildered, and then angry, when some members of the Society wanted to extend this translation into Hindi. Already the narrowing focus was evident; even knowledge could not be given a secular objective.

The second part of his doctrine was also brought into play. In 1866, he began a weekly newspaper, the bilingual (English and Urdu) Aligarh Institute Gazette; later that year he formed The British Indian Association of the North Western Provinces and Oudh (the name of his province then), whose charter said, unambiguously, that it would promote the interests of the British government. The quid pro quo was that the British would promote the interests of Muslims. Although the petition for the creation of what became known as the Aligarh Muslim University was presented in 1869 by six Muslims and four Hindus, there were immediate differences over the principal medium of instruction. Sayyid Ahmad, with the interests of only Muslims at heart, wanted Urdu. The conflict between the two languages began to sow the seeds of the communal dialectic.

On 29 April 1870, during a visit to London, Sayyid Ahmad wrote to his friend Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk that the Urdu–Hindi controversy would make Muslim–Hindu unity impossible. Muslims will never agree to Hindi, and if Hindus also, following the new move, insist on Hindi, they also will not agree to Urdu. The result will be that the Hindus and Muslims will be completely separated.

Sayyid Ahmad was not against cooperation; equally, he never had any doubt that the prime beneficiary of his work should be Muslims. The foundation of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh was laid by the Viceroy Lord Lytton in 1877. Occasionally, circumstance, or anxiety maneuvered him towards sycophancy, as for instance when he argued that during the Mutiny, when the blood of the Christians was spilt, there should have also mingled with it that of Mohammedans; and those who shrunk from manifesting such devotedness and sided with the rebels willfully disobeyed the injunctions of religion, besides proving themselves ungrateful to their salt, and thereby incurring the severe displeasure of Government, a fact that is patent to every peasant.

Neither educational reform nor political support to the Raj meant that Sayyid Ahmad had become, as yet, an advocate of the argument that Hindus and Muslims had separate destinies. His speeches at Patna on 27 January 1883 and Gurdaspur in the Punjab on 27 January 1884 have been quoted repeatedly; I can do no better than pick up a paragraph from Patna: India is the home of both of us (Hindus and Muslims). We both breathe the air of India and take the water of the holy Ganges and the Jamuna. We both consume the products of the Indian soil. We are living and dying together… My friends, I have repeatedly said and say it again that India is like a bride which has got two lustrous eyes – Hindus and Mussulmans. If they quarrel against each other that beautiful bride will become ugly and if one destroys the other, she will lose one eye.

His vision changed suddenly when, in the winter of 1885, the Indian National Congress was born.

The instant, and vehement, rejection of the Congress by Sir Sayyid suggests some nudge by the authorities. The British, still shaken by the experience of Hindu–Muslim unity during the Mutiny, were not in a mood to take any chances. Sir Sayyid began to divide Hindus and Muslims into two social and political forces. The election of a Muslim president, Badruddin Tyabji, at the third Congress session in 1887, far from calming him, only further inflamed. He called it deception, a theme that the Muslim League would echo against Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in the last, tense years before Independence. Tyabji wrote to Sir Sayyid, wondering why he was trying to keep Muslims away from the Congress. Sir Sayyid answered that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations, the first time the term appears in serious discussion, and therefore needed separate organizations to represent their interests. Sir Sayyid offered to join the Congress if it confined itself to social issues, but not if it was a political body. Sir Sayyid later argued, as in his article in Pioneer in April 1888, that the Congress had been created to subjugate Muslims under Hindu rule. The term he used was the ring of slavery. All these phrases would be resurrected when the League launched its drive for partition on the basis of the two-nation theory.

It is no surprise that historians like Ishtiaque Qureshi and S.M. Ikram who rationalized the creation of Pakistan called him the prophet of their nation.

The tragedy of the Muslim movement, as propelled by Sir Sayyid, was that his vision of the future was governed by an intellect that simply did not understand the concepts, like adult franchise, that would drive the twentieth century. Nothing illustrates this better than a speech which Sir Sayyid gave on 16 March 1888, at the invitation of the Mussalmans of Meerut. His theme was the Congress, which, he now believed, was the creation of the Babus of Bengali, who were now tampering with our nation by inducing Muslims to join the Congress. He condemned those Muslims who had attended the Madras session of the Congress as nothing more than hired men (the accusation drew cheers). They were not representative of the Muslim nation because they were not landlords, or Nawabs, or Rais (gentry): I should point out to my nation that the few who went to Madras, went by pressure, or from some temptation, or in order to help their profession, or to gain notoriety, or were bought (cheers). No Rais from here took part in it. The only Muslim there with some credibility, he said, was Badruddin Tyabji, and he had made a mistake.

He asked a question: who would rule India if the British left? His answer is astounding:

Now, suppose that all the English and the whole English army were to leave India, taking with them all their cannon and their splendid weapons and everything, then who would be the rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations – the Mohammedans and the Hindus – could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable.

There was a dangerously naive element to Sir Sayyid’s thinking: At the same time you must remember that although the number of Mohammedans is less than that of the Hindus, and although they contain far fewer people who have received a high English education, yet they must not be thought insignificant or weak… our Mussalman brothers, the Pathans, (could) come out as a swarm of locusts from their mountain valleys, and make rivers of blood to flow from their frontier on the north to the extreme end of Bengal.

There was no doubt, or a second thought, in Sir Sayyid’s view, about post-British India: But until one nation had conquered the other and made it obedient, peace cannot reign in the land. This conclusion is based on proofs, so absolute that no one can deny it. Some of those proofs were geographically far-fetched: Now, suppose that the English are not in India and that one of the nations of India has conquered the other, whether the Hindus the Mohammedans or the Mohammedans the Hindus. At once some other nation of Europe, such as the French, the Germans, the Portuguese, or the Russians will attack India. Their ships of war, covered with iron and loaded with flashing cannon and weapons, will surround her on all sides. At that time who will protect India? Neither Hindus can save nor Mohammedans; neither the Rajputs nor my brave brothers the Pathans. His conclusion? That the English government should remain for many years – in fact, for ever!

He dug into the argument. Can you tell me of any case in the world’s history in which any foreign nation after conquering another and establishing its empire over it has given representative government to the conquered people? Such a thing has never taken place. It is necessary for those who have conquered us to maintain their Empire on a strong basis… The English have conquered India and all of us along with it. And just as we (the Muslims, once) made the country obedient and our slave, so the English have done with us. He asked Muslims to trust the English, even in the face of prejudice. He quoted the scriptures. According to his interpretation of the Quran, God has said that no people of other religions can be friends of Mohammedans except the Christians… Now God has made them rulers over us. Therefore we should cultivate friendship with them, and should adopt that method by which their rule may remain permanent and firm in India, and may not pass into the hands of the Bengalis.

But there were other Muslim minds in India, from both the ulema and the laity, who knew the Quran and knew their interest as Indians. One answer to Sir Sayyid Ahmad was delivered within a year of this speech in Meerut, in 1889, by a clergyman.

Three scholars of the Waliullah seminary, Imdadullah, and his disciples Muhammad Qasim Nanautvi and Rashid Ahmad Gangohi, participated actively in the revolt of 1857, but survived the aftermath as the authorities could not find sufficient evidence against them. Imdadullah went to live in Mecca; the other two, in 1867, founded a school that continues to play a significant part in Muslim affairs much more than a hundred years later, at Deoband. It became so important in the life of the community that it had to create a separate department for fatwas. Gangohi saw the world differently from his contemporary Sir Sayyid. He did not hesitate to pass strictures on the accretion of Hindu practices in the social life of Muslims, but urged complete political unity in the common fight against the Christian British government. When asked about Sir Sayyid’s advice to Muslims to stay away from the Congress, he described it, memorably, in 1889 as sweet poison.

The British could have made no better investment than the founder of Aligarh College. In his address to the government of his province in 1896, for instance, Sir Sayyid argued that the Caliph of the Ottoman empire had no right to call for a Jihad against the British because they treated the Muslims so well in India. Even admirers of Sir Sayyid (for instance, K.K. Aziz in The Making of Pakistan: A Study in Nationalism) found his attitude to the British almost cringing.

The most powerful answer to Sir Sayyid came from another contemporary: Jamaluddin Afghani. Afghani, who had spent some time in India, was shocked and angry at what he considered the betrayal of the Islamic cause – even before the birth of the Congress, which sharpened Sir Sayyid’s tongue. He labelled Sir Sayyid a Dajjal, the Islamic equivalent of the Anti-Christ, in a devastating critique titled The Materialists in India, issued on 28 August 1884. His opening sentence sets the tone: The English entered India and toyed with the minds of her princes and kings in a way that makes intelligent men both laugh and cry. As for Sir Sayyid: …he took another road in order to serve his English masters, by sowing division among the Muslims and scattering their unity. Afghani continues:

His doctrine pleased the English rulers and they saw in it the best means to corrupt the hearts of the Muslims. They began to support him, to honour him, and to help him build a college in Aligarh, called the Mohammedan College, to be a trap in which to catch the sons of the believers in order to bring them up in the ideas of this man, Ahmad Khan Bahadur.

Ahmad Khan wrote a commentary on the Koran and distorted the sense of the words and tampered with what God had revealed. He founded a journal called Tahdib al-Akhlaq which published only what would mislead the minds of the Muslims, cause dissension among them, and sow enmity between the Muslims of India and other Muslims (especially) the Ottomans.

These materialists became an army for the English government in India. They drew their swords to cut the throats of Muslims, while weeping for them and crying: ‘We kill you only out of compassion and pity for you, and seeking to improve you and make your lives comfortable.’ The English saw that this was the most likely means to attain their goal: the weakness of Islam and the Muslims.

Nikki Keddie in An Islamic Response to Imperialism (University of California Press, 1968) elaborates on Afghani’s analysis: The attack was not, as is sometimes thought, on Ahmad Khan’s rationalism, reforms, and scant orthodoxy, all of which Afghani shared. It was actually directed against Syed (sic) Ahmad Khan’s belief in co-operation with the British rather than in nationalist opposition, and against his willingness to borrow as much as possible from the British and openly abandon much of the Indian Muslim heritage, thus ridding the Indian Muslims of a source of nationalist, anti-imperialist pride.

The political discourse initiated by Sir Sayyid did not find immediate resonance, at least on the scale that he hoped for. In the two decades after his death in 1898 the mood drifted, and then accelerated, towards the opposite direction. The politics of the partition of Bengal left Muslims in total confusion. Lord Curzon, who divided the principal province of the Empire in 1905 to create a Muslim-majority Bengal with its capital at Dhaka, advertised it as a means of Muslim empowerment. He told a Dhaka audience on 18 February 1904 that Bengali Muslims would find unity and power of a kind they had not seen since the Mughals. He also wanted, more familiarly, to teach the Hindu Bengali baboo a lesson. The baboo reaction was clothed in metaphors that extended from nationalist fervour to matricide; but no disguise was so effective as to completely hide the communal impulse. The Bengali Hindu bhadralok resented this affront and challenge to their traditional domination over the barbarous Muslim peasantry, and their implicit status as the true, natural and civilized rulers of the province. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing later about this period, would caution himself that he must learn to beware of Congressmen in sheep’s clothing.

Nawab Salimullah Bahadur of Dhaka sent the British a thank you note on 16 October 1905 when he formed the Mohammadan Union, with the unambiguous objective of challenging Hindus with the help of the British. The principal of the college that Sir Sayyid had set up, the Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, W.A.J. Archbold, negotiated the next step, writing to J. Dunlop Smith, private secretary to the new Viceroy, Lord Minto, that if the powers were ready to receive them, a Muslim deputation would arrive in Simla to present a carefully drawn-up petition. On 13 September Smith confirmed that the audience would be given. This petition was vetted and approved by the government before the delegation, led by His Highness Sultan Mohamed Shah Aga Khan, head of the Ismailis, along with 35 gentry, met Lord Minto at the regal ballroom of the Simla residence on 1 October 1906, at 11 in the morning. On 30 December 1906 the first session of the All-India Muslim League was held under the presidentship of Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk Mushtaq Hussain. In a wonderful irony, the honorary president of the League, the Aga Khan, reported to Dunlop Smith that the only well-known Muslim to oppose the League, who was bitterly hostile to the principle of separate electorates (that) was dividing the nation against itself was a lawyer from Bombay called Jinnah.

The irony was to somersault many times before Jinnah created a nation out of a fantasy in 1947. The discourse of the decade between 1937 and 1947 echoed, almost exactly, the arguments and rhetoric of Sir Sayyid. The premise was that a minority would not, or could not, get equality in a democratic regime that would of necessity tilt towards the Hindu-majority interest. As noted before, no one quite knew how this animal called democracy would operate in practice. Gandhi and Nehru promised idealism; but rainbows prove ephemeral when scraped against skepticism and fear.

Pakistan divided India’s Muslims into two and then three, weakening them everywhere. It also left residual hope in the hearts of future Sir Sayyids and Jinnahs, who argued that if a minority as dominant as the Muslims in united India could not come to a reasonable equation with the Hindu majority, then what hope existed for others? The urge for separation in free India took both religious and linguistic identities. Dependent India had been tested by the Muslim League, and failed to retain her unity. Independent India would be tested in many quarters, expected and unexpected (including the North East and Tamil Nadu). The severest challenge would come along the borders of Pakistan, where a geographical wobble had left Sikh and Muslim majority regions within India, in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. How free and democratic India has faced this challenge is the theme of this book.

It was first published in 1984, when fire and cloud again swirled through the nation’s destiny. Since history cannot end, there is always substance that can be added to a narrative. But the strength of a book can be easily measured by a simple question: have emerging facts diminished or impaired the logic and dialectic that sustain the argument and reasoning of the original work? By that means-test, The Siege Within: Challenges to a Nation’s Unity retains its relevance. Time has proved to be on the side of this book. There can hardly be a better reason for a new edition.

PART I

THE BIRTH OF PAKISTAN AND THE SURVIVAL OF INDIA

1

THE RATIONALE OF 1947

The name India derives from Indus, the great river born in the Himalayas which sweeps down the north-west on its way to the Arabian Sea. ‘Indus’ itself is a variation of the Sanskrit word sindhu, meaning river. The Oxford English Dictionary, pointing out that King Alfred mentioned India in his manuscripts, notes that the name has, from before the birth of Christ, defined ‘a large country or territory of southern Asia, lying east of the river Indus and south of the Himalaya mountains’. In 1947, the British left this large country free but divided. And the Indus which gave this land its name was now in the new nation of Pakistan.

Some historians have felt obliged to sell the thesis that the concept of India as one nation is a gift of British imperial power. The implication is that it is merely a matter of time before the unifying effects of the British empire wear off and the different lingual groups go back to the destructive warfare of the past. Among the recent theorists is David Page who writes in Prelude to Partition (Oxford University Press, 1982): ‘Long before the foundation of the Indian National Congress or the All-India Muslim League, there existed in India a national organization whose ramifications extended into the remotest village – the Imperial power itself.’

The British took Delhi in 1857; the Indian National Congress was born in 1885. It must have been an extraordinary rule which in just three decades managed to integrate a territory as large as this subcontinent whose parts had, it seems, ‘nothing in common’ for thousands of years. Two hundred and fifty years before Christ. Ashoka’s administration took Buddhism into every corner of India, but apparently did not leave any sense of common identity. Brihaspati’s principles of natural justice have been a part of popular faith for centuries, but it is the British courts which allegedly gave India a sense of law. The Mughal emperor Akbar’s administrative structures held together his vast empire in the sixteenth century, but we must believe that it is the British Collector in the district who taught Indians how to rule themselves. Shankara walked from Kerala to Kashmir to preach Hinduism before William of Normandy reached Britain, but it is the British railways which united India through a communications network! The argument of unity by courtesy of the British empire falls on many