Gandhi & Churchill (73 page)

But as the Indian Muslim movement changed over the 1920s and 1930s, Jinnah changed with it. Jinnah could say with many other politicians: There go my followers, I must lead them. And by 1930 they were leading not just to a separate Muslim electorate but a separate Muslim nation.

The idea of a Muslim nation was not entirely new—it had even crossed the minds of some Hindus.
¹⁹
For Muslims, however, it became more and more attractive as the British seemed ready to abandon India, leaving them to the mercies of a large Hindu majority. The focus of this fear and resentment was Jinnah’s Muslim League. With his elegant suits, stiff collars, and even a monocle, Jinnah cut an unsympathetic, even pompous figure beside Gandhi. Gandhians and Gandhi himself found him an easy target for ridicule. Later during partition, Indian historians would make him appear sinister, even satanic.

But Muhammad Jinnah was also a passionate man, and he was passionate about protecting the interests of Muslims across the subcontinent once the British left. At every stage, he felt, Gandhi and the Congress had crossed him. He had walked out of the 1920 Nagpur Congress after he had been shouted down, saying, “I have
no
voice or
power
.”
²⁰
His counterproposal to Motilal Nehru’s plan for a Hindu-majority Dominion had been ignored. He had become so upset at the pointless wrangling at the Round Table Conferences that he left India in disgust in 1931.

It was Kashmiri poet Muhammad Iqbal who first drew Jinnah to the idea of forging a separate Muslim state out of India’s four northwestern provinces. Iqbal had grown up in the Punjab, where Muslims treated British rule as a gift from God that freed them from the tyranny of the Sikhs.
²¹
At a Muslim League meeting in 1930, as the possibility of the British leaving loomed, Iqbal broached the idea of creating two nations in India, Hindu and Muslim. Three years later a Muslim student at Cambridge, Chaudhuri Rahmat Ali, came up with the name for this putative state. He chose the letter P for the Punjab, A for the New West Frontier Province or Afghania, K for Kashmir, S for Sind, and TAN for Baluchistan. Taken together they formed the word Pakistan, which meant in Urdu “Land of the Pure.” The name became both “a symbol and a slogan” for India’s politically active Muslims, who realized that if Pakistan really were formed, it would be the largest Islamic nation in the world.
²²

One of those whom Iqbal managed to convince was Jinnah. “Why should not the Moslems of Northwestern India and Bengal,” he asked Jinnah in a crucial letter in June 1937, “be considered as nations entitled to self-determination” just like other nations and peoples were?
²³
Such a question, it seemed to Jinnah, had only one answer. Paradoxically, this also led him to a view of India and the Congress similar to Churchill’s. India was not a single nation and never would be. Talk of Indian unity was a “myth,” a cloak for a Hindu power grab or worse. Indeed, many Hindu nationalists considered Muslims on the subcontinent to be lapsed Hindus. Some spoke openly of reconversion by force or otherwise, or at least expulsion. One ideologue, Madhav Golwalkar, even recommended dealing with the Muslims of India as Hitler dealt with Germany’s Jews: “a good lesson for us to learn and profit by.”
²⁴

There was another problem with the settlement the British had arranged. Jinnah realized (as had Dr. Ambedkar) that “separate electorates” set not only a minimum but also a maximum political influence, for minorities and their representatives. Under the All-India Federation scheme, no Muslim would ever become prime minister of India, no matter how agreeable his principles or revered his person. This prospect did not appeal to Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and so he returned to India in 1934 to become the Muslim League’s president and to prepare for battle.

The battleground would be the first round of legislative elections under the new constitution, slated for 1937. Shortly before he died that year, Iqbal wrote to Jinnah: “You are the only Moslem in India today to whom the community has a right to look up for safe guidance through the storm that is coming.”
²⁵
In just two and a half years Jinnah had managed to reorganize the Muslim League into an effective political machine. His model, ironically, was Gandhi’s Congress. Jinnah set up provincial parliamentary boards and a Central Parliamentary Board modeled on the Congress Working Committee. He strove to achieve the same dedication and party discipline. Jinnah even remade himself. He dropped the stiff collars and Savile Row suits and donned close-fitting black Punjabi
sherwani
coats that fell below the knees and that had once been the court dress of the Mughal Empire. There was even a Persian lamb Jinnah cap, to match the khadi Gandhi cap of the Congress. Muslims went into the 1937 election campaign prepared and organized as never before.
²⁶

The 1937 elections were a watershed for the Indian National Congress as well. The organization found itself in an odd position. Officially it still opposed the Government of India Act, but it also allowed its members to run for office in the act’s first legislative elections. The men who had been Gandhi’s closest disciples, “the Mahatmaji circle”—Prasad, Patel, Rajagopalachari, and J. B. Kripalani—mobilized their local “ward heelers” and got out the vote with the skill and aplomb of Tammany Hall bosses. Even the fiercest opponent of the 1935 Act, Jawaharlal Nehru, deemed it prudent to hit the campaign trail.

The Congress had scored well in the last Pre-Act elections in 1934, winning 44 of 88 seats. They could smell success in the upcoming round and defeat for the Muslim League upstarts. And so as Gandhi watched silently from the sidelines, the Indian National Congress made its first serious bid for electoral success.

The bosses were proved right. Out of 1,585 total seats, the Congress took 716, with clear majorities in five provinces: Madras, Bihar, Orissa, United Provinces, and Central Provinces. In three others they had strong showings.
²⁷
The Muslim League, by contrast, did badly. Only one in twenty Muslims across India circled its crescent and star symbol on their ballots. (Congress’s symbol was, of course, the charkha.) The League won only 109 of the 482 seats reserved for Muslims, and nowhere did it secure power, not even in Jinnah’s home province of Sind.
²⁸

Paradoxically, the League’s failure worked to its long-term favor. Seeing the election results, many Muslims became more frightened than ever that their rights and identities would be crushed by the Congress juggernaut. When Nehru announced, “There are only two forces in India today, British imperialism and Indian nationalism as represented by the Congress,” Jinnah’s retort was swift and furious. “There is a third party in this country,” he countered, “and that is the Moslems.”
²⁹
Many politically minded Muslims now saw supporting his party as their last resort. Jinnah’s goal was clear: to make the Muslim League the sole voice of India’s Muslims, just as Congress claimed to speak for all Hindus.

To Nehru, now the Congress president, Jinnah proposed a power-sharing plan, with the League and the Congress divvying up the spoils once India achieved independence. Nehru rejected his blandishments at once. On this subject his view was the same as Gandhi’s. Congress represented all Indians, not just Hindus (and by extension dalits and other Scheduled castes) but Muslims, Christians, and all the rest. To the secular-minded socialist Nehru, his disagreement with Jinnah was a simple conflict “between those who wanted a free, united, and democratic India and certain reactionary and feudal elements” who were exploiting religious difference to protect their privileges.
³⁰

Yet Jinnah knew that Muslims in the Congress were hard to find. Only one, Gandhi’s friend Maulan Abul Kalam Azad, sat in the Congress leadership; and the only reason Congress had scored well in Muslim provinces like the Northwest Frontier was that the Muslim vote had been split. So Jinnah took Nehru’s rejection philosophically. “Eighty millions of Musulmans have nothing to fear,” he told his followers. “They have their destiny in their hands.” In any case, there was only one person whose view really mattered in the Congress, he believed, and that was Gandhi. After the New Year he aimed to cut a private deal with the Mahatma, just as Viceroy Irwin had done after the Salt March.

But the Gandhi of 1938 was a different man from the one who had climbed the steps of Viceroy House seven years before. He was preoccupied with his village work; his high blood pressure made him tire easily and his attention wander. He was weary of politics. But the Congress would not let him go. His Congress followers turned to him for help on the question of whether they should
accept
the offices to which they had just been elected. Nehru and his more radical friends said no: they had wanted the elections to be a show of Congress force, nothing more. Prasad and the Mahatmaji circle took the opposite view: they naturally wanted to reward their followers for their loyalty and hard work. Gandhi was forced to work out a compromise. In the end, he arrived at a plan with the new viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, to allow Congress members to take their offices without having to comply with the government’s emergency measures.
³¹
The episode had been a tedious distraction for Gandhi, who considered the whole business irrelevant. And now his old nemesis Jinnah wanted to bypass Nehru to talk to him directly.

Gandhi felt an obligation to defer to his younger disciple, who was almost his son. But in late February 1938 he wrote to Jinnah: “I am at your disposal.” A month later, on April 28, Gandhi took the train to Bombay and arrived at Jinnah’s magnificent house on Malabar Hill. (Jinnah had married a rich Parsi heiress.) They sat down for a three-and-half-hour discussion. If Jinnah had expected an Irwin-style breakthrough, he was disappointed. Gandhi made some notes but was too tired and depressed to decide anything. He confessed to Nehru afterward: “I have lost the self-confidence that I possessed only a month ago.” He would leave any final decision to Nehru. That ensured that the answer to Jinnah’s offer of a League-Congress compact was no.
³²

There would be another fruitless summit meeting in May, but Jinnah’s mind was made up. Gandhi had let him down for the last time. Now India’s Muslims had to take matters into their own hands. He told his followers: “We must stand on our own inherent strength, and build up our own power.” For the first time he talked to Muslims of achieving their “national goal”: the first sign that he believed that when the British left India, there would be two nations, not one.
³³

On October 9, 1938, the Sind Muslim League met in Karachi, Jinnah’s birthplace. The Sind District Board and city fathers presented Jinnah with the key to the city on an engraved silver tray. Over their heads flew the Muslim League flag, green with a silver crescent and star in the center. At that meeting the League would pass a formal resolution rejecting the All-India Federation and calling a united Indian nation “impossible of realization.”
³⁴

The League flag was not yet a national flag. But a week earlier, on the other side of the world, an event took place that would, improbably enough, bring that a step closer to reality.

On the last day of September a large crowd gathered at the edge of the grassy airfield in Heston, ten miles west of London. They lifted their heads expectantly at the sound as an airplane made its final approach and landed. A swarm of photographers and reporters dashed onto the field to set up their microphones and newsreel cameras, including the very first television camera.
³⁵
The crowd watched with rapt expectation as the plane door opened and a thin man with spectacles and a small mustache descended the ramp. As he stepped to the radio microphones, he pulled from his pocket a single sheet of paper that fluttered in the autumn breeze.

“I’ve got it,” he said with a smile. The crowd went wild with joy.

Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain had achieved what everyone had desired but thought impossible. He had reached a final agreement signed by Adolf Hitler’s own hand, to prevent the growing crisis over Czech Sudetenland from triggering a general European war. As the crowd settled down, Chamberlain completed his statement: “My good friends, for the second time in our history a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

The crowd continued to cheer as he climbed into a waiting car. Then “London’s ovation to Mr. Chamberlain,” reported the
Illustrated London News,
“reached its climax when he went straight from Heston Airdrome to Buckingham Palace.” There “he was shown to Their Majesties’ private apartments, where [Mrs. Chamberlain] was already present, and received the Royal congratulations.” The king had wanted to meet Chamberlain personally at Heston, to welcome him after his diplomatic triumph.
³⁶
But he had been persuaded to let the prime minister come to Buckingham Palace instead, where Chamberlain received an honor unprecedented for a commoner. He was allowed to stand beside his monarch and the queen on the palace balcony, while an immense throng pressed underneath and cheered.

Later at 10 Downing Street Chamberlain repeated the phrase he had used in his statement at Heston: “I believe it is peace for our time.” Then he told the crowd, “Go home and get a nice sleep.” Both his foreign secretary, the former Lord Irwin and now Viscount Halifax, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon, gave him fulsome congratulations. No one particularly cared that the Munich agreement meant the partition of Czechoslovakia and the transfer of the Sudetenland to the Third Reich. The agreement was applauded by every newspaper in Britain except
Reynolds News
.
³⁷
The
Times
of London even sold Christmas cards showing Chamberlain with a smiling king and queen.