Allah Baksh versus
Savarkar
By Anil Nauriya
14 May, 2003
Soon after the assassination
of the legendary Allah Baksh on May 14, 1943, a young Sikh in Lahore
wrote an elementary biography of the murdered leader. The first part
of the title of the book by Jagat Singh Bright was "India's Nationalist
No 1". Today, 60 years after the killing, India barely remembers
Allah Baksh and his resounding challenge to Muslim separatism through
the Independent (or Azad) Muslims Conference that this Sind Premier
organized in Delhi in April 1940, a month after the Muslim League passed
its Partition resolution at Lahore. The Conference, presided over by
Allah Baksh, shook up the British establishment.
Azad wrote: "The session
was so impressive that even the British and the Anglo-Indian press,
which normally tried to belittle the
importance of nationalist Muslims, could not ignore it. They were
compelled to acknowledge that this Conference proved that nationalist
Muslims were not a negligible factor". This all-India Conference,
which Nehru described in his `The Discovery of India' as "very
representative and very successful" is today a forgotten event.
The man who organised it may not even have existed so far as most of
our historians are concerned. Instead, the portrait of V.D. Savarkar,
who denied Indian nationalism in order to assert Hindu nationalism,
hangs in the Central Hall of Parliament. Serious questions arise about
contemporary political parties, including the Congress. What makes it
possible for persons essentially opposed to its ideals to make a home
in and flourish in the Congress, especially in the post-1969 years?
There are both political
and intellectual roots to this crisis. There
was a time when it was the Congress which influenced its allies.
Allah Baksh was not in the Congress. But his Ittehad or United Party
in Sind was a close ally sympathetic to Congress programmes. His letter
to the Viceroy after the Quit India Movement of 1942, protesting against
Churchill's speech in the British Parliament, and returning his titles,
was remembered even till the 1960s as one of the classic documents of
Indian freedom. Gandhi and Nehru were in prison at the time. Subhas
Bose went on radio to compliment Allah Baksh. As a result of Allah Baksh's
letter he was dismissed from the Premiership of Sind even though he
still had a majority in the Assembly. Ultimately, he lost his life upholding
the concept of Indian nationalism.
Congress ideological alliances
in recent decades are merely alliances to protect its electoral, legislative
and parliamentary positions. The ideological factor is missing. The
doyen of the Indian socialist movement, Acharya Narendra Deva, had anticipated
this when he once chided the Congress for opening its doors to former
members of the RSS and the Muslim League. The Jana Sangh and then the
BJP alliances have also had electoral and legislative objects. But the
Hindutva organisations have taken care to protect and even strengthen
their ideological position as well. The recent BJP alliance with the
BSP in
Uttar Pradesh is being resented by saffron cadres precisely on the ground
that a blank cheque has been given to Mayawati.
Alliances are necessary and
are often made in politics. But if
alliances made between a tradition that led the struggle for freedom
and other traditions result in erasure of vital ideological positions
this cannot but have consequences for the country. When Indira Gandhi's
Congress faction came together with the CPI after 1969 the Union Education
Ministry presently went to Nurul Hasan. Historiography was placed largely
in the hands of well-intentioned but uni-dimensional historians analytically
oriented towards the pre-independence CPI. The Congress-CPI alliance
was probably necessary. But its impact on the intellectual front was
not well worked out by the two sides and was skewed. These historians
wrote in an age when they were tempted to assume that the Congress dominance
would be there forever or, if replaced, would be replaced only by a
formation in which the Left would play a major role. They, therefore,
concerned themselves primarily with the vindication of the pre-Independence
CPI, or variations upon this theme. Congress, including socialist, history
- for example, the Congress and Congress Socialist role in creating
and advancing the all-India peasant movements - went by default. Political
training for Indian nationalism was neglected.
The Congress as an organisation
hardly took note of what was
happening with its own support. Today the effects of this can be
noticed in the cultural sphere as well. Urdu poets like Saghar Nizami
who stood up for India in the 1940s are largely forgotten. Other poets
who backed sectarian movements are considered definitionally and pre-emptively
progressive by virtue of their membership of the Progressive Writers'
Association. Similarly, after 1989 when the Congress justly incorporated
Ambedkar also into its ideological pantheon, it so forgot itself that
famous Dalit leaders such as Juglal Chaudhury and Chaudhri Beharilal
who had supported the Congress since the Non-Cooperation Movement of
1920 and who had repeatedly been imprisoned in the freedom movement
were largely eliminated from national historical memory. While the Congress
has been willing, even if by default, to erase its ideological heritage,
the BJP has throughout not only protected its own but has also sought
to build up a basis for it, albeit often a synthetic one.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Hamza
Alavi circulated a paper seeking to furnish an explanation of the Pakistan
movement as one reflecting primarily the perceptions and interests of
"Muslim professionals and the salariat" of northern India.
The thesis had an appreciable circulation. If scrutinised closely, it
gives rise to several questions. From the point of view of the Muslims
in India, their chief concerns apart from security of life and property,
remain education and employment. So if the Alavi thesis were accepted,
the Pakistan movement in northern India failed to solve the very problem
for which it had received support in the 1940s.
Anglocentric writings, which
were tied to British foreign policy and
strategic objectives and continued to exercise influence in the South
Asian former colonies, suffered from a dichotomy with respect to Indian
nationalism. They critiqued Indian nationalism. But they did not adequately
critique the Muslim separatism which evolved into Pakistani nationalism.
The result was that most dissidents or opponents of Indian nationalism
were glorified, while the Muslim opponents of Muslim separatism and
of Pakistani nationalism were barely mentioned. These contrary voices,
like those represented by Allah Baksh, were sought to be silenced, as
were the subaltern and artisan voices among the Muslims. This was although
the doubts expressed through these voices stood vindicated by history
so far as the interests of Muslims within post-Partition India were
concerned.
These voices have also acquired
a renewed resonance in the context of prospects for enhanced cooperation
within South Asia. Indian scholarship, however, largely failed to challenge
the Anglocentric dichotomy. This was partly because the dominant scholarship
in India since the 1970s, being overly self-conscious about the specific
line which the CPI took on Pakistan in the 1940s, could not decide whether
to challenge or to reinforce the Anglocentric dichotomy. Even when it
discussed these voices it could portray them only as victims of Indian
nationalism. There were outstanding exceptions. Santimoy Ray's `Freedom
Movement And Indian Muslims', published by People's
Publishing House in 1979, had presented the relevant facts not only
on this but also on considerable subaltern involvement in the
national movement since 1919. But this work was not followed up in the
same spirit.
Since many of the contrary
voices, like those of Allah Baksh,
represented the unifying tendency within India, their muffling has
fed Hindutva. Savarkar's portrait now occupies the space created
partly by this Anglocentric elimination.