The dark face of Gandhi... How did the Mahatma divide India?

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Mahatma Gandhi was known as the pre-eminent politician and spiritual leader who brought India its independence through its famous nonviolence movement, but does it have a dark side that we don't know?

How did he help and contributed to the division of India?

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In 1906, the All-Indian Muslim League was founded in Dhaka 1906 and brought together leading Islamic figures from all over the country.

India was then just beginning to slowly transition from British India to self-governance.

Initially the party’s main objective was to protect the interests of India’s large Muslim minority, especially its elite, and its primary strategy was to use the demographic weight of the Muslim-majority provinces in northwestern and eastern India, particularly the large provinces of Punjab and Bengal, to secure greater representation of Muslims in the legislative and executive power and in Public services where Muslims were in dire need of protection. In the end, the partition of India in 1947 called for by the Muslim League later achieved - quite the opposite.

The 1947 partition separated the Muslim-majority provinces from the rest of India, making Muslims in minority provinces more vulnerable to the will of the Hindu majority. He reduced the share of Muslims in the population from more than a quarter in British India, but their total became only 10% in independent India, which allowed Hindu fanatics to explicitly equate Indian nationalism with Hindu nationalism. It is often mistakenly assumed that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan and the leader of the Islamic League in its final stage, started the demand for partition, but some prominent scholars, such as Aisha Jalal, confirmed that Jinnah never wanted this, and according to Jalal, the demand for Pakistan was It was a bargaining chip for Jinnah, but it was a foregone conclusion, which led not only to the division of India, but also to the division of the largest Muslim-majority provinces - Punjab and Bengal - in two as well. And the division left to Jinnah - as he put it - Pakistan "torn and gnawed by weevils."

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (in the interface on the left) with the Action Committee of the Islamic League (communication sites)

However, it is not possible to blame the division on the Islamic League and Jinnah alone; There has always been a tendency in Indian nationalism to equate the Indian identity with Hinduism and to define India according to Hindu terms, such as naming India "the mother goddess", in analogy with the Hindu gods Kali and Durga. Swayamzivak Sangh, or RSS, is a fascist paramilitary group that has spawned a number of other organizations, including the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is in power in India today. The RSS group published an armed racist Hindu ideology that defined Indian Muslims as "the other", while "Gulwalkar", the leader of this group from 1940 to 1973 - explicitly declared that Hindus "are the owners of this land, the Parsis and Jews are the guests, while Muslims and Christians are Understand the thieves.

Explicit fanatical Hindu chauvinism was of secondary importance during the independence movement. The dominant Hindu nationalism was, on the contrary, blended with Indian nationalism in a more implicit way - by adopting symbols from Hinduism itself - without publicly stigmatizing Muslims as outsiders. This tendency has always been a part of the Indian National Congress which has been represented by such ardent nationalists as Sardar Patel, the first deputy prime minister of the independence period.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of the Indian nationalist movement from 1920 until independence, claimed that his mission was to bridge the gap between Hindus and Muslims above all;

However, large segments of the Muslim elite considered him to belong to the teachings of Hindu nationalism.

In their view, Gandhi tacitly equated Hinduism with Indian identity in his dress, vocabulary, demeanor and obsession with protecting cows that are sacred to Hindus. .

Hindu Nationalism and the Muslim Elite

India's independence policies were above all those of the elite. The masses had only instrumental value. Even in the last elections held in India under the Raj (British colonial period) in 1946, only about 13% of the adult population had the right to vote based on property and income criteria. In the run-up to India's independence, the Muslim elite muted a sense of extreme insecurity associated with history and demography, and a lack of progress on English education, among other factors.

Before the Raj, the center of gravity of Indian politics was the heart of northern and central India, where a large part of the Muslim elite was concentrated. When control began to pass to the English East India Company, power also passed to the coastal cities of Calcutta, Madras and Mumbai, where the trading company established its bases, and an English-educated Hindu elite dominated these coastal cities and their lands, and this Hindu elite for the most part constituted the greater part of the Indian administrators in secondary positions in the Raj as well as spokespersons for self-government in India.

Looking at the fears of Muslims at the time of independence was not important;

This sowed fear into the psyche of the Muslim elite, and had to be addressed in a manner acceptable to the leaders of society if India was to remain united.

As the grandson of "Gandhi" and the prominent thinker "Rajmohan Gandhi" stated, "that journey towards independence, which still feared Muslims, was bound to lead to partition."

However, the appearance of "Gandhi" on the scene changed the character of the national movement to become populist after it was constitutional, and for being a leader interested in mobilizing the masses, "Gandhi" threw part of his political terminology in the form of Hindu religious expressions, for example, he used the term Ram Rajya (the rule of the Hindu god Ram Holy) to indicate that a just order will prevail after independence.

Gandhi (right) and Jinnah (left) (communication sites)

But this is alien to many Islamic elites because it alludes to a golden age of Hindu myths, that is, before the emergence of Islam in India, and many of them resented his intended adoption of the dress of a Hindu cleric, in addition to the title of Mahatma - which means the great soul - which brought Hindu spiritual terms to the political arena, which led to an increase in Muslims' sense of alienation.

In 1920, Jinnah, then a secular leader at the conference, strongly opposed Gandhi's use of religious expressions in politics and warned that "to mix politics and religion in the way Gandhi did it is a crime." He stuck to the refusal of Gandhi's support for the Khilafah movement, which called for the restoration of the Ottoman Khilafah after its defeat in the First World War. For Jinnah, invoking a reactionary and special golden age for Hindu or Muslim societies based on the exclusion of the other was a recipe for division.

He was the master planner of the 1916 Lucknow Agreement between the National Congress and the Muslim League, and because of that he was called the "Ambassador of Hindu-Islamic Unity".

At the 1920 conference in Nagpur, Gandhi left in dismay at the party's refusal to refer to him as the "Mahmata" and his refusal to support a policy of non-cooperation for his commitment to constitutional means of achieving independence.

British Prime Minister "Ramsay MacDonald" 1932 (networking sites)

Muslims heightened apprehension of Gandhi in 1932 after his stubborn rejection of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's project ensuring segregated electors, or legislative seats reserved for India's marginalized castes, a euphemism for the outcasts of the Hindu caste system, now known as "Dalits." The Dalits have the same privilege that Muslims enjoy in choosing their representatives in the Legislative Council in the upcoming elections. The Islamic League accepted the project, but the Congress rejected it.

Gandhi viewed the project as a tool aimed at dividing Hindu society and vowed to fast to death to persuade the British to cancel it. With the BBC in 1955, and in the same interview, Ambedkar ridiculed Gandhi's adherence to the caste system, implying that his interest in untouchables was artificial.

His rejection of the draft seems to have sent a message to the Muslim leaders that he and the Congress were more interested in promoting a homogeneous Hindu mass under the control of the upper classes than in fostering Hindu-Islamic unity and allowing the Muslims their fair share of power in an independent India;

Their logic was simple, and if the project were implemented, it might lead to parity between upper-class Muslim and Hindu representatives in the legislatures;

Representatives of the "Dalits" elected through independent "Dalit" bodies would balance them out.

The Islamic elite found the Dalits no threat. In fact, they were their enemy as potential allies against upper-caste Hindus who had mistreated Dalits for centuries and were bent on controlling Muslims in a similar fashion, according to many Muslims.

The road to partition

After Gandhi rejected the 1932 project, Jinnah returned from his self-imposed exile in London in 1934 to take over the leadership of the Muslim League. However, the leader who returned was quite different from Jinnah, who had been warning of the dangers of mixing religion with politics in 1920; He decided to emulate Gandhi in this matter. The Quaid-e-Azam, as he was known among his followers, surpassed the Mahatma in using religion for political purposes, and said that Hindus and Muslims were not just a majority and a minority, but two different nations. This formula became the starting point for the claim to Pakistan for the first time in the session of the Muslim League in "Lahore" in 1940, even though the claim came in ambiguous terms.

Meanwhile, the Congress - which claimed to represent all Indians - became increasingly Hindu under Gandhi, a leadership that continued unofficially even after his resignation from the party in 1934. Although Muslim votes at the time were divided between the Muslim League and several parties In the regional Islamic, the Muslim League won four times the number of seats allotted to Muslims - 106 instead of 25, as did the Congress Party in the 1937 provincial elections.

The elections (December 1945) for the Central Assembly were a major victory for the Muslim League, which won all thirty seats reserved for Muslims, and in subsequent district elections held in 1946, won by an overwhelming majority, taking 425 of the 476 seats reserved for the Muslim community, Which indicates that it is on its way to becoming the sole representative of Muslims in India, or at least the elite.

Gandhi, with his enormous influence on the Congress leadership, could have ousted Nehru but decided not to.

(communication Web-sites)

Part of the explanation for this shift, from the point of view of Muslims, is that the provincial governments in which the Congress was in power between 1937 and 1939 treated the Muslim community unfairly.

Congress President Jawaharlal Nehru's contempt for Jinnah and the Muslim League and his refusal to absorb the League into the provincial government in the United Provinces after the 1937 elections contributed to the Muslims' despair of the Congress.

Gandhi, with his enormous influence on the leadership of the Congress, could have ousted Nehru but decided not to, and he was shown to have the power to control the leadership of the Congress two years later when he forced Subhas Chandra Bose to relinquish his elected position as Congress President because he found him too radical.

During this period Gandhi remained the unofficial and sole leader of the Congress. He attended all meetings of the working committee, and no member of the committee was appointed and no decisions were taken by the higher leadership without his approval.

And it continued like this until the spring of 1947, when Nehru and Patel split with him for various reasons about accepting the idea of ​​partition. Gandhi opposed partition entirely, but despite his opposition, he had earlier alienated the Muslim elite through his deliberate adoption of Hindu body and vocabulary as well as through some His political decisions that Muslims considered pro-Hindu and anti-Islamic means that he cannot be excused from partial responsibility for its occurrence.

 In light of the historical evidence - some of which is presented only here with specific reference to Gandhi - it would be wrong to attribute the division solely to the machinations of Jinnah and the Muslim League. We cannot deny that, since the late nineteenth century, a strong trend emerged among the Islamic elite that emphasized the distinct identity of Indian Muslims. This idea resisted unconditional integration into the national trend, which the Muslim elite saw as a vehicle for Hindu hegemony because the latter constituted about 65% of the population in pre-independence India. (The Aligarh movement founded by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan attests to this fact.)

This sentiment was heightened among the Muslim elite by a similar strong trend to Hindu nationalism in the same period within and outside the Congress party, and the difference between the two was that the focus on Islamic identity - as it is a minority phenomenon - could easily be described as a separatist movement, while Hindu nationalism could It is accepted that it is called Indian nationalism only because it represented the majority. Unfortunately, this was a dilemma that the Indian national movement and its leaders - including Gandhi - were unable to solve. The partition of India was the result of the cumulative failure of the Hindu and Muslim elites to find a satisfactory solution to this crisis.

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Translation: Sarah Al-Masry

This report has been translated from Foreign Affairs and does not necessarily reflect the website of Meydan.