The Longest August (9 page)

The mass arrests by the government pushed up the number of political offenders to somewhere between sixty thousand and ninety-two thousand.
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In his rivalry with Gandhi as the primary spokesman of Indians, Jinnah had a built-in disadvantage. It was not just that as a Hindu, Gandhi belonged to the majority community, but by invoking the symbols and mythology of the religion, he had given himself a Hindu halo.

By contrast, Jinnah's distaste for street politics remained unabated. He and Gandhi lived in totally different worlds, politically and socially. Temperamentally, Gandhi was a man of heart, skillful in pulling emotional strings, creating and applying “moral pressure.” He tried diverse ways to
win, particularly when he could not marshal rational argument to support his stance. As his polar opposite, Jinnah was a man of intellect, steeped in logic, unsentimental, a lawyer to his fingertips. He was cold, conservative, constitutionalist, and consistent.

Jinnah realized that the dramatic events of the Salt March and its aftermath, reported worldwide, had overshadowed his efforts at advancing the cause of Indian nationalism through constitutional means. In his political joust he had lost to Gandhi. He decided to quit India. In October 1930 he sailed to London and returned to practicing law.

In stark contrast, Gandhi and other Congress luminaries were languishing in dirty, poorly maintained jails. There was therefore no prospect of them attending the first Round Table Conference on India in London later in the year.

3: The Two-Nation Theory

A Preamble to Partition

When the first Round Table Conference on India opened in London on November 12, 1930, it turned out to be anything but round. The eighty-nine delegates sat around an E-shaped configuration. Among the Muslim representatives, Jinnah stood out because of his distinctive hand-tailored suit and his attention-drawing behavior. “Jinnah did not at the opening of the Conference say what his party [Muslim League] had agreed on, and they are a little sore in consequence,” wrote Sir Malcolm Hailey, the Indian government's consultative official, in a private note to Viceroy Lord Irwin. “He declined to give the Conference Secretariat a copy of his speech in advance as all the others had done. But then Jinnah, of course, was always the perfect little bounder.”
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In his opening speech Jinnah said that there were four parties involved: the British, the princely states, the Hindus, and the Muslims. Thus he made Muslims a distinct group, rather than Indians with special interests and demands. He made explicit what was implicit in his earlier Fourteen Points.

Back in India, the League's acting president, Sir Muhammad Iqbal, also made an original point in his address to the organization's annual conference in Allahabad in late December. A mustached man with a receding hairline and a middle-distance gaze, he was a Cambridge-educated barrister and poet-philosopher. He stressed the distinction of Muslims in a territorial context. “I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state,” he said. “Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of the consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the destiny of Muslims, at least of
North-West India.”
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In retrospect, this would prove to be the germ out of which sprouted Pakistan.

In London the conference set up eight subcommittees to deal with different subjects, the most important being the federal structure, provincial powers, and minorities. At the end of the deliberations on January 19, 1931, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald said that his government was prepared to “accept devolution of power at the Center if the [central] legislature could be constituted on a federal basis”
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—and hoped the Congress Party would attend the next conference.

Alert to his superior's cue, Viceroy Lord Irwin released Congress leaders on January 25 on the eve of the party's Purna Swaraj (Full Independence) Day. He invited Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi for talks.

The Gandhi-Irwin Pact

Gandhi had a three-and-a-half-hour, one-on-one meeting with the viceroy in Delhi on February 17, a groundbreaking event. According such privilege to the leader of a party committed to ending the British Raj raised hackles among many British politicians, especially Conservatives. Preeminent among them was Winston Churchill, former chancellor of the exchequer and secretary of state for the colonies. He could not bear “the nauseating and revolting spectacle of this one-time Inner Temple lawyer, now seditious fakir, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceroy's palace, there to negotiate and parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.”
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The viceroy's game-changing invitation thrust Gandhi into the celebrity stratosphere.

He and Lord Irwin met several times to hammer out an agreement. During one of these sessions, the viceroy asked his interlocutor if he would like tea. “Thank you,” replied Gandhi as he adjusted his shawl. Holding up a paper bag, he said, “I will put some of this salt into my tea to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party.” The air rippled with laughter.

During the hard-nosed bargaining, one of the concessions that Gandhi wrung from Lord Irwin was the permission for Indians to make salt on the seacoasts. Overall, though, this turned out to be a token gesture by the viceroy, who compelled Gandhi to accept a future constitution in which Britain would retain control over defense, foreign relations, minority problems, and financial obligations to foreign countries. This was
summed up in Article 2 of the pact.
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Yet, in retrospect, this agreement would prove to be the apogee of Gandhi's political achievement.

In exchange for the Congress Party ending civil disobedience, and agreeing to participate in the next Round Table Conference, Lord Irwin pledged to release all political prisoners and return their confiscated lands.

The Gandhi-Irwin Pact was inked on March 5. Though its terms did not meet the minimum that Gandhi had prescribed for a “truce,” he vouched for the sincerity of Lord Irwin, who was set to retire the next month. Despite grumbling from its younger members about Article 2, the Congress Working Committee (CWC, or Congress high command) endorsed the deal. But the special session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) at the end of March did not. It instructed Gandhi to disown Article 2 at the Round Table Conference.

This hiccup in the Congress camp did nothing to douse the fast-spreading rumor in the predominantly Hindu rural areas of India that the great Mahatma had triumphed over the British king and that Ram Raj was now in the offing.

What transpired at the next conference in London, which opened a fortnight after the collapse of the Labor government of MacDonald, was the exact opposite of the Hindu villagers' expectations.

Second and Third Round Table Conferences

The second Round Table Conference convened on September 7, 1931, against the background of a deepening political crisis in Britain caused by the Great Depression. Mahatma Gandhi was the sole delegate of the Congress Party, claiming to represent 85 percent of all Indians. But he could not sustain his party's claim in the face of 111 other delegates: nearly three-fifths of them from British India, one-fifth from the princely states nominated by the viceroy, and the rest from the British government.

Each of the main issues—the federal structure and the minorities—was taken up by a committee. Gandhi was appointed to both. On the thirty-eight-strong Minorities Committee, however, there were more Muslims (13) than caste Hindus (10), with the remaining seats allocated to the Untouchables (Hindi:
Achhut
)—officially called Depressed Classes, forming 11 percent of the Indian population—along with Sikhs, Christians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, and women.

Gandhi presented the (Motilal) Nehru Report, which rejected separate electoral rolls for Muslims, as the solution to the contentious Hindu-Muslim problem. He got nowhere. All other groups, except caste Hindus, lined up behind an agreement with separate electorates for different communities at its core.

Challenging the official decision to list the Untouchables as a separate community, Gandhi claimed that he represented all the castes of Hinduism “in my own person.” This failed to convince the Untouchables' leader, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. A young, fiendishly articulate law graduate of Columbia University, he slammed Gandhi's practice of calling the Untouchables “Harijans” (Hindi: Children of God), an unworthy example of political posturing. As outcastes, the Untouchables stood apart from caste Hindus, he insisted.

Anticipating failure at the conference, Gandhi spent much time and energy lobbying for India's total independence by trying to convert the British public to his cause. He stressed that quitting the British Empire would not mean severing ties with the people of Britain. He deployed his charm, wit, and self-dramatizing skills to the hilt. Dressed in his trademark loincloth and shawl, with a dangling watch and sandals, he provided an exotically attractive image for British newspapers. He traveled to Manchester, the textile heart of the empire, and Oxford, addressing altogether different audiences. In London he stayed at Kingsley Hall in the impoverished East End.

While Gandhi grabbed newspaper headlines and entertained readers with occasional quips—“You, in your country wear plus-fours, I prefer minus-fours”
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—Jinnah applied his advocacy talent to enrich himself in London.

Specializing in India-related cases, he practiced law before the Judicial Committee of the (king's) Privy Council. “Contrary to my expectations, I was a success,” Jinnah would tell American journalist-author Louis Fischer a decade later, with characteristic British understatement.
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This success amounted to him earning £25,000 (today's £1.44 million) a year. He lived in a three-story villa in upscale Hampstead with eight acres of garden, where Fatima, his seventeen-years-younger dentist sister acted as his housekeeper and surrogate mother of his daughter, Dinah. He traveled in a chauffer-driven Bentley. In the midst of an economic depression, he purchased several apartments in the posh Mayfair neighborhood.

Following the October 1931 general election, which Labor lost heavily, MacDonald continued as the prime minister of a national government
that was dominated by the Conservatives. Sir Samuel Hoare, the new Conservative secretary of state for India, was ill-disposed toward the Congress Party, a feeling shared by Viceroy Lord Willingdon in Delhi. Within weeks the viceroy proclaimed Emergency Powers Ordinances in the Congress strongholds of Bengal and United Provinces.

Yet Sir Samuel showed sufficient sensitivity toward Gandhi's sartorial appearance. When King George V and Queen Mary decided to invite all Conference delegates to a tea party at Buckingham Palace, the king said to Sir Samuel, “What? This little man to be in the Palace without proper clothes on, and bare knees!” Summoning his best diplomatic manner, Sir Samuel persuaded the king not to mention dress restrictions on the invitation cards. After the event, when a journalist asked Gandhi if he had had enough clothes on, he replied, “The King had enough on for both of us.”
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Joking aside, neither Gandhi nor Jinnah was surprised that the conference failed to resolve the communal issue. MacDonald disbanded the assemblage on December 1, saying that the Indian representatives' failure to reach a communal settlement left his government no option but to make a unilateral decision.

After Gandhi returned to India empty-handed in late December, the CWC decided to renew the civil disobedience struggle. Over the next few months Gandhi and other party leaders were jailed.

On August 16, 1932, MacDonald announced the Communal Award. It granted separate electoral rolls and seats to Muslims, Sikhs, Untouchables, Christians, Anglo-Indians, and Europeans. From a communal perspective, Punjab and Bengal mattered most. In Punjab, Sikhs were a substantial minority, and in Bengal, the miniscule European settler community, dating back to the days of the East India Company (1600–1874), loomed large in British eyes. The government in London proved iniquitous in its allocation of communal representation. In Punjab, it gave Muslims, forming 56 percent of the population, 51 percent of the legislative seats; Hindus, including the Untouchables, 30 percent; and Sikhs 19 percent. In Bengal, it awarded Muslims, constituting 54 percent of the population, 48 percent of the seats; Hindus 32 percent, down 12 percent on their actual proportion; and Europeans, forming a puny 1 percent of the total, beefed up tenfold.
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Congress rejected the Communal Award outright. The Muslim League grumbled, prevaricated, and in January 1935 accepted it “until a substitute is agreed upon by the various communities concerned.”
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The third Round Table Conference, which opened in London on November 17, 1932, was boycotted by the Congress Party. Sir Sultan Muhammad Shah, known popularly as the Aga Khan—the official protégé of the British charged with selecting the Muslim delegates—excluded Jinnah from his list. The attendees were down to forty-six. After scrutinizing and summarizing several reports, they disbanded on Christmas Eve. Their recommendations were incorporated in a white paper published in March 1933. Between then and April 1, 1936, when the Government of India Act 1935 promulgated on August 2 was enforced, there was a succession of momentous events that led to a growing divergence between majority Hindus and minority Muslims.

Now or Never

As an accomplished barrister and fabulously rich man in London, Jinnah was admired by Indian expatriates, especially Muslims. In early 1933 he was one of the honored guests at a black-tie dinner party given by the Aga Khan at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in London. At the predinner reception he found himself accosted by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, who pressed on him a pamphlet titled “Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?
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The document included a letter dated January 28, 1933, and addressed to “My Lord,” for his opinion on “the proposed solution of this great Indian problem as explained herein.”

The author was Rahmat Ali, a tall, powerfully built, thirty-five-year-old bachelor. After graduating from Islamia Madrassa in Lahore and teaching at the prestigious Aitchison College, he had obtained a law degree from Punjab University before moving to Britain in 1930. The next year he enrolled at Emmanuel College in Cambridge.

In his 2,350-word essay, described as an appeal on behalf of “our 30 million Muslim brethren who live in “PAKSTAN—by which we mean the five Northern units of India, viz.: Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan” for “your sympathy and support in our grim and fateful struggle against political crucifixion and complete annihilation.” It excoriated the Muslim delegates at the Round Table Conferences for agreeing to a constitution “based on the principle of an All-India Federation,” which amounted to “nothing less than signing the death-warrant of Islam and its future in India.” Like Muhammad Iqbal, a fellow Punjabi, Rahmat Ali focused on the
northwestern zone of India, overlooking the Muslim-majority Bengal in the east.

Jinnah responded coolly toward Rahmat Ali and his pamphlet. When Ali and his three cosignatories contrived to meet him to gain his backing for “PAKSTAN,” Jinnah replied: “My dear boys, don't be in a hurry; let the waters flow and they will find their own level.”
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