Vol. 8 · pages 346–350

321 PAKISTAN : NATIONAL FRUSTRATION Mr. Gandhi this morning and Mr. Gandhi said that he loves Hindus and Muslims alike. I again say standing here on this platform that although I may not put forward that claim but I do put forward this honestly and sincerely that I want fair play between the two communities.” Continuing further Mr. Jinnah said: “ As to the most important question, which to my mind is the question of Hindu-Muslim settlement—all I can say to you is that I honestly believe that the Hindus should concede to the Muslims a majority in the Punjab and Bengal and if that is conceded, I think a settlement can be arrived at in a very short time. “The next question that arises is one of separate vs. joint electorates. As most of you know, if a majority is conceded in the Punjab and Bengal, I would personally prefer a settlement on the basis of joint electorate. (Applause.) But I also know that there is a large body of Muslims— and I believe a majority of Muslims—who are holding on to separate electorate. My position is that I would rather have a settlement even on the footing of separate electorate, hoping and trusting that when we work our new constitution and when both Hindus and Muslims get rid of distrust, suspicion and fears and when they get their freedom we would rise to the occasion and probably separate electorate will go sooner than most of us think. “Therefore I am for a settlement and peace among the Muslims first; I am for a settlement and peace between the Hindus and Mahommedans. This is not a time for argument, not a time for propaganda work and not a time for embittering feelings between the two communities, because the enemy is at the door of both of us and I say without hesitation that if the Hindu-Muslim question is not settled, I have no doubt that the British will have to arbitrate and that he who arbitrates will keep to himself the substance of power and authority. Therefore, I hope they will not vilify me. After all, Mr. Gandhi himself says that he is willing to give the Muslims whatever they want, and my only sin is that I say to the Hindus give to the Muslims only 14 points, which is much less than the ‘ blank cheque ’ which Mr. Gandhi is willing to give. I do not want a blank cheque, why not concede the 14 points ? When Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru says: ‘ Give us a blank cheque ’ when Mr. Patel says : ‘ Give us a blank cheque and we will sign it with a Swadeshi pen on a Swadeshi paper’ they are not communalists and I am a communalist! I say to Hindus not to misrepresent everybody. I hope and trust that we shall be yet in a position to settle the question which will bring peace and happiness to the millions in our country. “ One thing more I want to tell you and I have done. During the time of the Round Table Conference,—it is now an open book and anybody who cares to read it can learn for himself—I observed the one and the only principle and it was that when I left the shores of Bombay I said to the people that I would hold the interests of India sacred, and believe me—if you care to read the proceedings of the Conference, I am not bragging because I have done my duty—that I have loyally and faithfully fulfilled

322 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES my promise to the fullest extent and I venture to say that if the Congress or Mr. Gandhi can get anything more than I fought for, I would congratulate them. “Concluding Mr. Jinnah said that they must come to a settlement, they must become friends eventually and he, therefore, appealed to the Muslims to show moderation, wisdom and conciliation, if possible, in the deliberation that might take place and the resolution that might be passed at the Conference.” As an additional illustration of the transformation in Muslim ideology, I propose to record the opinions once held by Mr. Barkat Ali who is now a follower of Mr. Jinnah and a staunch supporter of Pakistan. When the Muslim League split into two over the question of co-operation with the Simon Commission, one section led by Sir Mahommad Shafi favouring co-operation and another section led by Mr. Jinnah supporting the Congress plan of boycott, Mr. Barkat Ali belonged to the Jinnah section of the League. The two wings of the League held their annual sessions in 1928 at two different places. The Shafi wing met in Lahore and the Jinnah wing met in Calcutta. Mr. Barkat Ali, who was the Secretary of the Punjab Muslim League, attended the Calcutta session of the Jinnah wing of the League and moved the resolution relating to the communal settlement. The basis of the settlement was joint electorates. In moving the resolution Mr. Barkat Ali said* :— “For the first time in the history of the League there was a change in its angle of vision. We are offering by this change a sincere hand of fellowship to those of our Hindu countrymen who have objected to the principle of separate electorates. ” In 1928 there was formed a Nationalist Party under the leadership of Dr. Ansari.† The Nationalist Muslim Party was a step in advance of the Jinnah wing of the Muslim League and was prepared to accept the Nehru Report, as it was, without any amendments—not even those which Mr. Jinnah was insisting upon. Mr. Barkat Ali, who in 1927 was with the Jinnah wing of the League, left the same as not being nationalistic enough and joined the Nationalist Muslim Party of Dr. Ansari. How great a nationalist Mr. Barkat Ali then was can be seen by his trenchant * The Indian Quarterly Register, 1927, Vol. II, p. 448. † The Indian Quarterly Register, 1929. Vol. II, p. 350.

323 PAKISTAN : NATIONAL FRUSTRATION and vehement attack on Sir Muhammad Iqbal for his having put forth in his presidential address to the annual session of the All-India Muslim League held at Allahabad in 1930 a scheme* for the division of India which is now taken up by Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Barkat Ali and which goes by the name of Pakistan. In 1931 there was held in Lahore the Punjab Nationalist Muslim Conference and Mr. Barkat Ali was the Chairman of the Reception Committee. The views he then expressed on Pakistan are worth recalling.† Reiterating and reaffirming the conviction and the political faith of his party, Malik Barkat Ali, Chairman of the Reception Committee of the Conference, said: “We believe, first and foremost in the full freedom and honour of India. India, the country of our birth and the place with which all our most valued and dearly cherished associations are knit, must claim its first place in our affection and in our desires. We refuse to be parties to that sinister type of propaganda which would try to appeal to ignorant sentiment by professing to be Muslim first and Indian afterwards. To us a slogan of this kind is not only bare, meaningless cant, but downright mischievous. We cannot conceive of Islam in its best and last interests as in any way inimical to or in conflict with the best and permanent interests of India. India and Islam in India are identical, and whatever is to the detriment of India must, from the nature of it, be detrimental to Islam whether economically, politically, socially or even morally. Those politicians, therefore, are a class of false prophets and at bottom the foes of Islam, who talk of any inherent conflict between Islam and the welfare of India. Further, howsoever much our sympathy with our Muslim brethren outside India, i.e., the Turks and the Egyptians or the Arabs,—and it is a sentiment which is at once noble and healthy,—we can never allow that sympathy to work to the detriment of the essential interests of India. Our sympathy, in fact, with those countries can only be valuable to them, if India as the source, nursery and fountain of that sympathy, is really great. And if ever the time comes, God forbid, when any Muslim Power from across the Frontier chooses to enslave India and snatch away the liberties of its people, no amount of pan-Islamic feeling, whatever it may mean, can stand in the way of Muslim India fighting shoulder to shoulder with non-Muslim India in defence of its liberties. “Let there be, therefore, no misgivings of any kind in that respect in any non-Muslim quarters. I am conscious that a certain class of narrow-minded Hindu politicians is constantly harping on the bogey of an * For his speech see The Indian Annual Register, 1930, Vol. II. pp. 334-345. † Indian Annual Register, 1931, Vol. II, pp. 234-235.

324 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES Islamic danger to India from beyond the N.-W. Frontier passes but I desire to repeat that such statements and such fears are fundamentally wrong and unfounded. Muslim India shall as much defend India’s liberties as non-Muslim India, even if the invader happens to be a follower of Islam. “Next, we not only believe in a free India but we also believe in a united India—not the India of the Muslim, not the India of the Hindu or of the Sikh, not the India of this community or of that community but the India of all. And as this is our abiding faith, we refuse to be parties to any division of the India of the future into a Hindu or a Muslim India. However much the conception of a Hindu and a Muslim India may appeal and send into frenzied ecstasies abnormally orthodox mentalities of their party, we offer our full throated opposition to it, not only because it is singularly unpractical and utterly obnoxious but because it not only sounds the death-knell of all that is noble and lasting in modern political activity in India, but is also contrary to and opposed to India’s chief historical tradition. “ India was one in the days of Asoka and Chandragupta and India remained one even when the sceptre and rod of Imperial sway passed from Hindu into Moghul or Muslim hands. And India shall remain one when we shall have attained the object of our desires and reached those uplands of freedom, where all the light illuminating us shall not be reflected glory but shall be light proceeding direct as it were from our very faces. “The conception of a divided India, which Sir Muhammad Iqbal put forward recently in the course of his presidential utterance from the platform of the League at a time when that body had virtually become extinct and ceased to represent free Islam—I am glad to be able to say that Sir Muhammad Iqbal has since recanted, it—must not therefore delude anybody into thinking that it is Islam’s conception of the India to be. Even if Dr. Sir Muhammad Iqbal had not recanted it as something which could not be put forward by any sane person, I should have emphatically and unhesitatingly repudiated it as something foreign to the genius and the spirit of the rising generation of Islam, and I really deem it a proud duty to affirm today that not only must there be no division of India into communal provinces but that both Islam and Hinduism must run coterminously with the boundaries of India and must not be cribbed, cabined and confined within any shorter bounds. To the same category as Dr. Iqbal’s conception of a Muslim India and a Hindu India, belongs the sinister proposals of some Sikh communalists to partition and divide the Punjab. “ With a creed so expansive, namely a free and united India with its people all enjoying in equal measure and without any kinds of distinctions and disabilities the protection of laws made by the chosen representatives of the people on the widest possible basis of a true democracy, namely, adult franchise, and through the medium of joint electorates—and an

325 PAKISTAN : NATIONAL FRUSTRATION administration charged with the duty of an impartial execution of the laws, fully accountable for its actions, not to a distant or remote Parliament of foreigners but to the chosen representatives of the land,—you would not expect me to enter into the details and lay before you, all the colours of my picture. And I should have really liked to conclude my general observations on the aims and objects of the Nationalist Muslim Party here, were it not that the much discussed question of joint or separate electorates, has today assumed proportions where no public man can possibly ignore it “Whatever may have been the value or utility of separate electorates at a time when an artificially manipulated high propertied franchise had the effect of converting a majority of the people in the population of a province into a minority in the electoral roll, and when communal passions and feelings ran particularly high, universal distrust poisoning the whole atmosphere like a general and all-pervading miasma,—we feel that in the circumstances of today and in the India of the future, separate electorates should have no place whatever. ” Such were the views Mr. Jinnah and Mr. Barkat Ali held on nationalism, on separate electorates and on Pakistan. How diametrically opposed are the views now held by them on these very problems ? So far I have laboured to point out things, the utter failure of the attempts made to bring about Hindu-Muslim unity and the emergence of a new ideology in the minds of the Muslim leaders. There is also a third thing which I must discuss in the present context for reasons arising both from its relevance as well as from its bearing on the point under consideration, namely whether this Muslim ideology has behind it a justification which political philosophers can accept. Many Hindus seem to hold that Pakistan has no justification. If we confine ourselves to the theory of Pakistan there can be no doubt that this is a greatly mistaken view. The philosophical justification for Pakistan rests upon the distinction between a community and a nation. In the first place, it is recognized comparatively recently. Political philosophers for a long time were concerned, mainly, with the controversy summed up in the two questions, how far should the right of a mere majority to rule the minority be accepted as a rational basis for government and how far the legitimacy of a government be said to depend upon the