Yes, this is how it appears and the tragic irony of all historians' attempts at understanding who start out trying to unearth the multiplicities who end up being forced to assume a "hidden inexorable hand of history". The problem in trying to go back to the source of each motivation and individual action that adds to collective action we end up in a never ending chain of actions which we can never gather into a coherent logical chain that predicts why a particular event happened the way it did. So in the end it appears as if a hidden hand of history has forced it all to happen. ML could only be ML because Islam was invented by Muhammad and was carried into India. Muhammad invented Islam because either it was really revealed to him as he claims, or that he adopted pre-existing Judaic motifs and memes to pursue personal and group ambitions. Muhammad could not have done this if the Juadic sects had not appeared before in the Levant as well as awhole lot opther circumstantial factors. These could not have happened if the Israelites had not interacted with the Mesopotamian traditions and the Egyptian monotheisms etc...ultimately we will go back to the formation Homo Sapien Sapien..Sarma wrote
after extensive reading on the partition issue, I do not believe, as many "historians" and "authors" make out, that any particular event or sequence of events, any particular personality or a group of actors have the power or the force to alter the inexorable march of history. It is only in this sense, and in none other, that one cannot put the onus for partition on Jinnah.
But there lies the problem. We can only take this chain back because we have skipped vital focus on individuals involved at each stage. Then and only then can we see why an individual's choice from several multiple options open to him channeled events in a partyicular direction. It is by focusing on individuals and how they interact with the collective that we begin to understand why events took a certain direction and not the other. Human choice at critical junctures is critical.
This again is a highly debatable issue. First simply because other eventlines did not take place. And we have not yet reached the stage in historical sociological analysis where we can predict like in physics say, with a high degree of probability, what the outcome is going to be. This is an old debate and stalwarts exist on both sides of the debate. Eric Hoffer, regarded by some as the non-academic founder of modern academic sociology, writes in his "True Believer" that, without "Lenin", the RSDLP would most likely have gone towards a less radical democratic setup for Russia. Similar controversies about the impact or non-impact of individuals exist in many other cases. The tendency to postulate a blind "inexorable" force of history is common in the Hegelian school, including its derivatives like the Marxists. But even they have been unable to predict outcomes without factoring in role of individual choice.That is to say, it would be some other Abdul in place of Jinnah, if not Jinnah himself. Dr. Ambedkar says it best, and I paraphrase here, in his book Pakistan or Partition: "The demand for Muslim nation is not something new that has arisen in the last few decades (referring to the 1900s). It has always been there as an undercurrent. It first manifested itself as the need to form a separate and parochial organization, namely the Muslim League. Then, the undercurrent took the form of the demand for safeguards. Subsequently, it morphed into reservations in the legislative bodies and the executive. But, this too was insufficient, and hence the demand for effective representation, a euphemism for disproportionate representation for Muslims, i.e. 33.33% when their population was only 23% of the overall population. But, this effective representation too fell short when the Muslim leaders realized that they would still be in minority. Then came the demand for parity, but that too wasn't the final solution that the Muslims were seeking. Only late in the game did it dawn upon them that what they were after, all these years, was a separate state where they can rule the roost."
"It has always been there as an undercurrent." - Is that so? By the arguments of "inexorable forces of history", there must have been a force behind this "undercurrent" that predated the undercurrent? So individual Muslims had no choice in shaping and starting this undercurrent - or even in stopping it? This seems to go against everything that JLN writes about Islam in general and Islam in India. For JLN, Islam's separatist tendencies of a separate "religious homeland" could not be true - he attributes all the barabarity to particular ethnic and race culture, all use of Islam to promote identity as being sourced form ethnic past and motivated by non-religious drives. Amalendu Misra summarizes this imagination of JLN - "Nehru engaged himself in imagining the coming of Islam to India through its original followers - the Arabs. the hatred against Islam in the Indian psyche and the denigration of Afghan and Slave rule, Nehru conceded was because Islam did not come India 'proper'. By proper he meant Islam in its original undiluted form" (Misra, Identity and Religion: foundations of anti-Islamism in India, p121). JLN actually speculates that if the original Arab culture had come with early Islam the rising Ara culture would have intermixed with previous Indian culture and enriched each other. There goes the "inexorable force of history" - for here is acknowledgement of choice.
JLN had started his reconstruction of Islam as a religion in the Indic sense, and diassociated all barbarity from the faith, much earlier than 1937. Moreover he tried to strip off all claims of a separate identity for Muslims in India at the same time. Here however, at one go JLN does an impossible conjuring trick. While he wants to deny the political and the military component of Islam, and ascribes a higher, "purer", culturally advanced origin for Arabic Islam he is elevating Islam to the status of a competing culture to the Indic but not of Indic origin. But at the same time by denying the nationhood of Islam he contradicts this very same separate and equal or high cultural status compared to the Indic. Liaqat Ali reacts "The Muslims are a nation and not a community. It would be a travesty to dismiss 90 million people with a glorious past as a community."I provided the above historical context so that we can all stop blaming Nehru ji, and Gandhiji and all the "Congresswallahs" for partition. Believe me, I am a dyed-in-the-wool Knickerwallah and Kamalwallah. But, after a careful reading of the original sources to the extent possible, I've realized that blaming our own leaders Nehru and Gandhi for the partition is the worst thing we can do as Indians. These people have served our nation to the best of their capabilities selflessly and tirelessly. The most cliched and uninformed thing we can say about Nehru, in particular, is that he wanted to become the PM, and his career ambition came in the way of settling with Jinnah. An emphatic No. Only a shallow and superficial reader of history can reach this conclusion.
He among all the other Congressites, is instrumental in promoting the absurd theoretical dichotomy of making the Islamic a high culture equal or competing to the Indic but of non-Indic origin, while seeking to deny the natural fallout of such a status in the aspiration for a separate nationhood - creates all the memes and excuses for ML to flourish. Nehrus writings and his practice itself reveal a deliberate and conscious pretension in his attitudes towards the Islamic.
On the one hand he ignores all reality of Islamic rule, sometimes omits passages or claims from narrative sources that conradicts his construction programme. He portrays Islamic taking of Hindu wives as a sign of syncretism - but remains silent on the lack of reciprocation from the Hindu side. On the other, he demands that Muslims relinquish their notions of attachment to Arabia.
It is actually a simplistic portrayal to say that JLN was patriotic and nationalistic in all his motives in a "secular" "non-communal" sense. Only considerations of power based on Hindu imagery of plurality and the consciousness of identification with the Hindu, could have made JLN viciously attack the aspirations of a high culture for self-assertion - a culture which by his own construction had no inherent violent expansive tendencies.
JLN was doing a JS in his reconstrucion of the "Muslim" - he did not unfortunately yet have a Jinnah to focus on. They both have done it for the same purpose, to make use of a reconstructed Islamic identity that can be safely slotted into a power structure that they wish to impose. After acknowledging such high culture and non-violent non-expansive core for Islam, there was no reason to be scared of allowing the ML to have its pound of flesh in the 37 elections - and only one factor explains the fear, a clear recognition that the ML has the power to disrupt weilding of power by the Congress, and in the dynastic milieu of north Indian networks, it meant personal power.
. Has anyone read the book yet? 
Hindi गांजी ganji telugu
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