brihaspati wrote:A_Gupta wrote:The claim was made by Brihaspati on the TSP thread that it was Jawaharlal Nehru's hunger for power that led to Partition.
My riposte was that in that case Sardar Patel was also hungry for power, for he too, ultimately pushed for Partition.
{Brihaspati turned that into "Sardar Patel's power-hunger (plus JLN's) precipitated Partition, which is, like Brihaspati's history, a distortion of the facts.}
I can see, that A_Gupta's hyperfine sense of logic has landed him into saying that "Sardar Patel was also hungry for power since he also pushed for partition just as JLN did" is not equal to "Sardar Patel's power hunger plus JLN' precipitated partition" - even if the latter is not a statement I set out to briefly prove.
What you wrote and what I wrote is there for anyone to read.
Actually, just as the congrezite spin on the Partition process has constructed a so-called "nationalist" (essentially Nehruvian) version of Partition historiography which in a sense A_Gupta is trying to re-promote - there is a similar spin by the "nationalist" (essentially Jinnahian) Paki historiography.
There is no "Congressite" spin on the Partition process. Given the huge controversies about it, we acquired primary sources and studied them ourselves. Just as "truth has a liberal bias" in American politics, in this case - about Partition - it turns out truth has a Congressite bias.
In the need to clear JLN's name, A_Gupta had to cherry pick as he typically does in his own version of distortion of history - beginning with the original post of mine in the TSP thread where I had clearly mentioned that JLN was just one of the two individuals between whom a contest for personal power precipitated the Partition process. Since the post was about the consistent historical record of the congrez platform in the creation and preservation of Pakistan - from the congrez side. I never made any statement that it was done in a vacuum, and I explicitly stated that facilitators - Brits. When I had mentioned two individuals - obviously I was mentioning the other of the pair - Jinnah. But there has never been any derying or denying on my part, of the secessionist, Islamist role of the theocratical Islamic society substructure - and hence whatever be the role of Jinnah, has never been denied by me.
Here you are guessing motives and intentions, again. You can read the mind of PM Manmohan Singh, and of Jawaharlal Nehru, so of course, you can read my mind, isn't it?
The question may arise, now as to how can then JLN's role be discussed separately from Jinnah. This innocent looking question is actually a very old "congrezite" version of nationalist historiographical trick : it is moving the goalposts subtly towards Jinnah as the initiator - against whom JLN was merely, oh merely "reacting"! This then removes any personal inclination or motivation from JLN.
I do not claim to be able to read minds. Let me be clear here, first by defining terms.
1. "Motive" - a motive is the incentive to act in a certain way or to want a certain outcome. For instance, once a rich uncle puts me as the beneficiary of his will, thereafter I have a motive for wanting him to die. That is the meaning of motive - I benefit from the rich uncle's death. (For concerned people here, I have no such uncle.
)
2. "Intention" - However, I may have absolutely abhor that motivation, I love my uncle and want him to have a long life. i.e., though the motive is there, the intention is not there.
How does a historian record motive and intention? Motives may be judged from the situation. What is infinitely harder - and that may require mind-reading - is intention.
So, when you ask - what possible motives did JLN (or Jinnah or Patel or anyone else) have, you can try to list out what possible anticipated positive outcomes for JLN (or Jinnah or Patel, etc.) could there have been? So yes, becoming the Prime Minister is a positive outcome for JLN, and could have been a motive.
But what was JLN's intent? Unless you have rather explicit statements of that, the historian has to resort to reading minds. It is possible to demonstrate that some of them, e.g., Stanley Wolpert, make up things out of pure imagination. Others speculate, but acknowledge their speculation.
As to how difficult it is to know someone's intent - here is a prima facie case of Jinnah's power-hungriness - namely wanting his powers in Pakistan to be based on the Ninth schedule of the 1935 Gov. of India Act.
http://observingliberalpakistan.blogspo ... owers.html
But there is a case to be made that Jinnah was doing what was necessary for Pakistan for its survival, and not acting out of power-hunger.
Not being a mind-reader like Brihaspati, and not wanting to make up stuff like the professional historians, all I can do is note acts and statements, and ask do they make objective sense, are these actions rational and consistent with the stated objectives? Consistent with what the person did before and after?
So, e.g., someone can play the mind-reading game - Mrs. Indira Gandhi's motive and intent in liberating Bangladesh was personal glory. How can one disprove this? Perhaps in this particular example it is possible to find some evidence one way or the other (not having studied the material, I cannot say). But in general it is impossible. One can simply ask whether Mrs. Gandhi's actions March-December 1971 were consistent with improving India's strategic position at each step. If they were, while one can never rule out that she did all that she did for personal glory, one can state objectively whether she nevertheless acted in India's best interests.
So, what one can do is ask about the events in 1946 - given the information available to the Congress, their objectives, and their particular concerns (e.g., they were very conscious of the problem of 600 princely states, and how it was the tussles between the ancestors of these princes that led to India losing political independence in the first place), were their actions consonant with those objectives?
The answer is, generally, yes. And so it holds for each of the major leaders of the Congress as well. So, while it is impossible to rule out that some or all of Gandhi, Patel, Nehru, Azad, etc., had the intent of self-aggrandization - because we are not mind-readers - we can pronounce on whether their actions and statements were in the interests of India or not.
This is how there is now an impressive pseudo-nationalist historiography on both sides of the border - each trying to absolve its icon's roles of the initiative or personal motivation. Each side blames the "other" for initiating partition. The following is exactly a representation of this reconstructive attempt and spin :
Yes, I have no doubt of this historiography. Unfortunately, it does not preclude that one side has the truth.
The fact is that "short of suicide" (Gandhi's phrase), the Congress did everything it could to work with Jinnah, but ultimately it gave up and faced the inevitable. What was the reason for one-by-one, everyone in the A.I.C.C. to be convinced that Partition was unavoidable, necessary?
As in most of A_Gupta's selective quoting, his lambasting of JLN/congrez -critical positions are based on "opinions" and "summaries" and impressions. It is repeatedly claimed that congrez and JLN did everything possible to "work with Jinnah". Really? It can be shown that congrez under MKG's influence tried to work with Islamism and Islam, but not with Jinnah.
It can be shown that the Congress worked with those Muslims who would agree not to reduce the majority community in India to a minority.
In the process they began the process of buttering up and conceding to Islam itself a space in Indian politics that would ultimately lead to provincial hardcore Islamist elite getting legitimized in politics. In the 1920's, the selective whitewashing and blackwashing of the type A_Gupta does - suppresses the detailed evidence of Jinnah's overt position against the overt Islamists - whom the congrezites were pampering ignoring protests even from within. Will A_Gupta have the courage to put up the process by which Jinnah left the congrez? Even the Nehruvian spinning historiography version of it?
Certainly. I know Brihaspati will find fault in the summarizing of a decade of history in a sentence, but essentially, the Congress rejected Jinnah's demands for parity, which he had in the 1920s.
Multiple nested quotes
This is how Sardar Patel put it:
A little before he was sacked in early 1947, N.P.A. Smith, the powerful director of the Intelligence Bureau, submitted a note to Wavell. This note gives a flavour of the easy relationship that Patel[Home Minister in the Interim Government] could establish with his English subordinates, even with those who knew that he wanted them to go, as Smith did: I told him [Sardar Patel]...that any attempt to force the Muslim would result, through the disintegration of the police and Army in the loss of NW India. His reply was that, if I thought that generosity would placate the Muslim Oliver Twist, I did not understand either the Muslim mind or the situation. With which statement I am tempted to agree...
No one, including me, has ever tried to portray Sardar as an islamophile. A_Gupta simply quotes a statement that actually confirms Sardar's correctly negative understanding of Islamism - but ironically confirms something A_Gupta has chosen to ignore, that Sardar's statement here is showing simply his uncompromising stance on secession. He is unconcerned about the fallouts of "forcing" the Muslim.
Good spin on this. Sardar Patel is saying here that Pakistan cannot be averted by giving in to Muslim League demands for parity and more. This is not his uncompromising stand on secession. You can read the full context here.
http://observingliberalpakistan.blogspo ... -said.html
Now the types of A_Gupta spinning of history will not stop to think - that if Sardar here is trying to promote secession, why would he counter the Brit's claim that "NW India" would be "lost" if Muslims are "forced" by "not placating them" - by saying that "placating" will not change Muslim behaviour? What was this "forcing" about being referred to? Obviously it was the Sardarian line of "integration" - by "force" if necessary. Some minimal basic historical honesty and integrity should force Nehruvians to acknowledge the evidence for this position in Sardar - almost uncompromisingly until June -in Sardar.
There is no need for this forced interpretation. The full context is provided in the link above.
As I've previously mentioned, Patel worked with V.P. Menon over December 1946-January 1947 on a partition proposal.
I will wait for A_Gupta to bring up the ubiquitious "sequence" of pronouncements from Sardar and Nehru on the issue of secession. Who started when talking about what. That would be most illuminating.
For that it is necessary to examine the series of Muslim League demands, beginning as early as the 1920s. It is obviously complicated, but if it could be put in one sentence it would be the demand for absolute parity. What this meant is that Muslims - Muslim League - would get 50%, Hindus would get 50%, and the place for Sikhs, Christians, Jains, tribals, nationalist Muslims, etc., would be taken from the Hindu 50%. This was obviously unworkable, and acceptance of it would constitute the suicide that Gandhi mentioned.
The sleight of hand Brihaspati does in his long series of quotes is the same as that of the Seervai-Noorani school of history of the Partition, and that is to focus solely on Congress actions and not what the Congress was reacting to - the Muslim League demands (and the British support thereof). That is the only way of making the Congress to be culpable for Partition.
Actually, it is not taken from Seeravai-Noorani school of history. It is from actual statements which are usually and strangely not found quoted in the Nehruvian version that A-Gupta is promoting. Once again, A_Gupta's sleight of hand is again trying to show the standard Nehruvian justification based on the so-called "reactive" principle - that everything congrez and JLN did was in reaction to ML. This is partial truth if the other sides' parallel claims are then dismissed that Jinnah was reacting to congrez and JLN. Both then should be taken together and analyzed for reality - without accepting claims on any one side as sacrosanct. I have not done anything like this - and not claimed that I am accepting Jinnahian history! But of course defenders of JLN's image needs to ignore my specific proposition that we assume that "Jinnah was doing continuous Taqyia" and "he never really meant what he said". In the eagerness to serve the Nehruvian cause A_Gupta of course has to ignore such lines.
No, actually, the problem is that if one wants to believe that after 1939, Jinnah wanted some form of political unity of India, then one has to believe he was doing Taqiya. There is no public statement of his showing a willingness to compromise on a sovereign Pakistan. There is no private statement of his, either to his Muslim League confidants, or to the British, that he was willing to compromise on a sovereign Pakistan. In the absence of any such, you have to do this "mind-reading" trick, that he really wanted this or that.
In contrast, the Congress and A.I.C.C. speeches were generally published in the newspapers and are consistent. In particular, in the press conference of July 10, 1946, in substance, JLN said nothing that he had not already said in the A.I.C.C. session of July 6-7th and that had not been published by the newspapers in summary.
As to the reactive part - yes, Congress was by and large reacting to the British proposals, and as Sardar Patel said on one occasion "He (Patel) wanted them to understand that the British Government was on the Muslim League side. The British and Muslim League were friends in need and now that the British knew they could not possibly stay here longer, they wanted to help their friends, the Muslim League."
Once again, I have omitted Jalal's work from my post - so Nehruvian spinner's hatred of Jalal doesn't really apply to what I wrote. I look upon her as similar to the reconstructive spin that A_Gupta is giving.
However, all the quotes I quoted - are typically not placed in a sequence that I placed - from the Nehruvian apologists. As is the typical tendency with such apologists - everything "negative" associated with activities/statements/positions of JLN have to be "shared" by others, typically Sardar because errors cannot be blamed on one single person - while everything "positive" is JLN's credit alone in which case apparently the former logic of things not happening onlee on individual initiative is not to be applied.
Actually, please go through what I've written and tell me what is "credited to JLN". I actually haven't credited JLN with anything. Go back through this thread, and take a look. As to what is on the Cabinet Mission Plan site, you have said it omits JLN, so it too doesn't credit JLN with anything.
Your real problem is that neither I nor the Cabinet Mission Plan website **blames** JLN for anything either, and that is what riles you up.
But what is more interesting is the sleight of hand by which A_Gupta ignores my specific questions - since he was so insistent on formal statements form stalwarts representing their true inner "minds" -
(1) if parity was so much an obsession - why did Jinnah accept only on the "hope" of achieving this?
Jinnah and the Muslim League made it clear that they accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan with the understanding that it contained the seeds of Pakistan and that they could, after ten years, secede. In the meantime, they would have absolute parity with the non-Muslims in the interim Government and in the Constituent Assembly. The compulsory grouping plan would enable slender Muslim majorities in the B&C sections to carry off all of Bengal, Assam and Punjab into Pakistan.
(2) more importantly, what changed between the initial acceptance of the plan by congrezz AICC in July and then the sudden volteface after JLN took over the presidency?
Nothing. First of all, the very same session of AICC where Congress accepted the Plan was the one in which JLN became president (July 6-7, 1946). Secondly, you can read all the speeches of Azad, Patel and Nehru made on that occasion. They all say essentially, but in not so many words, that the Congress does not intend to honor the Muslim League grouping provisions, that provinces can opt out of the groups.
In particular, they expected NWFP and Assam to opt out of groups B & C respectively.
I will reproduce what was reported of those speeches by-and-by.
Here is a brief excerpt of what Maulana Azad said in that session: "The Working Committe has therefore made it clear that the should be no compulsion in the matter of grouping. The provinces should be free to decide whether they wish to join a particular group or not. We are confident that the interpretation we have put on the grouping clause is the correct interpretation."
Patel, speaking after Azad: "The most dangerous proposal in the Constituent Assembly scheme is one realted to grouping. Our interpretation of the relevant paragraph in the State Paper is that the provinces are free to decide at the initial state whether they wish to join a particular group in which they have been placed. No province can be compelled to join any group against its own wishes."
--
In calling the July 28-29th meeting of the Muslim League announced by Liaqat Ali Khan on July 9th, it is reported [Annual Register 1946] "The immediate occasion, however, for summoning the League Council is the nature of references to the Constituent Assembly plan made by prominent members of the Congress Working Committee at the recent AICC meeting. It will be recalled that on May 25 the Cabinet Mission and the Viceroy....added that the interpretation put by the Congress resolution on para 15 of the statement to the effect that the provinces can, in the first instance, make the choice of whether or not to belong to the Section in which they are placed, does not accord with the Delegation's intentions' Despite this categorical pronouncement, the Congress has continued to maintain, with the aid of legal opinion that the provinces have the right ot opt out of their Section at the very beginning. The Muslim League on the other hand, regards the grouping of provinces laid down in the statement of May 16 as the "corner-stone of the long-term scheme" to use Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan's words....The speeches at the AICC meeting as reported were not such as to allay the League's misgivings."
Specifically to A_Gupta's "co-sharing-of-initiative" tactics - Sardar was present both "before" and "after" : but the sudden public statements by JLN (for which he was criticized from within his party - which in turn implies that he did this without consulting his senior colleagues - which in turn shows that they did not share his views to the extent he articulated them) seems to have started the ball rolling.
You should really read the speeches of July 6-7th AICC session and compare them with what JLN said in his press conference of July 10th. The Muslim League in calling its July 28-29th session specifically referred to the press reports of the speeches giving in the July 6-7th AICC session.
Why was Menon claiming that he "brought Sardar" around from his uncompromising stand in May? Who was Menon most closely associated with?
??
We do have the Viceroy saying in late 1946 that Sardar Patel has made Menon into his spokesman.
All of this points to JLN's specific initiative preceding Sardar's. Sardar was for integration by force if necessary - which shows through in all his subsequent actions and moves.
All my quotes are from documentary evidence typically not cited by the likes of A_Gupta in a sequence, because they then start revealing a disturbing pattern perhaps. Combined with this, I have already shown the callous statements and attitude shown by JLN in his ethically perverse selective application of legal and other excuses in behaving completely differently when it came to intervention to save Hindu lives and Muslim lives [ahimsa "for Bengali hindu suffering from Muslims in Noakhlai" and "bullets for Bihari hindus rioting on muslims" ] - points to his personal panic at the possibility of having to share personal dominance with Jinnah.
But in contrast to Sardar, he neither showed Sardar's grasp of the dynamics of Islamism, and Islam nor Sardar's primary desire to unite by force if necessary. His attitudes towards Bengal and Punjab throughout the Partition years confirm this personal angle further.
I am not an apologist for Jinnah, and even less an apologist for Islamism. That should not prevent us from looking up the actual documents - and claims from both sides [because each side suppresses documents that do not fit into their whitewashing campaigns] and coming to our own conclusions.
I'll give you an analogy as to what is going on here.
Suppose Musharraf says India is ready to solve Kashmir on Pakistan's terms. There is a publicly reported-on Indian cabinet meeting where the various senior ministers all say, this is not our interpretation of what has been agreed to. This is reported in the newspapers. Three days later, the Prime Minister of India in a press conference says, that Kashmir on Pakistan's terms is not part of any deal India is agreeing to. Then Musharraf walks off in a huff, blaming the Indian PM for scuttling the peace talks. And then 60 years later, a Brihaspati comes and asks - why did the Indian PM scuttle the deal with Musharraf?
The analogy is quite perfect in that the Congress was pretty unanimous in rejecting the compulsory grouping (that is, Azad, Patel, Nehru, in arguing for accepting the Cabinet Mission Plan, argued that the compulsory grouping did not apply; and the opposition to the motion to accept the CMP argued that the compulsory grouping was a major defect and a trap); compulsory grouping was against the Indian interests; all this was reported in the papers. Three days later, JLN made it explicit. Jinnah walks off in a huff, and 60 years later, Brihaspati is asking why did JLN reject this?
