Alternative History - A Contemporary's Account

IT is a recurrent thought for students of modern Indian history whether India’s partition could have been avoided had Messrs Jinnah and Gandhi gotten along well. Is it right to put all blame at the doors of Jinnah for the sub-continental sundering? What was the rest of the leadership doing? What if in place of Gandhi Indian national movement had got a leader like Ben Gurion, and a force like Haganah in place of a tool like non-violence? Or, Bose in place of Nehru?

Ram Manohar Lohia takes such questions head on with the aggro of a challenger in his book ‘Guilty Men of India’s Partition”. Though originally meant to be a review of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s India Wins Freedom, Guilty Men… (first published in 1960) ends up revealing a picture of the freedom leadership that has otherwise remained hidden in the mainstream historical narrative (deliberately?). The book places the Hindu-Muslim problematique at its centre and tries to answer the questions raised above.

Lohia sets the tone rather harshly, calling the contemporary leadership petty, self serving, spiteful, jealous, and mean – a bunch of tired old despairing men, their corroded will accepting partition. He was present at the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting that took up the issue. Only the Mahatma, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and Jaiprakash Narayan expressed dissent. Azad sat in one corner puffing at his cigarettes while Messrs Nehru and Patel were offensively aggressive to Gandhi. The duo had come to the meeting as converts, having not even consulted Gandhi before agreeing for the Partition.

But, can they be held guilty merely for accepting partition, or were they responsible even for pushing it? For example did not the treatment of Jinnah by the Congress leadership led by Gandhi, from Khilafat onwards, contribute to the widening of the rift? Lohia believes so though he does not elaborate beyond maintaining that the freedom leadership by this time was driven as much by personal ambition as by national cause.

The author goes in some detail into the leadership of Gandhi, as far as to construct an imaginary architecture of freedom struggle minus the Mahatma. At the time of the advent of Gandhi, Indian national movement was in the hands of two distinct and equally potent and patriotic forces – constitutionalists and revolutionaries. Both showed a measure of understanding and unwritten collaboration till Gandhi came on the horizon and introduced principles like non-violent mass protests leading to antagonism between the two. Lohia believes that minus Gandhi, the two streams in conjunction could have delivered independence faster by at least a decade, and possibly without partition.

Though a little charitable on Nehru’s overall personality, Lohia minces no words on Nehru the politician. He indicates that Nehru had set his eyes on partition even before the Mountbattens landed in Delhi. He has not much against Sardar Patel whom he finds the tallest of the lot, if only because all others around him were dwarfs. Interestingly, Lohia wonders aloud about the set of people who found Patel as Hindu communal but failed to use the same yardstick on Azad.

For him, both Jinnah and Azad only thought of Muslim interests, as separate from interests of the Indian people. If Muslims chose Jinnah it was only because he succeeded in addressing their vanity better than Azad. Lohia is most starry-eyed about Subhas Chandra Bose. If only Bose had made some adjustment with Gandhi. If only Bose had possessed the cunning and refinement of Nehru. It is a contemporary’s account, but with all the emotions of a competitor.

But what engages Lohia’s mind most through the book is the issue of Hindu Muslim estrangement. Not only that Partition was a culmination of eight centuries of conflict between the two communities, it increased post partition under Congress’ watch. With the exception of Gandhi, Lohia believes the Congress leadership remained a bystander as communal fires raged in the north. Perhaps, Modi is not the only Nero who fiddled. And mind you this is not any RSS types but the foremost socialist of India writing. To give an example, Lohia narrates an incident: He arranged a peace meeting in riot torn old Delhi and wanted the Mahatma to address it. First, the Congress managers dithered in giving Gandhi’s time for a few days, and then, when it did happen finally, the microphone went missing just before the address!

Seems Digvijaya Singh’s Osama-jee is a genetic issue, for, Lohia calls Congress’ perfidy a “crime rooted in vote catching desire” as the party partnered the League even as Muslim separatism recurred in Kerala just dozen odd years into Partition. Lohia’s solutions to ending the sub-continental estrangement however are more like the scrapbook of a utopian intellectual. From abolition of the caste system to more organized intermarriage between Hindus and Muslims to inter-dining all are on his table.

By the time Lohia came out with this book, Pakistan was already in throes of its first round of Martial law, so it is little strange that he writes of the reunion of India and Pakistan as a wish, a prayer, and a probability. Perhaps the history of freedom struggle was still fresh to warrant such idealism. The fond hopes have remained alive in the hearts of socialists of all hues in India with even the right wing L K Advani talking of some kind of confederation in South Asia as late as 2006.

While going through the book, one feels Lohia has rushed through the most defining period of modern Indian history. It is a slim work, a mere 100 pages, so a little ambitious to capture the full breadth of the final years of Indian freedom struggle. Also, the book clearly misses the elephant in the room – the British and their role – on Partition. Without any disrespect it can be said that the role of the Imperial power and its great game in Partition was more than the sum total of freedom leadership’s intellect. Enough declassified information from that period is now available both in India and United Kingdom to prove this.

But within that framework Lohia presents an unvarnished candor shorn of any chicanery. For a generation brought up on sanitized Marxist history, Guilty Men… gives an alternative narrative. It shows to us that the freedom leadership, after all, consisted of men and women of flesh and blood, who though well meaning, had their share of human follies. And that those follies might in some measure be held responsible for our present ills.