Durga Das 2

Quotes included

• • Travel to the Middle East and Europe

  • Economic imperatives and imperialism

  • Jinnah in London

  • Fazli Husain

  • Government of India Act 1935 and British intentions

  • A Communalist and a Nationalist reverse roles

Comment

In the summer of 1931 Durga Das went abroad on a tour of Europe. On the way he visited Egypt.

Travel to the Middle East and Europe

Durga Das writes:

"..this diversion enabled me to visit some Egyptian leaders and view political developments in a country whose struggle for freedom had for years inspired our own nationalist movement. Zaghloul Pasha was a household name among the politically-minded in India and the Wafd was the equivalent of the Indian National Congress.

During my talks with Nahas Pasha and his colleagues, my eyes were opened for the first time to the key to the politics of the entire Middle East. The countries of this region, they pointed out, were like pegs to hold down the imperial tent that was India.

Their liberation therefore depended primarily on India's success in winning her freedom. If the British quit India, they declared, they would lose all interest in holding down the Arab world. Suez, Aden and the Persian Gulf would then cease to be strategically important. This brief Egyptian interlude imparted a new dimension to the problem of Indian freedom."

Durga Das also stopped by in Vienna.

Vienna was at the same time the Mecca of the medical world. My companion, who had an attack of lumbago while in Rome, went into a sanatorium here. One day, at his bedside, I casually referred to the occasional bouts of writer's cramp from which I suffered. The attending physician promptly whisked me off to a room, had me wrapped up in a wet sheet and covered with blankets. I emerged from this treatment cured for good...

The most rewarding of the encounters with which I filled my hours in Vienna while my companion convalesced were those with Vithalbhai Patel, who too was lying ill in a sanatorium in the city. He was in a reminiscent mood and recalled with a touch of asperity how, though he had brought Gandhi and Irwin together, he had not been asked to accompany Gandhi to the Round Table Conference. He was best fitted, he said, to deal with the wily diplomatic manoeuvrings of the British...

"At a touching farewell in Vienna- I little realised then that this was to be our last meeting-Vitalbhai urged me to write my reminiscences of the Central Legislative Assembly and, remarking that freedom was round the corner, urged me to enter parliamentary life in free India...

On reaching England, the famous George Bernard Shaw was one of the many people Durga Das met:

As I thanked him for giving me an interview, he remarked:"I am a selfish fellow. I thought you might help me understand a bit about India.". Seeing me puzzled, he explained to my pleasant surprise that he had read my article in Headway, entitled "How West Meets East- The Spirit of India and the League[League of Nations]" and felt that I wrote the language he understood.

When I remarked that he might do this at a meeting with Mahatma Gandhi when the latter arrived a month later for the Second Round Table Conference, he replied with a mischievous smile:"I am a minor Mahatma myself. I have enough experience of India's learned for me to know that what they say goes over my head.".

Now began a dialogue which lasted over two hours, provoked by his question: The civilisation of Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome had passed into oblivion after a few hundred years. What had given the social order in India its permanence and its strength to defy the ravages of time? What was the secret of Indian survival?

Ours was a system of social security, I explained. In modern idiom it guaranteed employment, the incentive to work and exchange of services, adequate provision for the aged, the widow and the orphan and a sort of insurance against natural disasters. The State as such did not come into the picture. In fact, the system was rooted in the assumption that the State did not exist, or was an abstraction, or at best to be identified, if need be, with the person of the ruler.

After a detailed exposition in which he pulled me up whenever I digressed, I concluded with the observation that the turn of the century had found the country's population balanced by its economic growth. But the expansion of population since then had far outstripped the economic gains.

This imbalance had not been appreciated by the rulers, for the joint family cushion had absorbed its shocks. But the cushion was wearing thin, and, should economic development be delayed, India would break up and dissolve under the weight of its mounting population and the lag in economic growth, if British rule continued for another fifteen years or so.

There was a smile on Shaw's face as he remarked that imperialism was on its way out. Shaw insisted on coming down in the lift to see me into the car the Indian High Commissioner had lent me for the occasion...

Yeats, who entertained me to tea at his home[in Ireland], surprisingly asked about the City of London's economic strangehold on India. I referred to the precipitous fall in the price of silver, which had ruined the Indian peasant, who invested his meagre savings in ornaments of this metal. The poet expressed confidence that India would win freedom under Gandhi's unique leadership and said he looked forward to her contribution to world thought...

Economic imperatives and imperialism

Comment

While Durga Das was in London, he also met Baldwin, a former Tory Prime Minister who supported Dominion status for India, defying his own party on the issue.

Durga Das writes:

Baldwin sat impassive, gazing at me as I proceeded to give him my analysis of political affairs in India and suggestions on how Whitehall could deal with them... At long last, Baldwin broke into what had virtually become a fifteen-minute monologue. [Labour Prime Minister] Macdonald's misgivings about the outcome of the London parleys, he remarked were not unjustified. He had to reckon with the hard-core Tories.

Baldwin traced the hostile climate to the hurt inflicted in Lancashire's textile industry by the Congress through its boycott of British goods. The financial crisis precipitated in Britain by World War I had been aggravated by this boycott. The burden of the Empire, he admitted candidly, was becoming more and more oppressive. It was more than likely that before long Britain would be compelled by sheer necessity to cut her losses.

India, Baldwin declared reflectively, might secure self-government much earlier than anybody now thought possible... He would urge the Indian leaders to employ to the maximum advantage whatever instruments were available to them now and whatever others were placed at their disposal under the coming reforms...

Did the key to Indian freedom then lie in India itself? No, in Whitehall, Baldwin answered. But settle with the Muslims for a start, he said, for Muslim intransigence, real or imaginary, was the weapon the British opponents of Indian self-rule would use to delay advance...

Durga Das also writes:

Perhaps the most important part of my discovery of London was the understanding I gained of the way the India Office functioned... I learned that the India office had a complete replica of the entire administration in India, down to the district level. Nothing, however trivial, happened in India which was not recorded and assessed. Policy was formulated at the India Office and directions were sent from there in relation to every sphere - financial, administrative, economic and commericial. Even the Viceroy got an occasional glimpse of high policy in his private correspondence with the Secretary of State.

The policy cell at the India Office had its links with the Foreign Office, the Treasury, the Board of Trade and the City. Thus India was governed from the India Office, and the Viceroy and the Civil Service were in truth the agents of the home Government. The theory of the "man on the spot" applied merely to administrative acts in pursuance of general policy directives.

[Late Bal Gangadhar ]Tilak was right, therefore in maintaining that the key to freedom lay in London and that the political pressure in Parliament would help a lot. But Gandhi had diagnosed the situation even more astutely. The British, a nation of shopkeepers, would react to a blow struck where it hurt most. It would take ages to work on the British conscience alone...

Durga Das returned home to find that the political climate had deteriorated considerably.

Willingdon was the new Viceroy, who "lost little time in calling Gandhi a "humbug" to whom he was determined to give no quarter. The London Round Table Conference did not go well for Gandhi or the Congress. Not only had Willingdon disowned the previous Viceroy's Irwin's committment to Gandhi to allow Gandhi to take Congress's own Muslim delegates Ansari and Ali Imam to the Conference, the British government also promised a Communal award based on a formula the British had agreed upon separately with the Aga Khan and Jinnah if the Indian delegates failed to agree among themselves."

...the effort of a settlement had been trumped with the Crescent Card. ...Against the failure was set the impact he [Gandhi] made on the common people of Lanchashire. They gave him a welcome... exceeding in fervour what they accorded even to royalty. Mothers brought their children for him to touch and bless. It was a demonstration of affection... that moved Gandhi profoundly. He had inspired the severest boycott of Lanchashire textiles, yet to the average Lancastrian he was not to be hated on that account but to be honoured as a saint...

Meanwhile, the Congress back in India reacted to the failure of the London Conference with a call for Gandhi's return and passive resistance.

Within three weeks of Gandhi's landing back in Bombay in December 1931, the Congress Party was banned and its leaders arrested in thousands. 35,000 civil disobedience volunteers were jailed,

"the largest number of arrests was made in connection with the protest against the export of gold for imports, largely of British goods. This was the time Britain was facing a financial crisis and a drain of gold..."

Jinnah in London

Comment

There were mainly two Muslim-only political organisations at that time, the All India Muslim Conference to which Aga Khan and the Muslim member of the Viceroy's Executive council Sir Fazli Husain were allied and the Muslim League which had become almost defunct after Jinnah moved to London in the late 1920s till the mid-'30s.

When Durga Das visited London in mid-1931, he also met Jinnah.

Durga Das writes :

Among the newspapermen in Delhi, I had been the closest to him over a long period... Over an excellent meal, the talk revolved mostly around politics. Jinnah confessed he was not enamoured of his legal practice in London; what he coveted professionally was a seat on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Or he might try to enter [the British]Parliament.

Did that mean he intended to retire from Indian politics for good? I asked. "No, Durga," he replied, "I came away to London because I did not wish to meet that wretched Viceroy.(Willingdon with whom he had quarrelled when the former was Governor of Bombay). I was hurt, besides, when my very reasonable proposals at the Calcutta All-Parties Convention were turned down by Motilal Nehru and his lot. I seem to have reached a dead end. The Congress will not come to terms with me because my following is very small. The Muslims do not accept my views, for they take their orders from the Deputy Commissioner(district authority)."

What did he think of the prospects of the forthcoming [Round Table]conferences? His answer came pat: "What can you expect from a jamboree of this kind? The British will only make an exhibition of our differences."

Jinnah was forthright in expressing his opinion on Gandhi's decision to participate in the London parleys. "They(the British) will make a fool of him, and he will make a fool of them." he remarked caustically. "Where is the Congress claim that it represents the Muslims as well? Gandhi has failed to get Ansari nominated. Frankly, Durga, I expect nothing to come of this conference."

But he could get together with Gandhi, Sapru and others, I suggested, and work for a communal settlement in the favourable climate engendered by the patriotic impulse of every Indian delegate."Suppose I do succeed," was Jinnah's comment, "they have this fellow, the Aga Khan, and Fazli's dogs."

Before I took leave of him, I told him in all sincerity that I missed him in Delhi. "I may come back for good," he replied, and, with a shrug of his shoulders added: "You can never tell."

Fazli Husain

Durga Das writes :

A new chapter in political history opened when Fazli Husain joined the Viceroy's Executive Council on 1st April 1930. He had already acquired national fame as the champion of Muslim interests in the Punjab.

He now proceeded to operate with the entire country as his ambit. Since the League was moribund, Fazli revived the All-India Muslim Conference to follow up the demands formulated at the All-Parties Muslim Conference held under the Aga Khan's chairmanship in Delhi on 1st January 1929.

I owe to Sir Fazli much of the inside information on the slowly widening rift between the two major political forces in India. I had for long been puzzled by the apparent contradiction in his political attitudes. A communalist where Muslim interests were concerned, he displayed a strong sense of nationalism at Simla-Delhi so far as general problems went.

Meeting him soon after the Congress had adopted the parliamentary programme[in 1934, after which the Jan. 1932-onward ban on Congress was lifted by the government], I discovered behind his dissection of the Hindu-Muslim question a penetrating and analytical mind and remarkable clarity of vision.

Most Muslims of today, he said to me, belonged to families that were Hindu not so long ago. Two generations back, the forebears of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the poet, were Saprus - Kashmiri Brahmins - and Jinnah's ancestors not so far removed either were also Hindus. In his self-interest, the Muslim was inclined to flatter the British by protestations of flattery.

Fazli threw considerable light on the plan for Pakistan, then insidiously germinating in certain minds, non-Muslim as well as Muslim. Those who fathered the idea in the early thirties had been financed by British intelligence in London, he said.

But their brainchild had evoked no interest at all in India. Sir Mohammad Zafrullah Khan, who echoed Fazli's views before the Consultative Committee set up in London to consider the White Paper on proposed reforms[which later became Government of India Act 1935], had, for instance, dismissed it as chimerical.

The Aga Khan had, however, made a vague allusion to Pakistan in a letter to Fazli as a means for safeguarding Muslim interests under a democratic regime in India. The Aga Khan was providing funds at that time for the Unionist Party in the Punjab, the All-India Muslim Conference and the Praja Krishak Party of Khwaja Nazimuddin and Fazlul Haq in Bengal. Fazli had published the letter only after expunging the reference.

In politics, Fazli told me he steered his course by two fundamental propositions. First, that democracy would be ill-balanced if progress in the rural areas did not keep pace with that in the towns. Secondly, that it would be inadvisable for the Muslims to organise an All-India political party of their own. What one could at best attempt was a balance between the Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority provinces, as the Nehru report suggested.

Until adult franchise was introduced, he would continue to favour separate electorates. He stood for a United States of India, in which both Hindu and Muslim states would contribute to a composite culture. The best way to protect the minorities, according to Fazli, was for them to form provincial parties which could join hands with other parties to improve economic conditions. Communal differences, he added, were not based on religion but on sharing political power and the meagre economic resources of the country.

He had a poor opinion of Jinnah, whom he considered an arm-chair politician. He thought Jinnah stood for joint electorates with reservation of seats merely to earn kudos from the Congress and Moderate leaders. Jinnah's main contribution to the national movement, he said, was his consistent advocacy of Indianisation of the commissioned ranks in the Army...

...He told me that on seeing what Gandhi had done for the Indians[in South Africa, when Fazli visited S. Africa] his respect for him had gone up. Indeed, he was nearer Gandhi than most other politicians.

He added "Gandhi wants the maximum monthly salary to be fixed at Rs. 500. I receive twelve times that figure. The way I live, however, is not one that our economy can afford for a long, long time.

I hold that we shall have to devise an Indian standard of living lower than the Western but higher than the traditional one here. I am all for a way of life that the urban and rural people can share. It would be a tragedy if our cities go Western while people in our villages remain backward. Some day, when our political troubles are over, we shall have to do something on Gandhian lines."

Government of India Act 1935 and British intentions

Durga Das writes:

Nationalist propaganda had a new cause to feed on with the publication of the Reforms Bill towards the end of 1934 and its enactment by the British Parliament in the summer of 1935.

The electoral provisions of the Act were to come into force in July 1936 and the Act in its totality on 1st April 1937. Although the part relating to federation was not to become operative until a given number of Princely states had consented to it, the provinces gained a separate legal entity and their own financial resources, and the Central Government's powers of direction and control were limited to specific spheres.

To garner views on what was happening in the Government's inner councils, I had a talk with [Sir Brojendra]Mitter who analysed the situation thus: Irwin recognised the Congress as a vital force and signed an agreement with Gandhi. But the British Government, after 1931, began to whittle down their pledges. They thought that if they could promote communal clashes they could retain control of the country. They had begun for the first time to think of the Muslim question in terms of their own safety.

Fazli had now thrown up another idea, Mitter said almost in panic. Not content with securing separate electorates and a fixed number of seats in the legislatures, Fazli had talked in the Executive of creating Muslim majority zones as a counterpoise to Hindu-majority areas. He sensed that the British were now building up a new power triangle designed to retain their hold in India. They were planning to divide the country into Hindu, Muslim and princely domains in the belief that pro-British Muslims and Princes would outvote the nationalist Hindus in a federal set-up.

He added:"The whole attempt of the new plan is to break the back of the Congress for fifteen to twenty years. Hoare and Willingdon are foolish to think so, but I keep silent in the Council. I do not want to reveal my inner feelings to them. I do not agree with these Congress fellows, but I find that the conspiracy is to weaken the Hindu community and forge an Anglo-Muslim alliance to hold the Hindu down."

But this was not how farseeing Britons viewed the prospect. Hailey, Governor of the U.P., who was made a peer on retiring from the I. C. S, speaking at a farewell dinner given by members of the civil service at the Chhattar Manzil Club in Lucknow in 1934, when the Congress movement had been virtually paralysed by repression, said in effect:

"It is impossible to suppress a nationalist movement. We have tried to suppress it with all the force at our disposal, but even so you cannot be sure that the Congress will not come up again. There is no safeguard for the Civil Service in a democracy, except that trained officials will necessary to execute ministerial policy and not merely deal with law and order. The future Government of India will be largely socialistic..."

Seeing that the Congress would now be participating in legislatures, Gandhi had resigned from the Congress Party in 1934, and had gotten immersed in a newly formed All India Village Industries Association.

Durga Das writes:

Back in New Delhi I had a talk with the Home Member, Sir Henry Craik, and was convinced he was more concerned with Gandhi's village programme than with the wordy bouts in the legislatures.

This was confirmed by what I gathered of his talk with "friendly" pressman, to whom he had mentioned that he had sent a confidential letter to the provincial Governments that Gandhi's new move was meant to cause disaffection among the masses and subvert authority. To counter it, the Finance Minister, Sir James Grigg, included in his budget, Rs 20 million for a two-year drive for rural improvement...

A Communalist and a Nationalist reverse roles

Durga Das writes:

On 31st March, 1935, Fazli's membership of the Viceroy Executive Council ended. Four days earlier, I had a long talk with him to ascertain his future plans and get his assessment of the political forces in the country, and in the Punjab in particular...

I began the talk by mentioning that Jinnah had revived the League and resumed its leadership and that Sir Sikander Hayat Khan, an influential landlord of West Punjab and Revenue Member of the Provincial Government, had come to an understanding with the Hindu and Sikh leaders of the Punjab on communal differences.

Fazli replied that his first task was to restore self-respect among the Ministers in Punjab. Because of Hailey's tactics, which were being continued by his successors, the Ministers had become glorified tahsildars (subordinate revenue officials).

Secondly, he would revive the Unionist Party. He told me what he said was a four-year-old secret. He had sent a message to the Secretary of State for India through Irwin in December 1930 that it was unfair to the Muslims, who had kept away from Gandhi's civil disobedience movement, to make them accept what the Nehru report offered them. He had coupled the message with the threat that if the Muslim demands were not conceded before the reforms were introduced he and his followers would throw in their lot with the Congress in its political struggle against the Government.

This threat worked, he added, and ultimately resulted in the Communal Award, because meanwhile there had been a change of government in Britain and the Tories became the dominant force.

Reverting to the current situation, he said that as matters stood he was agreeable to the formula devised by Sir Sikander for joint electorates, provided the Muslims were given the seats alloted to them under the Communal Award and the size of the three communities was correctly reflected in the electoral register.

He said the Sikh leaders backed out because, though thirteen per cent of the population, they formed twenty-four percent of the electorate. The Hindu proportion was fair, but the Muslims, who constituted fifty-six percent of the population, formed only forty-four percent of the electorate.

He said the Punjab Muslims couldnot work the reforms without Hindu support. He proposed to reorganise the Unionist Party on the basis of the advance of the backward classes and open it to all the communities. "I do not want Punjab to be the Ulster of India,", he added.

Fazli expressed total opposition to Jinnah's plan to fight the elections through a communal party, the League. He would see to it, he said, that Muslims everywhere joined non-communal parties. He was surprised that Jinnah was taken seriously by anybody.

He recalled that Jinnah had written to the Times of India on 3rd October, 1925 decrying the charge that the Congress was a Hindu body. Speaking in the Legislative Assembly, he had declared: "I am a nationalist first, nationalist second, and a nationalist last.". He wanted the Assembly to become a "real nationalist Parliament". He joined the boycott of the Simon Commission in 1928 and split the League. He did not cooperate with the Muslim delegates at the R.T.C in London.

"His League is on paper. It has no organisation. He only wants kudos, however he may get it." he concluded his indictment. His final words were:"If God gives me two years, I shall have completed my service to the Punjab and to India. Now that the Communal Award has given the necessary safeguards, we can work for the early achievement of Swaraj."

Fazli reached Lahore on 1st April 1935. Ten months later, he got the Aga Khan to attend a meeting of the Executive Board of the All-India Muslim Conference in Delhi in February 1936 and made it declare "that the Muslims put India first, being as much their motherland as of other races who inhabit India."

The Aga Khan also gave funds to help counter the propaganda of Jinnah's League, which received financial support from the Hindu millowners of Bombay because of its tacit alliance with the Congress in the coming elections.

In a bid to capture all-India leadership of the Muslims, Jinnah prepared a purely communal programme and invited Fazli to preside over the next session of the League.

Fazli turned down the offer and asked his followers not to meet Jinnah when he visited Lahore. Jinnah in anger retorted: "I shall smash Fazli." He set up a central Parliamentary Board of the Muslim League on the pattern of the Congress. Fazli told me he did not approve of an inter-provincial organisation as it would fetter provincial initiative in settling communal issues and was contrary to the spirit of provincial autonomy.

On 1st April, 1936, Fazli reorganised the Unionist Party under his own chairmanship. He drew up a manifesto which proposed the reduction in the emoluments of Government servants(the Gandhian touch) and declared that community of economic interests was true basis of political parties. He proposed to remove economic inequities and dramatised his programme by remarking that the average income of a Punjabi was less than the expense of the clothing and feeding of a prisoner in a Punjabi jail...

Soon after this, Fazli Husain wrote a letter to Durga Das saying among other things :

"In actual practice, the work Jawaharlal [Nehru] wants done in the provinces is more or less the same as the programme the Unionists have set before themselves to execute."

Durga Das writes:

Here was a tragic situation. Fazli, a communalist-turned-nationalist, envisaged cooperation with the Congress on the economic plane and Jinnah, a nationalist-turned-communalist, sought a coalition with the Congress on a communal basis.

But fate frustrated Fazli's plans at this point. He fell ill on 1st July and died on 9th July. A huge crowd demanded that he be buried in Badshahi Masjid(King's Mosque) in Lahore, but Fazli's wishes were that he be buried in his family graveyard in Batala. His remains lie in India's Punjab, his motherland. It is one of the ifs of history whether, had Fazli lived another two years, politics would have taken a different turn.

The idea of partitioning the country took root among the Muslims only after Fazli's death. Apparently none of his instruments-Zafrullah Khan and Noon among them-had imbibed the true spirit of patriotism of their mentor.