Muhajirs and the Nation

Bihar in the 1940s

Papiya Ghosh

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000083880
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This book examines community-oriented formations and communal polities in pre-Partition north India, highlighting the centrality of the experience of Muslim minority provinces such as Bihar during the Partition. It shows how community, religion and nation in Bihar in the 1940s were intertwined.

1
Rabita-e-Awam: Congress ‘Contacts’ Muslims

The predominantly small landlord leadership of the Bihar Congress was broadly right wing in orientation, and between the 1920s and 1940s, worked on forging a united anti-imperialist front.¹ Together with this overall picture there were other stories. The ‘total rural sweep’ by the Congress in the 1936 elections has been attributed to the critical contribution of the Kisan Sabha. But the increasing influence of the Socialists in the Kisan Sabha and their intention to transform the Congress from within, strained the relationship between the orthodox Congress leadership and the Kisan Sabha. It was only towards the end of 1939, that the right wing Congress leadership managed to re-establish its control in Bihar.² Simultaneously, between the 1930s and 1940s, not only did the agrarian reform programme of the Bihar Congress fail to take off, the party also increasingly lost the support of the Muslim masses, despite its Muslim Mass Contact (MMC) initiative: Rabita-e-Awam.³ There was some connection between these two dimensions and together they formed much of the context in which the Bihar Congress lost out on both these fronts.

¹ Ghosh (1986); Damodaran (1992, pp. 318 and 367); and Sharma (1995, pp. 136–39).

² Damodaran (1992, pp. 105–7 and 156). Although the franchise was limited to about 10 per cent of the population, the electorate included the more substantial rent-paying tenantry whose demands became difficult to ignore completely; Chopra (1985, p. 500); ‘Note on the Kisan movement in Bihar’, with D. O. 515-GB, Patna, 14 May 1937, M. G. Hallett to Linlithgow and Secret 1221-GB, M. G. Hallett to Linlithgow, 11 November 1937, pp. 1137–40.

³ Gupta (1996, pp. 83–86); Damodaran (1992, p. 153); and see Sharma (1989, p. 148), for the statements of C. P. N. Singh, K. B. Ismail and Shyam Nandan Sahay, all of them landlords, that the zamindars had not lost much, and for a mention of the half-hearted implementation of the legislations. Regarding the loss of Muslim support, see Ghosh (1991a; 1991b). Also see Damodaran (1992, pp. 13, 368 and 373) for the argument that this was not only because of the Muslim League’s arrival, but the failure of the Congress to counter Hindu communal elements.

On the eve of the organisational breakthrough of the Bihar Muslim League in late 1937, which was marked by several Congressmen moving over to the League, one of them, Saiyid Muhammad Ismail, wrote to Rajendra Prasad that ‘the burning question’ facing all patriotic Indians was ‘how to remove the differences between the Hindus and Muslims, both [the] intelligentsia and the masses’.⁴ During its two-year ministry (1937–39), the Bihar Congress was inclined to explain the grievances of the Muslim community by pointing to the incessant and unspecific propaganda of the Muslim League.⁵ When Maulana Azad visited Bihar in mid-1938, he found the ministry beleaguered by ‘innumerable problems, each acute and urgent in itself’. He was ‘disillusioned’ to discover that he ‘heard no word of sympathy but only curses’ from ‘officials, non-officials, landlords, kisans, Muslims, [and] Hindus’.⁶

⁴ Choudhary (1984a, p. 106), Patna City, 8 October 1937. Ismail later became the president of the Bihar Muslim League.

⁵ Choudhary (1985, p. 230), ‘Review by “An Observer” of the Two Years in Office’; Choudhary (1984a, p. 166), Ziradei, 21 November 1938, Rajendra Prasad to Sultan Ahmed; and Ghosh (1991a, p. 95).

⁶ Ravindra Kumar ( 1991, p. 31), ‘Situation of Bihar’, 17 July 1938.

The 1937–39 Congress ministry years have been described as a ‘politically decisive period’, that saw both the alienation of the Muslims and the consolidation of the Muslim League in provinces such as Bihar, where Muslims comprised a minority of the population. Both these developments that made the Congress a ‘sitting duck’ have been linked by Mukul Kesavan to the Congress decision to reject coalitions with provincial Muslim parties.⁷ According to Kesavan, though the Congress and the Muslim Independent Party did not have an explicit electoral alliance, their ‘fairly strong political affinities’ and overlapping membership indicated that the MIP was ‘ideally suited’ to be a coalition partner for the Congress, had it been inclined to form a government formally representative of the Muslim electorate.⁸

⁷ ‘Congress and the Muslims of U.P. and Bihar, 1937–39’, Occasional papers on History and Society, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, no. 27, second series, June 1990, pp. 1–4 and 7.

⁸ Ibid., pp. 64–65 and 70.

Some years later, Rajendra Prasad wrote that in 1937 there was no question of a coalition ministry with the Muslim League in provinces such as Bihar, Orissa and the Central Provinces where no League candidate was returned in the elections. Besides, the Congress had decided to go by the ‘well understood constitutional principle of having homogeneous ministries composed of its own members, among whom Muslims were of course included’.⁹ He recalled that the Congress had entered into a ‘pact’ with the MIP, ‘promising full support to its nominees, who were Congressmen in all but name and had suffered imprisonment’ during the Congress-led agitations.¹⁰ But there appears to have been some pre-election misunderstanding about the choice of candidates. Rajendra Prasad wrote to the Congress minister, Syed Mahmud, that it came as a surprise to him that Sajjad had complained to him about the pre-election arrangement of the MIP and the Congress, when in fact, it should have been the other way around.¹¹ He was also critical of Sajjad, the principal founder of the MIP because he had ‘faltered’ and asked its leader, Muhammad Yunus, to accept office and form a ministry between April and July 1937, at a point when the Congress had declined to do so.¹² In 1939 Sajjad described the Congress decision of ‘not coalescing with any other party’ and ‘not inviting nationalist groups which had a programme akin to its own’ to join the government, as a ‘blunder’.¹³ But unlike the Muslim United Party, the MIP, which had won the largest number of Muslim seats (15), did not merge with the provincial Muslim League. It only allowed some of its members to simultaneously join the Muslim League in December 1937. This arrangement was revoked in April 1940 on grounds of non-reciprocity. The MIP and its sponsor, the Bihar Jamiyat al-Ulama-i-Hind, opposed the Pakistan resolution soon after it was passed, arguing that it had nothing to offer to Muslims in provinces where Hindus comprised a majority of the population (see Chapter 2).

⁹ Prasad (1947, pp. 145–46).

¹⁰ Prasad (1957, p. 435).

¹¹ Datta and Cleghorn (1974, pp. 189–90), Patna, 6 February 1940. Also see p. 158, Wardha, 5 October 1936, from Rajendra Prasad. ‘Regarding the Independent Party, although they seem to approach us in some matters more than any other Muslim party in our Province, even they are not prepared to join hands with the Congress and have to content themselves with offering co-operation to liberty-loving parties, which may include anybody and everybody. . . . It is difficult to see how they will be able to go with us when face to face with other parties and Government.’

¹² Prasad (1957: p. 440).

¹³ AICC G-42/1939, letter to the Congress working committee.

Since the early 1920s, the Bihar Congress had acquired the stigma of some of its members also belonging to the Hindu Mahasabha (see Chapter 5). In the ministry period this issue surfaced strongly in July 1938, in the aftermath of violence over the route of a rath yatra procession in Bhagalpur. The post-riots statements made by the secretary of the Bhagalpur Muslim Mass Contact (MMC) committee, Abdul Hamid Reshmi, were unanimously accepted by the local MMC working committee after its enqu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Rabita-e-Awam: Congress 'Contacts' Muslims
• 2. Muttahida Qaumiyat and the Imarat-i-Shariah
• 3. The Pakistan Movement in Bihar
• 4. Contesting the Sharif: The Momin Conference
• 5. Shuddhi, Sangathan and Akhand Bharat
• Bibliography
• Index