The Indian National Congress, though reluctantly open to the demand of self-determination and formation of separate autonomous Muslim units under a somewhat loose Indian Confederation, remained staunchly opposed to the demand of Pakistan as an independent entity till almost the final phase of the tumultuous history leading to the gory partition. The attempt at intellectual appraisal of the momentous phase of the history remains daunting even so many years after scores were settled.
Viewed from the surface, it seems that the league’s Pakistan clamour and Congress’ resistance simply boil down to a mutual resolve of political hegemony — the former remained obsessed since its inception in 1906 with its antipathy towards the ‘Hindu’ Congress that was viewed as bent on foisting Hindu rule in the name of majoritarian civilisation and culture while the Congress, on the other hand, though extremely wary of flaunting any Hindu-orientation in its political rhetoric, remained resolved to foil any attempt by the Muslims to divide the ancient ‘Hindu’ land on the basis of communal differences.
However, there is something of a deeper element. It is the deeper call of India. This aspect ignored, much of the communal conundrum would remain un-comprehended and things might seem to be mere Muslim struggle to resist Hindu’s purported obsession with possessive hegemony.
Shut into a separate, geographical cloister hemmed in by the Himalayas on the north and ocean on the south, India has remained home to a people with peculiar and somewhat original view of life that marks her as distinct. She has absorbed all that has entered into it, putting upon all that came her way the typical Indian stamp and welding the most diverse elements into a fundamental unity. “India’s history throughout has been marked by a tendency, a constant effort to unite all this diversity of elements into a single political whole under a central imperial rule so that India can be politically and culturally one. Even after a rift had been created by the eruption of the Mohammedan peoples with their very different religious and social structure, there continued a constant effort of political unification and there was a tendency towards a mingling of cultures, even some heroic attempts were made to discover or create a common religion built out of these two apparently irreconcilable faiths,” says Sri Aurobindo.
This is what constitutes the vibrant core of quintessential India. This again accounts for the Congress stonewalling separatist clamour from the Muslim league. This is the reason why Gandhi and others continued opposing the Muslim league’s exhortation that the Congress being a Hindu party had no right to either represent the Muslims or nominate any Muslim representative to any elected or nominated body. After his talks with Jinnah failed in 1944, Gandhi said that Pakistan as being envisaged by the Muslim league was an absurdity. And this is the stance he stuck to the last despite having capitulated before the inexorability of history. Partition pained him not as much because of the mutilation of India’s body and subsequent misery to millions as because of his having failed to live up to the call coming from the deepest soul of India that proclaims oneness in multiplicity.
However, there is another side. Though a composite culture is supposed to have evolved in the ruling elite during the Mughal rule it had its own limits. The blending was far from perfect. The elite principally drawn from the two Hindu castes- the Rajputs and the Kayasthas- were ready to accept the court etiquette, but it did not mean that they had dispensed with the baggage of tradition. This was true prominently in case of the Rajput princes who made it a habit to hasten homewards to hold the rajtilak (coronation) ceremony after being bestowed with a mansab or jagir from the imperial court. Even the marriage of the Rajput princesses to the members of the Mughal royal family did not go far in promoting integration between the two communities. These marriages seemed to be mere political bargains sought by hard-pressed Rajput kings to survive.
However, the Congress leadership seemed to be nurturing all through an invincible conviction of the organic unity between the two communities and this is what seemed to have steeled Muslim league’s resolve to turn its face away from India. Ironically enough, the more the Congress flaunted its resolve the fiercer turned the desperation on the part of Muslim league to go along the line of self-determination and, by its logical extension, partition. This connotes a queer insecurity seemingly deep set in the Muslim psyche vis-à-vis the typical Indian/Hindu tendency to take up, absorb and turn into its likeness almost eerily all that is dissimilar to it.