Muslim League Reorganized:
Thus, the task that awaited Jinnah was
anything but easy. The Muslim League was dormant: even its provincial
organizations were, for the most part, ineffective and only nominally
under the control of the central organization. Nor did the central body have any
coherent policy of its own till the Bombay session (1936), which Jinnah
organized. To make matters worse, the provincial scene presented a sort of a
jigsaw puzzle: in the Punjab, Bengal, Sindh, the North West Frontier, Assam,
Bihar and the United Provinces, various Muslim leaders had set up their own
provincial parties to serve their personal ends. Extremely frustrating as the
situation was, the only consolation Jinnah had at this juncture was in Allama Iqbal (1877-1938), the poet-philosopher, who stood steadfast
by him and helped to chart the course of Indian politics from behind the scene.
Undismayed by this bleak situation,
Jinnah devoted himself to the sole purpose of organizing the Muslims on one
platform. He embarked upon country-wide tours. He pleaded with provincial
Muslim leaders to sink their differences and make common cause with the
League. He exhorted the Muslim masses to organize themselves and join the
League. He gave coherence and direction to Muslim sentiments on the Government
of India Act, 1935. He advocated that the Federal Scheme should be scrapped as
it was subversive of India's cherished goal of complete responsible Government,
while the provincial scheme, which conceded provincial autonomy for the
first time, should be worked for what it was worth, despite its certain
objectionable features. He also formulated a viable League manifesto for the
election scheduled for early 1937. He was, it seemed, struggling against time
to make Muslim India a power to be reckoned with.
Despite all the manifold odds stacked
against it, the Muslim League won some 108 (about 23 per cent) seats out of a
total of 485 Muslim seats in the various legislatures. Though not very
impressive in itself, the League's partial success assumed added
significance in view of the fact that the League won the largest number
of Muslim seats and that it was the only all-India party of the Muslims in the
country. Thus, the elections represented the first milestone on the long
road to putting Muslim India on the map of the subcontinent. Congress in power
with the year 1937 opened the most momentous decade in modern Indian history.
In that year came into force the provincial part of the Government of India
Act, 1935, granting autonomy to Indians for the first time, in the provinces.
The Congress, having become the dominant
party in Indian politics, came to power in seven provinces exclusively,
spurning the League's offer of cooperation, turning its back
finally on the coalition idea and excluding Muslims as a political entity
from the portals of power. In that year, also, the Muslim League, under
Jinnah's dynamic leadership, was reorganized de novo, transformed into a mass
organization, and made the spokesman of Indian Muslims as never before. Above
all, in that momentous year were initiated certain trends in Indian politics,
the crystallization of which in subsequent years made the partition of the
subcontinent inevitable. The practical manifestation of the policy of the
Congress which took office in July, 1937, in seven out of eleven provinces,
convinced Muslims that, in the Congress scheme of things, they could live only
on sufferance of Hindus and as "second class" citizens. The
Congress provincial governments, it may be remembered, had embarked upon a
policy and launched a programme in which Muslims felt
that their religion, language and culture were not safe. This blatantly
aggressive Congress policy was seized upon by Jinnah to awaken the Muslims to a
new consciousness, organize them on all-India platform, and make them a power
to be reckoned with. He also gave coherence, direction and articulation to
their innermost, yet vague, urges and aspirations. Above all, he filled
them with his indomitable will, his own unflinching faith in their
destiny.
The New Awakening:
As a result of Jinnah's ceaseless
efforts, the Muslims awakened from what Professor Baker calls (their)
"unreflective silence" (in which they had so complacently
basked for long decades), and to "the spiritual essence of
nationality" that had existed among them for a pretty long time. Roused by
the impact of successive Congress hammerings, the Muslims, as Ambedkar (principal author of independent India's
Constitution) says, "searched their social consciousness in a desperate
attempt to find coherent and meaningful articulation to their cherished
yearnings. To their great relief, they discovered that their sentiments of
nationality had flamed into nationalism". In addition, not only had
they developed" the will to live as a "nation", had also endowed
them with a territory which they could occupy and make a State as well as a
cultural home for the newly discovered nation. These two pre-requisites
provided the Muslims with the intellectual justification for claiming a
distinct nationalism (apart from Indian or Hindu nationalism) for themselves.
So that when, after their long pause, the Muslims gave expression to their
innermost yearnings, these turned out to be in favour
of a separate Muslim nationhood and of a separate Muslim state.