Partition & the Idea of India

The constitutional question in India from the 1930s onwards was not only when the British would leave. It was what would follow: what kind of state, with what guarantees, for a population divided by religion, language and region in ways that no single federal formula obviously satisfied.

The Muslim League’s answer, formalised in the Lahore Resolution of March 1940, was that Indian Muslims constituted a nation and required their own state. The Congress’s answer, which Azad articulated at length in his Ramgarh presidential address days earlier, was that India was a single nation containing many communities, and that minority anxieties should be met by constitutional guarantee rather than by division.

Between 1940 and 1946 these two positions hardened. Every failed negotiation — the Cripps Mission of 1942, the Simla conference of 1945 — strengthened the case of those who argued that agreement was impossible, and weakened the case of those, like Azad, who argued that it was not.

In 1946 a British Cabinet Mission came to India with a proposal designed to avoid partition. Its plan of 16 May envisaged a federal union with a weak centre responsible for defence, foreign affairs and communications, and provinces grouped in a way that gave Muslim-majority regions substantial autonomy within a single country.

Azad, leading the Congress delegation, supported it. It offered the substance of what the demand for a separate state was said to require — security and self-government for Muslim-majority provinces — without dividing the country, and it is the formula he considered the best available.

The plan did not hold. The two parties interpreted the grouping provisions differently, the interim government proved difficult to form, and by late 1946 public order in several provinces had deteriorated severely. Historians continue to disagree about whether the plan was ever workable and about where responsibility for its failure lies. That disagreement is genuine and this site does not resolve it.

In early 1947 the British government announced a date for transfer of power, later brought forward. The plan finally adopted divided British India into two dominions, with Bengal and Punjab themselves partitioned. The All India Congress Committee accepted the plan in June 1947; available accounts record that Azad abstained rather than vote for it.

Independence came on 15 August 1947. So did the boundary. The movement of population across the new borders, and the violence that accompanied it, are among the largest such events in recorded history. Estimates of the numbers killed vary very widely between historians, and figures should be treated with corresponding caution; the scale of displacement runs into many millions.

Azad had opposed the division consistently for seven years and had been, for six of them, president of the organisation that accepted it. That is a difficult position to be in, and he did not pretend otherwise afterwards.

On 23 October 1947, two months after independence, Azad spoke from the Jama Masjid in Delhi to Muslims who had remained in India, many of them frightened and many considering leaving. Accounts of the address record two arguments running through it.

The first was historical: that Indian Muslims had been part of the freedom struggle and part of the country’s life for centuries, and that this claim was not cancelled by the events of that year. The second was practical and, in its way, severe: that they should not seek protection through deference to whoever now held power, and that if they chose to stay, no one could compel them to go.

It is a speech that is quoted often and read less often. Its tone is not consoling. It asks something of its audience — self-respect, and the refusal of a supplicant’s position — at a moment when self-respect was expensive.

Azad’s conception of India did not end with Partition; it was written into the arrangements that followed. The Constitution adopted in 1949 established a secular republic with equal citizenship, guaranteed fundamental rights, and no state religion. Azad served in the Constituent Assembly throughout its work, and in the cabinet of the government that implemented the result.

He then spent eleven years on the part of the project he considered most durable: the education system. It is a reasonable reading of his last decade that he regarded schools, universities, laboratories and academies as the instruments through which the argument he had lost in 1947 could still, over a long enough period, be won.