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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Muslim League

A Bad Friend

18 Sat Mar 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Abraham Isaac Kook, Ahad Ha'am, Albert Einstein, All India Khilafat Committee, Arab, Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg, Benjamin Ze'ev Herzl, CENTO, Central Treaty Organisation, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim, Henry Polak, Hermann Kallenbach, Immanuel Olsvanger, INC, India, Indian National Congress, Israel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Jew, Khilafat Movement, MEA, Ministry of External Affairs, Mohandas Gandhi, Mossad, Muslim, Muslim League, Narasimha Rao, Nicolas Blarel, Pakistan, Palestine Liberation Organisation, PL 480, PLO, Public Law 480, RAW, Theodor Herzl, Zalman Shazar

The Evolution of India's Israel PolicyBlarel, Nicolas. The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 428 pp.

India’s relations with Israel have fast emerged, since the end of the Cold War, as among the most important for the South Asian nation. A vital source of arms and intelligence, Jerusalem has become Delhi’s third-largest defence vendor within 25 years of establishing full diplomatic relations. Additionally, India relies on Israeli expertise in agriculture, and trade between the two countries, currently hovering around $5 billion, is expected to double as soon as a free trade agreement in the works in finalised. Despite the strategic value of the Indo-Israeli relationship, it has somehow not been a popular subject of study among academics and policy analysts. Public understanding is mostly shaped by media reports that are, by their very nature, shallow and temporal. In these climes, Nicolas Blarel’s The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy: Continutity, Change, and Compromise since 1922 is a much-needed survey and analysis of relations with one of Delhi’s most valued partners.

Although the partnership between the two almost-twin modern republics now appears to be a natural alliance, their history has been rocky, frustrating, and at times even antagonistic. Instead of beginning at the seemingly obvious chronological markers of Indian independence and the creation of Israel, Blarel recounts his tale from the aftermath of the Balfour declaration in 1917 when Indian opinion on a Jewish state first began to form. It is commonly believed that Indian views on Israel were forged by Mohandas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru and they remained unchanged until Narasimha Rao established full diplomatic relations in 1992. Blarel challenges this notion on two counts – first, that Gandhi had such a profound influence on the foreign policy of independent India, and second, that India’s Israel policy was so inflexible. In fact, Blarel argues, Gandhi and Nehru showed an evolution in their thinking on Israel, as did the foreign policy of independent India.

Gandhi’s first impulse on the Jewish question was to oppose the partition of Palestine.This was informed more by the domestic politics in India at the time than any proper grappling with the issues plaguing the Jewish community. The late 19th century had seen a sudden surge in pan-Islamic sentiment among Indian Muslims and the British victory over the Ottoman Empire in the First World War and the subsequent uncertainty in the fate of the caliphate agitated them. In an effort to win over the Muslim community from the Muslim League and bring them into the fold of the Indian National Congress, Gandhi supported the All India Khilafat Committee in their protest against the British. The Indian nationalist movement thus exploited Muslim concerns over Palestine to forge a united front between Hindus and Muslims in India.

The Jewish Agency was keen on winning the support of Indian nationalists such as Gandhi and Nehru for they believed it would give a political boost to their aspirations. Furthermore, they had also noticed the impact of Indian Muslim sensibilities on British policies in the Middle East. David Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann themselves met with and also sent other important Zionists such as Immanuel Olsvanger to meet with Indian leaders to try and convince them of the justness of Jewish demands in Judea. Gandhi was already somewhat aware of the plight of European Jews through his friendship with Hermann Kallenbach, Henry Polak, and others in South Africa yet the Jewish Agency could not win either Nehru or Gandhi over to their side. The reasons, again, were rooted in Indian domestic politics. First, Gandhi did not wish to alienate Indian Muslims whom he perceived to be sympathetic towards the Arabs.

Second, the Indian leader did not accept the precepts of political Zionism. In a letter to Albert Einstein, Gandhi agreed that he could understand the spiritual desire of the Jewish people to return to Palestine but that did not give them any political rights. The Indian leader saw Zionism as a cultural phenomenon as Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg advocated, or a spiritual quest as Abraham Isaac Kook did, but not a political movement as Benjamin Ze’ev Herzl strategised. This was perhaps largely because Gandhi could not accept the argument for a confessional state in the Middle East and oppose a similar claim in India for Pakistan.

Finally, Gandhi could not come to terms with Zionist methods in pursuing their objectives on two counts – he could not condone the violence of the Irgun Tzvai Leumi and the Lohamei Herut Yisrael and he did not like how the Jewish Agency was willing to work with the British when they should have been opposing imperialism. Here, Gandhi did not seem to notice that Jewish support for Britain was largely for self-preservation from Arab mobs that had taken to attacking Jewish settlements with increasing frequency since the early 1920s.

Germany’s persecution of the Jews during World War II did not change Gandhi’s views on a Jewish state. Though he condemned the atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish people in Europe, he did not think they should dispossess others in Palestine for the faults of Europeans. However, perhaps due to the details of the Holocaust becoming widely known, Gandhi seems to have had a slight change of heart in 1946 that is not popularly known. In an interview with American journalist Louis Fischer, the Indian leader agreed that the Jews had a prior claim to the land in the Fertile Crescent but criticised their reliance on imperial powers to achieve their goals. In another interview that same year, Gandhi again agreed that the Jews had a case for a state but had squandered their good will and support by resorting to terrorist means.

As Blarel points out, Gandhi’s views on Israel did evolve between Khilafat and independence but they did not have too much of an impact on Indian foreign policy. That honour was left to Nehru, whose views were not as similar to his mentor’s as is commonly believed. In principle, Nehru was more supportive of Jewish political aspirations than Gandhi was; he accepted that their immigration into the region had substantially improved standards of living in Palestine and was impressed by Jewish achievements in science, the arts, business, and politics. Like Gandhi, he rejected the religious basis for statehood but rather than define the question in religio-cultural terms, Nehru saw the Palestinian question as a nationalist one rather than a religious one. This gave the Jewish Agency a little more room to manoeuvre but maintained a firm position on the viability of Pakistan.

The Muslim League craftily leveraged the pan-Islamic sentiment of Indian Muslims to pin the Congress into an anti-Zionist corner. They would threaten the British with unrest and the Congress with a fractured nationalist struggle if either sided with the Zionists. This same dynamic carried on post independence as Pakistan tried to build a Muslim coalition around it against India, particularly over Kashmir. In an effort to maintain consistency between its positions on Pakistan and Israel, appease the Muslim community in India, and counter Pakistani propaganda in the Middle East, India slowly slid into the anti-Zionist camp.

These philosophical contortions sometimes meant that India found itself on no one’s side. During the debate in the United Nations over the Mandate, India insisted on a single state in Palestine with two autonomous regions to the frustration of both Arab and Jew! Finally, when the creation of Israel was declared, India waited for two years to extend recognition. However, in an attempt to still be seen as neutral between the two sides, Nehru refused to establish full diplomatic relations with the new state. The Indian prime minister argued that the time was not ripe so soon after the dismemberment of Pakistan from India to vex Indian Muslims by sidling up to the Zionist state. Interestingly, this did not stop him from requesting Israeli assistance in technology and agriculture through the offices of Indian socialists who had maintained good relations with Israeli kibbutzim.

Despite requesting aid from Israel, Nehru and the Congress treated the Jewish state almost like their own untouchable. Israel was allowed to convert a pre-independence office of the Jewish Agency in Bombay into its consulate, though the consul was kept away from any official functions in Delhi. In fact, Delhi reprimanded Tel Aviv and even closed the consulate for six years from 1962-1968 for celebrating Israel’s independence day in a hotel in Delhi. When Israeli president Zalman Shazar requested a halt in India for rest and refuelling on his way to Nepal in March 1966, the Indian government did not allow him to land in Delhi but in Calcutta. Shazar was not even given a five-minute courtesy reception at the airport by either the government of India or of West Bengal.

The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy contends that Delhi was not locked in a Nehruvian mindset on Israel from 1947 until normalisation in 1992 but adapted its policies to suit the circumstances. Blarel argues that Indian policy always reflected realism and was not moralpolitik. India was dependent on the Suez Canal for trade and oil for its economy from the Arab world; the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Six-Day War in 1967 hurt the Indian economy as the canal was closed for a time during which the cost of Indian exports to Europe and the New World rose between 15 and 35 percent. India hoped that its support of the Palestinian cause would insulate it from economic shocks as well as gain reciprocal support from Arab states for the Indian position on Kashmir and isolate Pakistan in the process.

After Nehru, the evolution of India’s Israel policy was towards greater inflexibility and stridency. As Blarel observes, several things had changed since the end of the Nehru era. Since 1967, Israel had shifted firmly into the American camp and introduced an imperial power into the region; the Palestinian situation became far bleaker after the Six-Day War. In 1975, India co-sponsored a resolution in the United Nations that equated Zionism with racism. In general, much like Indian non-alignment, its Israel policy was veering towards one side.

One major lacuna in The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy is that it does not explain why Israel sought closer ties with India. The reason was obvious before 1948: association with Gandhi, the apostle of non-violence. In the first decade after creation, Israel believed that India’s international influence as the leader of a bloc of newly independent Afro-Asian states would be helpful in gaining recognition from the global community. However, India’s influence waned as its economy failed to grow commensurate to its population and it lost a war against China. In addition to the hostile treatment Israel received in the United Nations as well as bilaterally from India, why did Tel Aviv continue to seek close ties with Delhi?

In fact, Israel’s efforts were commendable – Israel was among the first countries to provide military and medical assistance to India during the Sino-Indian War in 1962, supplying heavy mortars and ammunition. It provided artillery, ammunition, and instructors to India in 1965 during the Second India-Pakistan War, and during the War of Bangladeshi Liberation in 1971, Israel even helped India train the Mukti Bahini. Of course, Delhi did not acknowledge any of this, thanking Tel Aviv only for its medical aid. In 1968, when India established its intelligence service, Research & Analysis Wing, then prime minister Indira Gandhi reached out to Israel’s HaMossad leModiʿin uleTafkidim Meyuḥadim – Mossad – to help train the fledgling service. While Indira Gandhi was whining about US PL 480 food aid being “ship to mouth” in 1966, she had simultaneously rejected Israeli offers of grains to assist India in staving off famine.

While India went to such great lengths to win Arab admiration, it found little to show for its efforts. Most Arab states remained neutral or favoured Pakistan in its wars with India, some even providing arms and ammunition and safe havens for the Pakistani air force from Indian bombardment. When India tried to gain membership to the Organisation of Islamic Countries on the basis of its substantial Muslim population, Pakistan was able to torpedo its application by threatening to walk out of the conference. In an effort to please the Arabs, India had even supported the Arabs in their decision to cut oil production and raise oil prices in 1973.

In the Middle East, India reserved all its moral admonitions for Israel alone. While it criticised Tel Aviv for siding with imperial powers, India did not utter a word of protest when Iraq, Iran, and Turkey joined the Central Treaty Organisation. Delhi’s condemnation of terrorist methods applied only to the Zionists but not the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In fact, India recognised the PLO in 1975, 11 years after its formation and 17 years before it accorded the same status to Israel.

Blarel explains that India found it difficult to change its policy towards Israel not only for strategic and domestic electoral considerations but also because an orthodoxy had materialised in Indian politics and within the Ministry of External Affairs. While strong prime ministers like Nehru and Indira Gandhi could control the MEA, weaker leaders found it more difficult to do so. In that sense, it was a miracle that Rao managed to establish relations with Israel despite ruling over a weak coalition. The strain of recognition was evident from the fact that there was little movement in ties between the two countries for almost a decade thereafter.

The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy is a veritable tour-de-force in an important field that has few scholars. Blarel has assiduously mined the archives, published records, and private collections in India, Israel, and at the United Nations, a task that deserves commendation for the difficulty in doing historical research in India. The result is an magisterial survey and analysis of Indo-Israeli relations over a span of 70 years. The Evolution of India’s Israel Policy is also a wealth of information, containing many nuggets of interesting and sometimes counter-intuitive factoids. For anyone interested in Indian policies towards the Middle East and particularly Israel, this is an unavoidable book.

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The South Asian Divergence

18 Sat Feb 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Army and Nation, commander-in-chief, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, KS Thimmaya, Muslim League, Nirad Chaudhuri, Pakistan, Qamar Javed Bajwa, SD Verma, Steven Wilkinson, Vallabhbhai Patel, VV Kalikar

army-and-nationWilkinson, Steven. Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy Since Independence. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2015. 295 pp.

It is not often that a senior government official publicly recommends a book by an academic, especially if the former is in the Pakistani military and the latter at an American university. However, that is exactly what Qamar Javed Bajwa, Pakistan’s new Chief of Army Staff, did in December 2016 during a gathering of senior army officers at Rawalpindi Garrison in the General Headquarters. The military had no business in running the government, Pakistani newspaper The Nation quoted Bajwa as saying, and the General asked the gathering to read Steven Wilkinson’s Army and Nation: The Military and Indian Democracy Since Independence to understand civil-military relations in Pakistan’s arch rival.

Broadly, Wilkinson asks a question that has perplexed many a scholar of postcolonial states – why have most of them proven inhospitable for the germination of liberal democracy and fallen to authoritarianism of various hues? Army and Nation focuses on one specific aspect of the answer, namely, the role of the military and its relation to the civilian leadership. Although ostensibly about India, the book cannot but be a commentary on Pakistan as well seeing as how the Islamic state deliberately positioned itself as anti-India. India and Pakistan present, in many ways, an interesting case study of a people with similar cultural heritage that diverged at independence and ended in drastically different spots on the political spectrum.

Wilkinson argues that the reason for India’s success in keeping the military out of political power is the apprehension of the Indian National Congress towards the profession of arms. Having participated, even minimally, in government, Congress leaders had administrative experience in thinking about the challenges their new country might face. Nirad C. Chaudhuri, for example, had argued for a more representative Indian military that was free of foreign officers in a 1935 policy paper; similarly, in 1938, VV Kalikar moved a resolution in the Council of States to restructure the Indian army more representatively. As a result, Congress moved quickly after independence to convert a colonial force that was fuelled by communal fissures to one that was more representative and firmly under the control of the civilian leadership. The Muslim League, on the other hand, had no such experience and complacently believed that statehood along confessional lines would solve all problems. It is such naivete that has led many to argue that Pakistan was insufficiently imagined; one must be careful, however, in differentiating between a thoroughly imagined nation and an insufficiently imagined state.

Punjabi over-representation in the army started from 1857, when India’s imperial master stopped recruiting troops from the Gangetic plains and instead brought in communities that had been loyal to Britain in the mutiny. This was the same pattern of recruitment the Crown followed in Nigeria, Ghana, Iraq, or elsewhere in the empire – favour minority communities against the larger population of the region. As a result, 60 percent of the Indian army was from Punjab on the eve of World War II. That number fell to 32 percent within a year of independence, admittedly aided in no small measure by Partition.

The Congress leadership, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Baldev Singh, and others took several measures to insure against the military. First, officers commissioned after 1935 were given a massive 40 percent wage cut. Next, the commander-in-chief of the Indian army was removed from the governor-general’s executive council in 1947 and made him responsible to the Minister of Defence; eight years later, they abolished the post completely and the military was served by three service chiefs with lesser power and of equal status despite the size and importance of their service. Symbolically, Nehru took over the residence of the commander-in-chief, Teen Murti Bhavan, as the civilian prime minister’s official habitation. Three, a new military academy was created in Pune; the National Defence Academy would offer a different vertical from that of the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. Along with careful recruitment, this would aid in the diversification among senior officers. The tenure for senior generals was also shortened and extension of their term became exceedingly rare.

To ensure that retired officers could not act on their political beliefs with the support of their uniformed comrades, senior posts were deputed to the Ministry of External Affairs which posted them to international destinations, separate from each other and distant to India. Nehru was not beyond using his intelligence agencies to keep a close eye on the military elite. Lt. Gen. SD Verma describes, for example, how, in 1960, he had to take a boat out to the middle of Nagin lake to speak privately to then CoAS KS Thimayya for fear that they were being spied upon. The corruption, bureaucratic lethargy, and lack of political vision in Indian politics frustrated many Indian service chiefs and some spoke approvingly of a short stint in power for the military – to “clean up” – and the limitation of universal adult suffrage to the literate population. Given the understanding shown by some of the senior Indian military officials to their former classmates from Sandhurst who had seized power in Pakistan, Nehru’s suspicions do not seem entirely unwarranted.

Another measure the Indian government took to ensure that the military does not enter politics is the creation of a large paramilitary force. Although such a force is no match to the regular army, it meant that the army need not be deployed extensively for domestic peacekeeping operations. This kept the army relatively isolated from national life. Civilian leaders thus hedged against the military in a manner similar to how the British placed white or Gurkha troops alongside suspect Indian units.

Wilkinson points out that while some diversification did happen in the Indian military, delivery fell far short of promises. The conflict over Kashmir in 1948, internal instability, nascent separatist tendencies, and the wars with Pakistan and China gave little room for a complete restructuring of the Indian military. Nonetheless, there has been a substantial change in the composition of the armed forces since independence.

Army and Nation etches out the path not taken by Pakistan. There were no efforts by Rawalpindi to forge a genuinely representative army. In fact, the cultural hostility between Punjabis and Bengalis impeded the integration of East Pakistan into Pakistani national life – something amply proved by the war in 1971 and subsequent secession. On the whole, Wilkinson is soft on Pakistan’s democratic failure. He argues that the country was dealt a worse socioeconomic and military hand that was compounded by the Muslim League’s amateur approach to national politics. It must be remembered, however, that this hand was demanded by the founding fathers of the Islamic state – neither the national religious imagination, the borders, and the population exchange were imposed upon Karachi by London or Delhi. Furthermore, conflict in Kashmir was sought, despite the challenges posed by inheriting a new state, by the Pakistani military whose raison d’etre was anti-Indian.

India’s solution to the potential for a military coup has come at a cost – the army has been unable to function efficiently and its role as a mute spectator in policy planning has left it unable to defend India’s borders as China showed in 1962. Civilian bureaucrats and politicians, the prime minister included, declared policies without making the necessary material and logistical provisions for them. Thus, Nehru embarked on his Forward Policy on the China border despite repeated warnings from officers on the ground that India’s forces were ill-prepared to handle any potential repercussions from the Chinese side.

Was the Congress’ evisceration of the military really necessary? Studies have repeatedly shown that class militaries – units drawn from similar ethnic, religious, linguistic, or other groups – perform better in combat owing to their closer bonding. The risks posed by such recruitment can be mitigated to a large extent by extensive training, professionalisation, and the weaving of a strong inclusive nationalist narrative. Congress leaders clearly did not trust their citizens to be ready for this sort of reform or were unable to implement it themselves. More importantly, the road not chosen hints at another way in which India and Pakistan stand as mirror images of each other: while Pakistan was a well-imagined nation and poorly envisaged state, India was the exact opposite in being a fairly well envisaged state and poorly imagined nation. Lost in the effort to control all the things that divided Indians, Nehru did not see what united his countrymen – or if he did, chose to ignore it and refashion them after his own image. Wilkinson’s study is an interesting hypothesis in not just what it says but also what it thus implies, for India as well as for Pakistan.

Army and Nation acknowledges the myriad other factors that have flavoured the divergence between India and Pakistan but is nonetheless the study of one institution and the reader’s judgment should be restricted to the topic at hand. An interesting comparison, which Wilkinson briefly alludes to in his introduction, is the Israeli state and army. While religiously homogeneous, immigrants to the Holy Land in the early years of the Jewish state were ethnically diverse. Tel Aviv managed to shape them in to trustworthy soldiers even so. What were the effects of literacy levels in the population on the army?

Bajwa’s boys will benefit greatly from reading Wilkinson’s book as they will from Christine Fair’s Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, or Myra MacDonald’s Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War. The CoAS is known to be a keen observer of India whose interest goes back to his days as a young major serving at the Line of Control. His then commanding officer, Brigadier (retd) Feroz Hassan Khan, says that Bajwa belies the stereotype of the Pakistani military officer as someone who holds a visceral hatred towards India. It will be interesting to see if this alleged change in personality will amount to anything more substantial.

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Fulfilling Its Terrible Destiny

11 Sat Feb 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Anita Inder Singh, Anjuman-e Ulama-e Bihar, Asghar Sodai, Ayesha Jalal, BR Ambedkar, Britain, Caliphate, Creating a New Medina, Deoband, empire, INC, India, Indian National Congress, Islam, Jamiatul Ulama-e-Hind, Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam, Khilafat Movement, KM Ashraf, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Mohammad Sharif Toosy, Mohandas Gandhi, Muslim League, muttahida qaumiyat, NAP, National Agriculturalist Party, nationalism, Pakistan, United Provinces, Uttar Pradesh, Venkat Dhulipala

creating-a-new-medinaDhulipala, Venkat. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 544 pp.

By most accounts, Pakistan is a failed state: its inability to sustain a democratic process, oppressive treatment of minorities, regressive religious laws, and its developmental shortcomings certainly indicate a state that is not in congruence with modern – Western? – sensibilities. The prevailing consensus is that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan project was hijacked soon after the Islamic state was cut out of British India and marked a sharp turning point in the trajectory and fortunes of the fledgling country. Venkat Dhulipala’s explosive book, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India throws the proverbial wrench into that hypothesis, arguing instead that much of what has been perceived to be flaws in Pakistan’s national fabric is actually so by design and not accident.

For so complicated and debated an issue as Partition, Dhulipala presents an admirably succinct and comprehensive survey of the literature. One school of thought, led by Ayesha Jalal, argues that Jinnah used the demand for Pakistan as a bargaining chip to secure parity for Muslims in a unified India. According to Jalal, the crotchety leadership of the Indian National Congress bears the brunt of the responsibility – blame? – for the creation of the Islamic state. She reaches this conclusion by surmising from the vagueness of the Idea of Pakistan that it could not have been a serious proposition. The counter to this comes from Anita Inder Singh, who, although agreeing with Jalal that the Pakistani project was ill-defined, insisted that Jinnah did nonetheless want a separate country. In both these tellings, there was room to imagine Pakistan as a secular and modern republic like Turkey in Jinnah’s dreams that were soon hijacked by religious elements.

Even bottom-up histories, despite their foci on peasants, the ulema, Punjabis, Bengalis, or the victims of the Partition violence, rhyme with the Great Man histories of Jalal et al. in that they all cast doubt on existence of any clear idea of Pakistan notwithstanding the mass support for it. Fashionably, they even question the concept of nationalism. Regardless, the inability of academics to reify the sentiment has scarcely reduced its power. It is this confusion, some argue, that has resulted in the turmoil we see in Pakistani national life.

Dhulipala, however, begs to differ. The idea of Pakistan was crystallised in the public debates of Uttar Pradesh as a sovereign Islamic state that could not only provide succour for India’s Muslims but was also a worthy successor to the Caliphate that had just died in the reforms of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Istanbul in 1924. The new state of Pakistan would be an Islamic utopia and the protector of Muslims all over the world. The author has found support for this revolutionary thesis in archives in London, Delhi, Lucknow, even an occasional one in the United States, as well as oral histories, newspaper archives, and published primary sources in Urdu and in English. Dhulipala discovers that the Pakistani project traversed on two parallel tracks: while the Muslim League propounded statehood and all that it entailed – an army, infrastructure, currency, natural resources, human population – the Islamic soul and the spirit of the new country was popularised by the ulema. There was, also, occasional intersection between the two groups. Dhulipala shows that both groups shared a common political vocabulary, and, more importantly, the demand for a separate state based on religion cannot suddenly become a secular quest.

Some scholars have put the divergence between Hindus and Muslims as early as the writings of Syed Ahmad Khan in the late 19th century. Others have delayed this separation until the Nehru Report of 1928, after which Muslim participation in the national struggle for independence was somewhat muted. While tensions certainly simmered even earlier, the Government of India Act of 1935 became the battleground around which separate religious identities would coalesce. The British aim to sow divisions in the Indian nationalist movement and string along its empire with promises of independence was only partially successful – it divided the Indians but Britain still could not hold on to its colonial possessions.

Dhulipala warns his readers that communalisation was not inevitable even after 1935. Parties such as the National Agriculturalist Party wove a coalition of Hindu and Muslim landlords, exhibiting class solidarity, and Muslims in the Indian National Congress such as KM Ashraf argued that there was no Muslim culture in India per se and that the great majority of the community originated from Hindu stock. The ulema had not yet taken a position in support of the Muslim League and this aided the Congress who had some ulema arguing for a unified India. It is undeniable, however, that the fortunes of a moribund League were revived only by the clergy concerned that Muslims interests were been quashed in the conflict between the Congress-leaning Jamiatul Ulama-e-Hind and the Muslim League.

Although traditional historiography plays up the nationalist credentials of the Muslim clerics, there was a small but vocal and influential section of Deobandi ulema who backed the Muslim League and vociferously propagated the idea of Pakistan. Two of the more prominent ulema in this camp were Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, the chief of the Deobandi madrasa, and his mentor, Ashraf Ali Thanawi. In fact, the title of Dhulipala’s book comes from a speech given by Usmani: the alim describes how Mohammad left Mecca due to opposition to his beliefs and went to Medina to create a new Islamic state and compares the event to the creation of Pakistan which would be only the second Islamic state in history. The future state was thus imagined to the masses in powerful Islamic imagery.

Dhulipala does not disagree with his historian colleagues that there was a fair amount of Muslim support for muttahida qaumiyat (united nationalism), particularly from Husain Ahmad Madani, head of the JUH, and Syed Sajjad, chief of the Anjuman-e Ulama-e Bihar. It was felt that the partition of the subcontinent would divide and disadvantage the community and hinder tabligh, the proselytisation of Islam among the kaafir. This argument, however, could not carry the day.

As has come to be expected of any book on nationalism since Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Dhulipala discusses the Urdu press and its influence in spreading the idea of Pakistan. Many of these newspapers, though produced locally, enjoyed a pan-Indian readership. The power of the press, we are reminded, can be only seen from the way Indian Muslims were mobilised during the Khilafat Movement in 1919 to protest the British treatment of the defeated Ottoman Caliph. Creating a New Medina is peppered with tussles between Muslims for and against the creation of Pakistan carried out in the subcontinent’s Urdu newspapers.

One of the other myths Dhulipala punctures is that of a secular Jinnah. Undoubtedly a non-observing Muslim, Jinnah was nonetheless brazen about using Islamic rhetoric. His hesitation to open up the membership of the Muslim League to non-Muslims, his casual suggestion of population transfers between Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan all point to a tactical use of Islam and the ulema for his goals but also to someone who was culturally inclined towards an Islamic identity. Dhulipala quotes a contemporary historian of Islam, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who argues that a man is deemed Buddhist not because he is an exemplar of Buddha’s teachings but by his undertaking to try – Jinnah, and Pakistan, were both Muslim because they had undertaken to be so.

It is not true that Jinnah was unclear about what he wanted in a new state. In fact, in response to allegations that he is using the demand for Muslim statehood as a bargaining chip, Jinnah repeatedly states that he was not for an Indian federation. In fact, he suggests that Congress leaders read BR Ambedkar’s massive tome, Thoughts on Pakistan, that had come out within four months of the Lahore Resolution of March 1940. Interestingly, Mohandas Gandhi also recommended Ambedkar’s book. Jinnah also wrote the foreword for a two-volume compendium of articles by a Punjabi journalist, Mohammad Sharif Toosy, which made a powerful case for Partition.

Dhulipala argues that his work pushes against the countervailing understanding of the creation of Pakistan and he begins his review of the literature rather late in 1985 with Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Partition. The question arises, what was the consensus before 1985 that Jalal was arguing against? Is Dhulipala reviving old historiography, perhaps with much better data, or is his work genuinely new?

Second, was the debate between clerics like Madani and Sajjad arguing for unity and Thanawi and Usmani advocating Partition merely a matter of scholarship? What swayed the masses of the United Provinces, who had been so divided until the mid-1930s, to come down in favour of Usmani’s Jamiatul Ulama-e-Islam? Even a cursory glance at modern politics rubbishes any belief that scholarship is what carries the day with the electorate.

Creating a New Medina is not an easy book for the lay reader. Its 500 pages are densely packed with names and relations that only a professional historian of the era can keep apart. In that sense, it closely reflects Dhulipala’s 2008 dissertation – a scholarly work meant more for the well versed. However, even casual readers broadly aware of the history of Partition and the Indian freedom struggle in the North can still gain much from this work which brings to the foreground some undercurrents that went into the creation of Pakistan that better explain today’s events than other theories. For example, former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani reminds us in his book, India vs Pakistan: Why Can’t We Just Be Friends, that it was not Zia ul Haq who infused Islam into Pakistan’s politics but that it has been there from the very beginning. Asghar Sodai’s slogan from 1944, پاکستان کا مطلب کیا لاالہ الا اللہ (Pakistan ka matlab kya, la ilaha illallah), supports this thesis and Creating a New Medina has several other such examples. Seen from this perspective, Pakistan is not a failed state but merely fulfilling its terrible destiny.

Dhulipala’s book also poses a serious challenge to the way history has been taught in India. While a small sectional elite have tried to ramrod a narrative of religious pluralism at the moment of independence, research now suggests that Indians were far more concerned with their religious identity. The official story, which was Congress policy towards the Muslim League since the mid-1930s, has been re-emphasised post independence to cover up for its abject failure in controlling the fissure between Hindus and Muslims in India. The divergence was inevitable – even desirable – according to some, but Dhulipala’s work shows that there was still a chance to save the subcontinent until the early-1940s. To accept this raises questions about the sagacity of the leaders of the Congress party at a critical juncture in Indian history.

Creating a New Medina serves as a useful guide in looking not only at domestic politics and communalisation of the Indian electorate but also for foreign policy analysts who study Pakistan and its relations with India. That this Sick Man of Asia is replete with inconsistencies – as the secession of East Pakistan and the rejection of minority Muslim groups shows – cannot be taken as a sign that the country was, as Philip Oldenburg argued, insufficiently imagined. Even the most cohesive of nations have some ambiguity in their national narratives; that has not yet stopped people in believing in them.

Dhulipala has produced a thought-provoking book that deserves a considered response. As he himself admits, there are still gaps in his narrative that need to be, sources permitting, filled. One obvious tangent is the role and political beliefs of Muslims outside the northern heartland. Another is the socio-economic condition of those who voted to stay in India and those who chose to leave: did all who migrated do it out of a sense of religious necessity or were there, as in the journey to the New World, many who just sought a fresh start? As any good book does, Creating a New Medina shakes us out of our historical complacence and leaves us with further questions to ponder.

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