Forsaken by history

27/08/14 12:59 am

FORSAKEN BY HISTORY
The significance of the year 1937 as a major milestone in the colonial history of India is often either
brushed aside or missed altogether. The British parliament had, a couple of years ago, passed the new
Government of India Act promising Indians limited self-governance and suggesting a federal structure
of administration for the Indian empire. Provincial elections were ordered in 1937 all over British
India so that peoples representatives, though elected on the basis of restricted franchise, could still
wield some power. The Indian National Congress, despite its reservations over the provision of the act,
participated in the polls and, as was only to be expected, had a cakewalk victory in most of the general
constituencies everywhere; it also succeeded in electing its candidates from an impressive number of
constituencies reserved for the scheduled castes and tribes. The All India Muslim League, presided
over by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, did much below its expectations. Even in the provinces where Muslims
constituted a clear majority of the electorate, its performance was none too impressive. In Punjab, it
was defeated by the Unionist Party put together by Sikander Hyat Khan, representing the landowning
interests, who became the prime minister (this was the nomenclature used in the 1935 Act) of the
province. In Bengal, A.K. Fazlul Huqs Krishak Praja Party prevailed over the League in a majority of
the constituencies reserved for the Muslim community. His party lacked an overall majority in the
provincial assembly; it nonetheless emerged as the largest single party. The Indian National Congress
claimed the second place, the Muslim League was a not too impressive third. In Sind, it was a rag-bag
coalition of regional parties which formed the provincial government, the Muslim League was isolated.
In the North-West Frontier Province, given the popularity of Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and his brother,
Khan Sahib, the Congress did tremendously well; it won seats which fell short of a majority by just one;
the Muslim League failed in its mission to capture the province. It was only the Indian National
Congress in the rest of the country, including the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Bihar,
Assam, Orissa, as well as the Madras and Bombay Presidencies.
Jawaharlal Nehru was the Congresss president that year. At his direction, the Congress set down two
conditions for joining a coalition with others for forming a government in a province where it would be
unable to form a ministry on its own: (a) the Congress would not enter into alliance with any
communal party and (b) even where it chose to form a coalition with another party to form the
government in any province, the prime minister must be only from the Congress; it would supposedly
be demeaning for the great national party to take orders from a prime minister who belonged to a
nondescript political formation.
What was ironical was that in its anxiety to keep the Muslim League out of power in the NWFP, the
Congress did not hesitate to breach immediately the first of these conditions and agreed to
accommodate the sole Hindu Mahasabha legislator in the state assembly, Mehr Chand Khanna, in the
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27/08/14 12:59 am

ministry it formed. When it came to Bengal, the partys high command, so-called, was adamant in
sticking to principles. Fazlul Huq, having successfully snubbed the Muslim League in the just-held
polls, was most reluctant to have any truck with the League and was keen to have the Congress as his
partner. He sent a formal proposal to the Congress authorities inviting the party to form a coalition
with the KPP and join the ministry he would form as the provinces prime minister. Sarat Chandra
Bose, elected leader of the Congress in the Bengal assembly, was eager to respond affirmatively to
Fazlul Huqs invitation. His request to do so was contemptuously turned down by the high command.
Poor Fazlul Huq had no alternative but to approach his erstwhile sworn enemy, the League, to join his
ministry. The League responded with great alacrity; the KPP-Muslim League coalition regime took
charge of the provincial administration in Bengal. The course of history changed in Bengal from that
point onwards.
Fazlul Huqs KPP had a clear-cut programme to protect the interests of the rural masses. Once installed
in office, Fazlul Huq wasted no time in implementing the pledged promises to relieve the peasantry of
the burden of unbridled exploitation by big landlords and loan sharks. A legislation imposed ceilings
on land cess charged by intermediaries. Of far greater relevance was the introduction of a separate
legislation concerning rural indebtedness. It either considerably reduced or even squashed altogether
the burden of land cess charged by intermediaries in the recovery of past loans. Fazlul Huq did not
quite stop here. He decided to set up a commission the Floud Commission to introduce major land
reform all over the province. A further measure, perhaps of equal, if not greater, significance, was an
order which, taking into account the denominational distribution of the provinces population,
reserved 54 per cent of job opportunities in the provincial government henceforth for members of the
Muslim community.
This series of measures had a tremendous impact on all sections of the Muslims in Bengal whose
support for Fazlul Huq soared. The reaction of Hindus and the Indian National Congress was, perhaps
not totally surprisingly, to the contrary. The prospect of losing the opportunity of making easy money
by increasing exploitation of the rural poor disturbed the thinking process of the Hindu gentry and
middle-class Hindus; the additional, very real, possibility of shrinkage in opportunities to enter
government service further alienated them from Fazlul Huq and his administration.
Ignoring advice for restraint, the Congress launched a virulent campaign depicting Huq as an arch
communalist. It was conveniently forgotten that, barely a couple of years ago, the same Fazlul Huq had
made the Congress happy by taming the League in the polls. The news media in Calcutta, both English
and Bengali, owned by Hindu fat cats, were full of reports, often concocted, of how much sections of
the Hindu community were suffering in different parts of the province under the tyranny unleashed by
the coalition government. Fazlul Huq withstood the calamity for a while. He was a man of emotions

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though. At one point he decided that enough was enough, if he was dubbed communal for being a
friend of the poor, he would rather turn into a full-fledged communalist. He liquidated his own party
and joined the Muslim League, along with the bulk of the KPP legislators. He, so to say, handed on a
platter the crucial province of Bengal, with its huge density of Muslim population, to Mohammed Ali
Jinnah.
The rest of the story is well known. Huq was persuaded to move at the Leagues annual session in 1940
the resolution demanding the creation of Pakistan. The League reaped what Huqs KPP had sown in
Bengal. Muslim masses all over the country were bowled over by reports of what the League had
supposedly done for poverty-stricken Muslims in the eastern province. Their loyalties got swiftly
transferred to the League. Jinnah begun to roar like a real lion. Pressure was unbearable on Muslim
politicians who till then had kept their distance from the League. Sikander Hyat Khan could read the
signs, and capitulated in Punjab and joined the League too. It was the same story in the rest of the
country. Only Abdul Gaffar Khans NWFP refused to bend all the way.
Since at heart Fazlul Huq, besides abhorring Jinnahs overwhelming ways, could not reconcile himself
to the Leagues exceedingly aggressive communal stances, he soon fell out with the League leadership.
He tried to form an alternative government in Bengal by parting with the League. Most of his former
supporters were, however, no longer with him. Even so, Huq succeeded in scraping together a majority
in the provincial assembly with the help of Sarat Chandra Bose, who too had now broken with the
Congress following Subhas Chandra Boses expulsion. What raised a furore was Huqs seeking and
receiving support from the Hindu Mahasabha leader, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee. This latest move by
Fazlul Huq unnerved the British rulers. They had been happy when he merged his party with the
Muslim League, which kept the Congress out of power in Bengal. The Congress was turning
increasingly hostile. Mahatma Gandhi was threatening to launch the Quit India Movement, and the
spreading influence of the League was considered a good antidote by the foreign masters. That apart,
the Second World War was reaching a critical stage. Subhas Chandra Bose had disappeared from the
country and had surfaced in Berlin. And now his elder brother, Sarat Bose, was Fazlul Huqs choice for
the post of home minister in the new ministry he was proposing to form. This could not be allowed to
happen, for the home department handled many sensitive and confidential matters. Sarat Bose was
arrested under the Defence of India Act before he could be sworn in. A shaky new ministry anyway took
office with Huq as prime minister. It did not last long because of more desertions by his past followers
who did not like his associating with Mookherjee. Huqs self-styled Progressive Coalition government
soon collapsed and the Muslim League got back to power. Huq was by now a totally isolated figure; his
soliciting the support of the Hindu Mahasabha leader added grist to the anti-Huq propaganda by the
League, which succeeded in establishing absolute control over the Muslims in Bengal. It was equally
true elsewhere in the country. In the provincial elections held in 1946 after the war was over, barring
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the NWFP, it was the Muslim League, and only the Muslim League, triumphing in nearly all the
constituencies reserved for Muslims. The country got partitioned barely a year later. The League was
almost a non-entity in 1937; it could divide the country exactly a decade later.
The Congress could infringe its principles in the NWFP in 1937, but would not do so in Bengal; it
instead, made a gift of Fazlul Huq to the Muslim League. This individual, Huq, in that sense played the
most important role in settling the destiny of the sub-continent. He is nevertheless a forgotten person
as much in India as in Pakistan. What is even more astonishing, his name is barely mentioned these
days in Bangladesh too. What remains under layers of oblivion is the fact that the Bangladeshi national
ethos was created by the emergence of a self-assured Muslim middle class in Bengal, which in turn was
the direct consequence of the measures introduced by Fazlul Huq on assumption of office in 1937. The
reforms initiated by Huq emancipated an impressive percentage of the rural as well as urban Muslim
masses, offering them opportunities to get educated, provided them with jobs, and thereby created a
substantive middle class full of pride and self-confidence. It is this class which, in spite of its mistrust
of the Bengali Hindu exploiters, had a deep attachment for their mother tongue, Bengali, in spite of its
Hindu roots. The constituents of this class had been shapers of mass opinion in East Pakistan, and
have continued in that role in Bangladesh. The national consciousness built around pride for their own
language would not accept their mother tongue to be treated with contempt in Pakistan, where they
Bangladeshis made up the nations majority. Resistance grew and grew and was compounded by
rising resentment against the oppressive domination of their land and people by West Pakistanis both
in civil as well as military administration. The parentage of this Bangladeshi national ethos belongs to
Fazlul Huq. History however is habituated to bypass those who create history.

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