The Muslims after the Indian Mutiny ceased to be the country’s ruling class and became one of the many minority communities. It was not only a change of status in political and social standing but the new rulers of the country also distrusted the community under the mistaken belief of it being the perpetrator of the armed convulsions in 1857 against the growing might of the East India Company. The attitude of the Indian Muslims since then has been mostly moulded by three institutions in its theology and sociology. Of the three, Patna was the bastion of Wahabism in India strongly believing in the cult of jihad. The other was the Deoband madrassa promoting an uncompromisingly puritanical and exclusive fundamentalism among the faithful followers of Islam.
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The Muslims were the ruling class for centuries, enjoying a dominant position despite their relatively small number. Their elite had almost complete monopoly of the top ranks in the army and administration. Their native language was the universal means of local concourse, adopted equally by the foreigners including the British for their transactions. Their superior status was threatened after the take-over by the British. Their advantage in the government was eroded when Persian was replaced as the official language.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, a great statesman, realized that his co-religionists, merely learning Islamic scriptures in the indigenous madrassas. would not be able to compete against modern educated Indians. Being a forward looking leader of the community and being dedicated to the cause of education, he established the Mohammadan Anglo-Oriental College (later converted into an university) at Aligarh to provide the benefits of modern education mainly to the Muslim masses. Sir Syed did not exclude the other communities from his College because he was passionately committed to Hindu-Muslim unity.
Initially Sir Syed was closely allied with the leaders of the nationalist movement but he feared that the Congress demands for representative government and civil service examinations in India would adversely affect the Muslims who would not be able to hold their own against the Hindus in the system that was being demanded. He then adopted the path of separatism and was increasingly influenced by the British members of the College faculty who ‘preached to their students day in and day out hatred of the Hindus and loyalty to the British. They pro-pagated fear and jealousy of Hindu intellectuals and Hindu majority’.
The British government soon ‘realised that the Aligarh group could serve as a convenient pawn for them to counter the rising influence of the National Congress’. It prompted the leading Muslims to sponsor a delegation in 1906 to meet the Viceroy who assured them that ‘their political rights and interests as a community will be safeguarded in any administrative organisation’. Shortly after the meeting with the Viceroy, the Muslim League was formed. Sir Syed’s change of track led to discord among his closest associates who felt that he had capitulated before the European members of the College staff. His death was followed by a period of uncertainty until Jinnah took over the leadership of the Muslims. Tariq Hasan has perceptively observed that ‘the communalism of one community fed and thrived on the communalism of the other’.
The situation was further exacerbated when the Congress aligned itself with the Khilafat movement after the First World War. Hasan has quoted Lala Lajpat Rai who considered it ‘unfortunate that Gandhi and the leaders of Khilafat movement should have brought religion into such prominence in connection with a [nationalist] movement which was really and fundamentally more political than religious. The desire to seek religious sanction for the various items of non-cooperation movement was another great blunder. It led directly to the revival of sectarian zeal.’
Indeed the induction of the religious element into the nationalist struggle led to the departure of Jinnah from the Congress. Later Jinnah became the sole spokesman of the Muslims and presided over the Muslim League. In the meantime Sir Ziauddin Ahmed, a staunch supporter of the Muslim League, took over the leadership in Aligarh, eventually becoming the Vice-Chancellor of the university, a position he retained until partition. Aligarh became the epicentre of Muslim communalism.
The Muslim League’s performance in the 1937 elections to the provincial assemblies under the new constitution was disastrous. In spite of separate electorates for Muslims, it could only obtain 4.4% support in the total Muslim votes cast. It failed to form the government in the Muslim majority provinces of Bengal, North West Frontier and the Punjab where other political parties secured majorities. Instead of driving the League into wilderness after the elections, the Congress committed political hara-kiri by resigning en masse on flimsy technical grounds from the numerous provincial governments it controlled. That left the field wide open for the Muslim League to come up with the demand for Pakistan and for the collusive British government to manipulate developments that inevitably led to the separation of the Muslim majority provinces.
‘Jinnah’s supporters in the AMU grew more and more aggressive. The spirit of large-hearted tolerance that had marked the Aligarh movement gave way to extreme intolerance and rigidity.’ Jinnah had received the strongest support from Bihar and UP whose Muslims deluded themselves with the idea that under Pakistan they would find a place in the corridor linking the Muslim-majority provinces of the West and the East. Ironically today the ardent protagonists of separatism from UP are still treated as second-rate mohajirs in Pakistan while the Bihar Muslims had to seek the protection of the Indian army in Dhaka from their Muslim brethren. Jinnah knew that Aligarh would have no role to play in Pakistan; in the words of Khwaja Rasheed, ‘he used Aligarh and then threw it away in the garbage can’ after Pakistan was created.
Tariq Hasan writes that ‘India’s partition was truly a traumatic experience for AMU. To a large section of the supporters of the Muslim League, it was more like a dream come true but which ended in a nightmare’. Their loyalties remained with Pakistan and they could not come to terms with the Indian realities after Independence. Aligarh continued to be the centre of Muslim communalism and was frequently torn by violent religious disorders. It gave birth to the Jamaat-e-Islami and its offspring the Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) that subsequently became addicted to Islamic terrorism. ‘The last decade of the 20th century marked a steep decline in the affairs of the institution’ with falling academic standards and rising nepotism. Today it is hardly different from the multitude of third-grade universities in the cow-belt.
Tariq Hasan’s is an accurate, honest and unbiased history of the Aligarh movement that has often been at the centre of controversy. He has revealed that the movement was the product of a fear psychosis—at first the fear of the British antagonism and later in the 20th century of Hindu domination. The Muslim community has failed to realize that after Independence it had been accorded the same rights and privileges as the majority community. It was not allowed to live with this reality by the pseudo-secularists in the political arena who were constantly raising its expectations for their own selfish purposes. But that is another story.
Sanjoy K. Bagchi is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London and former member of the India Administrative Service.
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