Assassination of Gandhi and the early signs of crisis of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal : Professor Ahmed Kalam, Dept. of History, Dhaka Univ

New Age, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Friday, February 1, 2008

Assassination of Gandhi and the early signs of crisis of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal - 1
Professor Ahmed Kalam, Dept. of History, Dhaka University

IT IS still a daunting task for historians of Pakistani nationalism to explain why the Muslim League declined so quickly, in less than seven years after partition, in East Pakistan polity. Not only the party that legitimately claimed the credit of winning a homeland for the Muslims in East Bengal disappeared from the political stage, the nation itself fell apart in less than two and a half decades. To many Pakistani nationalist historians the imagining of Muslim nationalism was unproblematic and uni-dimensional, especially in East Bengal, the region inhabited by a Muslim majority, economically exploited and socially oppressed by the upper caste Hindus whose political platform was the Indian National Congress led by Gandhi.

A separatist politics, encouraged by the British, adopted and pursued by the Muslim elite of Bengal and Northern India, matured in the process of voicing constitutional guarantee for the Muslim minority. The political cohesiveness and solidarity among different social classes of Muslims were formed by Jinnah’s strategic manoeuvres within the quasi-liberal space of colonial politics. The response by Gandhi, Nehru and Patel to Jinnah’s political moves landed them in the cul-de-sac of no return without accepting the two-nation theory leading to the creation of two nation-states. Exactly that happened. India and the provinces of the Punjab and Bengal had to be partitioned. This story is well-known to the students of South Asian history.

The other outcome of the two-nation theory, i.e. the emergence of Bangladesh, has a storyline also. The difficulty with that story is its failure to locate the inaugural moment of the change in the way the community was imagined. In the genre of nationalist history the movement for the recognition of Bengali as the state language is considered to be the birth moment of the second coming of nationalism among the people of East Bengal. The incident of police firing on the students and masses on February 21, 1952, celebrated as Language Martyrs’ Day since then, is the most important landmark in the historiography of Bengali nationalism.

The assassination of Gandhi, by itself historical in a different historiography of the failure of the Indian nation to come to its own, is also a milestone in the Bengali nationalist historiography. The incident by evoking widespread mourning among members of both the nations succeeds in laying the foundation stone of a bridge between the two bitterly contesting nationalisms in South Asia. Gandhi’s death not only complicated Muslim nationalists’ assessment of him but also exposed the internal conflict of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal.

On January 30, 1948, while he was walking slowly from Birla house in Delhi, to attend a prayer, Gandhi, 78 years 3 months 28 days old on that day, was killed by an assassin in New Delhi. Gandhi spent 144 days in Birla House before being shot by Nathuram Godse, Bombay’s Marathi editor of the Hindu Rastra and a Hindu radical with links to Rastriya Sevaka Sangha, who held Gandhi responsible for weakening India by insisting upon a payment to Pakistan (Rs 55 crore, approx. 40m pounds).

Gandhi’s death was a tragic event of a huge magnitude which shocked the world to attention. Sheean wrote in his eyewitness account, ‘Just an old man in a loin cloth in distant India; yet when he died humanity wept.’ That evening after Gandhi was murdered the entire population of India was heartbroken by this dastardly act. Nehru in his radio speech on January 30 told the world that, ‘The light has gone out of our lives and there is darkness everywhere. I do not know what to tell you and how to say it...We will not run to him for advice or seek solace from him.’

Any evaluation of Gandhi is not so easy, if not impossible. Gandhi’s long political life, his struggle against racism and imperialism, his thoughts on Indian social reconstruction, his rejection of modern technology, his efforts at nation-building in modern India by reemploying traditional Hindu religion, his stand for the Muslims after partition, last but not the least, his political compromises with imperialism, do not allow analysts of his non-violent politics to arrive at any final decision about his political ideology. Radical politics often mentioned him as a reactionary and many on the Left believed it. On the other hand, his political followers accepted him as ‘Mahatma,’ the title which was given on January 21, 1915 by Nautamlal Bhagavanji Mehta at the Kamribai School in Jetpur, Gujrat. To many Harijans and poor peasants Gandhi was God’s incarnation on earth. He was the Hindu god, Rama, in the Kali Yuga – an age full of sins. Indeed, the difficulty of comprehending Gandhi becomes apparent by a statement of his closest political disciple Jawaharlal Nehru, the most outstanding of the founding fathers of modern India, who once wrote that he did not give much importance to Gandhi’s writings on Swaraj but found it difficult to explain Gandhi’s acceptability among millions of Indian peasants. Indian historians are continuously trying to find out how that happened. The subaltern historian Shahid Amin unravelled to a large extent the complexity of understanding Gandhi in his article ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’ in the third volume of Subaltern Studies. Those who are familiar with the nationalist struggle against the British are also aware of Gandhi’s deep influence and importance in Indian politics. Although it is true that he could not prevent the outcome of communal politics for which he is often blamed by historians like Ayesha Jalal who holds him responsible for not sharing power with the Muslims and thus hastening the partition of India. When the British left, India was divided into two sovereign nation-states – one with a Hindu majority and the other with the Muslim.

It cannot be said that Gandhi’s political ideology was always very acceptable to the Indian Muslims, but the latter, especially the activists and the leaders among them, did not have the same opinion about Gandhi. The divergence of opinion regarding Gandhi among Muslim politicians became much sharper after his assassination.

Pakistan came into being on August 14, 1947. Bengal was divided and East Bengal, morphed into East Pakistan and the Muslim League took control of the newly created nation-state. While they were carrying out the task of nation-building, the Muslim League activists were bubbling with zeal. But all of them were not unanimous about their project and it came out clearly on that fateful day of January 30, 1948.

The way Muslim leaders registered their reactions contained the seeds of decline of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the undisputed leader of the Muslims, in his condolence message at Gandhi’s death, published on January 31 in the Dawn published from Karachi, said, ‘Whatever our political differences, he was one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community and a leader who commanded their universal confidence and respect.’ On the basis of this statement, Abul Mansur Ahmad, the then editor of weekly Ittehad published from Calcutta, in his memoir quoted Jinnah as having said on Gandhi’s death, ‘India has lost a great Hindu.’ Acknowledging that ‘There can be no controversy in the face of death,’ Jinnah did not concede an inch, even after Gandhi’s death, from asserting that Gandhi was the leader of the Hindus, the political position Jinnah held all his life. Jinnah failed to reconcile politically even with an assassinated Gandhi. Though the immediate reason for Gandhi’s death was his effort to save Pakistan from financial ruin by exerting moral pressure, through a fast unto death, on the Indian government to deliver to Pakistan the withheld amount of Rs 55 crore on account of the division of assets shortly after partition.

Liaquat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, in his statement said, ‘He was a great figure of our times and was trying unceasingly to bring back sanity to the people and to establish communal harmony... His recent efforts for communal harmony will be remembered with gratitude.’ Khwaja Nazimuddin, the premier of East Bengal, said, ‘The greatest tragedy is that when Mahatma Gandhi was most needed he has been taken away from us.’ Both of them realised the importance of Gandhi’s mission after independence and unhesitatingly acknowledged his greatness with the risk of differing with their leader. On the other hand, the last Muslim prime minister of undivided Bengal, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardi, then living in Kolkata carrying out Gandhi’s mission of establishing communal harmony, made an emotionally charged statement, ‘Weep India weep, if you have tears, shed them now.’

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[In the second instalment of a three-part series, Professor Ahmed Kamal analyses how, in their reactions to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, some Muslim nationalists in East Bengal started to question the long-held basis of their anti-Gandhi public stand]
http://www.newagebd.com/2008/feb/02/oped.html#2
New Age, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Assassination of Gandhi and the early signs of crisis of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal - 2
Professor Ahmed Kalam, Dept. of History, Dhaka University
THE leaders of the official Muslim League in East Bengal were no different in raising Gandhi, in their condolence messages, on a pedestal overlooking the complex and at times incomprehensible nature of latter’s politics. AK Fazlul Huq, the most important among them, ousted by Jinnah in the Bengal Muslim League politics and now satisfied with the job of an attorney general in the provincial High Court, made a reference before the chief justice and other judges. He said ‘the historians of the future would place Gandhi amongst the greatest of the great men of the world.’ On the other hand Nurul Amin, the senior-most member of the East Bengal cabinet, raised a question in his statement, ‘Who could dream that this apostle of peace and true protector of rights of minorities would be the first victim of “independence”?’ Excepting Jinnah all of them highlighted the role of Gandhi in establishing communal harmony between the two communities of the Hindus and the Muslims after partition. All of them, great leaders with large political following in East Bengal, believed that in those turbulent time of barbaric communal strife Gandhi was the only saviour of the Muslims. However, they did not look back to re-examine the politics they had pursued and the outcome of which was the partition of India, so, all these hyperboles, one could argue, did not look like they went beyond being diplomatic niceties.
Now I will try to develop my argument by quoting the reactions of young Muslim nationalists of East Bengal. First, I am going to cite the reaction on Gandhi’s death by young Tajuddin Ahmed, who as a Muslim nationalist took active part in the Pakistan movement since 1943 and little over two decades later after partition became the first prime minister of the exile government of Bangladesh in 1971. One does not know if Tajuddin had ever met Gandhi who stayed in Noakhali, an East Bengal district, from November 7 to March 2 in 1947. Walking barefoot Gandhi covered 116 miles, visiting 47 villages ‘cursed by blood and bitterness,’ during the communal carnage there which followed the Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946. Politicians of various stature, newspaper correspondents, Gandhi’s disciples and Congress volunteers, Muslim League supporters rushed to Noakhali. But none of the young Muslim nationalists, including Tajuddin, whom we mention in this essay, visited Gandhi in Noakhali. But there was an instant and extensive reaction that we read in Tajuddin’s diary written hours after he received the news of Gandhi’s assassination. Grief overwhelmed him and abundantly flowed in the pages of his diary.
Expression of grief has no necessary correspondence with language. Silence, crying, hurting oneself, even hitting others are the known modes of expression of grief among the people.
Expression of grief often is loud and episodic remembrance, interrupted by outbursts of cries, of all the lost moments of happiness and unfulfilled desires involving the deceased. The reason and subject of grief often determine the mode of expression of mourning. But when grief is expressed through writing, the subject and object of grief merge in a text that opens up multiple possibilities of interpretations. Thus a written text expressing grief is always both private and public with the potentiality of entering into the domain of historical discourse. Through mourning Tajuddin was not only connecting with his political past, he, in fact, questioned the long-held basis of his anti-Gandhi public stand. Tajuddin’s grief thus opens up the possibility of reversing or re-establishing his relationship with a martyred Gandhi in a fresh review of politics. To do this, the only mode he adopts which is sustainable is to express his grief in writing. Thus inscribed in the pages of his diary, his grief transcends the boundary of the private and enters into the domain of the public where politics determines the language of his grief, especially so, when it is all about Gandhi.
Tajuddin’s diary entry on Gandhi’s death, which was about three and half pages, was much longer than his entry of any other day including even August 15, the day of independence from the British. From this the intensity of pain that Gandhi’s death inflicted on him becomes clear. He titled his diary page on January 30 as ‘Sad day (Friday) Sad news.’ His first reaction after hearing the news was, ‘I was puzzled for about 3 minutes I remained in nervousness – at the first utterance of news a peculiar harsh cry-like voice came out...’ To make sense of the impact of Gandhi’s death, Tajuddin mentioned that he took his father’s and brother’s death very normally, but he became very much heartbroken with Gandhi’s death. He further wrote that ‘for the first time I got shock from human death which I always take for very usual thing to happen. To me death is a common and natural thing. I never mourn anybody’s death.’ When his father died in 1947, only a few days short of a year before Gandhi’s death, Tajuddin was in Calcutta and had his ‘normal’ dinner after receiving his father’s death news. The following night he went on to have a ‘sound sleep’ at his village home ‘in the very place where [his father] breathed his last.’ But he could not sleep after receiving the news of Gandhi’s death. He mentioned his calmness after his father’s death and wrote that he ate four paratas and one bowl of meat only fifteen minutes after receiving his father’s death news. ‘But the case is different with me at the death of Gandhiji. I wanted to shake off the melancholy in me as weakness. I took my night meal at 12 pm...But I could not sleep well against my will. While I was awake I was [absorbed] in Gandhiji, when slumber caught me due to numbness it took me to Gandhiji.’ Tajuddin uses the examples of personal loss to measure the intensity of his mourning in the absence of any other measure. In his diary he mentions Gandhi as a ‘great sage.’
He recorded a detailed description of Gandhi’s last journey: ‘At 11:45am (IST) Mahatma’s body was taken out from Birla Bhaban in procession. The cortege was carried by military personnel because the funeral was declared a “state funeral.” At 4:20pm the bier reached Rajghat on Jamuna. At 4:30pm the body was placed on the pyre with head at the north. Devadas Gandhi placed over his body a pile of sandal wood. Ramdas Gandhi lit the pyre at 4:55pm. At 5:00pm Mahatma’s remains became ashes. Pandit Ramdhan Sharma read mantras...’ Tajuddin’s attention to details of the last rites is not only striking but is a testimony to his emotional involvement with Gandhi. He further recorded, ‘Pyre was provided with 15 maunds of Sandal wood, 4 maunds of ghee [clarified butter], 2 maunds of incense, 1 maund [of] coconut and 15 seers [of] camphor.’
His emotional state comes out strikingly when he writes about himself. This Tajuddin who even used cosmetics on Muharram Day (a day of mourning for the Muslims) because he ‘did not believe in that sort of expression of grief,’ but after Gandhi’s death his only luxury which was to comb his hair, which he did not do properly for two days and he ‘did not take bath for 48 hours.’ These he did ‘from [an] inner urge and out of forgetfulness.’ All these suggest that he was deeply grief-stricken, but why? He himself explained.
Though he opposed Gandhi for political reasons, Gandhi’s great personality diminished his opposition and produced a sense of guilt in Tajuddin. Affected by excessive guilt, he wrote that with the death of Gandhi the ‘sun declined and the beacon light of humanity declined too.’ He compared Gandhi with the Pole Star and took resolution to follow the ‘foot prints’ of this great man and sought for his ‘guidance.’ Tajuddin could not withhold his reaction like Jinnah by saying only that he was ‘the greatest Hindu’. Indeed, Tajuddin expressed his overwhelming grief through the pages of his diary.
Was Tajuddin the only person who reacted like this? Another Muslim nationalist, Kamruddin Ahmad wrote, ‘that night (30 January) I dreamt of Gandhiji – in his Asram (hermitage), he was smiling showing his toothless gum and said “future history will decide whether I am a hypocrite or not. I will certainly not stop going to Noakhali persuaded by you. When I decided to go there, at that time there was no riot in Bihar.” We were dissatisfied and came out disgusted. But after waking up I realised that I did not apologise to him while he was alive. I will suffer and my conscience will bite me rest of my life.’ This he wrote in his vernacular autobiography more than two decades and a half later.
Kamruddin Ahmad’s immediate reaction had been recorded by Tajuddin in his diary, ‘Kamruddin sb [shaheb] came down at 8:30pm – he was very much upset,’ wrote Tajuddin on the same day. While showing respect to Gandhi in his book Amar Dhekha Rajnitir Panchash Bachhar, Abul Mansur Ahmad, the Muslim nationalist from Mymensingh, also criticised Jinnah’s narrow-mindedness. He wrote that ‘before that day I myself could not realise how much I loved Mahatma.’ Badruddin Umar, then a young Muslim nationalist, was still in Calcutta at the time of Gandhi’s death, and recorded his feelings in his recent autobiography. He documented how Gandhi’s death generated fears and sadness amongst the minority Muslims of West Bengal. Soon after, Umar’s family left India to live in East Bengal.
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[In the final instalment of the three-part series, Professor Ahmed Kamal analyses how, in reaction to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, many Muslim nationalist leaders in East Bengal engaged in a ‘fresh review of politics’ and ‘crossed the threshold of religious communalism by inaugurating a politics which would go beyond this narrow communal boundaries and would usher in a politics that would promise to serve both the Hindus and Muslims’ of the land]
http://www.newagebd.com/2008/feb/03/oped.html#2

New Age, Dhaka, Bangladesh
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Assassination of Gandhi and the early signs of crisis of Muslim nationalism in East Bengal - 3
Professor Ahmed Kalam, Dept. of History, Dhaka University

THESE reactions were not only confined to the elite politicians and activists but also the people of Dhaka deeply mourned Gandhi’s death. On February 2 the Dawn reported, ‘Dacca mourned Mahatma Gandhi’s death by observing a complete hartal. Business was totally suspended, all Hindu and Muslim shops, bazaars, commercial houses, banks and educational institutions, offices and courts remaining closed. Pakistan flags were flown half mast on Government buildings and other institutions. There was no vehicular traffic and even Rickshaws and hackney carriages were not plying... In the afternoon, a mile long procession of the Hindus and the Muslims with a life size portrait of Gandhi silently paraded the six mile long route from Victoria Park to the Coronation Park, where a meeting was held and verses from the Bible, Qur’an and Gita were recited. The gathering of about 25,000 people observed two minutes silence for the peace of Mahatma Gandhi’s soul’. Indeed, while condoling on the death of Gandhi, the government of East Bengal announced through loudspeakers that the offices and courts including the University of Dacca would remain closed on Saturday (31 January). Tajuddin wrote the ‘whole city observed Hartal (general strike) – an unprecedented scene for Dacca city... Condolence procession went out... met in a condolence meeting ...silent prayer and no speech.’ Tajuddin did not fail to record the emotions of the people who were running around to get hold of newspapers. He wrote: ‘People were rushing for [news] paper in such a way as was not seen even in the third class booking office of the cinema halls of Dacca – man upon man, struggling the one, suffocating the other and trampling yet another was rushing forward to get at least a scrap of paper where in lay the news of [Gandhi’s death]...within 1 hour no paper was available.’
But why were there such outbursts of passion and why at this intensity? Though it is unbelievable that by January 1948 Muslims of East Bengal, even a large section of Muslim League activists, started loosing faith in the leadership of the Muslim League, a valuable document of this loss of faith survived. It was Purba Pakistaner Durbhaga Janashadharon (The Unfortunate People of East Pakistan) published by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Naimuddin Ahmed in the same month Gandhi died. This three-anna booklet for Muslim League activists of East Pakistan was the first record of disappointment and frustration about the Muslim League government of East Bengal. The excitement of achieving Pakistan started getting diminished among the activists of the Muslim League Workers’ Camp, the emerging dissident group in the Muslim League, to which Tajuddin, Kamruddin and other young nationalists belonged. Abul Mansur Ahmad shared the resentment of the workers’ camp while still living in Calcutta.
It will only be partially true if one argues that the reassessment of Gandhi became possible by the politically conscious section of the Muslim League because of their disillusionment with the League leadership which was tied especially to the Nawab family of Dhaka, the Azad editor Akram Khan and the business house of the Ispahanis – all suspected of serving the interest of the central government, neglecting that of East Bengal. In addition, the frustrations were exacerbated by the Punjabi and non-Bengali civil servants administering East Bengal. In fact, what was added to their grievance was the sense of collective insecurity of the Indian Muslims and the fear from the much too powerful neighbour pursuing the policy of Akhand Bharat after the British left India. In this context Gandhi was perceived to be the only shelter for the Muslims, especially in that riot-torn, hostile India where communal violence threatened the pursuance of any secular politics – the Congress’ declared objective of nation-building. This became very clear to those who participated in politics during the Raj claiming the rights of Indian Muslims. After the partition of India, Gandhi arranged to return Pakistan’s share of fifty-five crore rupees.
Recognising Gandhi’s greatness, Abul Mansur Ahmad wrote ‘Gandhi saved lives of Muslims of Delhi and its outskirts by hunger strike only fifteen days before his death’ for which he was killed by Nathuram Godse who held him responsible for protecting and safeguarding the Muslim interests. The Azad, the only vernacular daily till then published from Dacca, in its editorial recognised the fact that his fast unto death in his frail health to save Muslim lives from the Hindu communalist attacks successfully turned the tide of communal tension in Delhi and made the Hindus, Sikhs and the Muslims embrace each other in harmony. Thus, Gandhi posed a huge question mark through his death to the nationalist Muslims of East Bengal. This extraordinarily tragic incident made the latter look small before Gandhi’s greatness; they were all absorbed in guilt feelings.
Tajuddin wrote self-critically, ‘In the past the same I spoke against this Great Soul for political achievement.’ He confessed that he believed, as other Muslim nationalists did, that the only way to make the Muslim League powerful was by making the Congress weaker; and to undermine the Congress the easiest way was to undermine Mahatma who was the soul of that organisation. In his reactions, Tajuddin thus exposed the inability of somebody trained in colonial liberal politics to make sense of Gandhi’s politics which derived its legitimacy from a particular reading of Hinduism – his experiment with truth, his politics of Ahimsa and finally his idea of Swaraj. Understandably, this reading was culturally and historically inaccessible to Tajuddin and others of his kind. Reviewing the past from the changed context of January 1948, they could realise Gandhi’s greatness considering the future safety of the Indian Muslims and the security of the Muslim homeland.
In less than a year of achieving a state for the Muslims, young nationalists like Tajuddin considered Gandhi as a ‘hitherto unfelt beloved friend.’ The perception of Gandhi’s political role by Muslim nationalists changed after India was partitioned on communal basis. Previously, in their struggle for a separate homeland, the Muslim nationalists perceived Gandhi as an obstacle to their political goal whereas the very homeland, when achieved, found in Gandhi the only friend who could not only save the land but also the Muslims abandoned to the mercy of the Hindu nationalists in independent India. At the core of his guilt-triggered grief in the pages of his diary, Tajuddin still remained a Muslim nationalist, but Gandhi’s martyrdom raised the question of the minority rights much more vigorously in both nation-states, at least for the rights of one minority group young Muslim nationalists struggled before the partition.
Tajuddin’s concern for the vulnerable members of his community in India, following Gandhi’s ‘foot prints’ and ‘guidance’, would, in future, enable him to look beyond the boundary of the same community and redefine it to include the others, the Hindus in East Bengal. In this, he would be guided by the magnanimity of a martyred Gandhi. But this would entail a redefining of the political community in East Pakistan: a shift from Muslims to a broader Bengali identity imagined in course of time by the linguistic resources of the community. First spark of this identity was visible on March 21, 1948, less than two months after Gandhi’s death, when the young Muslim nationalists of East Bengal shouted a loud ‘no’ to Jinnah’s emphatic declaration for Urdu as the future state language of Pakistan. The demand for Bengali as one of the state languages led the young Muslim nationalists to gradually embrace cultural nationalism. Thus the Tajuddins and Kamruddins of East Bengal crossed the threshold of religious communalism by inaugurating a politics which would go beyond this narrow communal boundaries and would usher in a politics that would promise to serve both the Hindus and Muslims of East Bengal – the beginning of ‘secular politics’ under the umbrella of the Awami League, the party that would years later lead to create a nation-state based on a constitution proclaiming secularism as one of its four fundamental principles. Thus Gandhi’s death that triggered a tension among the rank and file of the Muslim nationalists of East Bengal took more than two decades to resolve by imagining a different identity for the latter and realising it by giving a violent birth to a secular Bangladesh – a new nation-state.