Khaled Ahmed on 'Creating a new Medina' - The Sudeten parallel
A great recent book, Creating a New Medina:State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India by Venkat
Dhulipala, assistant professor of history, University of North Carolina, US,
explains the pre-1940 opinion of the All-India Muslim League about a community
of Germans living in Czechoslovakia. The Muslim leadership had decided,
probably after watching the trend in Europe and the September 1938 Munich
Agreement, to side with the British position appeasing Adolf Hitler.
In October 1938, writes Dhulipala, “The Sind ML leader Abdullah Haroon drew a parallel with the situation of Sudeten Germans under Czechoslovakia and admiringly referred to Hitler’s actions to liberate them Jinnah himself noted that ‘if Britain in Gladstone’s time could
intervene in Armenia in the name of protection of minorities,
why should it not be right for us to do so in the case of our
minorities in Hindustan if they are oppressed?’” A “national”
parallel was thus created.
Hector Bolitho, in his 1954 book Jinnah: Creator of
Pakistan, actually quoted from the proceedings of a Muslim League session
of 1938 — a condemnation of how Czechoslovakia was treating the German minority
living inside it. On October 8, 1938, in his presidential address at
the Sindh Muslim League conference, Karachi, Jinnah said:
“In India I may draw attention of His
Majesty’s Government and the British statesmen who, I am sure, are
not under any delusion that the Congress represents
the people of India or [the] Indian nation, for there
are 90 million of Mussalmans. And I would draw their attention and here also of
the Congress high command and ask them to mark, learn and inwardly
digest the recent upheaval and its consequent developments which
threatened the World War. It was because the Sudeten Germans who were forced
under the heel of the majority of Czechoslovakia who oppressed them,
suppressed them, maltreated them and showed a brutal and callous disregard for
their rights and interests for two decades, hence the inevitable result that
the Republic of Czechoslovakia is now broken up and a new map will
have to be drawn. Just as the Sudeten Germans were not defenceless
and survived the oppression and persecution for two decades, so also the
Mussalmans are not defenceless and cannot give you their national
entity and aspirations in this great continent…”
Not much was known in India about the Sudeten
question. What is obvious today was the growing Congress-Muslim
League disagreement over Muslim separatism, which was to reach its climax in
1940, with the Lahore Resolution, known today in Pakistan as the
Pakistan Resolution. The communal situation did not improve after the Congress
government came to power after the 1937 election, and the
Muslims were more and more inclined to favour the League. The League clearly
saw its rival at cross-purposes with the British government on Hitler
and his exploitation of the Sudeten issue. There were more incidents that the
League’s leadership had probably misinterpreted.
The Congress government finally resigned in 1939,
causing the League to celebrate it as the “Day of Deliverance”.
Visits by Jawaharlal Nehru to Czechoslovakia in those days
of British appeasement couldn’t have registered well with London. He, along
with his daughter Indira, had visited Prague and “subsequently influenced the
strong condemnation of the 1938 Munich Pact by the Indian nationalist
movement”, noted the Czech Indologist, Miloslav Krasa. Today, the Munich
agreement of September 30, 1938 doesn’t have any admirers. The conference in
which Britain, France and Italy capitulated to Hitler was out of bounds for the
Czechoslovakian government and the Sudetens, who formed 23 per cent
of the population, as against the Czech majority of over 50 per cent, claimed
the status of a “nation”. The agreement gave in to Hitler’s demand “for the
unconditional cession of Sudeten German majority regions to Germany”.
Dhulipala has carefully examined the contents of B.R.
Ambedkar’s book Thoughts on Pakistan (1941), which must stand
as the intellectual mainstay of the book. Certainly not inclined to favour the
Pakistan movement, Ambedkar’s book nevertheless appealed to the League leaders,
who welcomed it and asked everyone to read it to legitimise the League campaign
for Pakistan.
The crux of the argument deployed by Ambedkar was that
Muslims indeed were a nation — and he was convincing as he
gave examples from recent European history of how
communities had separated as nations and formed new states.
Ambedkar’sknowledge of world affairs was probably unmatched by anyone in
India. He was focused on the planned exchanges of populations that had taken
place between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, under the Treaties of
Neuilly and Lausanne in 1919 and 1923. What the League was prepared to ignore
was his approval of Pakistan as “good riddance” for India,
provided all Muslims migrated from India to Pakistan.
Dhulipala writes: “The initial part of the book evaluates
arguments in favour of Pakistan that are primarily based on affect, considering
the tremendous sentimental value that the overwhelming majority of Muslims
attached to the two-nation theory. Ambedkar conceded these arguments clearly
demonstrated that the Muslims were a nation and he, therefore, unambiguously
supported the Pakistan demand. While this may have been music to the ears of
the League’s supporters, Ambedkar subsequently presented to the Hindus a series
of arguments to convince them to concede Pakistan, arguments which could only
have dampened Pakistani supporters’ enthusiasm for the man as well as for his
message.”
Ambedkar, in his Pakistan or the Partition of India,
Lessons from Abroad (1946), elaborates his position on what happened
in Europe: “Czechoslovakia proved to be a very short-lived state. It lived
exactly for two decades. On the 15th March 1939 it perished or rather was
destroyed as an independent state. It became a protectorate of Germany… By
signing the Munich Pact on 30th September 1938 — of which the protectorate was
an inevitable consequence — Great Britain, France and Italy assisted
Germany, their former enemy of the Great War, to conquer
Czechoslovakia, their former ally. All the work of the
Czechs of the past century to gain freedom was wiped off. They were once more
to be the slaves of their former German overlords.”
The conundrum of how “nations” come into being and how they
attain statehood has not unravelled fully in our times. Pakistan became a state
because the Muslims became a “nation”. Then, out of Pakistan, Bangladesh was
created because the Muslims of East Pakistan became a nation. Sudan, which was
bifurcated recently after its Christians became a nation, is once again torn by
civil war. In India, the separatist feeling doesn’t die down in certain
regions, just as in Balochistan, Pakistan faces a Baloch movement of
“liberation”. And people like me, who hope to realise the dream of
Saarc in South Asia, see with alarm the European Union fraying at its
southern edges.
The writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’
Also see
Venkat Dhulipala's lectures on the Muslim League in the 1940's
Communist Party of India's resolution on Pakistan and National Unity, September 1942
Communist Party of India's resolution on Pakistan and National Unity, September 1942
B.R. Ambedkar's Pakistan or the Partition of India (Bombay, 1940,1945)
