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| Congress must take on Jinnahs of Jammu and Kashmir | | | RUSTAM
EARLY TIMES REPORT
JAMMU, Apr 24: However, to say all this doesn't mean that the Congress didn't pander to communalism before 1947. It did pander to communalism at least twice, first in 1906 and then in 1916.
In 1906 at Calcutta, the official resolution of the Congress talked of reservation for the backwardly educated class. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who then was the follower of the Congress and had gone to Calcutta to participate in the Congress session, held under the president-ship of Dadabhai Naoroji, opposed the amendment. He said: "There is in this resolution mentioned that there should be reservation for the backwardly educated class, if the Mohammedan community is meant by it, I wish to draw you attention to the fact that the Mohammedan community should be treated in the same way as the Hindu community. The foundation upon which the Indian National Congress is based, is that we are all equal, that there should be no reservation for any class or any community and my whole object is that the reservation should be deleted". The resolution was passed together with the amendment.
In 1916 at Lucknow, the Congress entered into a pact with the Muslim League, called the Lucknow Pact. This pact, which ultimately led to the partition of India on communal lines, accepted the Muslim League's demand for separate electorates or separate registers.
The attitude of the Congress underwent a change after the withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation movement in February 1922, notwithstanding some understanding between Jinnah, who had by now become a communalist of communalists and staunch votary of two-nation theory and reservation on communal basis, and a few Congress leaders that the system of communal electorates would continue. The fact is that the Congress under the president-ship of Motilal Nehru in 1928 repudiated most of the Jinnah's communal demands.
Jinnah's basic demands were five - Separate electorates -- the chief plank in the programme of the Muslim League, which was founded in December 1906 at Dacca, would be dispensed with in lieu of joint electorates with reserved seats for minorities; one third representation in the Central Assembly, representation in Punjab and Bengal in proportion to the Muslim population; creation of three new Muslim-majority provinces (Sind, North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan); and residuary powers for provinces.
The Congress of Motilal Nehru declared that there would be "joint electorates everywhere"; that the Muslims would get reserved seats only at the Centre and in the Muslim-minority provinces and not in the Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab; and that the political set-up in India would be "broadly unitary" with the Centre exercising the residuary powers. This remained the Congress line between 1928 and 1947. After 1947, the Congress-dominated Indian Constituent Assembly done away with all kinds of reservations, except in the case of Scheduled casts and Scheduled Tribes.
All this shows that the Congress not only opposed the communal demands put forth by the Muslim League and similar other political formations, but also stood for uniform laws across the country and residuary powers for the Centre, notwithstanding the division of subjects into three lists, Union List, State List and the Concurrent List.
True that the Congress government accorded a special status to Jammu and Kashmir at the behest of Sheikh Abdullah and his essentially Kashmir-based National Conference in October 1949. But it is also true that it was a temporary arrangement. The then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had declared so in so many words. The subsequent developments in the state established that the Congress stood for the state's full integration into India and by 1989 the process of the state's integration into India was almost complete. And, all this, notwithstanding Article 370, the parleys between Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah in 1952 and the 1975 Indira Gandhi-Sheikh Abdullah accord. New Delhi brought the state under the jurisdiction of most of the Central laws and institutions. So much so, the Congress leaders and the Congress-led governments at the Centre took strict action against Kashmiri leaders whenever they indulged in activities, which, according to the congress and the Union Government, were communal and harmful for the country's unity and integrity and secular values.
It is hardly necessary to reflect on those actions as everyone in the state is aware of everything. The fact of the matter is that the Congress did all that it could do to bring the state at par with other states of the Union and tell the reactionary forces in Kashmir that Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part of India and that it shall remain so in future as well and there was no place whatever in its scheme of things for Muslim identity politics. The developments in the state after 1947 also established that though the Congress shared power with the National Conference and the People's Democratic Party, it did not allow any of these formations to cross the Lakshman Rekha. Instead, the Congress put its foot down each time when the National Conference or the People's Democratic Party thought in terms of driving the state away from the national mainstream. (To be continued)
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