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| Congress, SP doing what League did before 1947 | | Towards Another Partition -- I | |
Rustam
JAMMU, Jan 21: When the Congress -- which was founded by the British to weaken the Indian freedom struggle -- holding its annual session in Madras, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, in a speech at Lucknow on December 28, 1887, reflected on the attitude which his co-religionists should adopt towards the political movement going on in India. He described the Congress as a "Bengali movement" and said: "If you accept that the country should groan under the yoke of Bengali rule and its people (read Muslims) lick the Bengali shoes, then, in the name of God! Jump into the train, sit down, and be off to Madras, be off to Madras". (Surrendra Nath Bannerjea was the president of the Madras session of the Congress.) Sir Syed's opposition to the Bengali was based on the fact that as they were the most educated section of the Indian population, they would thus dominate the less educated Muslims in "competitive examination". Besides, analyzing the demand of the Congress that a proportion of the Viceroy's Legislative Council should be elected, he said that the "Hindu members of the Council would be four times that of the Muslims as their population is four times more".
To be more precise, Sir Syed said:"India is like a bride whose two eyes are the Hindus and the Mohmmedans and her beauty consists in the fact that her two eyes are of equal luster" and added that "what he objected to was that if the proposals of the Indian National Congress met with success, the Muslims would suffer 'grievous injury". According to him, "the Congress is in reality a civil wars without arms. The ultimate object of the Congress is to rule the country; and although they wish to do it in the name of all people of India, the Muslims would be helpless as they would be in a minority". Just a few weeks before Sir Syed's Lucknow speech the similar views had been expressed by Theodore Beck, Principal of the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College, Aligarh, in some articles in The Pioneer, then published from Allahabad, United Provinces, presently Uttar Pradesh. In The Pioneer of November 2 and 3, 1887 Beck wrote that the parliamentary form of government was "unsuited to country containing two or more nations tending to oppress the numerically weaker". In other words, Beck, like Sir Syed, who had worked against the Mughal dynasty to which he himself directly and indirectly belonged and worked with the British to defeat the 1857 Indian revolt against the British, preached the two-nation theory. The 1857 revolt was the first concerted effort of the Indians to end the British rule.
Sir Syed died in 1898. After his death, the Muslims were divided into three camps. There were some who wanted to join the Congress. There were others who wanted to revive the idea of a "grand council of chosen leaders" to look after the interests and needs of their co-religionists. And there were some who wanted to set up a Muslim organization as a parallel organization to the Congress. In November 1901, some leading Muslims of Lucknow held a meeting to discuss the idea of a "Mohammedan Political Organization" (MPO). As a result the "the Mohammedan Political Organization" was formed at a public meeting in Saharanpur (Uttar Pradesh) in July 1903, with Nawab Viquar-ul-Mulk as the convener of the meeting. He said: "The two organizations (MPO and Congress) are essentially different, not only in their most important objects but also in their modus operandi". He said so despite the fact the secretary of the Congress was a retired British civil servant A O Hume, the father and founder of the Indian National Congress. What he said indicated that the MPO was more against the Congress than the British. Earlier in August 1900, he had emphasized the need to watch "with vigilance the political interests of the community".
In 1906, Aga Khan, also emphasized the need for a separate political organization from that of the Congress. He said such an organization was "greatly needed by the Muslims of India for there was no hope of a fair deal for us within the folds of the Congress party or in alliance with it". He said, "in 1906, we boldly asked the Viceroy (Lord Minto) to look facts in the face; we asked that the Muslims of India should not be regarded as a mere minority, but as a nation within a nation whose rights and obligations should be guaranteed by statute". Another prominent Muslim leader Ameer Ali from London stressed the need of a separate organization for the Muslims, saying "the chief objection on the part of the Mohammedans to make common cause with the Indian National Congress is based on the conviction that, tied to the wheels of the Juggerrnath of majority (read Hindus), they would in the end be crushed out of the semblance of nationality". (To be continued). |
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