“I have considered from every possible point of view the scheme of Pakistan as formulated by the Muslim League,” Maulana Abul Kalam Azad proclaimed in a crucial statement issued some 16 months before India was partitioned in August 1947.

“As an Indian, I have examined its implications for the future of India as a whole. As a Muslim, I have examined its likely effects upon the fortunes of Muslims in India.

“…I have come to the conclusion that it is harmful not only for India as a whole but for Muslims in particular. And in fact it creates more problems than it solves.”

Azad was arguably the foremost Indian Muslim nationalist of his times. And he adamantly opposed the demand for Pakistan until the very end. He served as president of the Indian National Congress for far longer than he — or anyone else — had anticipated because of the exigencies that the Second World War entailed. The Congress leadership remained imprisoned for much of the war, primarily because it baulked at the idea of participating in the conflict as an un-free nation.

Neither Azad nor Jawaharlal Nehru bought into Mahatma Gandhi’s absurd theory that the Nazi forces should be combated spiritually rather than militarily; nor did they attach much credence to his idea that if Japanese forces invaded India, they would do so exclusively as enemies of the British colonial power. Gandhi eventually changed his mind, perhaps realising that his otherwise admirable creed of non-violence would be pointless in the face of a fascist onslaught. But the Congress nonetheless wasn’t keen to commit India to combat while the country remained a colony.

The eventual end of the war and the advent of Clement Attlee’s Labour government in London substantially altered the situation. Freedom for India was now decidedly on the cards, but it was complicated by the growing communal divide. The somewhat ambiguous demand for a separate Muslim state — or states — had been voiced by the Muslim League in 1940, but Azad saw the concept of Pakistan more as a bargaining chip for Mohammad Ali Jinnah than as an incontrovertible demand.

The Muslim League’s initial acceptance of the 1946 Cabinet Mission plan suggests that he wasn’t mistaken on this count. Azad had proposed an extraordinary degree of provincial autonomy as a possible solution to communal concerns. In his view, this would have enabled electorates in Muslim-majority provinces to elect Muslim-majority governments, if they so chose, which would then govern more or less as they wished, with minimal interference from the centre.

His view was based in part on the consequences of the elections that followed the 1935 India Act, whereby non-League governments came to power in Punjab, Sindh and the Frontier province. In Azad’s opinion, this undermined the League’s claim to representing the vast majority of Muslims. This situation changed substantially in the intervening decade, not least, as Azad concedes, on account of “the attitude of certain communal extremists among the Hindus”, who read into the Pakistan scheme “a sinister pan-Islamic conspiracy” which in turn “acted as an incentive to the adherents of the League”.

Azad’s autobiographical India Wins Freedom, written a decade after independence and published posthumously, is well worth re-reading for its illuminating précis of the freedom struggle and a fearless critique of where the leading parties, including the Congress, went wrong. Azad’s empathy for Gandhi and his non-violent creed does not prevent him from criticising the Mahatma for, inter alia, elevating Jinnah’s importance, not least by addressing him as Quaid-i-Azam. And he can, when the occasion demands, be equally scathing about Nehru’s errors — despite their close comradeship and frequent ideological concurrence, as well as the fact that the book is dedicated to Nehru.

Azad believes that the implementation of the Cabinet Mission plan, which would have entailed India’s segmentation into three sections within a federal context, would have been the ideal solution to the nation’s communal woes. The Muslim League had scuttled the 1945 Shimla conference under Lord Wavell’s auspices through Jinnah’s insistence that the League alone could nominate Muslim members to India’s executive council, chiefly in order to deny the Congress its nationalist, multi-communal credentials, even though it boasted a Muslim president.

Both it and the Congress accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan, but an inopportune statement by Nehru to the effect that nothing was written in stone facilitated the League’s decision to reject the plan on the grounds that the Congress could not be trusted to honour its commitments.

Azad was taken aback by Nehru’s announcement, and he was even more disenchanted in the summer of 1947 when his closest colleague in the Congress hierarchy fell in with Sardar Vallabhai Patel — whose impulses Azad had always been suspicious of — to support partition as the least painful outcome in the circumstances. Another Muslim nationalist who was shocked by the Congress stance was Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Azad’s final hope was Gandhi, but the combined influence of Patel, Nehru and Lord Mountbatten proved irresistible even for him.

As partition unfolded, the worst fears of those who thought it wasn’t a great idea in the first place — as well as some of those who assumed it was the best possible outcome — were realised, as a frenzy of bloodletting was unleashed among Hindus and Sikhs on the one side and Muslims on the other. There is anecdotal evidence that Jinnah, when faced with the consequences of his separatism, was both appalled and contrite. He may well have realised before he died that his ideal of a secular Muslim-majority state was no more than a chimera.

One of Azad’s primary concerns was that partition would lead to two inexorably hostile states condemned to coexist side by side. It would be futile to question his judgment, but it isn’t entirely necessary that the burden of history should forever poison relations between India and Pakistan. It could, in fact, be argued that never before has the need to overcome the weight of the past been quite so powerful. Unfortunately, there is little indication that this impetus is having the desired effect on the personalities that matter.

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