Chapter 5: History: The Muslim League
Every summer the Government of India left the heat of the plains and moved up to Simla in the hills. The Viceroy went, the officials went, and the files went with them. So did the letters. In August 1906 one such letter travelled the short distance from one Simla bungalow to another. Its writer was W. A. J. Archbold, Principal of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, who was spending the summer in the hills. Its reader was the private secretary to Lord Minto, the Viceroy — the head of the British administration in India. Archbold’s question was a practical one. If a group of leading Muslims asked to present an address to the Viceroy, would he agree to receive them? The answer came back that he would. Within eight weeks an address had been drafted, thirty-five names had been gathered from across the provinces, and a deputation stood before Minto at Simla asking that Muslims be given a representation of their own in India’s councils. Historians know about that first letter because the private correspondence survives. It is one of the rare places where the arranging of a public event can be watched from the inside, and it has been argued over ever since. Were the deputationists speaking for themselves, or was this an occasion the government helped to stage? The papers show the arrangement. They cannot show the motive.
Diagram
Fig. 5.0-1 Caption: The Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, founded in 1875, trained a generation of students in the Western system of education. Brief: Archival photograph or line drawing of the main college building at Aligarh in the early twentieth century; label the building and the town; keep the period clear in the caption.
5.1 The Growth Of Communalism
Hindus and Muslims had lived beside one another in India for many centuries. They shared languages, crafts, music, food, dress and, in many places, the same local shrines. Historians call this shared making a composite culture — a culture built jointly by people of different faiths, which neither can claim as its own alone.
Sharing a culture did not mean there was never conflict. Quarrels over processions, land, temples and mosques did break out, and rulers sometimes favoured one group over another. But such disputes were usually local and short-lived. They were not yet organised as a politics that divided the whole country.
That change is what this chapter has to explain. Communalism is the belief that the people who follow one religion form a single political community, whose interests are separate from and opposed to those of people who follow another. It is a claim about politics, not a statement of faith.
What The Uprising Of 1857 Changed
In 1857 soldiers and civilians of both communities took part in the revolt against Company rule. Leaders in different regions accepted the Mughal emperor at Delhi as their common figurehead. Officials in Calcutta and London noticed that religion had not divided the rebellion.
After 1857 the Crown ruled India directly, and the administration worked hard to prevent a second such rising. A united opposition was the danger. A population that thought of itself in separate blocks was easier to govern, and cheaper to govern.
From the 1870s onward, several government decisions treated Indians first as members of religious communities and only then as subjects with a common interest. Section 5.2 sets these out in detail. Their combined effect was to make religious identity a working unit of Indian politics.
How Do We Know What Officials Intended?
Our evidence for British intentions is of two kinds. There are official papers — minutes, despatches and resolutions — and there are private letters and journals kept by officials and their families.
Each has a limit. A minute records the argument an official was prepared to put on paper, and officials often wrote to justify a decision already taken. A private letter is franker, but it is one person’s view, written for one reader, and it cannot prove what a whole government meant to do.
More Than One Explanation
Historians do not all weigh the causes in the same way. Some argue that colonial policy was the main engine, and that communal politics grew where the government watered it.
Others argue that policy alone cannot explain the result. It worked, they say, because conditions inside Indian society gave it something to work on — a bitter competition for the few English-educated posts, very unequal access to modern schooling, and the readiness of some leaders to use religious symbols in public campaigns.
Most historians accept that both mattered. What they disagree about is the weight to give each, and that disagreement is worth holding on to as you read the next section.
The factors that follow are best read as a chain, not as a single cause. No one of them, by itself, would have produced a separate political organisation.
5.2 Factors Leading To The Formation Of The Muslim League
No single decision produced the Muslim League. A group of causes worked on one another over some fifty years, and the sections below take them one at a time. Keep asking, as you read, which of them the government controlled and which it merely used.
5.2.1 The End Of Mughal Rule And British Suspicion
British power in India was built on the ruins of Mughal authority. After the revolt of 1857 the last Mughal emperor was deposed and exiled, and the Crown took over the government from the East India Company.
In the years that followed, officials held the Muslim service and landed classes of northern India especially responsible for the rising. Recruitment to the civil and military services was tightened against them. The government also moved against the reformist movement its officials called Wahabi, whose leaders in Patna were tried for conspiracy in the 1860s.
From about the 1870s the official mood began to change. In 1871 the civil servant W. W. Hunter published The Indian Musalmans, written at official request, which argued that a community with real grievances had been pushed towards disaffection and should instead be conciliated. Government resolutions on education followed the same reasoning.
The change had a second and more calculating side. As English-educated Indians of every community began to organise and to petition together, officials came to value a group that could be won over separately. Conciliation and division were two sides of one policy.
5.2.2 The British Policy Of Divide And Rule
Divide and rule means governing a mixed population by keeping its groups apart, so that they oppose one another rather than the government. It is not a written policy that anyone signed. It is a pattern historians read out of many separate decisions.
Some of those decisions can be dated. In 1871 the government of Lord Mayo issued a resolution on Muslim education, promising greater aid to schools run by Muslims and encouraging instruction through Urdu. The measure answered a real grievance, and it also marked out a community for separate treatment.
Others were quieter but went deeper. From the census of 1871–72, and regularly from 1881, the government counted every Indian by religion and by caste. Once the population existed on paper as blocks of known size, it became natural to argue about how many seats or posts each block should get.
Officials also chose whom to talk to. Where they accepted a religious leader as the voice of a whole community, they made him one. And where nationalist demands were described in official minutes as the demands of one community only, the description helped make the charge stick.
The same logic reappears later in the chapter — in the partition of the province of Bengal in 1905 (section 5.3.3), and in the grant of separate electorates in 1909 (section 5.6).
5.2.3 Backwardness In Education, Trade And Industry
Communal politics needs a grievance to grow in, and unequal access to the new education supplied one. The pattern was regional and social before it was religious.
In 1837 the government replaced Persian with English as the language of the courts and the administration. The service families of northern India, whose skill was in Persian, lost the value of their training almost overnight. In Bengal, an earlier land settlement had already weakened many Muslim landholders.
Modern education was now the gate to a government post. Families that took to English schooling early — in Bengal, Bombay and Madras, and largely from particular urban groups — filled the new offices first. Official reports of the later nineteenth century recorded that the share of Muslims in the colleges, the services and the professions was well below their share of the population.
Two cautions belong here. First, these were all-India averages, and they hid enormous variation: the position of Muslims in Punjab was not the position of Muslims in Bengal. Second, the figures describe access and opportunity, not ability. Nothing in them says anything about what any community was capable of.
Organised modern industry was small everywhere in colonial India, and its ownership was concentrated in a few communities and cities. Groups outside those networks — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — had little share in it.
5.2.4 Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan And The Aligarh Movement
Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) was an educationist and social reformer who had served in the Company’s judicial service. He argued that his community’s future lay in modern education, and he wrote against practices he considered superstitious.
He referred to Hindus and Muslims of India as one quam — a word meaning a nation or a people — and said that the two were the two eyes of a single bride. The school he founded at Aligarh in 1875 became the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College two years later, and it drew both Hindu and Muslim students and donors.
Figure 5.2-1 shows him as he is usually pictured, in later life and in public dress.
Diagram
Fig. 5.2-1 Caption: Sayyid Ahmad Khan, founder of the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh. Brief: Archival portrait photograph, head and shoulders, formal dress; label with name and dates 1817–1898.
A portrait tells us how a man was presented and later remembered. It cannot tell us what he thought, and it certainly cannot show that his views changed — which is the historically important thing about him.
From the mid-1880s his political position hardened. He opposed the Indian National Congress from its founding, arguing that a system of election by counting heads would leave a numerically smaller community permanently outvoted. He urged that British rule should continue, and that loyalty to it would be repaid.
In 1888 he founded the United Indian Patriotic Association, formed chiefly to work against the Congress. Theodore Beck, the English principal of the Aligarh college from 1883, encouraged this direction, and historians disagree about how far Beck shaped it and how far Sir Sayyid reached it on his own reading of representative government.
The Aligarh Movement is the name given to this whole effort: modern education, social reform, and a politics of loyalty to the government and separation from the Congress. After Sir Sayyid’s death in 1898 its political side was led by Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk, and it takes us straight into the events of the next section.
5.2.5 A Divided Reading Of Indian History
The way the Indian past was written and taught did its own work. In 1817 James Mill published The History of British India, which divided that past into a Hindu period, a Muhammadan period and a British period.
The scheme labelled whole centuries by the religion of the ruling house. It made medieval rulers into representatives of a faith rather than of a dynasty, and it left no room for a shared culture. Textbooks, novels, plays and newspapers on both sides picked the framework up.
Historians today reject it. Rulers of the same faith fought each other constantly; armies, revenue departments and courts were mixed; and the deepest differences in Indian society ran along lines of region, language and class as much as religion. It is worth noting that Mill never visited India and read no Indian language.
5.2.6 Some Actions Of The Assertive Nationalists
Mobilising large numbers needs symbols people already share, and from the 1890s some nationalist leaders reached for religious ones. Tilak built the Shivaji and Ganapati festivals into public annual events in western India. Aurobindo Ghose wrote of India as a mother to be served, and of nationalism as a faith.
These devices worked. They brought thousands of ordinary people into political life who would never have attended a lecture or read a petition.
They also had a cost. Symbols drawn from one tradition did not speak to everyone, and parts of the anti-Partition agitation in Bengal used religious observances that left some Indians standing outside the movement. Historians differ on how much weight this deserves beside government policy. What is clear is that it made the claim of separate interests easier to argue.
5.2.7 Economic Backwardness And The Competition For Jobs
Colonial economic policy left India with very little modern industry, so the educated young had few careers open to them outside government service. The number of such posts was small and grew slowly.
Scarcity turned education into a contest. When there are ten applicants for one clerkship, the question of who gets a fair share becomes urgent — and the easiest way to define a share is by the group one belongs to.
Demands for reserved places by community followed. The government could then present itself as the neutral umpire between Indians, which was a comfortable position for a ruler to occupy.
The unemployed graduate rarely traced the shortage back to the economic policy that caused it. That, in the end, is what made the competition so useful to the government and so damaging to a common politics.
5.3 Events That Brought The League Into Being
The factors in section 5.2 were slow-moving conditions. They explain why a separate organisation became thinkable. They do not explain why it appeared in 1906 rather than in 1886 or 1926.
For that we need the particular events of thirteen years, set out in Timeline 5.1 and then taken one by one.
5.3.1 The Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental Defence Association, 1893
By the early 1890s the Indian National Congress had held annual sessions for eight years and was drawing in more of the English-educated. Its growth worried both the government and the Aligarh leadership.
In 1893 the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental Defence Association of Upper India was founded at Aligarh, with Theodore Beck as its secretary. Its declared purposes were to keep Muslims loyal to the government, to keep them out of political agitation, and to put their claims before the authorities directly.
Notice what kind of body this was. It was not a party and it fought no elections. It was an association of notables that dealt with the government on behalf of a community — the form Muslim politics would keep for the next twenty years.
5.3.2 The Hindi-Urdu Controversy, 1900
In the northern province then called the North-Western Provinces and Oudh — renamed the United Provinces in 1902, and today Uttar Pradesh — the courts worked in Urdu written in the Persian script. Petitions, summonses and records were all in that language.
For families whose livelihood was clerkship, pleading and record-keeping, that was not a matter of sentiment. Their training was their income. A campaign had meanwhile been pressing for many years for Hindi in the Devanagari script, which large numbers of people in the province read.
In April 1900 the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Antony MacDonnell, ordered that petitions might be filed in Hindi in the Devanagari script, and that summonses and official notices be issued in both languages. The order gave Hindi equal standing in the courts of the province.
Mohsin-ul-Mulk led the protest against it. He was then secretary of the trust that ran the Aligarh college, which depended on government goodwill and grants. MacDonnell required him to choose between the office and the agitation, and he drew back from the agitation.
That choice taught the Aligarh leaders a lesson they did not forget. A body tied to the government by grants could not also campaign against the government. If they wanted to press claims, they needed a political organisation that stood on its own feet.
5.3.3 The Partition Of Bengal, 1905
Bengal was by far the largest province of British India, and in 1905 Lord Curzon divided it. The eastern districts were joined with Assam to form a new province, and the western districts remained as Bengal.
The government’s stated reason was administrative: the province was too big to govern well. Nationalist opinion in Calcutta read it differently, as a blow aimed at the most politically active part of India. That argument, and the Swadeshi movement it produced, belong to the phase of the movement studied earlier in this book.
What matters here is the second effect. The new eastern province had a Muslim majority, and officials pointed this out in defending the measure. Nawab Salimullah of Dacca and others welcomed the partition on exactly that ground: for the first time, they would not be a minority in their own province.
So one measure produced two opposed political camps, and each side could point to the other’s reaction as proof of its own case. Communal politics does not need much more than that to begin.
5.3.4 The Deputation To Lord Minto At Simla, 1906
By 1906 the government had begun working out an enlargement of the legislative councils — the bodies in which a small number of Indians sat, mostly nominated, to advise and to pass laws. Once seats were to be added, the question of who would fill them became urgent.
This was the moment the letter in the chapter opener was written. The address that followed was prepared with the help of the principal of the Aligarh college, and thirty-five men from across the provinces put their names to it.
The central demand needs a definition. A separate electorate is an arrangement in which the voters of one community are placed on a roll of their own and elect their own members, so that no other voters take part in that election.
The deputation asked for two things that pull against each other. Representation ‘by political importance’ meant more seats than numbers alone would give; separate electorates meant those seats would be filled without any need to win support outside the community.
Historians have long argued about the meeting. Some read it as Muslim leaders acting on their own reading of their position; others, pointing to the correspondence that arranged it, read it as an occasion the government wanted held. The evidence settles the arranging. It does not settle what the thirty-five men themselves believed.
5.4 The Formation Of The All-India Muslim League, 1906
Three months after the deputation returned from Simla, its success was turned into an organisation. The occasion was ready-made. The Mohammedan Educational Conference, founded by Sir Sayyid to promote schooling, held an annual meeting that brought together notables and professional men from every province.
In December 1906 the Conference met at Dacca, in eastern Bengal, as the guest of Nawab Salimullah. Getting leaders from Punjab, the United Provinces, Bengal, Bombay and Madras into one hall was slow and costly work, and a body that already did it every year was too useful to waste.
Nawab Salimullah moved that a permanent political organisation be formed. The proposal was accepted, and on 30 December 1906 the All-India Muslim League came into being.
The name was a claim. ‘All-India’ announced that the new body spoke for Muslims everywhere, not for one province — and it was that claim, more than the number of members, which gave the League its standing with the government.
The Aga Khan, who had led the deputation at Simla, was chosen as its first president. Mohsin-ul-Mulk and Viqar-ul-Mulk served as its secretaries. The headquarters were fixed at Aligarh, and the central office was moved to Lucknow in 1910. A branch was opened in London in 1908 to put the League’s case before Parliament and the India Office.
Look closely at who was in the hall. The founders were nawabs, landholders, lawyers and men from the Aligarh circle. There were no peasants, no weavers and no small traders, and the League made no attempt in these years to recruit them.
We know who attended from the printed proceedings of the Conference, from newspaper reports, and from photographs such as Figure 5.4-1.
Diagram
Fig. 5.4-1 Caption: Members present at the founding meetings held at Dacca in December 1906. Brief: Archival group photograph of the assembled delegates, formally seated and standing in rows; caption must state the place and the date.
A group photograph is strong evidence of one narrow kind. It shows who was there and how they wished to be seen — dressed formally, arranged in order of standing, facing the camera together.
That last limit matters for the whole chapter. An organisation founded by notables at a conference is not the same thing as a movement, and the difference will shape everything the League does in its first ten years.
5.5 The Objectives Of The Muslim League
The meeting at Dacca did not only found a body. It also stated, in three clauses, what that body existed to do. The objectives adopted for the All-India Muslim League were these.
- To promote among the Muslims of India support for the British government, and to remove any misunderstanding about the intentions of the government towards them.
- To protect and advance the political rights and interests of the Muslims of India, and to place their needs and aspirations before the government in mild and moderate language.
- To prevent the rise of feelings of hostility between the Muslims of India and other communities.
Read the three together and the design becomes clear. The first commits the organisation to loyalty. The second commits it to a method — petition and representation, not agitation. The third promises that pressing a community’s claims will not turn into enmity towards anyone else.
The phrase ‘mild and moderate language’ is worth pausing on. It rules out boycott, mass meetings and street protest, which were exactly the methods the Assertive Nationalists had begun to use. A body that petitions can be heard only if the government chooses to listen — so this objective made the League’s strength depend on official goodwill.
The third objective sits uneasily beside the demand the League had just made at Simla. Separate electorates were meant to keep a community’s representatives safe from being outvoted. They also meant that a candidate never had to ask a single voter of another community for support.
Whether an arrangement of that kind prevents hostility or hardens it was argued at the time and has been argued ever since. The League’s founders held that a protected minority is a calmer minority. Congress nationalists held that a permanent division of voters makes every question a communal question.
These objectives did not last unchanged. In 1913 the League rewrote its aim, and section 5.7 explains what it put in place of simple support for the government.
5.6 Separate Electorates And The League’s First Decade
The claim made at Simla in 1906 became law three years later. The Indian Councils Act of 1909, usually called the Morley-Minto Reforms after the Secretary of State and the Viceroy of the day, enlarged the legislative councils and let a limited number of their members be elected.
The Act also set aside seats for Muslims. Those seats were filled by constituencies made up of Muslim voters alone, who returned Muslim members. In several provinces the number of seats was larger than the community’s share of the population — an arrangement called weightage, meaning representation deliberately set above what numbers would give.
To see what changed, set the new arrangement beside the ordinary one. In a joint electorate, every voter in a constituency is on one roll and all of them elect the same member, whatever their religion. A candidate there must gather votes from people unlike himself, and it does not pay him to attack them. In a separate electorate, that pressure disappears.
That last point deserves weight. Fewer than one Indian in a hundred could vote in 1909, so both columns of the table describe the politics of a very small electorate. What the Act settled was not who ruled India but the terms on which Indians would compete for a share.
The League In These Years
For its first years the League stood apart from the national movement. It had opposed the agitation against the partition of Bengal, and it took no part in the boycott of British goods.
Its energy went into claims rather than campaigns: more seats in the councils, a larger share of posts in the services, and state support for Muslim education. These were the concerns of the men who had founded it.
Its leaders were landholders, titled notables and professional men, and the League made little contact with Muslim peasants, weavers and labourers, whose grievances were about rent, debt and prices. In these years the League’s arguments were aimed more often at the Congress than at the British government.
Standing apart, however, was not a permanent condition. Within four years of the 1909 Act, events far outside India began to move the League towards the Congress, and section 5.7 follows them.
5.7 The Lucknow Pact, 1916
In 1906 the League had been founded partly to keep Muslims out of the national movement. Ten years later it sat down with the Congress and put its name to a joint demand for reform.
That agreement is the Lucknow Pact — the common scheme of political reforms accepted by the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League at their sessions in December 1916. Explaining how two rivals reached it is the work of this section.
5.7.1 Circumstances Leading To The Pact
Timeline 5.2 sets out the five years in which the two bodies moved together.
The Government Disappoints Its Friends
In December 1911 the government announced that the partition of Bengal would be undone and the province reunited. The capital was also to move from Calcutta to Delhi.
For the League this was a hard blow. The measure it had welcomed in 1905, and defended since, had been reversed under nationalist pressure. Loyalty, it appeared, was not always rewarded, and the government could be moved by agitation after all.
Events Outside India
Between 1911 and 1913 the Ottoman Empire, ruled from Turkey, fought Italy and then the Balkan states and lost territory in both wars. British policy through these conflicts was not sympathetic to Turkey.
This mattered in India for two reasons. The Ottoman Sultan was regarded by many Muslims as the Caliph, the recognised head of the Muslim world, and the chief holy places of Islam lay within Ottoman territory. When Britain and Turkey found themselves on opposite sides in the First World War, feeling in India hardened further against British policy.
Wartime restrictions completed the shift. Meetings were curbed, newspapers were watched, and several prominent Muslim leaders were interned during the war.
The League Changes Its Aim
In 1913 the League amended its constitution. In place of simple support for the government, it adopted as its goal a system of self-government suitable to India, under the aegis of the British Crown.
This was the decisive change. Two organisations that want different things can only bargain; two that want the same thing can combine. From 1913 the Congress and the League had a common object, and their disagreement was reduced to terms.
A younger generation carried the change forward. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, already a Congress member, joined the League in 1913 and worked deliberately for cooperation. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Mazhar-ul-Haq and Mohammad Ali and Shaukat Ali brought nationalist thinking into Muslim politics.
The Congress Repairs Itself
The Congress had split at Surat in 1907, and its two wings had worked separately since. Tilak’s release from prison in 1914 made a reunion possible, and Annie Besant pressed hard for one.
At Lucknow in 1916 the Assertive Nationalists returned to the Congress. A Congress that had just healed its own division was in a strong position to seek an understanding with the League.
5.7.2 The Signatories Of The Pact
In 1915 both organisations held their annual sessions at Bombay, and Congress leaders attended the League’s meeting. Committees on each side were asked to draft a joint plan of reforms for after the war.
In December 1916 the two bodies met again in the same city, Lucknow, at the same time. The scheme their committees had prepared was placed before both and adopted by both.
The agreement was therefore between two organisations, not two individuals. On the League’s side the leading figure was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who presided over its Lucknow session; on the Congress side it was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who had done most to carry the terms. The Congress session itself was presided over by Ambica Charan Majumdar.
Diagram
Fig. 5.7-1 Caption: Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the leading figures on the two sides at Lucknow. Brief: Two archival portrait photographs placed side by side, each labelled with the name and the organisation the leader spoke for in 1916.
Portraits of the signatories tell us who negotiated and nothing at all about what was negotiated. For that we must read the scheme itself, which is where the bargain becomes visible.
5.7.3 The Joint Scheme Of Reforms
The scheme adopted at Lucknow ran to ten main points.
- The India Council, which advised the Secretary of State in London, was to be abolished; he was to be assisted instead by two under-secretaries, one of them an Indian.
- Four-fifths of the members of the provincial legislatures were to be directly elected and one-fifth nominated.
- A fixed proportion of seats in each province was to go to Muslims, elected through separate electorates — for example half the seats in Punjab, two-fifths in Bengal and three-tenths in the United Provinces.
- Minorities were to have adequate representation in elected bodies.
- Defence, foreign affairs, the declaration of war and the signing of peace treaties were to remain outside the control of the Imperial Legislature.
- The Imperial Legislative Council was to have 150 members, four-fifths elected and one-fifth nominated, with one-third of the elected members Muslims.
- Bills passed by the legislature were to take effect unless vetoed by the Governor-General in Council; if the same bill was passed again within a year, the government was bound to accept it.
- Provinces were to be autonomous within their own spheres.
- Half the members of the Viceroy’s Executive Council were to be Indians, chosen by the elected members of the Imperial Legislative Council.
- Executive officers were not to exercise judicial powers, and the judges of a province were to be placed under its highest court.
One further provision has a name of its own. Under the scheme, no legislative council was to proceed with any bill or resolution affecting a community if three-fourths of that community’s members in the council objected that it harmed their interests. This is the communal veto — a power given to a fixed fraction of one community’s representatives to stop a measure outright.
5.7.4 The Impact Of The Pact
The Pact’s first effect was on the government. Until 1916 officials could reply to any Indian demand by saying that Indians did not agree among themselves. After Lucknow that answer was gone, because the demand carried the names of both organisations and both wings of the Congress.
The pressure told. On 20 August 1917 the Secretary of State declared in the House of Commons that British policy was the gradual development of self-governing institutions in India, with a view to responsible government. It was the first time the object of British rule in India had been stated in those terms.
Its second effect was on the Congress itself. The Lucknow session ended the split of 1907 and brought the two wings back into one organisation. The president of that session remarked that the Congress buried at Surat had been reborn at Lucknow.
Its third effect was on relations between the two communities in public life. From 1916 the Congress and the League worked together, and that cooperation held through the years immediately after the war.
What The Pact Cost
The price was paid in principle. By accepting separate electorates and weightage, the Congress conceded that Indians would enter the councils as members of communities rather than as citizens of one country. Once granted in an agreement, that principle was very hard to withdraw.
The communal veto pointed the same way. A rule that lets a fraction of one community’s members stop a measure treats every community as a permanent bloc with fixed interests.
The Pact was also an agreement between small groups of educated and propertied men. Neither organisation had a mass membership in 1916, and no peasant, worker or artisan of either community was consulted about a scheme that allotted seats on their behalf.
Finally, unity of demand is not the same as unity of politics. The League remained a separate body with its own claims, and the two organisations continued to disagree about what Muslims needed and who should speak for them.
Historians therefore describe Lucknow in two ways at once, and both are accurate. It was the high point of cooperation between the Congress and the League. It was also the moment at which separate electorates stopped being a British imposition and became an Indian agreement.
5.8 Summary
- Hindus and Muslims had long shared a composite culture. Local disputes occurred, but religion had not yet organised Indian politics into opposed blocks.
- Communalism is the belief that people of one religion form a single political community whose interests are opposed to those of another. It is a claim about politics, not about faith.
- The formation of the Muslim League had several causes working together, not one:
- After 1857 the government treated the Muslim service and landed classes as chief suspects, and from the 1870s changed course towards conciliating them.
- Many official decisions — grants marked out by community, a census that counted people by religion, and the choice of whom to recognise as a community’s spokesmen — worked as a policy of divide and rule.
- Replacing Persian with English in 1837, and unequal access to modern schooling, left some groups behind in the competition for government posts. This describes opportunity, not ability.
- Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan built the Aligarh college and, from the mid-1880s, opposed the Congress on the ground that election by numbers would leave a smaller community permanently outvoted.
- A colonial reading of Indian history, which divided the past into Hindu and Muhammadan periods, taught people to see the past in religious blocks.
- Some Assertive Nationalists mobilised support through religious symbols, which drew many in and left others outside.
- With little modern industry, the scarcity of posts turned education into a contest and produced demands for a guaranteed share by community.
- Particular events then fixed the date. The Defence Association of 1893, the language order of 1900, the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the deputation to Lord Minto in October 1906 followed one another closely.
- The deputation asked for representation above its numbers, electorates of its own, preference in nominations and services, and aid for a university. Minto promised that Muslim rights as a community would be safeguarded.
- The All-India Muslim League was founded at Dacca on 30 December 1906, at the Mohammedan Educational Conference, on a proposal moved by Nawab Salimullah. The Aga Khan was its first president.
- Its three objectives were to promote support for the British government, to advance Muslim political rights in mild and moderate language, and to prevent hostility with other communities.
- The Indian Councils Act of 1909 gave separate electorates the force of law, with weightage in several provinces. In a separate electorate a member never needs a vote from outside his own community.
- In its first decade the League stood apart from the national movement, opposed the anti-partition agitation, and was led by notables with little contact with poorer Muslims.
- Between 1911 and 1916 four things moved the League towards the Congress: the annulment of Bengal’s partition, British policy towards Turkey, the League’s adoption of self-government as its goal in 1913, and the return of a united Congress at Lucknow.
- The Lucknow Pact of December 1916 was adopted by both organisations at simultaneous sessions. Jinnah led on the League’s side and Tilak on the Congress side.
- Its scheme demanded elected majorities in the legislatures, autonomy for the provinces, Indians in the executive, separation of judiciary from executive — and fixed shares of seats for Muslims through separate electorates, with a communal veto.
- Its impact was large. The government could no longer say Indians were divided; the Congress split of 1907 was healed; and in August 1917 Britain declared self-governing institutions to be its object in India.
- Its cost was equally real. The Congress had now accepted in writing that Indians would be represented as communities, the arrangement was settled by small elite groups, and the two organisations remained separate.
5.9 Key Terms
- Aligarh Movement — the effort led from the Aligarh college for modern education, social reform, loyalty to the British government and separation from the Congress.
- Communal veto — the power, proposed in the Lucknow Pact, of three-fourths of a community’s members in a council to stop any bill they held to be against their interests.
- Communalism — the belief that people who follow one religion form a single political community whose interests are opposed to those of another.
- Composite culture — a culture built jointly by people of different faiths, which no one of them can claim as its own alone.
- Divide and rule — governing a mixed population by keeping its groups apart, so that they oppose one another rather than the government.
- Joint electorate — an arrangement in which all the voters of an area are on one roll and together elect the same member, whatever their religion.
- Lucknow Pact — the joint scheme of political reforms accepted by the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim League at Lucknow in December 1916.
- Separate electorate — an arrangement in which the voters of one community are placed on a roll of their own and elect their own members, with no other voters taking part.
- Weightage — representation deliberately set above what a community’s share of the population would give it.
5.10 Points to Ponder
- If an organisation is founded by landholders, nawabs and lawyers meeting at a conference, in what sense can it be said to speak for a whole community?
- A candidate in a separate electorate never needs a vote from outside his own community. Does that leave him freer to represent it, or less answerable to anyone?
- The letters that arranged the Simla deputation survive; what the thirty-five signatories privately thought does not. What may a historian fairly conclude from an imbalance of evidence like that?
- Sayyid Ahmad Khan once described Hindus and Muslims as one people, and later argued that their political interests were different. What kinds of evidence would help you judge why he changed?
- At Lucknow the Congress won a united demand and gave up a principle. When, if ever, is bargaining power worth a concession of principle?
- A census that counts people by religion makes it possible to argue about each group’s share. Does counting a difference create it, or only record it?
5.11 Objective Questions
The All-India Muslim League was founded in December 1906 at
- Aligarh
- Simla
- Dacca
- Lucknow [1 mark]
Weightage means
- representation set above a community’s share of the population
- the right of a community to veto a bill in the council
- the transfer of a subject from the province to the centre
- the counting of the population by religion in the census [1 mark]
Which of the following was NOT one of the objectives adopted by the Muslim League in 1906?
- To promote support for the British government among the Muslims of India
- To place Muslim needs before the government in mild and moderate language
- To prevent hostility between the Muslims of India and other communities
- To secure complete independence for India from British rule [1 mark]
Separate electorates were given the force of law in India by the Indian Councils Act of ____________. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: in its first decade the Muslim League supported the agitation against the partition of Bengal. [1 mark]
Match the items in Column A with those in Column B. [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. 1893 | i. The League adopts self-government as its goal |
| b. 1900 | ii. The Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental Defence Association is founded |
| c. 1913 | iii. The Congress and the League adopt a joint scheme of reforms |
| d. 1916 | iv. Hindi in the Devanagari script is given equal standing in the courts |
- Assertion (A): After 1911 the Muslim League began to move closer to the Indian National Congress. Reason (R): The government annulled the partition of Bengal, which the League had welcomed and defended.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A
- A is true but R is false
- A is false but R is true [1 mark]
5.12 Check Your Concepts
Define communalism, and state one way in which it differs from religious belief. [2 marks]
Name the two organisations that adopted the Lucknow Pact, and state the year and the city in which they adopted it. [2 marks]
Differentiate between a joint electorate and a separate electorate. [3 marks]
Give reasons why the language controversy of 1900 convinced the Aligarh leaders that they needed a political organisation of their own. [3 marks]
State the three objectives adopted by the Muslim League in 1906, and explain why two of them were difficult to hold together. [4 marks]
Explain, with an example, how the way Indian history was written and taught in the nineteenth century encouraged communal thinking. [4 marks]
Trace the circumstances between 1911 and 1916 that brought the Congress and the Muslim League to a common demand. [5 marks]
Describe the impact of the Lucknow Pact on Indian politics, setting out both what it achieved and what it cost. [6 marks]
5.13 Show Your Skills
- Study the description of this photograph and answer the questions that follow. The picture shows several rows of men photographed together in December 1906 at Dacca, at the close of the meetings of the Mohammedan Educational Conference. Almost every man in it is a landholder, a titled notable, a lawyer or a teacher, and all are formally dressed for the occasion.
- Name the organisation founded at these meetings, and state the exact date of its founding.
- What does the description of the men in the photograph tell you about who the new organisation drew its members from?
- State two things a group photograph of this kind cannot tell a historian about the organisation. [5 marks]
- Read the following situation and answer the questions that follow. Two candidates are contesting elections to a provincial council in 1913. In the first constituency, every qualified voter of the district, of whatever religion, is on a single roll. In the second, only the qualified Muslim voters of the district are on the roll, and only a Muslim may stand there. Both candidates make speeches for a month before polling day.
- Identify the kind of electorate operating in each constituency, and name the Act that created the second kind.
- Explain why the first candidate has a reason to avoid attacking any community, and the second does not.
- State one thing this comparison cannot settle about the politics of 1913. [5 marks]
- Read the following situation and answer the questions that follow. In August 1906 the principal of a college wrote from Simla to the private secretary of the Viceroy, asking whether a deputation of leading Muslims would be received if it applied. The answer was yes. Eight weeks later thirty-five men presented an address to the Viceroy at Simla, and the Viceroy gave them an assurance in reply.
- Name the Viceroy, and state the assurance he gave the deputation.
- Mention any two of the demands the address placed before him.
- Historians disagree about whether the deputation was arranged by the government or by the deputationists themselves. State what the surviving correspondence can settle, and what it cannot. [6 marks]