This was in 1950, with the government under pressure from the right to intervene militarily in East Pakistan, where a massacre of Hindus had begun. Jawaharlal first tried to work with his Pakistani counterpart, Liaquat Ali Khan, on a joint approach to communal disturbances and then, when this had been ignored, offered President Rajendra Prasad (a Patel ally) his resignation. But when Patel called a meeting of Congress Party members at his home to criticize Jawaharlal's weakness on the issue, Nehru fought back, withdrawing his offer of resignation, challenging Patel to a public debate on Pakistan policy and even writing to express doubt as to whether the two of them could work together anymore. The counterassault was so ferocious that Patel backed off and affirmed his loyalty to Jawaharlal, supporting the pact Nehru signed with his Pakistani counterpart.
Yet Patel did so not because he could not have defeated Nehru politically, but because he felt Nehru deserved his support on an issue of principle. Whereas the Hindu Mahasabha sympathizers in the cabinet, Shyama Prasad Mookherjee and K. C. Neogi, resigned over the Nehru-Liaquat Pact, Patel not only urged them to stay, he committed himself to the pact's implementation. His logic was Gandhian: the problem may have started with the mistreatment of Hindus in East Pakistan, but the moment retaliatory measures were taken against Muslims in West Bengal, India, in his view, lost the moral authority to put itself on a different plane than Pakistan or to take military action against it. Those who saw Patel as a hard-liner and a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sympathizer were surprised, but those who knew him as a lifetime Gandhian — and a man of his word who had been trained to respect and believe in the law — were not.
The Nehru-Patel partnership lasted only three years beyond independence. Sardar Patel had suffered a heart attack a few months after the Mahatma's assassination; then stomach cancer struck, and in December 1950, having fulfilled his historic role of consolidating India's fragile freedom, he passed away, age seventy-five. Patel and Nehru had also served as a check upon each other, and his passing left Jawaharlal unchallenged.
And yet, it must not be forgotten that Mahatma Gandhi's assassination by a Hindu fanatic strengthened the fundamental unity of the two men. The Mahatma's last conversation was with Patel; it is believed that the Sardar had been describing his differences with Nehru and seeking permission to quit the cabinet. Gandhiji again advised them to work together, and his death minutes later made that request a binding obligation upon the Sardar. Nehru (who had been scheduled to meet with the Mahatma on the same subject immediately after that fateful prayer meeting) saw it the same way. Gandhi's death brought the two together again; in their grief they put their differences behind them. It is time that their followers do the same. The heritage of all Indians is richer for having both Nehru and Patel to honor.
26. The Man Who Stayed Behind
IT IS ONE OF THE MORE INTRIGUING PARADOXES of Indian nationalism that the man who led the Congress Party for most of the crucial years before independence — at a time when the struggle was increasingly seen as being not just between Indians and British but between advocates of a united India and followers of Muslim separatism — was himself a Muslim.
Maulana Abul Kalam Muhiyuddin Ahmed — Maulana “Azad” (free) as he had baptized himself in his twenties — was president of the Indian National Congress from 1940 to 1945, leader of the Quit India movement and head of Congress Party delegations in crucial meetings during this period. As a Muslim divine, steeped in the erudition of his faith, and as a committed nationalist unalterably opposed to the proposed partition of his country, Azad symbolized the all-inclusive aspirations of the nationalist movement. The Muslim League leader Mohammed Ali Jinnah disparaged him as the “Muslim Lord Haw-Haw” (a reference to the British traitor who made propaganda broadcasts for the Nazis during World War II) and a “Congress Showboy,” a token elected by the Congress Party in 1940 to advertise its secular credentials. Maulana was too dignified a figure to respond to these insults. But at the All-India Congress Committee session in July 1947 that debated the Partition plan, Azad stayed silent throughout, and finally abstained from voting on the resolution. He could not vote against it because he knew that the League's appeal had now captured most of the Muslim masses, and he had learned through bitter experience how intractable the League's leaders were and how illusory the prospects of cooperation with them in a national government. So Partition, the very idea of which he found abhorrent, had become inevitable, and Maulana Azad was too intelligent a man not to acknowledge reality. His silence was the silence of a man who had nothing left to say; no words could have been adequate in the face of this transcendent political failure.
The irony was that he was ten times the Muslim that the secular, bacon-and-sausage-eating, English-educated, and Westernized Jinnah was. Born in Mecca and raised in Calcutta, Maulana Azad was a brilliant Islamic scholar, completing his religious studies at the astonishingly young age of sixteen, some nine years younger than the norm. He was a linguist, mastering Persian and Arabic in addition to Urdu and Hindi; an internationalist, who traveled extensively in the Arab and Muslim worlds acquiring a deep understanding of the main currents in those societies; a scholar, who read widely and retained a profound, even enyclopedic, knowledge of political and social issues; an educationist, who founded the Jamia Millia Islamia University in Delhi; a journalist and writer, who started, edited, and wrote India's first nationalist newspapers in Urdu; and a man of action, who led the Khilafat movement and the Dharasana agitation, and who remains the youngest-ever president of the Indian National Congress, having been first elected to that position in 1923 at the age of barely thirty-five.
And in the midst of all this he was a deeply humane and reflective Islamic thinker. Where Jinnah's was an Islam of identity, Azad's was an Islam of faith and conviction, the source of his intellectual worldview. As a follower of the Ahl-i-Hadith school of Islamic theology, he took a broad and all-encompassing view of his faith, reflected in several treatises liberally reinterpreting the holy texts and principles of Islam. Within the grand debate in Islamic jurisprudence between votaries of Taqlid, or strict adherence to conformity, and Tajdid, or constructive reinterpretation of doctrine in the light of contemporary social needs, the Maulana stood uncompromisingly for innovation. Muslim scholars counted him among the most gifted exponents of wahdat-i-deen, the Islamic equivalent of “Sarva Deva Samabhavaha,” or the essential oneness of all religions, and his unfinished Tarjuman-al-Quran is a remarkable exposition of the Koran as a vehicle for pluralism, intercommunal harmony and coexistence.
After Partition, Azad understood his historic role as the country's most important Muslim leader; in his person he symbolized the new democracy's guarantee that his co-religionists could remain in their homeland in security and dignity. In the wake of Partition he traveled extensively in the regions rent by communal carnage, directing the organization of relief work and setting up refugee camps, making powerful speeches to large audiences to promote peace in the newly drawn border areas and encouraging his fellow Muslims throughout India to remain loyal to their homeland, without fear for their safety and well-being. His devotion to this role sometimes involved him in clashes in the cabinet, notably with Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel over security issues in Delhi and Punjab, as well as over the allocation of resources to displaced Muslims for relief and rehabilitation. “If you want to see Pakistan, go to the Education Ministry,” one politician darkly growled about the Maulana's appointment of Muslim officials to positions in his own department.