Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

The Transfer of Power papers constitute a comprehensive record of all that passed between Indian leaders and the British government during the crucial period between 1942 and 1947. Its unveiling should have excited subcontinental scholars. It did not. The truth is that the establishments in India and Pakistan had made their adjustments with the reality handed to them in 1947. Upsetting this status quo would expose leaders of the freedom struggle as men with feet of clay. The Economist of April 1990, reviewing H. M. Seervai’s book based on the Transfer of Power documents, recommended that ‘there must be a reappraisal of reputations’. This ‘reappraisal’ has never taken place. Two years after the Transfer of Power papers were published, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal was able to establish in her Cambridge dissertation, The Sole Spokesman, that ‘it was the Congress which insisted on Partition. It was Jinnah who was against Partition.’ It has been widely accepted that the call for partition was a bargaining ploy whereby Jinnah hoped to strike a better deal for Muslims in a united India. But partnership with Muslims would have made it impossible for the Congress to achieve what Maulana Azad described as ‘unadulterated Hindu Raj’. Partition, in a way, was the gift the Congress gave to the Hindu right, which in the fullness of time, is today’s Hindutva.

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