Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

Father and son attended the Lucknow Congress of 1916, when a historic Hindu-Muslim pact was concluded between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, a party of Muslim notables that had been established in 1905 to advance Muslim interests (though several leading Congressmen, including three of the party’s Presidents to date, were themselves Muslim). But Jawaharlal did not speak at the Congress, remaining on the margins of that great (and sadly to prove evanescent) triumph of Hindu-Muslim political co-operation. His father, however, was emerging as a major figure in the party. Motilal was named by the Congress to draft, together with a brilliant young Muslim lawyer called Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the principles that would govern co-operation with the Muslim League. Their work, recognizing the principle that decisions would not be taken affecting the interests and beliefs of a minority community without the agreement of a majority of that community’s representatives, formed the foundation of what was widely hailed as the Lucknow Pact. The Congress’s leading literary light, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, hailed Jinnah as the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’ and set about editing a compilation of his speeches and writings. Nineteen sixteen was a banner year for the nationalist movement. The fracture in the Congress between the Moderates and the Extremists had been overcome with the re-entry of Tilak and Besant into the party; now the chasm between the Congress and the M...