Nehru: The Invention of India

by Shashi Tharoor

As early as 1888, the Congress’s founder, Allan Octavian Hume, felt obliged to denounce British attempts to promote Hindu-Muslim division by fostering ‘the devil’s . . . dismal doctrine of discord and disunion’. The strategy was hardly surprising for an imperial power. ‘Divide et impera was the old Roman motto,’ wrote Lord Elphinstone after the 1857 Mutiny, ‘and it should be ours.’ Promoting communal discord became conscious British policy. In December 1887—at a time when the Congress’s first Muslim President, Badruddin Tyabji, was striving to unite Hindus and Muslims in a common cause—the pro-British judge and Muslim educationist, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was arguing in a speech in Lucknow that the departure of the British would inevitably lead to civil war. The numerical advantage of Hindus over Muslims would give them unfair advantage in a democratic India; imperial rule by the Christian British, fellow ‘people of the book’, was therefore preferable. In 1906, a deputation of Muslim notables led by the Aga Khan and seeking separate privileges for Muslims was received by the British Viceroy, and the Muslim League was born. But in its thirty years of existence, the League had failed to become a potent force in national politics. Jinnah formulated an effective strategy to raise the League to political prominence as the ‘third party’ in a struggle involving the British and the Congress. He argued that he too was an Indian nationalist who sought greater rights from the British, bu...