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V SUNDARAM

        Y Krishan brilliantly exposes the fraud underlying the thesis that the Indian Muslims were innocent in partitioning the country. In the process he brings out the hypocrisy and double talk of Muslim intellectuals and scholars. Many Indian Muslims feel that the Muslims are treated as a suspect community having committed the supposed sin of partition. Rafiq Zakaria in his book on Partition cites the lament of a Mulim poet:

        'Among the sinners we are counted Though for what sin we know not Of the punishment we are aware But for what , God alone can tell'

        Scholars like Rafiq Zakaria, Azhar Ali Engineer, Dr.Syed Mahmud, and many other Muslim scholars overstrain themselves through either exaggerated or consciously loaded arguments to dilute the responsibility of the Muslims of India in bringing about the partition of the country. They do so by challenging the representative character of the Muslim League of Jinnah on the eve of Partition. For example Azghar Ali observes: 'It would be very difficult to maintain that all Indian Muslims were responsible for the creation of Pakistan. Only the educated Muslim elite classes of the UP and Bihar who supported Pakistan out of fear of losing their privileges in these feudal States. There was no universal franchise at that time. Only 10 per cent of the population had franchise at that time : And not more than 5 per cent voted in the crucial election of 1945. Out of these only 3.5 per cent supported the Muslim League. Thus only a miniscule minority of Muslims supported the Pakistan movement.'

        Krishan dismisses these untenable arguments by concluding that these Muslim scholars have deliberately overlooked the fact that an overwhelming majority of politically enfranchised Muslims in India supported the Pakistan movement.

        A pseudo-secular Congress politician of the Nehru era Dr Syed Mahmud in his address to the All India Muslim Conference held at Lucknow in 1964 said : 'Pakistan could not have been possible only by the support of the Muslims if the non-Muslims had not agreed. The leaders of both the communities have sinned and both are responsible for the tragedy of Partition.'

        Maulana Azad, Ayesha Jalal, Azghar Ali Engineer and Rafiq Zakaria have all concluded that Jinnah did not want Pakistan. According to them, Nehru and Patel were the real architects of Pakistan. These historians contend that it was the Congress which insisted on partition: 'It was Jinnah who was against Partiton. These are only a few minor flashes from the boundlessly rich and varied battery of anti-Kafir, blatantly Islamic and hysterical Historiography!! These great historians are only a hairline away from the declaration that Jinnah was a helpless victim of terrorism let loose by Mahakafir Mahatma Gandhi!!! After an exhaustive and penetrating analysis of the facts derived from the primary sources and a critical examination of all the major studies of the different aspects of Partition by distinguished scholars, Y Krishan comes to the categorical conclusion that it was the handiwork of Jinnah and the Muslim League leaders. To quote his own words : 'They had mobilised mass and passionate support of the Muslim community by raising the bogey of the Muslim minority and Islam being in danger, by actively promoting separatism by vigorously fertilising the poisonous weed of the Two-Nation Theory and eventually creating conditions which made peaceful co-existence of the two major communities — Hindus and Muslims — virtually impossible.'

        Y Krishan has also once for all destroyed the myth marketed by Jinnah and the Muslim League leaders after 1939 that the Congress Provincial Governments committed atrocities against Muslim minority in the Provinces of United Provinces (UP), Bihar, Central Provinces and Bombay in 1937 - 39. The Muslim League had asked the Raja of Pirpor (UP) Mohammed Mehdi Raja Syed to give a report on the Congress atrocities against the Muslims in 1938. Like most of the anti-national Muslim clerics in India today, he concluded: 'The conduct of the Congress Governments seems to substantiate the theory that there is something like identity of purpose between Congress and the Hindu Maha Sabha. We Muslims feel that vast majority of the Congress members are Hindus who look forward to the establishment of a purely a Hindu Raj.' The Muslims of UP view the use of the Congress flag, the use of the National Anthem (Vande Mataram), the reverence paid to Mahatma Gandhi, the policy of cow protection and the use of Hindi as an attack on the civil and cultural rights of the Muslims. The same anti-Kafir Islamic swan song was sung with vicious communal gusto by the Shareef Committee Report

        (1938) about the plight of Muslims in Bihar under the Congress (Hindu majority) rule. It complained of the reign of terror in Bihar. The same kind of General Report was given by the one-man committee report of Fazlul Haq (1939). He spoke of the sufferings of the Muslims under the Congress rule - denigration of Islam, interference with the religious beliefs and practices and cow slaughter and above all desecration of mosques by throwing pig meat in them etc. Accoring to Y Krishan these three reports laid a solid foundation for the birth if Pakistan. Jinnah blessed it in 1939 by declaring: 'Democracy of the kind with which the Congress high command is enamoured would mean a complete destruction of what is most precious in Islam.'

        It is clear from Y Krishan's acute analysis that it was Jinnah who sabotaged Gandhiji's proposal in 1944 to the effect that in a referendum on Pakistan in Muslim majority areas, the non-Muslim citizens would have the right to vote. Jinnah stuck to his position that only the Muslim residents had the right to vote. This meant that the non-Muslim bona-fide residents would not be treated as citizens and nationals of Jinnah's future Pakistan because of their religion. Thus Jinnah was clear and categorical in his commitment to make Pakistan the homeland for Muslims only.

        Lord Wavell , the Viceroy also assisted Jinnah and the Muslim League by coming out with his totally sinister Parity Principle to be made applicable to both the Muslims and the Hindus during the political negotiations in 1945 at Simla. By cleverly omitting to invite the truly secular Unionist Party from the Punjab for the Simla Conference in 1945 and by denying a seat to that Party in the Governor General's Council, Lord Wavell strengthened the hands of Jinnah and the Muslim League in the sordid process of manipulation for the creation of Pakistan. In the process, the civilized and democratic Unionist Party totally disappeared from the political scene.

        Another strikingly important point brought out by Y Krishan in this seminal book is that the government of India destroyed the composite character of the Civil and other Public Services by making the administrative apparatus partisan and discriminatory which became clear during those dark days of complete breakdown of law and order in the Punjab. This end process was diabolically achieved by giving option to Services in 1947 to serve in Dominions of their choice. Consequently all the Hindu minority officers came back to India from Punjab and all the Muslim minority officers went back to Pakistan from India. The entire civil administration in Pakistan was thus converted into a barbarous clan of violent marauders for letting loose organised Islamic violence against the Hindus.

        After the Cripps and the Cabinet Vision Plans, Jinnah and the Muslim League became certain of British Government's support for the establishment of Pakistan. Thereafter they were not willing to make a settlement with the Congress except on their own terms.

        Y Krishan also gives an interesting account of a discussion he had with Pandit Jawarlal Nehru as an IAS probationer in the IAS Training College at Metcalfe House in Delhi in 1948. Nehtu's face turned red when Y Krishan, then only 26 years old, put a straight question to Nehru: 'Sir, why have you allowed anti-national PAKISTAN SUPPORTING Muslim leaders like the Raja of Muhammedabad, Begum Aizaz Rasul, Raja of Pirpur, Maulana Hasrat Mohani etc from UP, Syed Hussain Imam from Bihar, Mohammed Ismail from Madras, who have shamelessly worked with Jinnah for the creation of Pakistan, to remain in India even after 15 August, 1947?'

        I am of the view that Y Krishan showed greater understanding of the anti-national Muslim psyche as a young man than Islam-embracing Nehru in 1948! If only those anti-national men had been thrown out of India in 1947, the rest of the Muslims in India would have settled down to a life of peaceful co-existence in post-independent India.

        Finally Jinnah gave a parting Islamic kick to both Nehru and Gandhi on 15 August, 1947 by giving this solemn appeal to the Muslims of India: 'Now that your country is divided, you should be loyal citizens of India.' Was this not an act of betrayal of the Pakistan movement and of the Indian Muslims for whose 'liberation' India was partitioned?

        All in all Y Krishan's book is a major path-breaking book on India's partition. General, abstract truth is the most precious of all blessings: 'Without it, man is blind, it is the eye of reason'. Y Krishan has clearly brought out some unknown, unpleasant but very vital truths about the Partition of India. He has indeed given a cubic content to the following immortal words of a timeless historian TACITUS: 'This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.'