Encyclopedia of Islam

India

  

355  J

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torates for Muslims. AIML and INC also agreed to 

support the British in World War I; more than 1 

million Indians served in the British armed forces 

during this war.

After the war, both organizations participated 

in the Khilafat movement (1919–24), but their 

relations grew more strained when the move-

ment failed. Muslims continued to participate in 

the effort to achieve self-government, but AIML 

leadership became increasingly concerned about 

their minority status in a democratic republic 

where Hindus would be in the majority. They 

knew that not only were they in the minority, 

but also that the Muslim populace was scattered 

across India, speaking different languages and 

having different social statuses. Instituting the 

sharia

 or an Islamic government was not on 

their agenda. Rather, they sought ways to create 

a sense of common purpose among India’s Mus-

lims to protect their political interests. Whereas 

the leadership in Congress favored creating a 

centralized federal government elected by the 

majority with no guaranteed reservations for 

Muslims, AIML leaders wanted more provin-

cial autonomy in parts of India where Muslims 

were in the majority. They also wanted at least 

a third of the seats in the legislature reserved 

for Muslims. Not all Muslim leaders, however, 

favored Muslim political advocacy. Indian ulama, 

especially the Deobandis, envisioned a Muslim 

community who were educated in Islam and 

its moral principles living together with other 

Indians. Indeed, many supported the INC, as did 

several prominent secular Muslims.

As Hindu and Muslim approaches to self-gov-

ernment diverged internally as well as externally, 

many Indians joined in opposing British reluc-

tance to surrender power to the Indian people. 

In the forefront of those opposed to Indian inde-

pendence was Winston Churchill (d. 1965), an 

imperialist and political conservative who would 

become England’s heroic prime minister during 

World War II. Regarding Indians as children who 

needed to be disciplined, the British resorted on 

several occasions to the use of brute force to quell 

acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent demon-

strations. Nevertheless, Indian political parties 

achieved greater voting rights and were able to 

hold elections in 1937. This brought the INC to 

power for the first time. The AIML had a weak 

showing in these elections; even where Muslims 

were in the majority, local parties based on class 

rather than religious identity did better than the 

AIML. The INC, on the other hand, failed to bring 

about meaningful changes in the aftermath of the 

election, thus limiting its ability to win skeptical 

Muslim voters to its ranks.

World War II brought further division between 

the two parties. The INC, departing from its pro-

British stance in World War I, refused to support 

the British. Subhash Bose (d. 1945), a two-term 

INC president, even raised an army with Japanese 

support to fight against them, hoping to achieve 

independence by bringing about a British defeat. 

The mainstream INC leadership, led by Gandhi, 

won widespread popular support by mobiliz-

ing large-scale acts of civil disobedience against 

the British, known as the Quit India Movement. 

Many of the party’s leaders spent the war in prison 

as a consequence, but they triumphed after the 

war by sweeping the elections of 1945–46. The 

AIML, on the other hand, decided to support the 

British war effort in the hope that their political 

position would improve with the war’s conclu-

sion. In the postwar elections, it, too, could claim 

victory. It won all reserved seats in the national 

legislature, plus most of the Muslim seats in local 

legislatures.

The AIML’s success was a result of a strategy 

of reaching out to rural voters through Sufi pirs 

and taking advantage of divisions among local 

political parties. Jinnah’s party also gained popu-

lar support among Muslims by invoking the ideal 

of Pakistan, a “pure land” for all Indian Muslims 

where they could be free to realize their ideals to 

the fullest. The idea of a political entity to protect 

Muslims from domination by non-Hindus had 

been articulated earlier by m

Uhammad

  i

qbal

 (d. 

K  356  

India

---

1938), a leading Indian intellectual, past presi-

dent of AIML, and close associate of Jinnah. In 

the election’s aftermath, Jinnah claimed to be the 

“sole spokesman” for India’s Muslims, but he was 

still undecided about whether that state would be 

within the boundary of an Indian nation or out-

side it. Most Muslims, in fact, were not calling for 

a two-state partition but a self-governing Muslim 

entity in a united India. Hindu-Muslim commu-

nal rioting and the inability to find a compromise 

solution with INC leadership, particularly with 

its chairman, Jawaharlal Nehru (d. 1964), even-

tually convinced Jinnah that a separate Muslim 

state in areas where Muslims were in the majority 

was indeed necessary. Such an entity would have 

to consist of grouped provinces, not fragmented 

states scattered across India as some were propos-

ing. The two provinces that would form the new 

Muslim state were the Punjab in the west and 

Bengal in the east.

The British realized that in their weakened 

postwar position they could no longer hold 

nationalist forces at bay in India or anywhere 

else in the world where they still had colonies 

or mandate territories. In March 1946, there-

fore, they sent a high-level delegation to India 

to try to mediate the differences between the 

contending Indian nationalist parties, hoping 

to prevent a two-state partition. This is what 

Gandhi desired, too, and he even proposed that 

Jinnah be named India’s first prime minister, an 

idea that was ignored. Hindu nationalists assas-

sinated him in January 1948 because of their 

anger over his efforts to achieve reconciliation 

between Muslims and Hindus. In the end, the 

British delegation failed, and Lord Mountbatten, 

the Crown’s last viceroy, was appointed in Feb-

ruary 1947 to oversee the drawing of political 

boundaries and the smooth transfer of power to 

the leaders of India and Pakistan no later than 

June 1948.

The Punjab region straddled the western bor-

der between the two newly created countries and 

became the site where intercommunal hatreds 

exploded in a frenzy of mass murder, rape, and 

flight during the summer of 1947. Terrified Sikhs 

and Hindus fled eastward to India, and terrified 

Muslims fled westward to Pakistan. Although 

statistics in such turbulent conditions are often 

imprecise, it is widely accepted that as many as 

10 million were uprooted and 1 million died in 

the violence. The reverberations of this painful 

moment in Indo-Pakistani history can still be 

felt in the streets and byways of both countries. 

Pakistani Muslims remember this event as a h

iJra

,

recalling the Hijra of m

Uhammad

 from m

ecca

  to 

m

edina

 in 622.

On August 15, 1947, India’s first prime minis-

ter, Jawaharlal Nehru, stood before a large crowd 

and proclaimed India’s independence. It was a 

bittersweet moment, because it combined the 

thrill of independence with the pains of parti-

tion. Nehru chose to raise India’s new flag that 

day in front of Old Delhi’s Red Fort, the former 

seat of the Mughal rulers. The previous evening, 

speaking before the Constituent Assembly in New 

Delhi, he had declared, “The past clings on to us 

still.” The choice of the site and Nehru’s words 

indicate that the founding of the new republic was 

done with a keen awareness of how it had taken 

shape during a long history of Hindu, Muslim, 

and British interaction. It is also worth noting 

that not all Indian Muslims migrated to Pakistan. 

About half of them stayed, declaring that India 

was their true home.

On August 15, 2007, India celebrated its 60th 

anniversary. The intervening years were ones 

that saw Muslim participation in Indian politics, 

including three Muslims who served as president. 

They were also a time marked by several conflicts 

and near-conflicts with Pakistan. The two coun-

tries still have not reached a settlement on the 

question of Kashmir, a borderland Muslim major-

ity state that was officially made part of India at 

the time of partition. Nevertheless, Indians and 

Pakistanis continue to share a common history 

and culture, including a love for romantic poetry, 

popular music, curried foods, Bollywood films,