INDIA AND UNITY
By SIR WILLIAM BARTON T is a commonplace with Indian Muslims that Britain is always I ready to placate the Hindu Congress at the expense of her friends the moment Congress shows signs of reasonableness. In fact, leading Muslims go so far as to assert that the British, in passing the India Act of 1935, handed over their community, bound hand and foot, to the Hindus. Their fear *of domination by the Hindu majority, should a strong central government be set up when the British finally hand over India, is mainly responsible for the Muslim claim to separate Dominion Status.
The Cripps' offer recognised the principle of Muslim separatism. Muslims, however, wanted something more definite ; they have of late begun to doubt British sincerity. For example, they thought the reference in Parliamentary debates to the underlying unity in diversity in Indian life ominous ; in particular, they disliked the emphasis laid by the Viceroy on the geographical unity of India and the importance of its political unity in the post-war world in his address to the Chamber of Commerce in Calcutta last December. The political unity existing at prestnt is. Muslims insist, the creation of British power ; withdraw that power and the political structure based on it falls to pieces. The leaders of the Hindu majority, on the other hand, especially the Hindu Mahasabha, insist on the indivisibility of India and on an all-powerful government at the Centre. Most of them demand the abolition of the communal award so as to ensure the control of the central government by the Hindu majority. Muslims, it may be noted, if the award went, would in all probability lose control of Bengal, which would make their position almost impossible. India, in Hindu eyes, is a living political organism ; to carve out of it a separate Muslim...dominion would be sheer vivisection.
How far can this view be supported by the evidence? At the outset it is permissible to challenge the theory of geographical unity. The wide belt of difficult hill and forest, comprising the Vindhya and Satpura Mountains, isolated the peninsula through the ages from the great river valleys of the north, preventing the flow over the mountain barrier of the streams of invasion which, for thousands of years, swept over Upper India. The result is a differ- ence in the ethnic pattern between the two regions, a conflict of Dravidian ideology in the south with the Indo-Aryan ideology of the north, a conflict which is manifested today in the reluctance of the non-Brahmin Dravidian Hindus of Madras to accept the political dominance of the Indo-Aryan Brahmins of the north who control Congress. The strong opposition of these Dravidian Hindus to the attempt of the Congress High Command to impose a northern language, Hindi, on the country generally was significant of this attitude.
Disunity was the prevliling characteristic of India during the Hindu era, for 2,000 years or more, till the Muslim invasion of the eleventh century A.D. The country was divided into many kingdoms, small and great, constantly at war with each other. There was never a Hindu empire covering the whole, or even the greater part, of the sub-continent. The lack of political homogeneity was largely responsible for the ease with which the Muslim invaders overthrew
Hindu sovereignty. It is true that the Buddhist empire of Asolta (273-232 sec.) extenied south of the Vindhyas almost to" Mysore ;
the Hindu empire of the Guptas and Harsha (400 A.D. and 6.4o A.D.), however, was practically confined to the ancient Aryavarta, the holy land of Hinduism between the Vindhyas and the Himalayas. It seems then that the political unity of India has never been a Hindu achievement.
Muslim rule in India lasted for seven ceeturies. Yet no Muslim empire ever succeeded in absorbing the whole country. From the
fourteenth century separate Muslim kingdoms, independent of Delhi, dominated the country south of the Vindhyas, until at the end of the seventeenth they were overthrown by Aurangzeb the Mughal Emperor of Delhi. The empire collapsed soon afterwards. By the middle of the eighteenth century, when the British appear prominently on the scene, India was hopelessly divided against itself. The Maratha Hindus were plundering the Hindu Raiputs and levying blackmail all over the country ; a Muslim soldier of fortune held Mysore ; half the Panjab and Kashmir were included in the Afghan empire based on Kabul ; Mughal governors in Oudh, Bengal and Hyderabad had established separate kingdoms. From the chaos and anarchy then existing Britain has evolved the political unity which the Hindu intelligentsia values so highly today. Is it po sible, in view of the light thrown by history on the defects of Hind rule, that Hindu politicians would be able to keep conflicting element together once supreme power had been placed in their hands?
It is a very doubtful proposition. Hinduism, with the cast system and its implications, such as untouchability, is a hous divided against itself. Many Hindus recognise this and advocat the abolition of caste. Dr. Ambedkar, the well-known outcast leader, supports this view. The Hindu social system, he thinks, overweighted and unbalanced ; as it is, it cannot be the basis political reform without serious adjustments. Here, one may observe is an element in the Indian political field to which British politician have failed to give due weight.
An undivided India only exists in the dreamlarid of politic Hinduism, if we are to believe that intrepid realist, Mr. Rajag palachari, ex-Congress Premier of Madras, now taking a line his own. India, in his opinion, must inevitably go through a Ulster stage before she finds herself politically, and he would pledg political Hinduism to concede a separate Dominion to the Muslim should they ultimately desire it. His object at the moment is make possible a National Government by bringing the two mai parties together, Muslim separation is closely bound up with th problem of defence. What Hindus dread is that an independen Muslim State in India might, in alliance with Afghanistan and oth Muslim States, e.g., those of the Saadabad Pact, threaten the peg of Hindu India. The only escape from the danger is that Ind" should remain in the Commonwealth and rely on the Imperial fore for protection against external attack.
The unity Britain has built up in India is of immense value ; t keep it intact is well worth a heavy sacrifice on the part of Hind India, even to the extent of agreeing to the substitution, in place a strong central government, of a loose confederation of perhaps thr Dominions, Pakistan (Muslim India), Hindustan (Hindu India) an Rajistan (the India of the Princes), India to temain in the Commo wealth. The result might be that ultimately, perhaps in a generatio the social and political barriers which divide Hindu and Musli would be broken down, making poisible a common culture an outloole on life. There would then be no obstacle in the way the strong central government on which political Hinduism lays much stress.
Whatever the attitude of political Hinduism may be towards Muslim claim to separate Dominion Status, Muslims may rely Britain to carry through the pledges given in the Cripps off Britain will not abolish the communal award. Muslims will ha a square deal in the ultimate settlement. But British statesm view with regret the prospect of the splitting up of the Indi Empire, and it is not surprising that from time to time they discu the problem in the hope of inducing the protagonists to come to reasonable compromise that might leave unimpaired the politi unity India enjoys-at the moment.
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