“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If
we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the
bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle
has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves,
that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost
never get it back.”
-
Carl Sagan
Hi, Everyone! This is
the last post in this series. And so I am going to recap in words of other
authors all that I have documented in the posts of the last couple of weeks.
“Lord Linlithgow, who was in favour
of the unity of India, once said that ‘the Hindus have made the mistake of
taking Jinnah seriously about Pakistan and as a result have given substance to
the shadow.’”
“In the last week of September
1945, at a meeting of the All-India Congress Committee in Bombay, Sardar Patel
even demonstratively chastised a Muslim member, one Mr. Mians, in these words:
‘If you say that the Muslim League is a nationalist organization, why are you
to be found in the Congress at all? Ever since the
Congress abandoned unadulterated nationalism the mischief had grown. That
was when the Congress accepted separate communal electorates. There have since
been a series of mistakes. From minority representation we travelled to the
fifty-fifty parity principle.”[1]
“It has been pointed out more than once in the
three volumes of this work that there were fundamental differences between the
Hindus and Muslims of India which stood in the way of their fusing into one
nation, as this term is generally understood.
This was emphasized by the separate
electorate, originally devised by Minto, but later accepted by the Congress.
Since then the Congress had, in practice if not in theory, recognized the
two-nation theory. . . .
As far back as 1934 the Congress
pledged itself to reject any scheme of solving communal problem vis-à-vis Indian Constitution which was
not agreed to by the Muslims.”[2]
“In 1937 his [Nehru’s] outright
rejection of Jinnah’s offer of Congress-League Coalition Ministry ruined the
last chance of a Hindu-Muslim agreement.”[3]
In 1942 Gandhi wrote in Harijan that if the vast majority of
Muslims want to partition India they must have the partition; and in 1944 he
actually carried on negotiations with Jinnah on this basis.
In 1945 the Congress Working
Committee passed a resolution that it could not think ‘of compelling the people
in any territorial unit to remain in an Indian union against their declared and
established will.’
The eminent Hindu leader
Rajagopalachari actually suggested the idea of Pakistan as the only basis for a
peaceful settlement of the Hindu-Muslim problem and
Even Nehru conceded the possibility
of Pakistan in January, 1946.
Early in March, the Working
Committee of the Congress itself suggested the partition of the Punjab, and
(therefore also of) Bengal, on communal basis.”[4]
“In 1937 his [Nehru’s] outright
rejection of Jinnah’s offer of Congress-League Coalition Ministry ruined the
last chance of a Hindu-Muslim agreement. His observance in 1946 destroyed the
last chance—though a remote one—of a free united India.”[5]
Anurupa
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