Attacks Gandhi and Jinnah

S’s main appeal to the Hindus was that they should elect only those Hindus who could boldly acts as advocates of a Hindu nation. The Congress had one policy i.e. of trampling Hindu sentiment to please the Muslims. The more the Congress bent the more fanatic the Muslims became. Congress leaders, mostly, did not have understanding of the Muslim mind, was held to be one of the reasons for Partition. Unfortunately leaders of post independent India have failed to learn from the mistakes made earlier.

Two guiding principles inspired S through out his career; they were the Independence and Indivisibility of India. He sensed India’s independence but was scared of the Congress’s servile, deceptive attitude. A foretold by S, the Muslim League came out with a demand for dividing Bharat. Said its Lahore Resolution of 1940 “The areas in which Muslims are numerically are majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute Independent states in which they shall be autonomous and sovereign”. When S criticized the Congress they discredited him for having suspected the patriotism of their holy fathers, I would say when you have no argument to defend yourself you use these words.

S never tolerated any unjust or unpatriotic political demands made by Indian minorities. He wanted patriots not minorities who demanded their pound of flesh for agreeing to something. When Rajaji offered the League Pakistan if they agreed to join the National Govt, S said it was a typical Congress conception of national unity that such as assurance should be given to the League before even the Brits had done so. What infuriated S was an article by Gandhi in the Harijan in October 1940 which stated that in case the Brits were overthrown as a result of the war and internal anarchy set in, “the strongest power in the land will hold sway over India and this may be Hyderabad for aught I know. All other chiefs will succumb to the strongest power of the Nizam who will be the emperor of India”. Why Gandhi was so madly infatuated with the Muslims baffles me. S replied that Gandhi knew as little of history as of Hebru and stated that if the rule of an Aurangzeb was domestic rule, the Hindus detested it as veritable hell. Gandhi’s disciple, Patel, by attacking Hyderabad 8 years later, vindicated S’s stand.

Whirlwind propaganda made S’s health deteriorate. Yet he attended the annual session of the Mahasabha in 1940 where he was elected President. In March 1941, Liberal circles held a non-party conference in Mumbai. Its convener was Tej Bahadur Sapru. The conference was about to break up since some of the leaders were nervous about its representation. At this crucial moment Sapru requested S to address the meet. He asserted his belief in India’s right to complete independence, but although some of them present there did not agree with him fully, they should travel together so long as they had a common journey. Sapru openly thanked S for saving the conference. Liberal leaders present were impressed with S’s intellectual and persuasive powers, rationalistic and realistic approach to the political problem. Jinnah as usual said the conference was engineered by the agents of the Congress and Mahasabha.

The Congress adopted a strange policy towards the Census. S believed that for the next 10 yrs, the census would determine all constitutional progress and matters wrt public services, representations in legislatures. The numerical strength between Hindus and Muslims as recorded in the census was going to affect the political discussions in India as had the census of 1931 affected the act of 1935. S appealed to all Hindus, Arya samajists, lingayats, sardars, jains to show their religion as Vedic, Hindu. The Congress boycotted it since to them it was a communal question. S said that if it were indeed communal why had, the Congress had agreed to communal electorates, they gave recognition to the numerical strengths while deciding the political questions of India. As a result Bengal was incorrectly declared a Muslim majority province. It was the same Congress who had boycotted the Census of 1931 but took the figures of the Muslim population as correct while determining the question of communal weightages in 1931. Later the negotiations between Jinnah and the Brit Cabinet Mission for determining the issue of Pakistan were taken on the basis of these census figures. Where had the Congressmen left their intellect?

Jinnah denounced the Mahasabha and warned the Brits that if they failed to create Pakistan, others would come and do it. S retorted that if the state of Croats was an ideal of his Pakistan, he asked Jinnah to read history and know the fate of Croats, Serbs and Slavs who had been victims of larger states. He said that the Hindu-Buddhist alliance from Jammu to Japan would be resisting a Pan-Islamic alliance. He ended by saying, “History avers to the ever-abiding truth that in India, Pakistanis may come and go but Hindustan goes on forever. If the Muslim insisted on partition, he said the Hindus are determined to continue the good fight for the freedom and integrity of Hindustan”.

It was the belief of S that no nation in World War II was actuated by moral considerations. To underline this truth he sent a cable to American President D. Roosevelt on 20/8/1941 urging him to declare whether the Atlantic Charter announced by him and Churchill covered the case of India or not and whether Amercial guaranteed the full political freedom of India within a year of the war. The cable was broadcast through out the world esp in Germany, Britain, Amercia etc and fully exploited by Hitler to expose the Allies profession of love and democracy. The point S drove home that India need not base her hopes on the professed war aims of the Allies.

S toured Assam in 1941 where received a grand ovation. He was told that Nehru’s attention was drawn into the Muslim influx into Assam he said that natures hates vacuum to which S commented that Nehru did not know that nature abhors poisonous gas. He kept on with his social movement but not without the same revolutionary fervor. He encouraged the R.S.S. patronized them. Future events confirmed his doubts.