Muslims in Uttar Pradesh during the Congress rule (between 1947 and 1986) were often picked out, denounced, spied on and targeted as “dangerous enemies within”. The removal of Muslims from the government job, particularly in police, neglect of Urdu language and the fate of evacuee property were some thorny issues in the late 1950s and 1960s.
In a meticulously researched and documented book, Claiming Citizenship and Nation: Muslim Politics and State Building in North India, 1947-1986 (Routledge India, 2022), author Aishwarya Pandit details the majoritarian shift of the UP Congress in early decades of Independence. Using a lot of primary sources, Aishwarya reveals how many Congress stalwarts such as Purushottam Das Tandon and Congress chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh namely Govind Vallabh Pant, Sampurnanand and Charan Singh were against Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Muslim appeasement”.
Interestingly, a Congressman-turned-socialist who rose to become Union home minister and prime minister of the country, Charan Singh believed that arms licences given to Muslims should be cancelled and even urged chief minister Pant to expel them from police services. Aishwarya names numerous cases to illustrate how successive Congress governments in Uttar Pradesh resorted to compulsory retirement of Muslims and summary dismissal from the police service.
The Uttar Pradesh government also used ‘Public Interest’ as a tool to retire Muslim officers, particularly from the police. Aishwarya quotes Charan Singh papers where choice of words makes their own impact: “In the post-Independence period, Muslim communalism was not apparent but internally it continued to remain alive like a smouldering fire. The period from 1947-51 can be treated as a period when Muslim communalism suffered from uncertainty and frustration. From 1952 to 1956, there were clear signs of revival and the Muslim communalism which had hitherto been observing a meaningful silence, started becoming assertive.”
According to Aishwarya, Muslim response to these challenges varied but the long-term outcome was a decisive alienation from the Congress and a fading of faith in the official professions of secularism.
An associate professor at Jindal Global Law School, Aishwarya challenges the premise that Nehruvian secularism was successful in taking care of Muslims in post-Independence Uttar Pradesh. She cites the representation of minority communities in the state services of UP (file no 49H/1958) as an example. The table reads, Class 1 service, number of Muslims as one while in class II, six; and in class III, 425.
The author also quotes Humayun Kabir papers that pointed at the Muslim representation in the UP government falling below the Scheduled Castes. The Congress government had responded to Kabir, who was a close associate of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and served twice as Union education minister in the Nehru cabinet, that Muslims were not “applying for jobs”. The compulsory Hindi requirement had also acted as a deterrent.
In 1958, out of the 93 successful candidates for the state civil service, the number of Muslims was two. In the police service, one Muslim figured in the list of 30 while in the forest service, the representation was nil. In the Union Public Service Commission examination of officers for the Indian Navy, Air Force and Army, there was a glaring absence of Muslim representation.
The concern of the Hindu refugees from Pakistan and its failure to protect them was an emotional issue which became an electoral issue from the 1950s onwards and continues to this day, observes Aishwarya while adding, “The Citizenship Amendment Bill is an attempt by the BJP government to address the concerns of the Hindu majority who believe that the Hindu refugees particularly in South Asia have been denied their citizenship rights and have been ignored by a state that enjoys power on the basis of ‘Hindu votes’.”
The author says that the 1965 war with Pakistan made matters worse for the Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, causing a lot of hardship. The Aligarh Muslim University faced a ‘loyalty test’ of sorts. Just like 2018 stir led by Satish Gautam, the BJP's Aligarh MP, the Hindu Yuva Vahini and the ABVP against the hanging of Mohammad Ali Jinnah's portrait in Aligarh Muslim University, post-1965 war too had witnessed a controversy and a clash between the Congress government in UP and at the Centre.
Two controversies merged together: First, having a portrait of a leader of an enemy nation in an Indian institution of repute. Second, the suspicion was that those who hung the portrait were sympathisers of Pakistan. The UP home ministry’s view was that “it may be reasonable to presume that these persons (who were responsible for the installation of the portrait) had a pro-Pakistan attitude”. The persons responsible should be blacklisted in lists ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ of the Intelligence Bureau. These lists of persons with ‘pro-Pakistan attitudes’ cannot be found now, but there is no doubt the bureau maintained such lists.
In 1968, Nawab Ali Yavar Jung, the Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Education, summed up the issue: “I am told that the picture dates back to the pre-Partition days. It should have been removed after Partition, as I do not like its continuing in the Union Hall, but as I said, the removal would better come from the members themselves… actually it should have been raised by the nationalist Muslim students, but they have not gathered strength and the union is dominated by students controlled by communal organisations.”
In conclusion, the author-scholar observes that even as UP Congress remained insensitive to the Muslim concerns, the community began looking at other political parties that, in turn, sought to woo them because of their demographical strength. Ironically, some of the beneficiaries were those who viewed Charan Singh as their ‘role model’.
The reviewer is Visiting Fellow at Observer Research Foundation. A political analyst, he has written four books, including ‘24 Akbar Road’ and ‘Sonia: A Biography’. Views expressed are personal.
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May 05, 2022 at 06:39PM
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