A bit long…..but please read for some facts Why Muslims Chose Not To Live With Hindus Zia Khan Hindus and Muslims were two distinct and separate communities sharing the same piece of land. The only way they could live together was by respecting the rights and accommodating each other at all levels of society. Given the structure and nature of the Hindu society at large it was a next to impossible proposition. Any Hindu in a position of authority had a religious obligation to first help and favour those belonging to his caste and after that any other Hindus. Muslims were ‘unclean’ aliens not to be treated at par or with consideration by Hindus. Sir Zafarullah Khan, a judge of the Federal and Supreme Court of India gives an example of this prejudice in his book The Agony of Pakistan (pp. 10, 11): ‘In January 1927 the Chief Justice (Sir Shadi Lal) procured the appointment to the High Court Bench, as a permanent judge, thus superseding four additional judges, of Mr. Justice Tek Chand ---- record discloses that during his period of office (seventeen years) this honourable judge, sitting alone or in Bench, did not decide one single case in favour of a Muslim when the other party was a non-Muslim; nor did he ever decide a case to which both parties were Muslims in favour of the party that was represented by a Muslim lawyer if the other party was represented by a non-Muslim lawyer. In the latter class of cases certain non-Muslim lawyers would charge Muslim clients enormous fees on the guarantee that the case would be allotted to the bench presided over by Mr. Justice Tek Chand and would be decided in the client’s favour. The guarantee never failed to be fulfilled.’ At the time, there were only two Muslims among a total of thirteen High Court judges in Punjab where the majority of the population was Muslim. In the years between 1858 and 1878 only 57 out of 3,100 graduates of Calcutta University , the premier institution for modern education in India , were Muslims. The faculty and staff in all of the universities in India , barring Aligarh and Usmania, remained mostly Hindu. Out of the 160 Fellows at Calcutta University in 1918, only seven were Muslims. The university Senate and Syndicate did not have even one Muslim member. Out of the 895 examiners, there were only nine Muslims. The situation was not much different at the Dacca University . In 1937, of the ninety students that received B.Sc. degrees only seventeen were Muslims. It was the same for the Masters programme which had eighteen Muslims out of a total of one hundred and eight. In the Punjab University out of a total of sixty-eight professors in 1933 only nine were Muslim. In 1945, it was sixteen out of a total of eighty-two. The Boards of Studies had a total of one hundred and two members in the twenty-one university departments in 1921. Only fourteen of these were Muslims and in 1932 their number was still only nineteen. In the first half century of the university’s existence not a single Muslim was appointed to the key Registrar’s position. In the Government College Lahore, regarded as the premier educational institution in Punjab , out of a total of 42 professors in 1928, only five were Muslim ---- three of them teaching Arabic and Persian and none in any of the science departments. King Edward Medical College , Lahore had a teaching staff of forty two professors and demonstrators in 1917. Only three of these were Muslims. In 1930 the exclusively Hindu schools in Punjab received three times greater grants from the provincial government than did the Muslim schools. The same sorry state for the Muslims existed in every government department and private organization, with the exception of the lower ranks in the Indian Army and police. There were a total of 957 judges and magistrates officiating in the Bengal courts in 1901 out of which only 98 were Muslims. In the five major railway companies, EBR, EIR, GIP, NWR and Burma Railways, that operated in India in 1933, out of a total of 1,048 gazetted officers there were only 45 Muslims. In the North Western Railway whose network was confined to Muslim dominated areas, of the 247 clerical staff the Muslims numbered 31 in 1927. In the Telegraph Department of the Government of India in 1910 there were a total of forty Divisional Officers. Not one of these was a Muslim. Among the lower staff, there were 12 Muslims among a total of 429. The reason most often cited for the inadequate representation of Muslims in the services was the non-availability of suitably qualified candidates among them. In reality, the situation was manipulated so that likely Muslim candidates were excluded from the selection process. Since Hindus occupied the vast majority of administrative posts in almost every department, elaborate schemes and arrangements were devised to exclude even the most qualified Muslims. Most often Hindu clerks misdirected interview calls for Muslim candidates or posted incorrect details of dates, times and venues or simply failed to inform any Muslim that managed to get through despite all the hurdles. The examiners, who were mostly Hindus, opted for different standards when awarding marks to Hindus and Muslims. The discrimination reached the stage where roll numbers instead of names were mandated for the examination papers. Hindu students got around the obstacle by inscribing the religious symbol ‘Om ’ at the top of the page to denote their religion. Any Muslim that still managed to qualify found himself discriminated against and harassed in all sorts of other ways. Qudratullah Shahab, a distinguished member of the coveted Indian Civil Service, writes about his interview for the service in his Shahabnama: ‘The interview board consisted of an Englishman as the president, a Muslim and a Hindu member ---- in this case Sir Radha Krishnan who later became President of India . Shahab had indicated in his application that he was interested in the study of comparative religion. It prompted Radha Krishnan to ask if he had viewed the issue as a Muslim or as a human being. After he replied that he found no cause to believe there was any difference between the two, the next questions from Radha Krishnan were: ‘what is the weight of a tennis ball? How many ping-pong balls will make a combined weight of four ounces? What is the width and height of the hockey goal frame? The map of Italy is shaped like a boot. Which nearby island, if moved into position, will make it look like the shoe of a woman and not a man?’ Admissions to professional and technical colleges and institutions were made particularly difficult for the Muslims. In an effort to reduce the imbalance, the Punjab Minister of Education, Sir Fazle Husain, introduced legislation in the mid-twenties that reserved forty per cent seats for the Muslims in the medical and engineering colleges in the province where they constituted fifty-seven per cent of the population. It brought forth a storm of protest from the Hindus, denouncing him as a ‘rabid communalist’, ‘enemy of Hindu-Muslim unity’, ‘murderer of Hindus’ and calling for his resignation from the Legislative Assembly. Hindus had almost exclusive control of the national press in India and they used it with great effectiveness to formulate public perceptions and opinion and project these to the authorities and the world at large. Hindu vernacular press in particular persistently used such terms as ‘ruffians’, ‘debauched’, ‘cruel’, and maleech (unclean) to prefix the word ‘Muslim’ in their pages. The English press was hardly any better and mostly tried to portray the Muslims as genetically backward, uncouth and given to extremism by nature. The situation was much the same in films and theatre that were also almost exclusively under Hindu control. Many of the films and plays were based on historical characters and episodes. The roles of Muslim figures were falsified and presented in derogatory terms while those of the Hindus exaggerated and glorified. In some cases things went to such extreme that it provoked country-wide protests and riots. The printing and publishing industry was dominated by the Hindus making it difficult for Muslim writers to get their works published. Even copies of the Koran had to be printed in Hindu-owned presses because there were so few Muslims in the business. In the circumstances, the vast majority of text books prescribed for schools and colleges were authored by Hindus. History, in particular, suffered badly as a consequence. The school books mostly glorified the Hindu period and ignored or downplayed the contributions of Muslims in the making of India . A well-known philanthropist, Sir Ganga Ram, had established a number of charitable institutions in Lahore . The legal instruments under which these were set-up specified that their managing committees must be composed of three non-Muslim provincial government officials and six Hindu members. Muslims were specifically not permitted to use the commercial library in the Bharat Building and the Sir Ganga Ram Abbreviation Bureau. The few Muslim newspapers and journals that did get published were generally excluded from libraries all over India by the mostly Hindu librarians. All India Radio, although a government controlled institution, was also dominated by the Hindus and their bias was reflected in its transmissions. Urdu programmes were systematically excluded and Hindi compositions took their place. There were constant complaints from the Muslims with little effect because most of the administrative and technical staff happened to be Hindu. The Hindu press raised much hue and cry when a Muslim (Z. A. Bukhari) was appointed its controller. In 1939, A.I. R’s Bombay station invited Congress leaders Rajendra Prasad and Jawaharlal Nehru to give talks but when Bukhari, wanted to invite Jinnah on the occasion of Eid, he was turned down by the Bombay government on the plea that ‘it would not have a helpful effect on the Hindus’. Perhaps the most telling contrast in the situation of Hindus and the Muslims in India was in the economic field. The preferential treatment accorded to the Hindus under the British rule eventually led to their complete domination in commerce, banking and industry. Muslims had no national bank until Habib Bank was set up in the mid-forties. All sources of finance were more or less closed on them. They owned hardly any industrial units. The only shops they operated, even in towns and cities where the majority of the population was Muslim, were those of butchers and some venders of vegetables and milk products. Any Muslim venturing into the rest of the commercial arena was denied credit and systematically squeezed out by the Hindus. In 1922, Hindu mill owners and wholesale dealers refused to supply cloth to some adventurous Muslims who tried to set-up shop outside Delhi Gate in Lahore . It was not until 1927 that a Muslim was able to open a shop for selling cloth anywhere in the city. To this day, no Hindu likes to buy merchandise from a shop owned by a Muslim. There are bizarre cases in Indian cities even now where Muslim shop vendors adopt Hindu names and attire to help them survive. The areas that comprised Pakistan produced eighty per cent of India ’s jute and cotton crops but virtually all of the processing plants and facilities were located in predominantly Hindu areas that were sliced off to become parts of India . At the time of partition, for instance, there were a total of 873 cotton mills out of which only sixteen were located in what became Pakistan . Any Muslim in need of cash had to turn to a Hindu money-lender (bania) who charged extortionate rates of interest. Most of the time, the borrower had little understanding of the terms of the loan. Before long, he found himself deprived of the property he had pledged against it. The situation in the rural areas, where mostly illiterate Muslim farmers lived, became distressingly acute. Hindu middlemen exploited them mercilessly, paying a pittance for agricultural produce that they later sold in the market at unconscionable profit. The end result was that virtually all of the wealth had accumulated in the hands of the Hindus. The extent of this domination became starkly evident at the time of Partition when all the Hindus and Sikhs had moved out of West Punjab . The cities appeared like ghost towns. In Lahore , for instance, all of the shops in Anarkali Bazaar and The Mall were closed down. The main roads were deserted and all of the houses in the more affluent areas empty. The number of cars that plied on the roads of this once bustling city was probably less than half a dozen. The railways ceased to operate and the road transport was reduced to a fraction of the original. It was the same with the Post and Telegraph and other service departments. All economic activity had been brought to a grinding halt. It took years to bring it to life again. The situation was, if anything worse in the other provinces from where the Hindus had also departed. Hindus regarded and treated the Muslims in social matters as ‘Untouchables’. Even highly placed Hindu leaders like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Madan Mohan Malavya refused to eat at Jinnah’s house. At most official functions, the tables for Hindus were laid out separately to the rest. After any meeting with a non-Hindu, at the first opportunity, a devout Hindu cleanses himself by taking a ritual bath. Most Hindu shopkeepers would not hand over merchandise directly to a Muslim customer. It was placed at the end of a long wooden flat-board and dropped into his hands or a sack to avoid any contact with the maleech. The Hindu custom of greeting friends and strangers, namastay or namaskar, with the two hands joined in front as against the handshake, owes its origin to the fear of any contamination through physical contact. The differences were not simply confined to religion. Hindus wore dhotis while the Muslims dressed in shalwars or pyjamas. The head dress too was different and they tied their turbans differently, even the cuts of their coats and shirts were different. They lived apart in separate villages and in segregated mohallas and katras in towns and cities. Any Muslim straying into a Hindu locality was frowned upon for even his shadow was considered ‘unclean’ and a source of pollution. It was rare indeed for a Hindu to rent any property to a Muslim as its occupation by the latter rendered it bharisht and unusable afterwards without extensive ritual cleansing and renovation. The food Hindus ate was different to that of the Muslims. It was cooked in different ways and in different types of utensils. Hindus stayed in separate hotels where Muslims and Christians were not welcome. Similarly, there were separate hostels and cooking facilities for Hindu and non-Hindu students in schools and colleges. Food and water were served by separate vendors at all the railway stations. Their social customs and traditions, indeed the entire approach to life, was different. Inter-marriages were taboo. For all intents and purposes these were two solitudes that shared the same country. They did not co-exist peacefully either. Bloody riots broke out with regular monotony at the slightest provocation, mostly arising out of religious issues and events. As Jinnah explained: It is extremely difficult to understand why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but are in fact different and distinct social orders ---- never can a common nationality evolve ---- There is not one Indian nation ---- the Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, literatures. They neither inter-marry nor inter-dine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. ---- They have different epics, different heroes, and different episodes. ---- To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state. To the casual observer people of the subcontinent look more or less alike. His or her impressions are based on contacts with westernized elites, both Hindu and Muslim, who outwardly dress and act in ways that make them appear similar. The Indians capitalize on this mis-perception to suggest that there was no real cause for Muslims to separate and they were misled by Jinnah and other leaders who had a vested interest in the creation of Pakistan or that it was done for reasons of religion. None of this is is borne out by historical facts. Of late some of the Pakistani media too have chosen to harp on the same canard for reasons that are open to conjecture.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 04:17:44 +0000
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