IQBAL AS POLITICIAN*

(18.3.67)

Ours is an age of formulas and simplifications, not only among and for the common people but also among the sophisticated intellectuals. One such simplification relates to the Pakistan movement and the emergence of Pakistan as an independent country. A kind of romantic historical criticism prevails, even in the highest Intellectual circles, which assumes a kind of divided responsibility between Iqbal and Jinnah regarding the Muslim liberation movement.

This simplification, the very antithesis of a critical historical attitude, considers Iqbal to be a typical 'ineffectual angel, beating his wings in the void" -an image of the poet as no more than a dreamer that our educated class has borrowed from the Romantic poetry of England . He is the visionary, the dreamer, who dreamt the dream of Pakistan . It was a great dream, but Iqbal being an unpractical man, that a poet must be, had not the guts or the intelligence to give this dream a palpable shape. It was left to Jinnah to devise the strategy and fight the real battle for the Muslim homeland.

This division of labour which is supposed to have existed between two of our great leaders has become the stock in trade of those who refuse to see history as a gestalt, or a total pattern of movement, formed by the thought and action of mil1ions of human beings working together, suffering together and moulding their destiny in a cooperative effort, the leaders merely embodying in their persons or actions the unconscious or conscious aims and urges of the people. This romantic conception of history is a help to those today who think of historical movements merely in terms of leaders appointed by heaven to save the benighted nations.

This messianic concept of historical development is a modern replica of the divine right of kings, used by the clergy of Europe in the Middle Ages to deceive the people that the kings were not their representatives and personification of their will, but rather superior beings bearing a charter from heaven to do as they liked. The anachronistic presence of this concept in our times can easily be related to religious obscurantist movements which try to convince the people that the State is not an expression of the will of the people but that of God Almighty. The real Islamic concept of State is quite clear on this point -the leaders are the servants of the people. Those who pretend otherwise are merely trying to relegate the powers of divine guidance and divine authority to themselves, and thus not working for a State of the Muslim people but for a State for themselves above the MUSLIM PEOPLE -for themselves and for the remnants of feudalism.

Pakistan was neither conceived nor brought into being by people who believed in this alien idea of divine right of kings. It was a movement of the Muslim common people in the context of the sub continent for the safeguarding of their rights as Muslim common people against all those powers- indigenous and alien -who were inimical to these rights, cultural, economic, political and social. Both Iqbal and Jinnah were representatives of the Muslim common people for this purpose, being themselves of the people.

Dr. Ashiq Batalvi's lectures on Iqbal and Pakistani Movement, delivered last week as the third series in the annual Iqbal Memorial Lectures under the auspices of the Chair of Philosophy of the Punjab University , brought out this significant fact about the nature of Iqbal's relationship with the Pakistan movement Iqbal was not "an ineffectual angel" but a man of action. Not merely because of his writings which formed the preponderant element in the self awareness and integration of the Muslim people, but also because of his direct participation in the political struggle which culminated in the emergence of Pakistan as an independent state.

Dr. Batalv.i was himself a partisan in .this struggle and one who was strongly committed on the side of Iqbal, i.e. the side" which represented the general mass of the common Muslims. In his excellent book on the last two years of Iqbal"s life, as well as in the lectures he delivered last week, he has tried to bring out the particular political role of the educated middle class among the Muslims during the thirties of which both Iqbal and Jinnah were the most prominent and uncompromising exponents. It was a small class and historically a very weak and unorganised one, both in comparison to the vast numbers, economic affluence and political strength of the Hindu middle class organized in the Congress, as well as in' comparison to the self absorbed, self seeking and opportunistic colonial feudal class created by the British as their main stray among the Muslims.

The particular phase of the struggle which Dr. Batalvi has formed the subject of his book as well as his lectures is the crucial phase in which this small educated middle class of the Muslims contended for power against the Congress and the colonial feudal group, especially in the Punjab. The preparation for this struggle for power continued for a long time. The movements of Muslim artisan and peasant classes had been going on throughout the 19th and early part of the 20th century. And they were all revolutionary movements. The last of this series were the Hijrat, the Khilafat and the Moplah peasant movement in the second decade of 20th century. The anti-imperialist character of these struggles has been covered over by anti-Muslim propaganda of the Hindu Press and the suppression of the real facts which a strongly entrenched imperialist Governments continued to indulge in for over two hundred years. Nevertheless the memories of these struggles were alive in the minds of the Muslim people, and generation after generation of the Muslims were steeled in their consciousness of' a separate identity by harking back to earlier movements. The ground had been well prepared in spite of the suppression of history. The Muslims continued to regard themselves as a separate nation even at the time when, like Jinnah and Iqbal they had no thought of a separate homeland.

Dr. Batalvi (1) chose for his lectures the particular period when the weak Muslim middle class chose to organise itself on an all India basis. As he points out the Muslim League was no more than a debating society before Jinnah's return from his voluntary exile. The Muslim leadership was divided into so many splinter groups fighting for sectional interests (mostly colonial feudal) in various parts of the country. An all India purpose was lacking from the activities both of the Muslim League as of the small parties of landlords formed in the various provinces to safeguard sectional interests.

The interests of the common Muslims, coming into consciousness in the cities all over the sub-continent, and reflected par excellence in the writings of Iqbal, formed no part of the deliberations of the landlord-dominated political parties, nor of the emotional and unrealistic outbursts of groups like the Ahrar and the Khaksars. The Round Table- Conferences for devising a constitution for the Indian Dominion had ended. Iqbal and Jinnah had attended some of them, though Jinnah for his performance at the 1st and the 2nd RTC had been considered by the British as too dangerous to be called to the 3rd. He had through his excellent debating of particular issues (especially his exasperating insistence on the Indianisation of the Indian army, at which the British understandably got extremely frightened) - proved the conferences to be a fraud' with which name he dignified them later.

One of the most important debates which Jinnah entered into with the British as well as the Hindu leaders concerned the basic issue with which the fate of the Muslims in the sub continent was linked. It was the issue of federal structure in the context of the communal award. Both the Hindus and the British refused to understand him, precisely because he understood them too well. The federal structure, as 'it came out in the Government of India Act 1935, envisaged an indirect election to the Central Assembly on the basis of adult (but communal) franchise in the provincial assemblies. The game was simple. The provincial assemblies with heir overwhelming majorities ruled by the Congress directly in the Hindu majority provinces and indirectly by cajoling, black mailing and browbeating the Muslim splinter groups in the Muslim majority provinces could easily make a nonsense of any safeguards which the communal award gave to the Muslims. This was proved in fact in the 1937 elections and it was this eventuality which Jinnah was fighting against in the 2nd RTC, which later forced Sir Samual Hoare to exclude hill} from the Muslim delegation on the plea that he was an obstructionist.

It was the 1935 Act which made it imperative on the Muslim educated middle class to organize themselves on an all Indian popular basis. Jinnah and Iqbal played the most important role in the transformation of the Muslim League into a strong popular party reflecting the interests of all classes of the Muslim people. Dr. Ashiq Batalvi's story of this effort, especially as, it related to the events in the Punjab , is of prime importance in our understanding of history. It is ' especially valuable because he was not only a witness of the events but a participant in then. The major weapon with which the Muslims tried to defeat the game of the British and the Congress was the institution of Central and Provincial Muslim League Parliamentary Boards.

The major intrigue to counter this struggle of the Muslims in the Punjab was carried out by the Unionist Party and its leaders: Fazal-i-Husain and Sir Sikandar Hayat. They did their best to make the provincial League, under the president ship of Iqbal, ineffective or redundant, and hence to subvert the united front of all India Muslims. Iqbal and Malik Barkat Ali continued to expose, both before the Muslims and before Jinnah, the game of these 'political adventurers' as Iqbal called them. The Unionists worked on the principle that if you can't fight them, join them; while Iqbal was trying to maintain the position of the Muslim League as the supreme body of the Muslims, and if it could not be done, to keep its identity free of the Unionist strange hold provided by the mysterious Sikandar -- Jinnah Pact. He died fighting in the course of this battle, convinced up to the last that the fate of the Muslims depended on their awareness of their separate identity.

Dr. Ashiq Batalvi has not tried to deify either Iqbal or Jinnah in the course of his lectures. He has, like a true historian brought together the real facts of the case. It is true that he was and is a partisan of certain tendencies. His critical attitude towards the colonial --feudal class has remained unchanged.. But his partisanship was and is in favour of the common masses and he looks at our history as a movement in which the masses, united behind Jinnah, slowly emerged as the most powerful force in the arena of the politics which had so far been monopolised either by the Congress or by the colonial feudal group among the Muslims, Iqbal gave voice to the interests and urges of the masses and Jinnah was the uncompromising instrument of history to carve out the path to the fulfillment of those urges and interests. That Iqbal called himself "a mere soldier of Jinnah" should not lead us to think that he regarded Jinnah as an autocrat who received his authority from any divine right. It was rather the recognition of the fact that both Jinnah and he were expressions of the profoundest reach of the consciousness of the Muslim masses as against the forces which sought to oppress them and thwart their urge to liberty.

Notes

*Iqbal as Politician. Published in The Pakistan Times 18.3.67.

1. Dr. Ashiq Batalvi -"Iqbal Ke Akhari Do Saal", published by Markazi Majlis-i-Iqbal, Karachi.