The art of Lying: The lies of Amit Shah on Two Nation Theory
“Lies sound like facts to those who’ve been conditioned to misrecognize the truth”
Last year, the Union Home Minister of India Amit Shah tabled the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill (2019), — now Citizenship Amendment Act. As soon as the Bill was proposed in parliament it was met with protest both in the Parliament and outside. In order to justify the Bill, Union Home minister Amit Shah passionately “reiterated” a lie, which has been latently circulating among Indian masses ever since Independence, but gained massive traction with the development of Social Media and coming into power of the BJP in 2014.
Justifying the proposed religious basis of Indian Citizenship, which goes against the ethos of the Indian Constitution, Amit Shah said that “[Indian National] Congress was responsible for the partition of Indian Subcontinent on religious basis in 1947”. Shah basically held the Congress party as responsible for the infamous Two Nation Theory. This reiteration of the lie by Union Home Minister and entire propaganda machinery of the ruling party is a classic example of Gobbelsion propaganda i.e. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it”. In this post-truth age, where emotions and biases are the basis of deciding and believing what piece of information is true and what is false, we need to continuously remind and reiterate again and again the truth. Let us again revisit the truth and facts about the infamous Two Nation
Who was or were the first proponents of infamous ‘Two Nation Theory’, which ultimately lead to the partition of the Indian subcontinent on religious lines leading to the formation of Pakistan? In the public common sense, the first name which arises is that of Mohammed Ali Jinnah and Mohammed Iqbal. But as the saying goes truth is stranger than fiction. The first-ever proposition for ‘Two Nation Theory’ from any political formation was proposed by none other than leaders or would-be leaders of the Hindu Mahasabha and it was only later that the ideologues of All India Muslim League adopted it. Let us see who proposed the two-nation theory and when they did it.
The first such understanding of ‘partition’ of India on religious lines was imagined by Bhai Parmanand in 1908–09. He became a prominent leader of the Hindu Mahasabha which was formed in 1915. In his autobiography ‘The Story of my Life’, Bhai Parmananda while remembering his exchanges with Lala Lajpat Rai wrote…
“The territory beyond Sindh could be united with North-West Frontier Province into the great Musulman Kingdom. The Hindus of the region should come away, while at the same time the Musulmans in the rest of the country should go and settle in this territory”
Then the two-nation theory came directly from the Lala Lajpat Rai the leader of Hindu Mahasabha. Lala Lajpat Rai wrote in The Tribune of December 14, 1924.
“Under my scheme, the Muslims will have four Muslim States: (1) The Pathan Province or the North-West Frontier; (2) Western Punjab (3) Sindh and (4) Eastern Bengal. If there are compact Muslim communities in any other part of India, sufficiently large to form a province, they should be similarly constituted. But it should be distinctly understood that this is not a united India. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Mulsim India.”
The next proposal comes from none other than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. While delivering the presidential address to the 19th session Hindu Mahasabha at Ahmedabad in 1937, Savarkar first criticized those who wanted a United India and proposed his support for the infamous Two-Nation theory. He said…
“As it is, there are two antagonistic nations living side by side in India. Several infantile politicians commit the serious mistake in supposing that India is already welded into a harmonious nation, or that it could be welded thus for the mere wish to do so. These well-meaning but unthinking friends take their dreams for realities. That is why they are impatient of communal tangles and attribute them to communal organizations. But the solid fact is that the so-called communal questions are but a legacy handed down to us by centuries of cultural, religious and national antagonism between the Hindus and Moslems. When time is ripe you can solve them, but you cannot suppress them by merely refusing recognition of them. It is safer to diagnose and treat a deep-seated disease than to ignore it. Let us bravely face unpleasant facts as they are. India cannot be assumed today to be a Unitarian and homogenous nation, but on the contrary, there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Moslems, in India.”
Again on August 15 1943 in Nagpur Sarvarkar reiterating his Two-Nation theory Savarkar said…
“I have no quarrel with Mr. Jinnah’s two-nation theory. We, Hindus, are a nation by ourselves and it is a historical fact that Hindus and Muslims are two nations”
Another point needs to be clarified here. Several people from the Hindutva right-wing have blamed Syed Ahmed Khan as the first person to propose the ‘two-nation theory’. The fact of the matter is that Syed Ahmed Khan did indeed propose the two-nation theory. In 1888, at Meerut Syed Ahmed Khan said that…
“Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations — the Mahomedans and the Hindus — could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not, it is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could remain equal is to desire the impossible and the inconceivable”.
But this statement of his must be seen in the context of rising clarion for pan India Hindu nation in Bengal. In fact, the political mobilization in the name of the Hindu religion in Bengal is the backdrop of Syed Ahmed Khan’s speech in Meerut.
The conceptualization of India as a Hindu nation first gained prominence among the intellectuals of Bengal especially after the 1870s, which historians have categorized as the period of Hindu revivalism. Historians have identified Rajnarain Basu and Nabagopal Mitra as the “grandfather” of Hindu Nationalism. Rajnarian Basu- a leader of the Brahmo Samaj- in 1872 wrote that “the noble and puissant Hindu nation rousing herself after sleep and rushing headlong towards progress with divine prowess”, to describe Hindu Revivalism. Nabagopal Mitra who started the Hindu Mela in 1867, played an important role to build ‘Hindu Consciousness’, wrote in National Paper- also founded by him that “the basis of national unity in India is the Hindu religion. Hindu nationality embraces all the Hindus of India irrespective of their locality or language”. In this context, Syed Ahmed Khan’s understanding of and proposal for ‘two-nation theory’, was more like a reaction to rising Hindu Nationalism, which identified India with Hinduism and projected Muslims as “others”, an aspect which found it most profound expression in Bankim Chandra’s Anandamath.
From the above review of statements and writings of Hindutva Leaders we can clearly see that the first and enthusiastic proponents of the Two-Nation theory were not Congressmen or seculars, as Amit Shah and entire Hindutva Brigade would want you to believe- but the ideologues of post-independence Hindutva movement. That ‘Two Nation Theory’ as a political program came first from the Hindu Right-wing should not surprise us at all. The reason for this is that the Hindu Right-wing program holds the view that the Colonial British rule was divine providence and it actually freed Hindus from eight hundred years of Muslim rule. In this worldview of the Hindu right-wing, Britishers are seen as allies, which logically explains their lack of, or rather zero participation in India’s Freedom struggle and blatant opposition and brutal suppression of the ‘Quit India Movement’ in 1942. The two-nation theory forms the ideological backbone of the Hindutva movement.
The Author is a Ph.D. research scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India