Jinnah Helped Draft the 1916 Lucknow Pact, Argued in 1929 Against a Bill to Try Bhagat Singh and His Fellow Hunger-Strikers in Their Absence, and Accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan for 53 Days in 1946

On 12 September 1929 the Home Member of the Government of India, Sir James Crerar, asked the Legislative Assembly to add a new section, 540-B, to the Code of Criminal Procedure. The section would let a court go on with an inquiry in the absence of accused men who had made themselves unable to attend by their own act and who declined to be represented by counsel. Crerar named the case behind it, and told the House that at one time no fewer than thirteen of the sixteen accused in the Lahore Conspiracy Case had been on hunger strike and unable to appear before the magistrate. Bhagat Singh was one of the strikers.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, member for Bombay city, rose near the end of that day’s sitting. He said that “if there is sympathy and admiration for the accused, it is only to this extent, that they are the victim of the system of Government.” Then he turned on the Bill. “You want this House to give you a Statute laying down a principle generally in the criminal jurisprudence for this particular case, so that you may use it for breaking the hunger-strike in the Lahore case.”

“Well, you know perfectly well that these men are determined to die. It is not a joke.” A little later: “The man who goes on hunger-strike has a soul. He is moved by that soul and he believes in the justice of his cause; he is not an ordinary criminal who is guilty of cold-blooded, sordid, wicked crime.” Where the accused’s methods were concerned, he kept his distance. “I do not approve of the action of Bhagat Singh, and I say this on the floor of this House,” he said, and then: “It is the system, this damnable system of Government, which is resented by the people.”

This piece follows what Jinnah said and did from 1906 to June 1947, using the Assembly’s own debates, the League’s resolutions, the Indian Annual Register and the Jinnah Papers published by Pakistan’s National Archives, and it gives the other side’s account where there is one. The divide that was designed covers the colonial rules on census and electorates. Here the subject is one man’s record.

What the Assembly did with the Bill

Jinnah finished on 14 September. The day before, Jatindra Nath Das, one of the Lahore accused, had died in jail on the 64th day of his hunger strike. “If these young men pursue this course, and I am sorry to hear that one of them has died, what will happen?” Jinnah asked. He called a trial held without the accused “a travesty of justice” and “this farce”, and offered the Government two ways out. Treat the prisoners decently, or split the case and try the men who were fit to attend.

Later that day Motilal Nehru moved that the House adjourn to discuss the Government’s treatment of the Lahore prisoners, a way of censuring it. The motion carried by 55 votes to 47, and Jinnah’s name is on the list of the majority.

The Bill itself never came to a final vote, and on 16 September Crerar agreed to circulate it for opinion, which pushed it to the next session, and said the Government had weighed “the words of studied moderation used by the Honourable and learned gentleman from Bombay, Mr. Jinnah.” He also kept the door open, and said that if “any contingency should arise” before the House met again, there could be “no limitation or qualification on the discretion of the authority in whom the necessary powers are vested.”

Crerar did not say who held those powers, but on 1 May 1930 the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, issued an ordinance that took the Lahore Conspiracy Case from the magistrate and gave it to a special tribunal of three judges appointed by the Chief Justice of Lahore. The tribunal could go on without any accused man who had “by his voluntary act” made himself incapable of appearing, and its proceedings were final, with no appeal. Bhagat Singh was hanged on 23 March 1931. The earlier tuput account tells that story.

Naoroji’s secretary

Thirty years old in December 1906, Jinnah sat beside Dadabhai Naoroji on the platform of the Calcutta Congress as the president’s secretary. His biographer Stanley Wolpert writes that Jinnah helped write the address Naoroji was too weak to read himself, and the address called the partition of Bengal “a bad blunder for England.”

The Aga Khan, the Muslim League’s first honorary president, later recalled Jinnah as “our doughtiest opponent in 1906”, who “said that our principle of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself,” as Wolpert quotes the memoirs.

In January 1910 Jinnah took his seat on the Imperial Legislative Council as the Muslim member for Bombay. The Wakf Validating Bill, which he introduced in 1911 and which was law by 1913, restored the legal standing of Muslim endowments after a Privy Council ruling. Wolpert calls it the first act sponsored by a non-official member in British Indian history.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the Congress moderate, told Sarojini Naidu, according to Wolpert, that Jinnah “has true stuff in him, and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.” Jinnah joined the Muslim League in 1913 on the condition, Wolpert says, that loyalty to the League must never mean disloyalty to the wider national cause.

Lucknow, December 1916

The Congress and the League met in Lucknow in December 1916 and adopted one scheme of constitutional reform, with Jinnah presiding over the League’s session. Wolpert says the key to the pact lay in guaranteed shares of seats for Muslims: one third at the centre and in Bombay, half in the Punjab, 40 percent in Bengal, 30 percent in the United Provinces, 25 percent in Bihar and Orissa, and 15 percent in the Central Provinces and Madras.

A second clause gave each community a veto. No bill affecting one community could go forward if three quarters of that community’s members in the council opposed it. Gwyer and Appadorai say the Lucknow Pact introduced weighted representation for minorities, and that the Congress later broke away from its policy.

Tilak defended the pact to the Congress. “It has been said that we, Hindus, have yielded too much,” he said, according to Sudheendra Kulkarni’s account in Scroll. “The concession that has been made to our Mohommedan brethren in the Legislative Council is really nothing too much.”

A resignation over the Rowlatt Act

When the Rowlatt Bill was tabled on 6 February 1919, Jinnah told the Imperial Council it was “a wrong remedy for the disease, the revolutionary crimes,” in the words Wolpert quotes. All twenty-two Indian members opposed it. The thirty-four official members outvoted them in March.

The Indian Annual Register’s chronicle records that Jinnah resigned his seat on 28 March 1919. The letter to the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, said the constitutional rights of the people had been violated “at a time when there is no real danger to the State, by an overfretful and incompetent bureaucracy.” A government that passed such a law in peacetime, he wrote, “forfeits its claim to be called a civilised Government.”

Nagpur and the break with Gandhi

In October 1920 Gandhi changed the constitution of the Home Rule League, which Jinnah had headed in Bombay, and renamed it the Swaraj Sabha. Sheela Reddy writes in Mr and Mrs Jinnah that Jinnah and nineteen other colleagues resigned. The open letter he sent to Gandhi said that Gandhi’s methods “have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto.”

Gandhi did not hide the cost he expected. As Wolpert quotes him, Gandhi told the Congress Subjects Committee in Nagpur on 28 December 1920 that the struggle might go “through a sea of blood”, and he hoped future generations would say “that we suffered, that we shed not somebody’s blood but our own.” During the open session Jinnah rose alone to oppose the resolution. “I appeal to him to pause, to cry halt before it is too late,” he said, and the audience shouted him down when he called Gandhi “Mr.” instead of Mahatma. Frank Sly, the Central Provinces’ Commissioner, reported to the Viceroy two days later that “Jinnah carried no influence.”

The Delhi Proposals and the Nehru Report

The Delhi Proposals of March 1927, which he got twenty-nine leading Muslims to agree to, offered joint electorates in place of separate ones, on conditions. Sind would become a province, the Frontier and Baluchistan would get reforms on the same footing as the rest, and Muslims would hold at least a third of the central legislature. According to Jinnah’s statement for the League Council in March 1929, the All-India Congress Committee had substantially accepted these in May 1927. The Congress’s Madras session that December called the Frontier reforms “a fair and reasonable one”.

The Simon Commission, announced in 1927, had seven British members and no Indian, and Jinnah’s wing of the League boycotted it. “Jallianwalla Bagh was a physical butchery,” he told the League at Calcutta at the turn of the year, “the Simon Commission is a butchery of our souls.”

The Indian answer was the Nehru Committee’s report. The communal proposals the All-Parties Convention adopted at Calcutta had joint mixed electorates everywhere, no reserved seats in the Punjab and Bengal if adult suffrage came, and reserved seats only for Muslim minorities elsewhere and for non-Muslims in the Frontier. Wolpert judges that the report “fundamentally repudiated the Lucknow Pact.”

At the Convention on 28 December 1928 Jinnah moved three changes: separate electorates would stay, a third of the seats in the central legislature would be reserved for Muslims, and the provinces would hold the residuary powers. Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru said that if Jinnah was “a spoilt child, a naughty child”, the Convention should “give him what he wants and be finished with it.” M. R. Jayakar answered that Jinnah spoke for “a small minority of Muslims”, since Maulana Azad, Dr Ansari and others had accepted the report. Jinnah’s reply, as Wolpert quotes it from M. H. Saiyid’s 1945 biography, was: “Minorities cannot give anything to the majority. It is, therefore, no use asking me not to press for what you call ‘these small points’.” His closing words were “let us part as friends.” The changes were rejected.

Fourteen points that the League never voted on

Jinnah’s answer was a draft resolution. The collection of constitutional documents by Gwyer and Appadorai dates the text 28 March 1929, and the Indian Annual Register shows the League Council meeting in Delhi that day with Jinnah’s statement and draft before it. The draft said no constitution would be acceptable to Muslims unless it met fourteen conditions. Among them: “In the Central Legislature, Mussalman representation shall not be less than one third.” Separate electorates would stay, “provided it shall be open to any community, at any time, to abandon its separate electorate in favour of joint electorate.” And: “No cabinet, either Central or Provincial, should be formed without there being a proportion of at least one-third Moslem Ministers.”

Jinnah’s covering statement said the Nehru proposals could “at best be treated only as counter Hindu proposals to Moslem proposals.”

The League could not agree on it, and on 31 March its Subjects Committee passed by a majority a resolution approving the principles of the Nehru Report with five changes. Dr Mahomed Alam took the chair in the open session at the Roshan Theatre, declared that resolution carried amid shouting, and dissolved the meeting. Jinnah arrived, took the chair back and adjourned the League without a vote.

Accepted on 6 June, withdrawn on 29 July

The Cabinet Mission’s statement of 16 May 1946 refused Pakistan. “We are therefore unable to advise the British Government,” it said, “that the power which at present resides in British hands should be handed over to two entirely separate sovereign states.” A union confined to foreign affairs, defence and communications came in its place, with the provinces grouped in three sections. Section B took the Punjab, the Frontier, Sind and British Baluchistan, and Section C took Bengal and Assam.

The League Council accepted it on 6 June. Its resolution gave the reason: “the basis and the foundation of Pakistan are inherent in the Mission’s Plan, by virtue of the compulsory grouping of the six Muslim provinces in Sections B & C”. The League was “willing to co-operate with the constitution-making machinery”, in the hope that it would end in a sovereign Pakistan, and it reserved the right to revise its policy. Two days later Jinnah wrote to the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, that Wavell had promised a provisional government with twelve portfolios: five for the League, five for Congress, one for a Sikh and one for a Christian or Anglo-Indian. “But for this assurance,” Jinnah wrote, “we would not have got the approval of the Council to the scheme.”

The Congress also accepted the plan, and Azad records that the All-India Congress Committee passed his resolution by an overwhelming majority. The League later said the Congress’s acceptance was “conditional and subject to their own interpretation”. Jawaharlal Nehru, in Azad’s account, told a Bombay press conference on 10 July that the Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly “completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise”. Asked whether the plan could be modified, Azad says, Nehru replied that the Congress was free to change it as it thought best.

Azad, who had just handed the presidency to Nehru, wrote: “Now happened one of those unfortunate events which changed the course of history.” Of Nehru’s statement that the Congress was free to change the plan, he wrote: “I must place on record that Jawaharlal’s statement was wrong.” Jaswant Singh agreed, in his 2009 book on Jinnah, that Nehru’s statements “went directly and totally against the letter and spirit of the Cabinet Mission’s plan”. Jinnah, Singh wrote, had supported the scheme, “virtually abandoning a sovereign Pakistan but insisting upon the grouping of Provinces”.

On 29 July the League Council withdrew its acceptance and said the British had “committed a breach of faith” by going back on the formula for the provisional government. A second resolution declared that “the time has come for the Muslim nation to resort to Direct Action to achieve Pakistan, to assert their just rights, to vindicate their honour and to get rid of the present British slavery and the contemplated future Caste-Hindu domination.” Jinnah, in words the Jinnah Papers’ editors quote from the Council’s proceedings, said: “This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods.” The British and the Congress had each held a pistol through the talks, he said, the one of authority and the other of non-cooperation. “Today, we have also forged a pistol and are in a position to use it.”

The League fixed 16 August as Direct Action Day, and on 14 August Jinnah told Muslims to keep it peaceful. The day brought riots in Calcutta, and the Indian Annual Register for 1946 reports estimates of the dead there from 4,000 to 10,000. On 21 August Nehru said in a press statement: “I said nothing about crushing the Muslim League or anyone.”

What Mountbatten recorded on 2 and 3 June

By 2 June 1947 the question was no longer the Cabinet Mission plan. Lord Mountbatten told the leaders at the meeting that morning that Jinnah “could never agree to the partition of Provinces, which he considered fundamentally wrong.” The Congress, Mountbatten went on, had accepted that no Muslim-majority area should be coerced, but only if the same rule applied to the non-Muslim majority areas that the original Pakistan plan had included.

In his own broadcast the next evening Mountbatten said: “But when the Muslim League demanded the partition of India, Congress used the same arguments for demanding in that event the Partition of certain Provinces. To my mind this argument is unassailable.” Following him on All-India Radio, Jinnah said: “It is clear that the Plan does not meet in some important respects our point of view,” and left it to the League Council, summoned for 9 June, to decide whether to accept it as a compromise.

Who carries most of the responsibility for what followed is still argued. The League’s resolutions of 1946 put it on the British and the Congress. Azad, by his own account, warned Nehru in the spring of 1947 that history would never forgive them if they agreed to partition, and that “the verdict would then be that India was divided as much by the Muslim League as by Congress.” The line that was drawn through the Punjab and Bengal that summer is the subject of the piece on the Radcliffe Line.

The printed text of Jinnah’s broadcast ends: “Once more I most earnestly appeal to all to maintain peace and order. Pakistan Zindabad.” The editors of the Jinnah Papers note that the press copy handed out in advance did not contain those last words and that Jinnah probably added them himself. The same day Vallabhbhai Patel wrote to Mountbatten that he was distressed at Jinnah’s “abuse” of the hospitality of All-India Radio, and that had he known in time he would have prevented him “from turning the All-India Radio into a Muslim League platform.”