Abstract
Ever since the British decided to introduce representative institutions in India, their nature and basis became a subject of acute controversy. Most Indian leaders of both the conservative and liberal political persuasions subscribed to what some of them called the liberal theory of representation and pleaded for representative institutions along the same lines as in Britain. For them the state was a secular institution, castes, creeds and religions were politically irrelevant, decisions should be taken on the basis of the majority principle and the rights of minorities should be fully protected by appropriate constitutional safeguards.
Let posterity know what agony this old man went through thinking of it. Let not the coming generations curse Gandhi for being a party to India’s vivisection.
(Gandhi, 1947)
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Notes
The Pioneer,5 October 1893. See also Syed Sudfiuddin Pirzada (ed.), Foundations of Pakistan: All India Muslim League Documents: 1906–1947 (National Publishing House, Dacca) 1969, vol. 1, p. xxxvii.
Quoted in Rama Nand Agarwala, National Movement Constitutional Development (Delhi: Metropolitan 1956) p. 63.
See also Sir Reginald Coupland, The Indian Problem vol. 1 (London, 1942), pp. 29 f;
and Sir Maurice Gwyer and A. Appadorai (eds), Speeches and Documents on the Indian Constitution, 1921–47 vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1957) p. 260.
Quoted in T. Wallbank (ed.), The Partition of India: Causes and Responsibilities (New York, 1966) p. 40.
Bhai Parmanand in his Arya Samaj or Hindu Sangathan (Delhi, 1923) argued that the only satisfactory way to secure peace was ‘to effect complete severance between the two peoples’.
Lala Lajpat Rai repeated the view in Tribune (Lahore), 14 December 1924). Raja Maheshwar Dayal Seth of Hindu Mahasabha carried on important negotiations with Jinnah in 1942. See The Indian Annual Register,vol. 11, 1944, p. 60.
See Ram Gopal, Indian Muslims: A Political History (Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1964) p. 304.
For a complete text of Jinnah’s speech, see M. A. Karandikar, Islam: India’s Translation to Modernity (Eastern Publishers, 1961), pp. 281 f.
In Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1962), Kedourie more or less equates it with the central European variety of it. In his Nationalism in Asia and Africa (New York: World Publishing, 1970) he analyses Asian and African independence movements almost entirely in European terms, and fails to appreciate that many a leader in these countries often used the terms nation and nationalism in almost wholly non-European senses.
Both Peter Worsley, The Third World (London, 1964),
and K. R. Minogue, Nationalism (London, 1967) suffer from similar limitations. None of these writers cites primary sources in the original and they almost ignore indigenous ‘nationalist’ discourse.
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© 1989 Bhikhu Parekh
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Parekh, B. (1989). Partition and the Non-nationalist Discourse. In: Gandhi’s Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09248-2_8
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