RETREAT AND RAGE

First, the British Raj in India was critically dependent on collaborators came from both the old and the new (British-produced) order. If Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan chose the path of collaboration, so did most leading Hindus of that period. His Persian ancestry is relevant in this context. He spoke for the Persianized Muslim elite centred in western UP which played a crucial role in the rise of Muslim nationalism, leading to the formation of Pakistan. There is no similar Persianized Muslim elite in today's India and there is no power with which such an elite, even if it had somehow survived partition and subsequent modernization, could have combined. Second, even the first step towards Muslim nationalism could not have been taken in British India in the absence of separate electorates. This British move did not prove decisive, as the poor performance of the Muslim League in the elections to the state legislatures in 1937 showed;in the Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab, the dominant Muslim parties and leaders made common cause with the relevant sections of Hindus - the poor and the landless in Bengal and the Hindu and Sikh land owing peasantry in Punjab. Even so, separate electorates laid the basis of Muslim separatism. Our founding fathers abolished separate electorates and, mercifully for us, our rulers have not yielded to the pressure for allowing the dangerous scheme to make a re-entry by the back door, which is what the demand for proportional representation amounts to.

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