Number of words: 476

M.J. Akbar, in an erudite and magisterial essay analyses the challenge of it convincingly, in a yet to be published work The Major Minority: ‘At what point in the story of the last thousand years did Indian Muslims become a minority? The question is, clearly, rhetorical. Muslims have never been in a numerical majority on the Indian subcontinent’.

Also then ‘Did Indian Muslims consider themselves a minority during Mughal rule, which was finally buried, more than a hundred years after it had become impotent, in the rubble of the war of 1857? … Muslims formed only eleven percent of the population of the most powerful Muslim princely state in the British era, Hyderabad; eighty-four percent were Hindus. Did the Muslims of Hyderabad consider themselves a minority as long as the descendants of Nizam- ul Mulk, a Mughal governor who carved out an independent state from the shards of empire in 1723, ruled them? No.

‘A minority, therefore, is not a consequence of numbers, but a definition of empowerment. As long as Muslims identified with the state, were confident that they could expect economic benefits as well as jobs in the bureaucracy, judiciary and military, and their aman-i-awwal (liberty of religion) was protected, demographic figures were irrelevant’. Th at is why they were then psychologically not a minority, and yet, continues Akbar: ‘In 1948, [as soon as] the Nizam was deposed and Hyderabad was absorbed into the new … Union of India … the same Muslims suddenly began to think of themselves a minority?’ Why? An answer to this would settle a number of questions, I think.

It is in this, a false ‘minority syndrome’ that the dry rot of partition first set in, and then unstoppably it afflicted the entire structure, the magnificent edifice of an united India. The answer (cure?), Jinnah asserted, lay only in parting, and Nehru and Patel and others of the Congress also finally agreed. Thus was born Pakistan. However, minoritism in India stayed back and has now actually become even more emphasised, more acute, for we now have a precedent to follow, which with us is more binding than even constitutional provisions; suicidal, no doubt but we persist in flagrant masochism. In Pakistan it found new sectarian designs to assert minoritism, as in Bangladesh, too, though, in reality the Hindu of an undivided Bengal, had actually assented to a division of Bengal. So in all this what have we resolved? I can’t find any answer; for this entire episode of the breaking up of India in 1947 is one of those rare conundrums of history which appears to be an answer but in reality is very far from it. Such paradoxes have no answers, but as in life so in politics and in history, too, paradoxes quite often resolve contradictions.

Excerpted from Page 488-490 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh