Role of Lord Minto in promoting communalism in India.

Communalism in India mostly originated due to Colonial insertion, expansion and its
preservation. The Divide and Rule policy of the British was the prime reason for the
growth of communalism. This communalism later led to the partition of the country into
Pakistan and Hindustan.

The British bureaucrat’s first move to counter the menace (the growing feeling of unity
among the Hindus and Muslims) was the “All-India Mohammedan Deputation” that
waited on Minto at Simla on 1st October, 1906. Its leader was His Highness the Aga Khan
“of Bombay.” On him had been conferred the status of “leader of the Muslims in India.”
(He figured in this role on many a crucial occasion in later years. About the time the Raj
came to an end, he forswore Indian citizenship and vanished from the Indian political
scene, although fifty million of his colonialists remained in this country after Pakistan
had been carved out.)

The deputation itself was a collection of individuals, hand-picked for the purpose, in
disregard of the fact that the All-India Muslim League was the recognized forum of
politically minded Muslims in the country.

The cardinal point of the address was a plea for separate electorates for the Muslims in
any scheme of political reform on the ground that they were loth to place “our national
interests at the mercy of an unsympathetic majority.” At the same time, it asked for a
due share for them in “the gazetted and the subordinate and ministerial service.” The idea
that the Muslims were not just a minority was further reinforced by the demand that
their representatives in the Imperial Legislative Council “should never be an ineffective
minority.”

What was left unsaid in the address was underscored in the reply of Lord Minto. “I am
grateful to you,” he declared, “for the opportunity you are affording me of expressing my
appreciation of the just aims of the followers of Islam and their determination to share in
the political history of our Empire.” The Viceroy went on to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of
the Muslim claims. “The pith of your address,” he said, is a demand “that in any system of
representation, whether it affects a municipality, a district board, or a legislative council,
in which it is proposed to introduce or increase an electoral organization, the
Mohammedan community should be represented as a community.” He expressed the firm
conviction that “any electoral representation in India would be doomed to mischievous
failure which aimed at granting a personal enfranchisement regardless of the beliefs and
traditions of the communities composing the population of this continent.”
The comment in a nationalist newspaper was caustic. Said the Amrita Bazar Patrika of
Calcutta: “The whole thing appears to be a got-up affair, and fully engineered by interested
officials ... So the All-India Mohammedan Deputation is neither all-India, nor a-
Mohammedan, nor even a deputation so-called.” Congressmen felt deep resentment at
Minto’s reference to India as “this continent” and to its people as so many nations, each
with its own traditions. More partisan was Minto’s allusion to the Muslims as “the
descendants of a conquering and ruling race,” for in fact the overwhelming majority of
Indian Muslims are converts from Hinduism, not descended from the Turks, Persians,
Pathans or Mughals who once held sway over the country. Those who can trace their
ancestry today to these conquering races are but a drop in the ocean of Indian humanity.

The End