Thus a remarkable success had attended the efforts of the predominantly U.P. and Aligarh-based Muslim elite group which had organized the Simla Deputation to Minto on 1 October 1906, pleading for separate electorates and representation in excess of numerical strength in view of 'the value of the contribution' Muslims were making 'to the defence of the Empire'. The same group quickly took over the Muslim League, initially floated by Salimulla at Dacca in December 1906. Admirers of the Muslim League have indignantly sought to refute the nationalist (as well as Hindus communalist) charge that this entire movement had been stage-managed by the British, and was no more than a 'command performance' (Mohammed Ali's oft-quoted term for 141
the Simla Deputation at the Kakinada Congress of 1923). The Sayyid Ahmed group had been pleading for special Muslim representation by nomination from the 1880s, and as elections became unavoidable, a demand for separate electorates was bound to emerge. Very significant also were signs of internal differences among politically-conscious Muslims. Sayyid Ahmed's political heir, Mohsin-ul-Mulk, informed Principal Archbold on 4 August 1906 that a more active political line was necessary, as 'young educated Mohammadens seem to have sympathy for the Congress,—referring probably to Aligarh 'young gentlemen' like Hasrat Mohani or Mohammed Ali or the Zamindar editor Zafar Ali Khan of Lahore. The Aligarh students union had in fact passed a resolution advocating Hindu-Muslim political cooperation in May 1906. Mohsin-ul-Mulk insisted on removing from Archbold's initial draft a sentence pledging
'aloofness from political agitation', since the radicals he wanted to counter were already saying 'that the policy of Sir Syed and that of mine has done no good to Muhammedans'.
Yet British responsibility for the encouragement of communal separatism remains an undeniable fact. Fuller had been 'playing off the two sections of the population against each other' in the new province, admitted Minto to Morley on 15 August 1906, and his successor had continued the policy of favouring Muslims in new appointments. He also pressed Minto to sanction a Rs 14 lakh loan to Nawab Salimulla of Dacca as 'a political matter of great importance'. There is ample evidence that through Principal Archbold, Mohsin-ul-Mulk and other Muslim leaders kept in
close touch with the Viceroy's private secretary Dunlop Smith, as well as with officials like the Lucknow Commissioner Harcourt Butler (in whose private papers historians have recently discovered a first draft of the Simla Memorial). While organizing the Muslim League, the Aga Khan assured Dunlop Smith on 29 October 1906 that he had instructed Mohsin-ul-Mulk 'not to move in any matter before first finding out if the step to be taken has the full approval of Government privately.'. . . More important than direct inspiration, however, was an objective similarity of interests, which would repeatedly manifest itself in succeeding decades between officialdom and both Muslim and Hindu upper-class communalists. It may be mentioned in parenthesis that at a meeting of the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal in December 1906,
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the Maharaja of Darbhanga had declared that 'with the Hindus Loyalty or Rajbhakti is an element of religion'. Nothing else can explain how an infant and really quite weak organization like the Muslim League (with a membership of only 400 in December 1907, an annual subscription of no less than Rs 25, and a minimum eligibility qualification of Rs 500 annual income), pursuing 'mendicant' techniques identical with those of the early Congress, could still be so successful within three years of its foundation. A deputation under Ameer Ali in early 1909 was able to quickly scotch a move by Morley to replace separate electorates by a mixed electoral college, since the contacts it had established with Tories were alarming for a Liberal administration engaged in a bitter fight over internal reforms. 'I cannot see that they (Muslims) are in the least entitled to the number of seats that will now be allotted to them', Minto confessed to Morley in private on 11 November 1909—but neither felt it at all incumbent to do anything about it. The basic weakness of the Muslim League was to be revealed soon enough, when, ignoring its loud protests, the new province of Eastern Bengal and Assam which had undoubtedly helped the Muslim elite was suddenly wound up in December 1911.
The Indian Councils Act of 1909 proved to be the most short lived of all of Britains
'constitutional' experiments in India, being totally revised within nine years by the Montagu- Chelmsford Report of 1918. It quickly revealed itself to be a failure, both in rallying moderates and in keeping politically-active Hindus and Muslim apart. The moderates at their Madras Congress (1908) had welcomed the proposed reforms as 'large and liberal'. By 1909, however, a closer look had made men like Malaviya extremely critical of the excessive concessions to Muslims. As Bayly has shown in detail in his micro-study of Allahabad, developments like the uneasiness caused by violations of civil liberties in the suppression of radicals and further extension of separate electorates into local bodies were making an important section of the old Moderate leadership think in terms of somewhat greater militancy by about 1915-16. For the moment, however, Congress politics lemained 'very dull' (as Jawaharlal Nehru recalls in his Autobiography) in the immediate pre-war years. Attendance at Congress sessions fell off sharply, and Moderates without Extremists to prod them on seemed capable of only 143
making eloquent speeches. Gokhale did that with some effect on the floor of the reformed Imperial Council, pleading for universal primary education, attacking repressive policies, and
drawing public attention to the plight of indentured labourers and the condition of Indians in South Africa.
The Muslim political elite got a rude shock in December 1911, when George V announced the revocation of the Partition at the Delhi Durbar. The king had personally suggested this as a suitable 'boon': he had seen something of the Bengal agitation at first hand, having visited India as Prince of Wales in 1905-06. After some initial hesitation, Viceroy Hardinge and Secretary of State Crewe found the idea quite attractive as it involved little extra expenditure unlike other possible 'boons'. The suggestion was strongly endorsed by Home Member Jenkins, who was deeply worried by the continuing revolutionary terrorism in Bengal, and felt that 'until we get rid of the partition ulcer, we shall have no peace. . . '. The Government of India despatch of 25 August 1911 linked the reunion of Bengal under a Governor-in-Council with a transfer of the capital to Delhi, both as a sop to Muslim sentiments and, much more important, on the rather farsighted argument that Viceregal authority should be insulated from provincial pressures as ultimately 'a larger measure of self-government' was inevitable in the provinces.
Muslim opinion was not mollified by the bid to recall Delhi-based Mughal glory, and was in fact further alienated by Britain's refusal to help Turkey in her Italian and Balkan wars (1911-12); Hardinge's rejection of proposals for a Muslim University at Aligarh in August 1912; and the August 1913 riot in Kanpur over demolition of a platform adjoining a mosque. The so-called 'Young Party' captured the Muslim League in 1912, and began steering it towards greater militancy, some kind of accommodation with nationalist Hindus, and increasing pan-Islamism. Its leaders included Wazir Hassan, T.A.K. Sherwani and the more radical Ali brothers
(Muhammad and Shaukat) and Hasrat Mohani in U.P., the Extremist veteran Zafar Ali Khan in Punjab, and Fazlul Huq in Bengal (a rising young lawyer who for fifty years would combine sophisticated politicking with a genuine rustic mass appeal). Unlike 'Old Party' veterans like Salimuila, Nawab Ali Chaudhuri and Shansul Huda in Bengal or Mohsin-ul-Mulk in U.P., these were seldom titled zamindars, (though in U.P. they
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did get the support of the Raja of Mahmudabad for a time). Francis Robinson has shown that in U.P. the Young Party tended 'to belong to the class which occasionally had a small pittance in rents from land but generally . .. had to find employment in service or the professions'—(p. 177) very similar in social composition, it may be noted, to radical Hindu nationalists. Journals like Muhammad Ali's Comrade (Calcutta), Abul Kalam Azad's Al-Hilal (Calcutta) or Zafar Ali Khan's Zamindar (Lahore) were soon attracting police attention by their pan-Islamist and anti- British tone. The Ali brothers backed by Abdul Bari's Lucknow-based Firangi Mahal school of ulama organized the Anjumen-i-Khuddam-i Kaaba in 1913 to raise funds to protect the Muslim holy places, and in 1912-13 Ansari and Zafar Ali Khan led a medical mission to help Turkey in the Balkan wars. Wazir Hassan as the new secretary of the Muslim League pushed through in March 1913, a resolution stating colonial self-government through constitutional means to be the League's aim, bringing it in tune with the Congress. The stage was being set for the Khilafat movement and a period of general Hindu-Muslim political cooperation.