Britain gives in to demands for reform from the Indian National Congress

I was unsure if I should put this in before or after 1900. Some of the demands for reform came before 1900, so the question might just as well be put there. The Indian National Congress originally did not support independence, but wanted reform, for instance that Indians should be able to get access to the higher positions in the administrations. Gradually, their demands changed to independence. Britain gave in to some demands, but far less than the moderate parts of the INC wanted. Instead they used traditional "divide and rule"-tactics to split the Indians along religious lines. This might have encouraged the divisions that lead to the creation of an independent Pakistan. But what if Britain had given in to the demands for reform from the Indian National Congress? This might have been in their interest. The reforms were after all reasonable and it would probably made the INC more loyal to the UK. It would still likely in the long run end in independence, but I would assume that it would change quite a lot how independence would be achieved. How would it affect the relations between the different religious groups? Would there still be an independent Pakistan?
 
As you may well know, the INC was established with support from the British themselves to allow the growing middle class in India have a "health release" and not go revolutionary. Therefore I doubt anything could be pushed: I think only after WWI was the INC not held by the balls.
Independence should, obviously, not be the explicit policy of the INC - Conservatives like Churchill would go absolutely nuts over shit like that(as was IOTL I think). It'll be hard to come up with anything other than "divide and rule" as that was the standard within the Empire, from Ireland to South Africa to India and elsewhere. It's also the easiest way to go.
Might sound ironic but a different or nonexistent WWII may do it. As was what happened in CalBear's AANW TL, India could develop a more pan-national and mature independence movement that allows all of British India to stick with each other. That requires time, which was not what was able to occur in IOTL.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
Our current local expert is Kalki - he's actually doing a TL on an alternate take on British India, though it's with a divergence a bit earlier than you're after.
He has a good thread on India, you could look there.
 
As you may well know, the INC was established with support from the British themselves to allow the growing middle class in India have a "health release" and not go revolutionary. Therefore I doubt anything could be pushed: I think only after WWI was the INC not held by the balls.
Independence should, obviously, not be the explicit policy of the INC - Conservatives like Churchill would go absolutely nuts over shit like that(as was IOTL I think). It'll be hard to come up with anything other than "divide and rule" as that was the standard within the Empire, from Ireland to South Africa to India and elsewhere. It's also the easiest way to go.
Might sound ironic but a different or nonexistent WWII may do it. As was what happened in CalBear's AANW TL, India could develop a more pan-national and mature independence movement that allows all of British India to stick with each other. That requires time, which was not what was able to occur in IOTL.

The INC did not originally support independence. As you pointed out, Britain was supportive of the establishment of the INC. However, they did come up with demands that Britain did not accept. These were quite moderate demands, they were more about the equal treatment of Indian and British civil sevants and political representation. The INC pointed out that this was in line with British political values (a bit like when the Americans pointed out the same before they became supportive of full independence from Britain. There were also more radical elements, but as far as I understand, they were forced out of the INC.

So, my question was not really about independence (I only pointed out that it still might have resulted in independence in the long run. Such reforms that were demanded could just as well have resulted in making the native elite more supportive of a continued membership of the empire. This might have delayed independence.
 
To do this, you need to change the racial attitudes of the British government. IOTL, the INC's calls for more autonomy were ignored because the British felt that non-whites didn't have the brains to govern themselves competently.
 
To do this, you need to change the racial attitudes of the British government. IOTL, the INC's calls for more autonomy were ignored because the British felt that non-whites didn't have the brains to govern themselves competently.

If Britain had considered it necessary to give into demands in order to avoid radicalisation, they might have given in to demands despite racist prejudices.
 
The trick is to have the first set of reforms of the 20th century, the Morley - Minto reforms, not be seen by Congress as divide and rule tactics. That actually requires not having divide and rule tactics.
 
@OP

Well to be honest we really have to see which specific set of reforms are we talking about. The early INC was more concerned with better administration of the Indian Empire. However they also stressed strongly on equal status for the British and the Indian natives with regards to not just opportunity for advancements in career, but also in matters of the Law.

In fact the last point was one of the reasons the INC arose. After the uproar over the Illbert Bill of 1883, the Indians and their British sympathisers in the administration learnt a lot about how to organise themselves into a political organisation to better represent their interests. The British and Anglo Indian opponents of the bill organised a well coordinated and effective political campaign to oppose the bill, which btw nearly succeeded and surely marred Lord Ripon's otherwise sterling career. All of which was because the bill allowed native judges to prosecute british origin people.

The experience gained from this episode precipitated the founding in the INC in 1885.

Equality before the law is tricky as it introduces ideas such as Rights of Man and Rule of Law into the picture. last thing you would want is for the natives to start getting ideas that they just might be the equals to the rulers. Thats 19th century social darwinism for you. It maybe abhorrent to our modern sensibilities but from a pragmatic standpoint and from the idea of cultural superiority pervading the time period it is a perfectly natural and acceptable conclusion.

From this very logic, more specifically the pragmatic logic of preserving the empire, the conclusion can be drawn that Conservatives in Britain would never support the reforms for fear of reform being a stepping stone to independence. A slippery slope if you will. As such the survival of the British liberal party as the leading political force would be essential to ensuring that any reforms are passed.

More so another issue a lot of historians miss in this time period was the effect the Indian Mutiny had on the British. Sure a hundred thousand Indians were killed and the loss of life among the natives was terrible. But there were hundreds if not thousands of British and anglo-indian people killed too, many of them women and children of officers stationed in India. And many of the officers who died were killed by their own troops. The women and children were raped and murdered by their own servants, working in their homes. People they met and interacted with everyday. Think about that for a second.

Whatever the reasons may be for the mutiny, which are surely numerous, this 'betrayal' of sorts created a palpable distrust between the British and the Indians. I doubt the reforms would be implemented by a distrustful administration. Surely this distrust would have to be mended for any reforms to be ever passed.

And finally, as some posters have pointed out, parts of the reforms posited by the INC were passed and implemented. But the reforms were almost always too little too late. When the british implemented reforms, the Indians were already talking about limited autonomy. When limited autonomy was given, the Indians wanted Self-rule as a dominion. And when dominion status was finally conferred it was on August 15th, 1947.

As you can see the british were always behind the curve vis a vis the demand vs implementation of reforms in the Raj and in the end paid the price for it with the end of the Empire.

As for the question of Pakistan, the idea of Pakistan may be first conceived before the 1940s but it never caught on with the public until the opening days of the second world war when Nehru, Gandhi and other leaders of the INC were imprisoned for the 'Quit India movement'. It was in that vacuum that the Muslim League grew from a fringe entity in politics, under the able guidance of Jinnah into a formidable political movement in the sub-continent.

If only Gandhi and Nehru had not managed to so spectacularly alienate Jinnah, the muslim league would have never registered as much as a blip on the political consciousness of the sub-continent.

Hope this answers some of your questions and raises a lot more :p
 
Years ago in a class on political parties, my optional book was India Wins Freedom by Abul Kalam Azad who was an politician at the time of independence. He thought partition was a disaster, and stated that rivers of blood ran.

Maybe if India had gotten ahead of the curve and had enough of a tradition of religious freedom so that Muslims and other religious minorities had confidence they would not be treated as second-class citizens.

Theory: This is actually easier when you have a 5 to 10% minority. When you have a 30% minority, it's harder because those in the majority realize that with their own shifting coalitions, you might end up as part of a governing coalition.
 
@OP

As for the question of Pakistan, the idea of Pakistan may be first conceived before the 1940s but it never caught on with the public until the opening days of the second world war when Nehru, Gandhi and other leaders of the INC were imprisoned for the 'Quit India movement'. It was in that vacuum that the Muslim League grew from a fringe entity in politics, under the able guidance of Jinnah into a formidable political movement in the sub-continent.

If only Gandhi and Nehru had not managed to so spectacularly alienate Jinnah, the muslim league would have never registered as much as a blip on the political consciousness of the sub-continent.

I'm curious about this. How did Gandhi, Nehru and the other INC leadership manage to alienate Jinnah so badly?

Also after this alienation, how was Jinnah able to so effectively grow the Muslim League into the powerful political force it became during the WWII period, transforming the idea of Pakistan from a fringe aristocratic idea to the mass movement it became?
 
I'm curious about this. How did Gandhi, Nehru and the other INC leadership manage to alienate Jinnah so badly?

Also after this alienation, how was Jinnah able to so effectively grow the Muslim League into the powerful political force it became during the WWII period, transforming the idea of Pakistan from a fringe aristocratic idea to the mass movement it became?


Allow me to present some history about the man before we continue.

Jinnah joined the INC in 1904, a decade before Gandhi was anywhere on the INC's radar. He was the member of the moderate faction of Congress which advocated for hindu-muslim unity and self-rule through constitutional means. He even wrote a scathing article criticising the founding of the Muslim League in 1906.

By the time the First World War rolled in he had joined up, along with his allies in the moderate faction, with the radical faction of INC and formed the Home Rule Movement. They were seeing some success but then the war put any ideas for reform on the back burner. It was at this time that Gandhi showed up in the picture. In the meantime in 1912 order to secure a entente he joined the Muslim League. He did not leave the INC until much later.

By 1919 most of Jinnah's allies in the moderate faction had died. This had severely weakened the Moderate faction. Gandhi meanwhile used this vacuum to bolster his influence on the INC. He used the Khilafat movement which for the reinstatement of the Ottoman Emperor as the Caliph of all (Sunni) Muslims as a springboard to gaining support among the muslims. His idea of satyagrah really caught on with the enraged nation in the aftermath of the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre in 1919. Jinnah believed the satyagrah movement under Gandhi to be counterproductive as it would further alienate the British government, and make them more unwilling to accept change, both of which it did. At this point he was shouted down in the INC meetings and Jinnah had finally lost all influence in the INC. In 1920 he finally resigned from congress.

Then spent a good part of the next decade and a half in the wilderness. It was finally in 1933 that he decided to step back into the political ring to contest the elections in provincial 1937. The Muslim league got soundly drubbed and won few seats, even in the Muslim majority regions. The INC even won the majority of the seats in modern day Waziristan in Pakistan where virtually the entire population was Muslim. [1]

This made him rethink his strategy and dramatically expand membership of his party. As such the Muslim league was perfectly poised to step into the political vacuum created by the arrest of Gandhi and Nehru in 1940, just as Gandhi had before him; and take his party from the fringes to the center stage.

Now moving on to actually answering your question as to the cause for the divide.

Well starting off in 1914 itself Jinnah was convinced that Gandhi's movement would only lead to chaos (which it sort of did ref: Chauri Chaura incident) and would lead to an alienation of the British government from the Indian movements. He was a lawyer, like Gandhi. Unlike Gandhi he wanted to work with the system not break it down.

Also there was the issue that Gandhi basically came into the picture a lot later than Jinnah and showed him the door. Gandhi basically proceeded to dismantle everything Jinnah had worked for (i.e., the rapport between the moderate faction of the INC and the government) and remove any opposition in the INC, which included Jinnah and his supporters. I wouldn't be surprised if all this made Jinnah feel Gandhi was an usurper.

Towards the end of this story Jinnah was convinced that Gandhi was turning the INC into a mouthpiece. Gandhi had successfully sidelined many of his opponents within the INC starting from Jinnah and the emaciated Moderates and later the radicals like Subhash Chandra Bose. In the later case he openly demanded that Bose step down or that Gandhi would go on another hunger strike to the death (his preferred weapon). The machinations of the Gandhi Clique made Jinnah wary of association with him.

His support for the formation of Pakistan came from the fact that his suggestion to the INC for securing the Muslims in a Hindu majority India were not acted upon several times. When he took over the Muslim League in 1929 he realised that this was his ticket to establishing a party that could take on the INC, and by extension the Gandhi clique, and the virtual hegemony it had on Indian politics.

Gandhi meanwhile had started moving from a secular ideology to an ideology for his movement based on certain ideas of Hinduism. This was so as to secure a larger support base among the Hindu masses. Obviously this was threatening to Jinnah who knew that if the independence movement went down that route, there would be lesser political guarantees for Muslims in independent India.

Meanwhile soon after his release Gandhi expressed deep discontentment with the idea of Partition. He had rightly foreseen that it would lead to needless blood shed. Unfortunately for him, Jinnah was convinced that it was another on of his ploys to manipulate Jinnah into submission. That combined with the favouring of Nehru as Gandhi's right hand man sealed off any avenues for rapprochement between the two camps.

So that was what finally galvanized him to action and convinced him to push for Pakistan. By 1941-42 the idea of Pakistan held widespread appeal among Indian Muslims and the Gandhi-Jinnah split was irreparable.

And this is how Gandhi the man responsible (inadvertently so) for the partition of the subcontinent is known as one of the staunches opponents of partition.

And Jinnah one of the most eloquent and erudite voices in the Indian independence movement and for Hindu-Muslim solidarity became the architect of the Partition.

Hope this helps. :)

[1] Interestingly enough modern day waziristan is the place where most of the ISI funded terrorists camps are. It basically the lawless badlands of Pakistan.
 
Last edited:
Allow me to present some history about the man before we continue.

Jinnah joined the INC in 1904, a decade before Gandhi was anywhere on the INC's radar. He was the member of the moderate faction of Congress which advocated for hindu-muslim unity and self-rule through constitutional means. He even wrote a scathing article criticising the founding of the Muslim League in 1906.

By the time the First World War rolled in he had joined up, along with his allies in the moderate faction, with the radical faction of INC and formed the Home Rule Movement. They were seeing some success but then the war put any ideas for reform on the back burner. It was at this time that Gandhi showed up in the picture. In the meantime in 1912 order to secure a entente he joined the Muslim League. He did not leave the INC until much later.

By 1919 most of Jinnah's allies in the moderate faction had died. This had severely weakened the Moderate faction. Gandhi meanwhile used this vacuum to bolster his influence on the INC. He used the Khilafat movement which for the reinstatement of the Ottoman Emperor as the Caliph of all (Sunni) Muslims as a springboard to gaining support among the muslims. His idea of satyagrah really caught on with the enraged nation in the aftermath of the Jallianwallah Bagh Massacre in 1919. Jinnah believed the satyagrah movement under Gandhi to be counterproductive as it would further alienate the British government, and make them more unwilling to accept change, both of which it did. At this point he was shouted down in the INC meetings and Jinnah had finally lost all influence in the INC. In 1920 he finally resigned from congress.

Then spent a good part of the next decade and a half in the wilderness. It was finally in 1933 that he decided to step back into the political ring to contest the elections in provincial 1937. The Muslim league got soundly drubbed and won few seats, even in the Muslim majority regions. The INC even won the majority of the seats in modern day Waziristan in Pakistan where virtually the entire population was Muslim. [1]

This made him rethink his strategy and dramatically expand membership of his party. As such the Muslim league was perfectly poised to step into the political vacuum created by the arrest of Gandhi and Nehru in 1940, just as Gandhi had before him; and take his party from the fringes to the center stage.

Now moving on to actually answering your question as to the cause for the divide.

Well starting off in 1914 itself Jinnah was convinced that Gandhi's movement would only lead to chaos (which it sort of did ref: Chauri Chaura incident) and would lead to an alienation of the British government from the Indian movements. He was a lawyer, like Gandhi. Unlike Gandhi he wanted to work with the system not break it down.

Also there was the issue that Gandhi basically came into the picture a lot later than Jinnah and showed him the door. Gandhi basically proceeded to dismantle everything Jinnah had worked for (i.e., the rapport between the moderate faction of the INC and the government) and remove any opposition in the INC, which included Jinnah and his supporters. I wouldn't be surprised if all this made Jinnah feel Gandhi was an usurper.

Towards the end of this story Jinnah was convinced that Gandhi was turning the INC into a mouthpiece. Gandhi had successfully sidelined many of his opponents within the INC starting from Jinnah and the emaciated Moderates and later the radicals like Subhash Chandra Bose. In the later case he openly demanded that Bose step down or that Gandhi would go on another hunger strike to the death (his preferred weapon). The machinations of the Gandhi Clique made Jinnah wary of association with him.

His support for the formation of Pakistan came from the fact that his suggestion to the INC for securing the Muslims in a Hindu majority India were not acted upon several times. When he took over the Muslim League in 1929 he realised that this was his ticket to establishing a party that could take on the INC, and by extension the Gandhi clique, and the virtual hegemony it had on Indian politics.

Gandhi meanwhile had started moving from a secular ideology to an ideology for his movement based on certain ideas of Hinduism. This was so as to secure a larger support base among the Hindu masses. Obviously this was threatening to Jinnah who knew that if the independence movement went down that route, there would be lesser political guarantees for Muslims in independent India.

Meanwhile soon after his release Gandhi expressed deep discontentment with the idea of Partition. He had rightly foreseen that it would lead to needless blood shed. Unfortunately for him, Jinnah was convinced that it was another on of his ploys to manipulate Jinnah into submission. That combined with the favouring of Nehru as Gandhi's right hand man sealed off any avenues for rapprochement between the two camps.

So that was what finally galvanized him to action and convinced him to push for Pakistan. By 1941-42 the idea of Pakistan held widespread appeal among Indian Muslims and the Gandhi-Jinnah split was irreparable.

And this is how Gandhi the man responsible (inadvertently so) for the partition of the subcontinent is known as one of the staunches opponents of partition.

And Jinnah one of the most eloquent and erudite voices in the Indian independence movement and for Hindu-Muslim solidarity became the architect of the Partition.

Hope this helps. :)

[1] Interestingly enough modern day waziristan is the place where most of the ISI funded terrorists camps are. It basically the lawless badlands of Pakistan.

Fascinating, thanks for this! It seems Partition was just as much a civil conflict driven by huge personalities (Jinnah vs Gandhi/Nehru) as it was a religious/communal war. Its interesting that Gandhi/Nehru alienated both the INC moderates (Jinnah) and radicals (Subhas Chandra Bose).

I guess it was Gandhi's way or the highway in the INC.
 
Top