The Two-Nation Theory

In 1935 Mawdudi shared a train compartment with B. G. Kher, the Congress party’s chief minister-designate of Bombay. Mawdudi felt that Kher humiliated those Muslims with whom he came into contact during the trip, and there and then decided that he could not live in a state ruled by Hindus.^[33] As idealistic as he may have been, by the late 1930s even he could see that the dream of converting the whole of India to Islam no longer seemed possible. For that reason Mawdudi increasingly succumbed to the communalist feelings that had all along influenced his turn to revivalism and political activism. If he was opposed to Congress’s secular nationalism—aimed at gaining independence for India—it was primarily because he was a Muslim communalist at heart.

Many, including Mawdudi’s own supporters, have argued that the Jama‘at’s opposition to the Pakistan movement and the Muslim League was only the logical result of Mawdudi’s opposition to secular nationalism. Yet, Mawdudi’s rejection of secular nationalism was neither as steadfast, nor as jejune, as both his critics and his followers suggest. It was communalism, behind the facade of Islam—creating distinctions between the “self” and the “other”—which governed Mawdudi’s binary view of the world as sacred and profane. For Mawdudi, secular nationalism was a threat to communalism, and only for that reason did it feature in his ideological demonology, because secular nationalism meant Congress rule—a “Hindu Raj” in Mawdudi’s words. In 1938, in a lengthy article in Tarjumanu’l-Qur’an, he wrote, “Nehru’s promises of scientific progress and nationalist democracy will be tantamount to the extinction of Islam, and hence Muslims.”^[34]

In the same article Mawdudi systematically attacked Congress’s position on secular nationalism and democracy as unworkable and detrimental to the interests of Indian Muslims. In its place he offered two “two-nation” schemes of his own,^[35] proposing a state within a state (riyasat dar riyasat) that echoed Muhammad Iqbal’s demand for a “Muslim India within India.”^[36] He then offered plans that would preserve the territorial integrity of India and still give Muslims substantial communal autonomy. The first plan favored dividing India into two “culturally autonomous” democratic entities, which would form the “international federation” of India with a constitution similar to those of “Switzerland, Australia, or the United States.”^[37] The constituent entities would be equal partners in running the state, would have distinct boundaries, and would be sovereign in their internal affairs, with the power to formulate and implement their own laws. For matters pertaining to the state as a whole, such as the formulation of its confederate constitution, a constituent assembly would be formed, the members of which would be chosen through elections based on proportional representation.

Should the first plan not prove popular, Mawdudi devised a second one, in which India would again be reorganized along confederate lines, this time with fourteen territories, thirteen of which—Ajmer, Awadh, Baluchistan, East Bengal, Bhopal, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jawrah, Junagadh, North-West Frontier Province, North and West Punjab, Sind, and Tonk—would be awarded to Muslims, and a single large fourteenth would be Hindu. The thirteen were “justly” suggested by Sayyid ‘Abdu’l-Latif whom Mawdudi lauded for the plan’s wisdom in redrawing the map of India along communal lines. Twenty-five years would be allotted for exchanging populations between the thirteen territories and their Hindu neighbor. The fourteen territories would be bound by an Indian confederacy, but would enjoy sovereignty over their internal affairs. These plans clearly underscored Mawdudi’s communalist inclinations, but still in an Indian framework. But that would not be the case for long. Even at the end of this revealing article he wrote that if the second plan too was rejected, Muslims would “have no choice but to demand a completely autonomous unit, tied together [with its Hindu counterpart] only for defense, communications, and trade,”^[38] an idea which was not too distant from what the Congress, the Muslim League, and the viceroy were debating at the time.

These ideas of Indian confederacy, however, increasingly gave way to sober realization of the fractious direction in which Indian politics were heading. Mawdudi, like most Muslim communalists, began to feel the constraint of the narrowing range of options before him. When asked in 1938–1939 about his choice of the title “Daru’l-Islam” (Abode of Islam) for his project in Pathankot, Mawdudi explained “it means only a Muslim cultural home and not a Muslim state, but if God wills it, the two may become one.”^[39] By Muslim state, he surely no longer meant the entirety of India, for he had left South India two years earlier, having concluded that there was no future for Muslims in that region.^[40] It was following the elections of 1937, when Indians were given limited self-government, and over the course of the following decade that, like many of his coreligionists who resided in Muslim minority provinces, Mawdudi, too, began to succumb to the temptation of secessionism. As his dream of an “Islamic India” was shattered by harsh realities, talk of converting the whole of India to Islam gave way to talk of an “Islamic state” in a separate Muslim territory. From this point on, the Jama‘at’s relations with the Muslim League became more complex, marked by both competition and concord. Beyond the rivalry which characterized the relations between the two, the basis for a symbiotic relationship anchored in their shared communal outlook also emerged during this period.