Whose Freedom Struggle Was It?

Every August, as India marks another year of independence, a familiar demand resurfaces in one particular direction. Muslims are asked, again, to prove they belong — to demonstrate love for the flag, the anthem, the republic — as though citizenship for one community is a debt perpetually falling due, while for others it was simply inherited. Eighty years on, the questions asked of Muslims after Partition are, disconcertingly, almost identical to the questions being asked of them today.

This article is drawn from an in-depth Nous conversation between historian Professor Shamsul Islam and host Bushra Khanum — please go through the full video for more context and detail than a single article can capture.

Speaking with Nous around this year's Independence Day, Professor Shamsul Islam — a political science academic of four decades' standing, author of more than thirty books, and one of the country's most persistent chroniclers of the RSS's own historical record — offered a bracing response to that recurring demand: stop answering it, and start asking a different question instead.

"This is a deeply dangerous situation — that Muslims in this country are being put in the dock to prove they are patriots, that they love India. Don't answer that question. Turn it around. Ask the Hindutva camp instead: what role did you play in India's freedom struggle?"

Turning the Question Around

Professor Islam's argument begins with a simple chronology. The RSS was founded in 1925; the Hindu Mahasabha shortly before it. Between then and 1947, India's freedom movement moved through the Non-Cooperation Movement, the Khilafat Movement, the Salt Satyagraha, and finally the Quit India Movement of August 1942 — whose anniversary, he pointed out, falls in this very week.

"'Angrezon, Bharat Chhodo' — the call to Quit India — wasn't given by the RSS. It wasn't given by the Hindu Mahasabha. It was given by the Congress, under Gandhi and Maulana Azad. It was given by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. It was given by Sardar Patel. So when we're told to answer for our loyalty, the river is flowing backward. The real question is what the self-appointed guardians of Hindu identity were doing throughout all of this."

He extended the point to the flag itself, citing what he described as an English-language newspaper closely aligned with the Muslim League and colonial administration, published on August 14, 1947 — the eve of independence — which argued that the tri-colour would never be truly embraced by Hindus, calling a flag with three colours inherently inauspicious.

"The people who came to power by an accident of fate have handed us the tri-colour — but it will never be respected or owned by Hindus. Three is itself an evil number, and a flag of three colours will produce a very bad psychological effect on the nation.' That's what was written, in their own English-language paper, the day before independence. And today, it's Muslims who are told they don't love the tri-colour."

He drew a similar contrast around Vande Mataram, noting that Netaji Bose — whose Indian National Army included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, with two of its leading commanders Muslim — deliberately chose Jai Hind over Vande Mataram as the INA's rallying cry, precisely because the song's origins in the novel Anandmath were bound up with a narrative of massacring Muslims.

The Republic Nobody Taught You About

The heart of Professor Islam's argument — and the subject of his book Muslims Against Partition of India — concerns a gathering that, in his telling, has been almost entirely erased from the popular record: the Azad Muslim Conference, held in Delhi over four days in April 1940, barely three weeks after the Muslim League passed its Lahore Resolution calling for Pakistan.

"This is a country's bad luck — everyone has forgotten it. The Muslim League was always going to bury it. But the historians who've built their careers occupying our academies, who consider themselves so eminent — I hold them responsible for this. They wrote endlessly about how secular Aurangzeb was, how secular Shah Jahan was. They never touched this."

By his account, what began as an anticipated gathering of a few hundred delegates snowballed dramatically: instead of an expected 500 attendees on the final day, roughly 100,000 arrived; instead of 5,000 women, some 20,000 came, at the grounds near Delhi's Old Delhi Railway Station. Delegates came from every province — Uttar Pradesh alone sent 357, Punjab 155, Bihar 125, Bengal 105, Sindh 82, Bombay 60, Delhi 112, and smaller delegations from the North-West Frontier, Balochistan, the Central Provinces, Madras, Odisha, Ajmer-Mewar and Assam. The organizations under its banner spanned the Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind, the All India Momin Conference, the All India Shia Political Conference — marking, he noted, the first time Shia and Sunni organizations had formally united on a political platform — the Khudai Khidmatgar, the Bengal Krishak Praja Party, the All India Muslim Parliamentary Board, and the Jamaat Ahle Hadees, among others.

"The renowned scholar of communal politics of that era, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, said this conference represented the majority of Muslims. The majority. So why did the Muslim League get to claim that mantle instead?"

Who Actually Got to Vote

His answer to that question turns on a detail he says is conveniently absent from most retellings: the extraordinarily narrow franchise under the Government of India Act of 1935, under which fewer than 8% of Indians — income-tax payers, lawyers, degree-holders, large landowners — had the right to vote at all. Among Muslims, he estimated, that figure was closer to four or five percent.

"This is something the honest Muslims of this country — who take abuse every single day — don't even know. The Muslim League won its 1946 mandate from four or five percent of Muslims, because that's who was allowed to vote. My own family were barbers. We didn't have the vote. Weavers didn't have the vote. Blacksmiths didn't have the vote. The people who built the Muslim League, who ran governments in coalition with the Hindu Mahasabha in provinces like Sindh — that had nothing to do with us."

The Man They Erased: Allah Bakhsh

At the centre of Professor Islam's account is Khan Bahadur Allah Bakhsh Soomro, the former Premier of Sindh and a driving force behind the Azad Muslim Conference, assassinated on May 14, 1943 — a killing Professor Islam compares, in terms of its ideological motive, to Gandhi's own assassination five years later.

"This should be taught in every university in this country. What the Jamiat Ulema published — small one-anna pamphlets against the Two-Nation Theory — should be part of the university curriculum today."

He summarised portions of Allah Bakhsh's landmark speech to the conference: a warning — vindicated in 1971 — that an East Pakistan separated from West Pakistan by 2,000 miles was politically unworkable; an insistence that India's Muslims, descended from the subcontinent's earliest inhabitants no less than "Dravidians and Aryans," were equal heirs to its soil and its cultural inheritance, not strangers awaiting a homeland elsewhere; and a pointed internal critique — predating Ambedkar's own writing on caste by years — of upper-caste Muslim elites who denied burial rights and imposed a discriminatory "Arzal tax" on lower-caste Muslims in the eastern Gangetic plain. The conference also passed a resolution condemning racial discrimination in South Africa, and posed a direct challenge to Jinnah: if untouchability persisted among Muslims themselves, what exactly would "his" Pakistan look like?

The conference's closing anthem, penned by Shamim Karhani and printed in Delhi's Jama Masjid-published Payam-e-Azadi on May 13, 1857's anniversary week, struck a defiant note against the very idea that any corner of the shared homeland could be declared impure by virtue of who lived there — invoking shrines and rivers sacred to Hindus and Muslims alike as inseparable parts of one inheritance, and calling on Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs to face the demand for partition as brothers, together.

"Allah Bakhsh has no memorial. Not one. Savarkar has a statue installed inside our own Parliament."

Excavating the Real Origins of the Two-Nation Theory

Perhaps the most provocative thread in the conversation is Professor Islam's genealogy of the Two-Nation Theory itself — which he insists did not originate with Jinnah, but was borrowed by him from a lineage of Hindu nationalist thinkers decades earlier.

He traced it first to Bhai Parmanand — a Congress leader who went on to lead the Hindu Mahasabha and later the RSS — who, in memoirs written around 1907-09, proposed carving a "great Muslim kingdom" out of Sindh, the North-West Frontier and Afghanistan, paired with a population exchange sending Hindus from that region eastward and Muslims from the rest of India westward into it.

"The first actual partition plan for India — this was it. Decades before Jinnah."

He pointed next to Lala Lajpat Rai, who in a 1924 series in The Tribune proposed carving up to four separate Muslim-majority states out of India — a Pathan province in the North-West Frontier, Western Punjab, Sindh, and Eastern Bengal — plus additional territory wherever Muslim populations were concentrated elsewhere. Professor Islam argued this scheme, predating both Chaudhry Rahmat Ali's coinage of the word "Pakistan" and the League's own Lahore Resolution by sixteen years, was a direct ideological ancestor of partition.

He cited B.S. Moonje — a Congress-turned-Hindu-Mahasabha figure, mentor to both Savarkar and RSS founder Hedgewar, and a key architect of the RSS's paramilitary orientation — who argued that just as England belonged to the English and Germany to the Germans, "India belongs to the Hindu." And he cited Lala Hardayal, a revolutionary he otherwise professed deep respect for as a founder of the Ghadar movement, who nonetheless argued that Muslims should either be forcibly converted through shuddhi or expelled to Afghanistan.

Most pointedly, he cited Savarkar's own presidential address to the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad in 1937 — three full years before the League's Lahore Resolution — in which Savarkar declared Hindus and Muslims to be "two antagonistic nations," dismissing as "infantile" anyone who believed the two could form a single nation.

"In 1940, Dr. Ambedkar sat down and wrote his book on Pakistan — comparing the Hindu Mahasabha's view, the Muslim League's view, and the view of Muslims who opposed Pakistan. His conclusion was this: Savarkar and Jinnah, however much they fought publicly, agreed on one thing — that Muslims constituted a separate nation. The only disagreement was whether that nation had to live under Hindu dominance. Savarkar wanted that. Jinnah didn't accept it."

He added a final citation — the historian R.C. Majumdar, whom he noted the RSS itself regards as a credible nationalist authority — who wrote that it was Jinnah who adopted the Hindu Mahasabha's partition agenda fifty years after it was first articulated, not the other way around.

A Precedent Nobody Remembers

Professor Islam offered one further, lesser-known episode as evidence that the drive toward an exclusively defined "pure" nation predated its application to Muslims altogether: the 1937 separation of Burma from India, recommended by the Simon Commission. At the time, he noted, the president of the Hindu Mahasabha was a Buddhist monk from Burma, Mahatma Uttama, who travelled to Delhi to meet Savarkar and argue against separating Buddhism from Hinduism, given their shared roots. The Hindu Mahasabha, he said, forced his resignation.

"1947 was not the first partition. The drive to build a purely Hindu political order first separated the Buddhists. Then it moved on to Muslims. If we don't understand that sequence, we'll never understand why this keeps happening."

1857, and the Roots of the Betrayal Narrative

Asked about the roots of communal blame-laying, Professor Islam pointed all the way back to the aftermath of the 1857 uprising, when Delhi fell after roughly four months of resistance — a defeat he attributes, citing what he described as original documentary material in his possession, to the actions of four named collaborators who helped British forces retake the city.

In the aftermath, he argued, upper-caste elites on both sides moved swiftly to distance their communities from the revolt altogether — citing Sir Syed Ahmed Khan's own writings blaming "riff-raff" elements rather than respectable Muslims, and a mirrored disavowal from prominent Hindu figures of the period, including Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rajnarayan Basu (grandfather of Aurobindo Ghosh), who similarly insisted Hindus bore no responsibility. It was this same circle, he argued, that some decades later — through the "Hindu Mela" movement Basu co-founded with Nabagopal Mitra in the 1880s — first articulated the idea of India as the exclusive motherland of an "Aryan race," a precursor ideology to the Hindu Mahasabha itself.

How the Ground Was Poisoned

To illustrate how everyday communal harmony was deliberately unravelled at the local level in the years before Partition, Professor Islam recounted an episode from a memoir written by a former RSS volunteer named Dhuriya, who had been active in the organization as a young man in what was then Multan district. In his own later account — quoted by Professor Islam in English from the original — the writer described the murder of two well-liked young sons of a respected Muslim shopkeeper in the town of Haveli Lakha, a killing he initially disbelieved was the RSS's doing, until he later learned it had been orchestrated by an RSS figure from Montgomery and carried out by two RSS volunteers — one of whom Dhuriya later met and confronted directly.

"That's how the atmosphere was poisoned — deliberately, locally, by people manufacturing hatred where none had existed. And under that pressure, even the Congress began to bend."

The Deal Nobody Consulted the People On

On the mechanics of Partition itself, Professor Islam was scathing about the process by which the boundary was actually drawn — accelerated from its original June 1948 timeline, and handed to a barrister, Cyril Radcliffe, who had never set foot in the region he was tasked with dividing, working from outdated maps and incomplete census data over a matter of weeks. The English poet W.H. Auden captured the absurdity and violence of that process in his 1966 poem "Partition," which Professor Islam recited in part — a poem worth seeking out in full for its portrait of a boundary drawn in haste, sealed off from the very people whose lives it would upend, by a man who left the subcontinent within a day of finishing his task, never to return.

The human cost that followed, in Professor Islam's account, included the rape of well over 100,000 women and girls across the new border, and a strikingly asymmetric pattern of communal protection — Gandhi and others in India sheltering Muslims in ashrams during the Delhi violence, against what he described as a much thinner record of reciprocal protection extended to Hindus and Sikhs left behind in the newly formed Pakistan, where he argued political calculation, not principle, dictated how much protection minorities received.

What's Owed, and to Whom

Asked, in closing, what today's ordinary Muslim citizen — endlessly asked to answer for a history not of their making — should take from all this, Professor Islam circled back to the Constitution as the shared ground worth defending, whatever its imperfections.

"This country will survive, and Muslims will survive with it, only if its Constitution survives. The RSS does not believe in this Constitution. It wants to take this country toward a Hindu Rashtra — and not just any Hindu Rashtra, but one built on the kind of hierarchy Golwalkar himself once described."

He invoked Swami Vivekananda's own observation — that the concept of human equality within Vedanta was, in Vivekananda's own reading, something Hindu thought had absorbed from Islam — arguing that Hindutva's antagonism toward Muslims is bound up with the discomfort provoked by Islam's historical role in offering the socially marginalized a claim to equality that caste Hinduism withheld. He expressed frustration that Muslim community leadership today, in his view, has largely retreated from that egalitarian legacy into narrower battles, rather than reclaiming a much richer inheritance.

He closed by invoking Udham Singh, who, before his execution for assassinating Michael O'Dwyer in reprisal for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, declared his name to be Mohammad Singh Azad — a final act of interfaith solidarity he contrasted with the RSS's own historical absence from the pantheon of the freedom struggle's martyrs.

"Ask them: where is your Bhagat Singh? Where is your Ashfaqullah Khan? Where is your Udham Singh? Know your own inheritance. Don't let anyone recite it back to you."

What emerges from this conversation is less a single argument than an invitation — to go back to the primary sources, the newspaper archives, the memoirs, and the resolutions that a great many of India's citizens, of every community, have simply never been shown. Whether one agrees with every conclusion Professor Islam draws from that record, the record itself — a hundred thousand people gathering in Delhi in 1940 to reject Partition in the name of a shared homeland, a Sindh premier assassinated for saying so, an anthem daring to call the whole country's soil equally sacred to all who lived on it — is not in dispute. The question the conversation leaves behind is simple enough: eighty years on, who still owes whom an explanation?