Was Nehru more responsible than Jinnah for Partition?

The question is unsettling. It resists comfort and refuses the ease of inherited certainties. Yet, on Republic Day, when India commemorates the Constitution born in the aftermath of the 1947 partition, the question of who was responsible for India’s partition finds voice once again.

The Partition of India in 1947, as the recently released biography of former Law Minister “No Regrets: The Life and Times of Asif Pasha”, observes, “remains one of the most painful and divisive chapters in the subcontinent’s history.”

Written by veteran journalist J.S. Ifthekhar and published by Media Plus Foundation, the biography is a richly produced, multi-colour volume spanning over 250 pages, the book chronicles not only the life of a statesman who wore many hats, but also offers rare, first-hand reflections on defining moments in India’s political history.

Conventional wisdom, and much of post-independence historiography, has placed the burden of blame almost entirely on Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But this biography urges the reader to pause. Through the recollections of former Law Minister Asif Pasha, who-4 - as the author notes - followed the political upheavals of the 1940s with uncommon attentiveness as a young political student, the book reopens the debate around India’s partition.

Asif Pasha drew upon ‘What Price Freedom’ by Muslim League MLA Mohammed Raza Khan, and ‘India Wins Freedom’ by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to argue that “a more accommodating and federal approach by the Congress leadership, especially Nehru, might have prevented the Partition.” The Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 embodied precisely such an approach - a united India with strong provincial autonomy. Jinnah accepted it. Jawaharlal Nehru’s public assertion that the Constituent Assembly would not be bound by prior agreements “effectively nullified the compromise and pushed Jinnah to revert to the demand for Pakistan”, notes the book.

Maulana Azad would later write with striking candour that this moment destroyed the last real chance for unity. His warnings about alienation and the dangers of rigidity were ignored, even as dissenting voices within the Congress were sidelined, observed Asif Pasha, having served as the Minister of Law, Prisons and Printing Press for Andhra Pradesh when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India.

Asif Pasha also traces Partition’s origins further back. The book notes, “the roots of partition were sown much earlier, with the introduction of separate electorates by the British under the Indian Council Act of 1909 (also known as the Morley-Minto Reforms). In 1935, the government expanded and extended the principle of separate electorates. This system allowed Muslims to elect their own representatives separately from the Hindu majority – a move that institutionalized communal divisions in Indian politics.”

What lends credibility to these reflections is the man himself. Asif Pasha reveals that he was never driven by grievance or ambition. Elected in 1972, his political career was brief but pivotal. When he lost a subsequent election, he never contested again, yet remained remarkably active throughout his life.

As Law Minister, he broke new ground by appointing Muslim government pleaders purely on merit. As Chairman of the Minorities Commission, he corrected long-standing exclusions, facilitating the appointment of a Muslim High Court judge and a university vice-chancellor. Long before entering politics, his work with educational institutions convinced him that education was the true path to empowerment.

Educated at Andhra Christian College and Aligarh Muslim University, fluent in Urdu and Telugu, and shaped by friendships across faiths from childhood, Asif Pasha himself embodied a composite culture that Partition may have fractured but did not extinguish. Even in his nineties, people continued to visit his home for counsel.

“Partition was not simply the result of communalism, but of political miscalculations and a refusal to compromise,” Asif Pasha observed. It is a sentence that neither absolves nor accuses but asks us to think.

There is one final detail that lends No Regrets a quiet, almost haunting resonance. Asif Pasha passed away a day after reviewing the first printed copy of his biography. He examined it carefully, appreciated it, but did not live to see its launch, which would take place less than a week later.

On Republic Day, as we honour the Constitution that emerged from the partition of 1947, the book resurfaces that question once again. Asif Pasha is no longer here to ask the question himself. But through these pages, one does wonder: Was the Partition inevitable? Or was India’s unity lost because compromise came too late, and rigidity too early?

(The writer is a journalist and author of the best-seller coffee table book “The Kohinoors: Distinguished Personalities of Hyderabad”)