Maulana Azad – the unforgettable titan

 

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On 11 November 1888, Abul Kalam Ghulam Mohiuddin Ahmed, better known as Maulana Azad, was born in Saudi Arabia’s holy city of Mecca. His father, Maulana Khairuddin, was an Afghan settled in Bengal. His mother, Alia, was an Arab.

Azad was given traditional Islamic education. He also learnt Arabic, Persian, philosophy, geometry, algebra and maths at home. He taught himself English, world history and politics. He reinterpreted the holy Quran and repudiated Taqlid or unquestioning acceptance and adopted the principle of Tajdid or renewal of Islam through innovative precepts and practices.

During his visits to West Asia, he interacted with the youth in Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Syria and Turkey, especially the Iranian revolutionaries in Egypt, who wanted to establish a constitutional government in Iran. He also met with the Young Turks in Constantinople. These experiences turned him into a nationalist revolutionary.

Azad and the colonial rule

Back home, he met Bengal’s leading revolutionaries Aurobindo Ghosh and Shyam Sundar Chakravarty. Soon he joined the revolutionary movement against the British rule in India. The revolutionary activities were confined to Bengal and Bihar. Maulana Azad helped establish secret revolutionary centres all over north India and Bombay.

In 1912, Maulana Azad started a weekly journal in Urdu called Al-Hilal to increase the number of Muslim revolutionary recruits. Al-Hilal played an important role in forging Hindu-Muslim unity after the bad blood created between the two communities in the aftermath of Morley-Minto reforms. These reforms are also known as the Indian Councils Act of 1909. It was an attempt to widen the scope of legislative councils, meet a few demands of the moderates in the Indian National Congress and to increase the participation of Indians in governance. Crucially, the right of separate electorate was given to the Muslims of India, bolstering the two-nation theory.

Al-Hilal became a revolutionary mouthpiece and was banned in 1914. Maulana Azad started another weekly, Al-Balagh, with the same mission of propagating Indian nationalism and revolutionary ideas based on Hindu-Muslim unity. This paper too was banned in 1916 and Maulana Azad was expelled from Calcutta and imprisoned in Ranchi from where he was released after the First World War in 1920.

After his release, the Maulana roused the Muslim community through the Khilafat Movement. This movement aimed at reinstating the Khalifa in Turkey, which the British had captured. Azad supported the non-cooperation movement started by Gandhiji and joined the Indian National Congress in 1920. In 1930, Maulana Azad was again arrested for violation of the salt laws as part of Mahatma Gandhi’s Salt Satyagraha. He remained in the Meerut jail for eighteen months.

He became the INC’s president in 1940 and remained in the post until 1946. In the Constituent Assembly, he steadfastly opposed the separate electorates for Muslims and advocated their scrapping. He was a staunch opponent of India’s partition and supported a confederation of autonomous provinces with their own constitutions.

Opposed India’s partition

Maulana Azad negotiated a package with Lord Wavell and the Cabinet Mission, but it fell through. The Congress Working Committee accepted Governor General Louis Mountbatten’s 03 June 1947 proposal of India’s division on religious lines. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi and a staunch nationalist, lamented, “you have thrown us to the wolves”. Maulana Azad was shocked and abstained from voting on the resolution. He desperately tried to prevent the ensuing bloodbath by joining Mountbatten to propose a united Armed Forces for a short period. But Dr Rajendra Prasad shot it down. Prasad declared the Congress government wouldn’t tolerate a united army even for a day after 15 August 1947.

The Partition and after

India became independent amidst a savage bloodbath and partition of the country. Millions of Hindus and Sikhs fled the newly created Pakistan for India; and millions of Muslims fled India for East and West Pakistan. More than a million people were killed in the violence. Azad toured the affected areas in Bengal, Punjab, Assam and Bihar, guiding the organisation of refugee camps, supplies and security. He addressed large crowds advocating peace and calm in the border areas and encouraging Muslims across the country to remain in India and not fear for their safety.

Azad remained a close confidante, supporter, and advisor to prime minister Nehru, and played an important role in framing national policies. As India’s first Minister of Education, he began tackling the daunting challenge of educating a populace which, at the rime of independence, was only 18% literate. He concentrated on educating the rural poor and girls. As chairperson of the Central Advisory Board of Education, he gave thrust to adult literacy, universal primary education free and compulsory for all children up to the age of 14 years, girls’ education, and diversification of secondary education and vocational training. Addressing the conference on All India Education on 16 January, 1948, Maulana Azad emphasized, “We must not for a moment forget, it is a birthright of every individual to receive at least the basic education without which he cannot fully discharge his duties as a citizen.”

He oversaw the establishing of the Central Institute of Education, Delhi, which later became the Department of Education of the University of Delhi as a “research centre for solving new educational problems of the country”. under his leadership, the Ministry of Education established the first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1951 at Kharagpur in West Bengal, and also the University Grants Commission in 1953. He also laid emphasis on the development of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and the Faculty of Technology of the Delhi University. He considered IITs essential contributors to the progress of higher technological education and research in India.

Azad was also instrumental in the promotion of culture and literature through education. most of the cultural and literary academies of India, such as Lalit Kala Academy and Sahitya Academy, were established by him.

Legacy

Maula Abul Kalam Azad died of a stroke on February 22, 1958. Azad spent the final years of his life focusing on writing his book, India Wins Freedom, an exhaustive account of India’s freedom struggle and its leaders, which was published in 1959.

Azad is remembered as one of the leading Indian nationalists of his time. His firm belief in Hindu-Muslim unity earned him the respect of the Hindu community and remains an icon of communal harmony in modern India. His work for education and social uplift in India made him an important influence in guiding India’s economic and social development.

Once Gandhiji’s secretary Mahadev Desai had observed, “There is no other in the Congress to match Maulana’s insights and wise counsel”. Sarojini Naidu paid a tribute to his erudition and wisdom in these words, “Maulana was 50 years old when he was born.”

When the home minister Kailash Nath Katju barred foreign missionaries in India to prevent evangelism, there was a furore among Christian missionaries. Nehru chose Maulana Azad to handle the issue. Azad wrote a letter to Cardinal Valerian Gracias, which is considered the epitome of wise reasoning. He distinguished between religious conversion, which requires deep reflection on issues of theology, and what the constitution calls “mass conversions”. The latter is a response to social and political provocation.

Maulana Azad, to this day, represents the dilemma faced by patriotic Indian Muslims. He was the man who led the Congress party for most of the crucial years before India’s independence. Those were the years when the nature of the struggle for India’s independence was transforming from Indians versus the British to advocates of united India versus advocates of a separate Muslim homeland. And Azad was himself a Muslim. He symbolised the all-inclusive aspirations of the national movement. And he was also the target of derision by the likes of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his Muslim League labelled him as a “Congress Showboy”. Jinnah – who hardly followed Islam’s precepts – indulged in an Islam of identity that suited his politics. Maulana Azad, a scholar of impeccable credentials, practiced the Islam of faith and conviction that genuinely created his worldview and suited his conscience. He was an exponent of Wahdat-e-Deen, which is equivalent to “Sarva Dharma Samabhaavah”, which means all religions are essentially one. 

For his invaluable contribution, he was posthumously awarded India’s highest civilian honour, Bharat Ratna, in 1992. Better late than never. Unfortunately, the National Education Day that commemorates his birth anniversary, has never been celebrated – only observed. Even that formality has been done away with now.

However, Maulana Azad was truly a titan amongst the political leaders of his generation. His contribution to education remains unparalleled in the history of post-independence India. India today needs leaders like him who relentlessly strove to remove the shackles of rigid thinking, wisely integrating the munificence of Islam and pluralism into the folds of nationalism.