Explain how Indian partition was a culmination of communal politics that started developing in the opening decades of the 20th century.

OR

Explain how the constitution of India protects the right of the Central government and the states.

Some scholars see Partition as a culmination of a communal politics that started developing in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

(i) They suggest that separate electorates for Muslims, created by the colonial government in 1909 and expanded in 1919, crucially shaped the nature of communal politics.

(ii) This created a temptation for politicians working within this system to use sectarian slogans and gather a following by distributing favours to their own religious groups.

(iii) Religious identities thus acquired a functional use within a modern political system; and the logic of electoral politics deepened and hardened these identities.

(iv) Community identities no longer indicated simple difference in faith and belief; they came to mean active opposition and hostility between communities.

(v) Communal identities were consolidated by a host of other developments in the early twentieth century.

(vi) During the 1920s and early 1930s tension grew around a number of issues. Muslims were angered by “music-before-mosque”, by the cow protection movement, and by the efforts of the Arya Samaj to bring back to the Hindu fold (shuddhi) those who had recently converted to Islam.

(vii) Hindus were angered by the rapid spread of tabligh (propaganda) and tanzim (organisation) after 1923.

(viii) As middle class publicists and communal activists sought to build greater solidarity within their communities, mobilising people against the other community, riots spread in different parts of the country.

(ix) Every communal riot deepened differences between communities, creating disturbing memories of violence.

(x) Some historians, both Indian and Pakistani, suggest that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s theory that the Hindus and Muslims in colonial India constituted two separate nations can be projected back into medieval history.

OR

The right of the Central government and the states:

(i) One of the topics most vigorously debated in the Constituent Assembly was the respective rights of the Central Government and the states

(ii) Among those arguing for a strong Centre was Jawaharlal Nehru. As he put it in a letter to the President of the Constituent Assembly, “Now that partition is a settled fact, … it would be injurious to the interests of the country to provide for a weak central authority which would be incapable of ensuring peace, of coordinating vital matters of common concern and of speaking effectively for the whole country in the international sphere”.

(iii) The Draft Constitution provided for three lists of subjects: Union, State, and Concurrent.

(iv) The subjects in the first list were to be the preserve of the Central Government, while those in the second list were vested with the states.

(v) As for the third list, here Centre and state shared responsibility.

(vi) However, many more items were placed under exclusive Union control than in other federations, and more placed on the Concurrent list too than desired by the provinces.

(vii) Besides, Article 356 gave the Centre the powers to take over a state administration on the recommendation of the governor

(viii) The Constitution also mandated for a complex system of fiscal federalism. In the case of some taxes (for instance, customs duties and Company taxes) the Centre retained all the proceeds.

(ix) In other cases (such as income tax and excise duties) it shared them with the states; in still other cases (for instance, estate duties) it assigned them wholly to the states.

(x) The states, meanwhile, could levy and collect certain taxes on their own: these included land and property taxes, sales tax, and the hugely profitable tax on bottled liquor.