Unmoved by appeal to union

After years of striving to create friendly feelings in the Indian nationalist movement between the country's Hindu majority and its largest minority, the Muslims, Mahatma Gandhi confessed: "I have found not the slightest difficulty in Hindu circles about evoking reverence for the Koran and the Prophet. But I have found difficulty in Islamic circles about evoking the same reverence for the Vedas." Islam, evidently, was far from being the open, malleable faith the Mahatma had fondly taken it to be.

Amalendu Misra looks at how Gandhi and three other Indian nationalist leaders of Hindu background tried to change the suspicion-charged relationship between Hindus and British India's huge Muslim minority into one of co-operation.

The largely Hindu leaders of Indian nationalism were desperate to present a united Indian front to the British by gaining the backing of Muslims, who made up about a quarter of India's population. These Hindus tried to win Muslim hearts by joining specifically Islamic causes; they offered Muslims more legislative power than perhaps any minority in any country has been offered by a majority; some Hindu leaders even resorted to threats. In the end, nothing worked. The Muslims demanded a separate Muslim state, Pakistan, when the British quit, and they got it.

This book, accordingly, is about a catastrophic failure of understanding: the riots accompanying Indian partition cost a million lives. The Hindu leaders' gambits make a surreal story. Gandhi led India-wide and, eventually, violent agitations in the 1920s in support of the caliphate - the claim to leadership of world Islam by the Turkish sultan, whom the British had deposed. But he did not check what the Turks felt about the matter. It came as a nasty jolt to him when the Turks decided to abolish the caliphate, citing Indian interference in their affairs as a reason.

Misra shows that while Gandhi often spoke of Muslims and Islam in reverential tones, he sometimes betrayed a feeling that he found their faith discouragingly inflexible.

Misra makes much of the fact that Gandhi presented key political ideas in Hindu terms. No wonder Muslims were alienated, Misra comments. Yet if a country has no common language but does have a majority religion, ideas related to that religion tend to be invoked in its politics to create a sense of unity. If Gandhi had not presented his plans in Hindu terms, he would never have reached the unlettered masses.

Muslims, in any case, knew that Gandhi was open to Muslim ideas. In fact, that was what they most feared in him. It is a point Misra rightly emphasises. The cruelty of Gandhi's predicament was that the thing he thought would win Muslim hearts - his search for common ground between Hinduism and Islam - aggravated Muslim suspicion. Muslims feared that this "synthesis" of the two faiths, beloved of Indian nationalist ideologues, would destroy Islam's strictly defined and monotheistic identity.

Hindus' failure to realise this is their greatest misunderstanding about Islam. Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first prime minister, noticed that Hindus might idolise the Muslim Emperor Akbar for his effort to reconcile Hindus and Muslims, yet he was no hero to most Muslims. Nehru still missed the lesson of this curious fact: few Muslims wanted synthesis.

Misra's sometimes incoherent text bristles with contradictions and pointless repetitions. There are some glaring factual errors. Yet his book is interesting because of the striking evidence he produces and because his comments on Indian nationalist leaders and on Islam are often refreshingly forthright. And the subject is vital. India has the world's third largest Muslim population. Accommodating it peacefully will be a key task for the future.

Radhakrishnan Nayar is a writer on international affairs.