Ahmadiyyat - The Renaissance of Islam — Page 240
240 AHMADIYY AT Parallel with the activities of the Simon Commission, the All India Congress established a committee of ten members under the chairmanship of Pandit Moti Lal Nehru for the purpose of proposing a constitution for India which should have the support of all political parties and minorities, and which could be treated as the agreed demand of the whole of India. The committee was known as the Nehru Committee. . Its report was published on 12 August 1928. Hazrat Khalifa- tul Masih II was much perturbed on reading the report as the proposals embodied in it, if they were accepted and were given effect to in the future constitution of India, would place the Muslims of India completely at the mercy of the majority and their future in India would be put in serious jeopardy. He carried out a penetrating analysis of the report which was published in seven instalments in the AI-Fazal, and was subsequently issued in the form of a book entitled Muslim Rights and the Nehru Report. At the beginning the reaction of an important section of Muslim leaders and the Muslim press was, on the whole, in favour of the Nehru Report. But the analysis of the Report by the Khalifa tul Masih alerted Muslim leadership to the dangers to which the Muslims would be exposed in case those proposals we~e accepted as the basis of the future constitution of India. It was then freely acknow- ledged that the keen intellect and the political foresight of the Khalifatul Masih had served to rescue the Muslims of India from the serious hazard to which their fortunes had been exposed by the Nehru Report. The report of the Simon Commission proved most disap- pointing and was universally condemned in India as a reac- tionary document. His Majesty's Government was so im- pressed by the force of this reaction that it authorized the Governor General, Lord Irwin (later Lord Halifax) to announce on 3I October 1929 that Dominion status for India was the immediate objective of His Majesty's Government and that for the purpose of ascertaining Indian public opinion on the future constitution of India it proposed to invite the representatives of British India and of Indian states for consul-