Daily Times

Recently, questions have been raised on the definition of the Ideology of Pakistan. A logical follow-up question is what exactly was the nature of the Pakistan movement?

The official view of the Pakistan movement presents a linear narration of a history beginning from the formation of the Muslim League in 1906, followed by the vision of Sir Mohammad Iqbal of a homeland for the Muslims floated in 1930, on to the Pakistan Resolution of 1940, and the League gaining strength to strength to finally attaining a separate homeland for the Muslims of India. This is the view that is taught in our educational institutions and mostly unquestioningly accepted by students.

The question posed here is: did the demand for Pakistan have the support and active participation of all the Muslims of India, or was it a strategically brilliant struggle for power by the Muslim League, led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah as its principal spokesman?

Furthermore, was the creation of Pakistan a case of ‘unintended consequences’ when tactical interim demands to achieve a different goal became a nemesis of the desired objective and eventually replaced it?

As late as 1937, when the elections were held in India for autonomous provincial assemblies, the Muslim League won only 109 out of the 482 seats allocated to the Muslims. It was in Punjab, Sindh, Bengal and NWFP that the Muslim League lost heavily. In Punjab, most seats went to the Unionist Party, a secular party of the landlords of Punjab, which included Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. The government in Punjab from 1937 to 1942 was a coalition of the Unionist Party, All India Congress and Siromani Akali Dal. In Sindh, where 72 percent of the population was Muslim, the League did not win a single seat out of the 34 reserved for the Muslims. The League also failed to win a single seat in the NWFP. In Bengal, the League won only 39 out of the 82 seats that it contested. The demand for Pakistan was not on the League’s agenda in 1937.

Just three years after the debacle in the 1937 elections, the League launched the Pakistan Resolution in 1940, calling for a separate homeland for the Muslims of India. This declaration struck India like a bolt of lightning from the blue.

The author of the Lahore Resolution, Sir Zafarullah Khan’s original idea was to create two Muslim federations on the basis of existing physical boundaries of the provinces and not on communal basis. This way the interests of the Muslims in the Muslim minority federations could be protected since it would be a quid pro quo situation vis-à-vis the Muslims and non-Muslims.

Jinnah did not like this idea, as it would have meant the devolution of the power of the League at the centre. Only two months before the Pakistan resolution, Jinnah had advanced the idea of a constitution for India that recognised that there were “in India two nations…both must ‘share’ the governance of their common motherland.”

So how did the demand from power sharing change to the demand for a separate country?

Ayesha Jalal in her book The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan has explained it thus: “The Lahore resolution should therefore be seen as a bargaining counter, which had the merit of being acceptable (on the face of it) to the majority-province Muslims, and of being totally unacceptable to the Congress and in the last resort to the British also. This in turn provided the best insurance that the League would not be given what it now apparently was asking for, but which Jinnah in fact did not really want”. In addition, the vague slogan of Pakistan could be used to bring the support of the Muslims to the Muslim League.

Thus the ultimate irony is that what was not asked for became a reality due to the confluence of events beyond the control of the protagonists: a classic case of unintended consequences of short-term tactics and hidden agendas.

These events unfolded with the start of the Second World War. The British joined the war without informing the Congress or the Muslim League, assuming that unquestioning support would be forthcoming from their colony. They were rudely surprised when a very upset Congress Party put conditions on its support to the British war effort. Their key demand was that India be given independence after the war. The British desperately sought the support of the Muslims to avoid having to address the demand of the Congress. Jinnah played his Muslim card and offered no opposition to the British war effort. The British used his position to tell the Congress that it could not accept its demand since the Muslims had a different view on this issue. The unbending attitude of the British left no choice for the Congress ministries but to resign in protest on October 23, 1939. The Congress, already weakened by the internal strife between the leaders who were inside and outside the ministries, was thus dealt another blow that weakened it considerably.

Jinnah’s support to the British earned him the gratitude of Lord Linlithgow, the Viceroy of India in the war years. Congress’s ‘uncooperative position’ on the war effort had riled the colonial masters. They considered Congress as anti-British and were willing to support any initiative that undermined the power of the Congress. As a result, Jinnah’s refusal to support the Congress was greatly welcomed by the British. For the League, the advantage gained was the recognition by the British that the party was on an equal footing with the Congress. In short, the League now had a veto power on any decision on India’s future form.

In 1945, after the surrender of the Germans, Lord Wavell the Viceroy was given the authority to negotiate a plan for the eventual independence of India by way of first forming an executive council that would have equal representatives of the Muslims and non-Muslims. The executive council would be the first step toward framing a new constitution of India by the Indians.

The Simla meeting failed due to the League’s insistence to nominate all the Muslims on the Viceroy council and the Congress taking the position that since it was an all-India party it had the right to nominate some of the Muslim representatives. The Unionists of Punjab also wanted one Muslim representative on the council. Jinnah knew that any sharing of Muslim seats with the Congress and the Unionists would be the death knell for the League. Sir Khizar Hayat Tiwana, the Punjab Chief Minister, blamed the failure of the conference on Jinnah’s unreasonable insistence on being considered the sole representative of the Muslims of India.

Jinnah was now running out of options to establish the Muslim League as the only Muslim party at the Centre. Following the failure of the Simla summit, Jinnah demanded that elections should be held to establish, once and for all, whether Jinnah and the League spoke for all the Indian Muslims, and that the majority of Indian Muslims supported the creation of a separate homeland. Given an opportunity to play the Muslim League against Congress, the British were all too willing to accept this demand.

(To be continued)

The writer is an engineer by training and a social scientist by inclination. He works as a consultant in the social sector