The contingency of Pakistan: Religious nationalism & Secular state
Pakistan etymologically — country of the pure — was coined by a Cambridge student, Choudhary Rahmat Ali, in 1933. Punjab was represented by the letter “P”, Afghan (North-West Frontier) Province by the letter “A”, Kashmir by the letter “K”, Sind by the letter “S”, and Baluchistan by the letter “tan”. The most peculiar thing is that it includes all the Muslim majority areas of the subcontinent.
Before independence, Pakistan was a part of the Indian Subcontinent. India has been conquered and controlled by several dynasties and empires throughout its history. Hegel described India — an object of desire. It is a place steeped in old, fascinating, and horrific history. Hindu derived from the Sanskrit term Sindhu, which translates into Persian as Hindu; someone who lives near the Indus River. Similarly, the term India and Indian are translations of old Persian terminology into Greek, Roman, and English.
Muhammad Bin Qassim was an Arab young commander. He conquered Sindh in 712 on the command of Hajaj Bin Yousuf (King of the Umayyad Caliphate). He was not the first to invade India, but the most peculiar thing is that it was the first major wave of Arab political expansion into South Asia. It grounded the seed of Islam in the region. It is considered an important event in the history of Pakistani nationalism, although no one had imagined anything like Pakistan at that time. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, in his famous speech in Aligarh in 1944 said,
Pakistan was created that very day the first Hindu was converted to Islam.
After Mohammad Bin Qassim, many foreign kings and rulers invaded India with different interests and gains. Some left, some remained. Those who stayed made coalitions with the indigenous monarchs. And for centuries, Muslims ruled over many parts of India, and people in their kingdom lived in religious harmony.
In the 18th century, the East India Company — an English joint-stock company — emerged as the cosmopolitan power in India. Many Indian soldiers — from different religious, ethical and cultural backgrounds — were recruited in the East India Company. The introduction of the new Enfield rifle served as the occasion for the insurrection. The sepoys had to bite off the ends of lubricated cartridges to load them. A rumour arose among the sepoys that the grease used to lubricate the cartridges was a combination of pig and cow lard, and thus having oral contact with it was deemed an abuse to both Muslims and Hindus. This event is remembered as the Great Indian Mutiny and later as the 1857-War of Independence. It was the most splendid revolt against colonial power in the world. It later provoked a change in the power structure of colonial administration. Post rebellion, British Indians had the worst faith, especially Muslims.
In 1859, Syed Ahmad Khan, an English company employee loyal to the British, penned the book The Causes of the Indian Mutiny — a stinging criticism of British policies, which he blamed for the uprising. Syed Ahmad Khan was an Islamic reformist and educationist. After this, he wrote many books to reform the mental status of Indian Muslims. In 1875, he founded the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College or simply MAO College. Pakistani nationalists consider it the birthplace of the Pakistan Movement — as the college was made meant to give origin to Pakistan Movement.
In 1885, the Indian National Congress was established as a political representation of Indians. By numbers, Hindus were in the majority in India, as well as in Congress. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, Muslims realised that the Congress was only working in favour of Hindus. Muslim’s scepticism was reinforced by Congress request for India to be governed democratically and Hindi to be declared as the national language. It was vital to remind Congress to take Muslim viewpoints into account. To neutralize the growing influence of Congress, Muslim rights have to be sought from a different source — a sole body representing the Indian Muslims. It necessitated the creation of a platform for the political representation of Muslims. In consequence, the All India Muslim League came into being in 1906. The Muslim League adopted the notion of Pan-Islamism, conservatism, Two-Nation Theory, and later separatism.
After the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920. It was an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the British government of India to grant India self-rule — Swaraj. It was one of Gandhi’s earliest large-scale movements of civil disobedience — Satyagraha. Gandhi bolstered the cause by nonviolently supporting the contemporaneous Muslim battle against the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire following World War I — the Khilafat Movement — led by brothers Shaukat and Muhammad Ali and Abul Kalam Azad.
Though the Khilafat Movement worked closely with Gandhi, the All-India Khilafat Committee was always a distinct entity, and its vision of India’s future, as outlined by the ulama of the Jamiat Ulama-e Hind, was no less utopian than Gandhi’s. Jamiat’s theories foresaw an India divided into two distinct populations — Hindus and Muslims — each with its own set of laws, courts, and educational system.
Gandhi’s suspension of his campaign and arrest in March 1922 significantly harmed the Khilafat movement. It was badly damaged when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk drove the Greeks out of western Asia Minor and overthrew the Turkish monarch, Mehmed VI. The movement came to an end when Atatürk completely dissolved the Caliphate in 1924.
However, the disparities between communities were not erased. Neither Gandhi nor the Khilafat leaders ever envisioned an India in which religious communities were not the dominant protagonists. Indeed, the Congress’s and the Khilafatists’ concurrent, though separate, processions and gatherings merely emphasised, and therefore codified, this separation between communities. The Muslim crescent, the auspicious constellation known to Hindus as the Saptarishi (the seven rishis), and the Union Jack were all prominently shown on the khilafat banner. As a result, it is not unexpected that the connection between Hindus and Muslims disintegrated once the sole thread that united them was severed. On the other hand, Hindu and Muslim leaders have increasingly focused on motivating adherents via the use of each religion’s specific symbols. As a result, an intense period of riots and recriminations ensued.
The first full-fleshed national movement in Europe was the French Revolution (1789–1799). But in India, national movements started in 1919 as all Indian identities were developed. In 1923, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a Hindu and Indian nationalist, penned the book Hindutva — Hinduness, which tried to characterise Indian culture as a reflection of Hindu principles; this notion developed to become a significant component of Hindu nationalist ideology.
Based on this rigorous Indian national ideology, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar established the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an Indian right-wing, Hindu nationalist, and paramilitary volunteer organisation, in 1925. The RSS is regarded as the first body in the Indian subcontinent to establish the Two-Nation Theory. This theory served as the foundation for India’s disintegration, as well as a fundamental building block in Pakistani and Hindu nationalism. It is a central fact in the modern history of India. According to the Two-Nation Theory, Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations that could not live together within a unified state, without dominating and discriminating against one another, or without perpetual violence.
Two-Nation Theory instilled Hindu nationalist sentiments amongst Hindus in India. Muslims were regarded as foreign invaders, and Islam as a foreign religion. In both Hindus and Muslims, herd instinct triggered collective hostility. Simultaneously, Hindu social movements such as Shuddhi (purity) and Sangathan (organisation) arose, intending to convert Muslims and Christians to Hinduism. In 1926, Fearing from Shuddhi and Sangathan, Muslim counterparts created Tabligh (religious preaching) and Tanzeem (organisation) to counteract the effects of these movements.
The creation of religious movements created a gap between mass. One extreme was Hindus and on the other were Muslims and there was no peaceful handshake between them. A religion card was exploited to sway the crowds on both the Hindu and Muslim sides. In 1924, hundreds of people were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots along India’s southwestern Malabar Coast. Similar religious rioting spread throughout northern India, where rumours of Muslim cow slaughter, the polluting appearance of a dead pig’s carcass in a mosque, or other clashing doctrinal fears stoked the tinderbox of distrust that was always lurking in India’s poorer towns and villages.
By 1930, many Indian Muslims dominating the northwestern provinces and the eastern half of Bengal, as well as important areas of the United Provinces and the great princely state of Kashmir, had begun to consider separate statehood as a potential remedy. The same year, while presiding over the Muslim League’s annual convention in Allahabad, Iqbal proposed that Indian Muslims’ final destiny be the consolidation of a North-West Indian Muslim state. He didn’t call it Pakistan, but his plan encompassed what would become the major provinces of Pakistan. At the time, Jinnah, the Aga Khan, and other major Muslim leaders were present at the Round Table Conference. They still considered a federation of all Indian provinces and princely states as India’s best potential constitutional solution in the future event of British departure. Separate electoral seats, as well as specific pledges of Muslim autonomy or veto powers in dealing with sensitive religious matters, were expected to be sufficient to avoid civil war and the need for true partition.
In 1933, several Muslim Cambridge students led by Choudhary Rahmat Ali postulated that the only appropriate outcome to internal religious disputes of India would be the establishment of Muslim land, to be known as Pakistan. The name was from the Muslim-majority northwestern and northeastern regions. But the narrative for a separate homeland based on religion has not been popularised in the Muslim League.
The British parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1935, which included a new set of constitutional reforms. The act was divided into two sections: provincial and federal. Dyarchy was abolished at the provincial level, and all government departments were placed under the jurisdiction of elected ministers. However, the British reserved sufficient emergency and powers to dismiss ministries and bring the provincial administration directly under the control of the British governor and his civil servants. In any case, the British were going to keep all of their vital attributes of sovereignty and key powers in finance and defence at the centre.
The federal section of the 1935 act envisioned a future federation in which delegates from the princely states would serve as a counterpoint to elected legislators from the British Indian provinces. The rules of representation were written in such a way that a nationalist majority in the proposed federal assembly was ruled out.
Jawaharlal Nehru denounced the 1935 act as a new charter of slavery. It was a programme, in the words of Subhas Chandra Bose, not for self-government, but for maintaining British rule in the new political conditions. The federal sections of the 1935 act, according to M.A. Jinnah were most reactionary, retrograde, injurious, and fatal to the vital interest of British India vis-à-vis the Indian states. The act attempted to strengthen rather than diminish British control in India by focusing Indian political attention on the provinces and bringing in authoritarian and submissive rulers to redress the balance against the democratic and nationalist opposition in British India.
The Muslim League and its president, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, did not join the Pakistan demand until after the historic Lahore meeting in March 1940, since Jinnah, a secular constitutionalist by birth and training, hoping for reconciliation with the Congress Party. However, such aspirations were shattered when Nehru refused to accept the Muslim League’s offer to form a coalition government with Congress following the 1937 elections. The Congress had initially entered the elections intending to overturn the 1935 Act, but after sweeping victories in most provinces and the Muslim League’s poor performance, Nehru agreed to join the government and declared that India had only “two parties”: the Congress and the British Raj.
On September 3rd, 1939, Lord Linlithgow declared India at war with Germany. The Indian National Congress protested vehemently, claiming that the Viceroy had dragged India into World War II without consulting the Central Legislature or the provincial governments. Many Indians saw it as a reassertion of high-handed British imperialism. They were the leading party in eight of the eleven provinces and had established the government. In exchange for wartime collaboration, the Congress working committee issued a resolution demanding a quick transfer of power. Lord Linlithgow’s response was inadequate. As a result, Congress requested the resignation of the Congress Ministries on October 22nd, 1939. Taking advantage of what they viewed as a fortuitous deliverance from Congress control, the Muslim League passed the Pakistan Resolution at its annual convention in Lahore in March 1940, with its vague demand for autonomous Muslim states.
The instigation of the Pakistan movement was recognised with the Lahore Resolution. In Lahore’s Iqbal Park, where over 100,000 people came to hear Jinnah speak at the 27th annual Muslim League session in 1940,
Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs, and literature… It is quite clear that Hindus and Muslims derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, different heroes, and different episodes… To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.
The fall of the Congress-led British Indian administration was hailed by the Muslim League, with Jinnah memorably stating it, a day of deliverance and thanksgiving. The Muslim League promised to assist the United Kingdom’s war efforts in a secret communication to the British Prime Minister on the condition that the British recognise it as the only organisation that spoke for Indian Muslims. Following the Congress’s effective protest against the United Kingdom, the Muslim League moved on to support the British war effort, allowing them to openly propagandise against the Congress using the Islam in Danger theme.
Jinnah revealed to Nehru that Muslims might be a competitive third party. Many Muslims quickly saw the new Hindu Raj as discriminatory and dictatorial, and the Hindu-led Congress ministries as indifferent to Muslim aspirations during the years from 1937 to 1939. The Congress’s cronyism toward its representatives, prejudice against its majority community, and favouritism for its leadership’s friends and relatives all conspired to persuade many Muslims that they had become second-class citizens in a land that, while possibly on the verge of liberty for some Indians, would be run by infidels and enemies of the Muslim minority. Muslim League played on Congress’s flaws in governing by collecting as many reports as it could gather in publications released during 1939, hoping to demonstrate how miserable Muslims would be under any Hindu ruler. Of course, the Congress’s high command argued that it was a secular and nationalist, not a sectarian, but Jinnah and the Muslim League retorted that they were the only ones who could advocate for and protect the rights of Indian Muslims.
The Muslim League was far less vigorous in demanding a quick British withdrawal during the 1940s. Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour Party administration was dead set on ending British rule in India. In 1946, William Pethick-Lawrence headed a cabinet mission to debate and potentially organise the processes for the transfer of power to aboriginal hands. The British had to deal with two established players throughout the pipeline: Gandhi and the Congress, and Jinnah and the Muslim League. Jinnah worked hard to create a strategy that accommodated the subcontinent’s two major groups’ mutual and disparate requirements. The last hope for a compromise solution was lost when Pethick-Lawrence’s expedition proved inadequate for the job of reconciling the parties. Each candidate of the talk blamed the opposite for failure, with Jinnah insisting on the realisation of the Two-Nation Theory. The ultimate goal is to establish Pakistan as an independent nation.
In the 1946 elections, the Muslim League won the majority of Muslim votes and reserved Muslim seats in the federal and provincial legislatures. The Muslim League won 429 of the 492 seats allocated to Muslims. As a consequence, the 1946 election was effectively a plebiscite in which Indian Muslims were persuaded to vote on the creation of Pakistan, which the Muslim League won. The Muslim League’s triumph was bolstered by the rural agriculturalists of Bengal, as well as landowners from Sindh and Punjab, who backed the party.
The Indian Independence Act was approved by the British Parliament in July 1947. It directed that the dominions of India and Pakistan be delineated by midnight on August 14–15, 1947 and that the assets be split within a month. Two boundary commissions raced against the clock to partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way that the maximum practical number of Muslims was left to the west of the former’s new boundary and the east of the latter’s, but as soon as the new borders were known, roughly 15 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated territorial boundaries to what they thought would be a “shelter” on the other. During that awful departure of innocents, up to a million people were slain in community massacres that dwarfed all preceding wars of this type in recent history. The Sikhs, who were stationed along Punjab’s new “line,” suffered the largest proportion of losses concerning their population. The majority of Sikh refugees settled in the very limited territory that is today the Indian border state of Punjab. Tara Singh subsequently inquired, “The Muslims got Pakistan, and the Hindus got Hindustan, but what about the Sikhs?”. After 75 years, the scars of partition can still be felt in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
References
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019). India — muslim separatism. Encyclopedia Britannica.
