Pakistan Resolution in retrospect

Pakistan owed her emergence to four outstanding leaders - Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98), Maulana Mohamed Ali Jauhur (1878-1931), Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), and Allama Iqbal (1877-1938). They had provided intellectual and political leadership to Indian Muslims during the ninety years (1858-1947) of British imperial dominance. Surprising though, all of them were thorough-bed nationalists at one time or another. But, betimes, they got disillusioned and shied away, willy nilly - shied away from their Hindu compatriots, either because of Hindu ethnocentrism in the late 19th century or Congress's rather exclusive, unitary nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.
That makes Pakistan, in part, a product of these Hindu myopic approaches asymmetrical with the prime dictates of ground realities in a multi-nation and multi-cultured subcontinent. In part, it was, of course, a product of the Muslims' quest for power, a quest designed primarily to organise their society on the basis of their pristine value structure.
Interestingly, three of these four leaders - Sir Syed, Iqbal and Jinnah - had initially started out as full-blooded nationalists, but were obliged to end up, finally, at the threshold of Muslim "separatism", and that, of course, after a good deal of traumatised reappraisals.
So did Maulana Mohamed Ali. He was the foremost "nationalist" leader along with Gandhi during the Khilafat and Non-co-operation Movement (1920-22), and he would also preside over the subsequent Cocanada Congress session (1923), an unique honour for a Muslim. Yet, within seven years, he would vehemently denounce Gandhi's much trumpeted Civil Disobedience Movement, launched in April 1930.
In his presidential address to the All India Muslim Conference at Bombay on April 23, 1930, he declared, "We refuse to join Gandhi, because his movement is not a movement for the complete independence of India but for making the seventy millions of Indian Musalmans dependents of the Hindu Mahasabha". And he was cheered by over 20,000 Muslims that had gathered on the occasion (Times of India, April 24. 1930).
In particular, Jinnah's chequered political career is singularly revealing. In a sense, his postures and predilections during his long political life (1904-48) was a microcosm of Muslim India's during the period.
For some seventeen years (1904-20), he had stood on the Congress's platform, pleading the Congress cause and envisioning a truly nationalist destiny for India. For another sixteen years (1921-37), though out of Congress for good he was still working for a nationalist destiny, he was still striving for a Hindu-Muslim settlement, and he was still collaborating with the Congress and its leadership. In pursuit of his mission, he devised several constitutional formulae, but all this to no avail.
At the Congress-sponsored All Parties National Convention at Calcutta in December 1928, called to consider and ratify the Nehru Report (1928), as the blueprint of India's future constitution, Jinnah had put forward the six minimum Muslim demands for acceptance. But all of them were outvoted one by one. In vain did Jinnah argue: "... what we want is that the Hindus and Muslims should march together until our object is obtained... I want you ... to rise to that statesmanship which Sir Tej Bahadur describes. Minorities cannot give anything to the majority ... If they are small points, why not concede? It is upto the majority and majority alone can give."
In aggregate terms, the most acrimonious and acerbic controversy in Indian politics in the late 1920s (since the Nehru Report) and all through the 1930s had hinged around the basic issue of Hindu "unitarianism" vs Muslim federalism. Federalism denotes a salad-plate solution and a penchant for co-existence while unitarianism a melting pot approach and a "brute - majority" dominance.
The difference in approaches was sharply reflected in the formation of ministries in the Hindu and Muslim majority provinces in mid 1937. While the Muslim provinces went in for coalition governments, the Hindu provinces under the Congress's aegis opted for exclusive one party governments.
Till early 1937, however, Jinnah was still his "nationalist" self, preaching his credo eloquently, trying to unite Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs "to hammer out an advance nationalist block" from amongst themselves, in order "to send to the Provincial Assembly" {as he urged them at Peshawar on October 19,1936}, exhorting Hindus and Muslims alike "to produce by a process of hammering fine steel and weed out those obstructing their march to freedom "{as he did at Nagpur on January, 1,1937} and pledging himself to join hands with any progressive party in the fight for the country's freedom {as he held out at Bombay on January 20,1937}.
But, alas, Jannah came to be caught on the wrong wicket. For one thing about this time, Pandit Nehru, the Congress Rashtrapathi (1936-38), began expounding his controversial "two-forces" formula, which counted Muslims out of India's body politic as a religio-political entity. In that direction he had fired his first salvo on September 18, 1936, saying that ".... The real contest is between two forces - the Congress representing the will to freedom of the nation, and the British Government in India and its supporters who oppose this urge and try to suppress it.
Intermediate groups, whatever virtue they may possess, fade out or line up with one of the principal forces. The issue for India is that of independence. He who is for it must be with the Congress and if he talks in terms of communalism he is not keen on independence." (italics for emphaisis).
To this formula Nehru retuned, on January 10, 1937. Shorn of its sophistry and anti-imperialist tone, this represented a challenge to Muslim individuality in Indian politics, an individuality which they had nurtured and claimed since the times of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan.
It also represented not only a challenge to the continued existence of the Muslim League (AIML), but also a moment of truth for Jinnah who had led that body continuously since 1919, except for his three years of self-exile (1931-34) in England.
Yet Jinnah's response was surprisingly conciliatory, if only because he, still, hoped for a rapprochement with the Congress. In his speech at Calcutta's Muhammad Ali Park, on January 4, 1937, he said "I refuse to line up with the Congress. I refuse to accept this proposition. There is a third party in this country and that is Muslim India.... We are not going to be camp followers of any party". (italics for emphasis) Despite this tunely rebuttal, he held out the olive branch, saying, "We are willing as equal partners to come to a settlement with our sister communities in the interest of India. And Jinnah reaffirmed this stance repeatedly for the next six months.
The deep divergence that characterised Hindu and Muslim, Congress and League, thinking in 1937 stemmed from the basic dichotomy between Hindu "unitarianism", a la the Nehru Report, and Muslim federalism, a la Jinnah's Fourteen Points (1929). In essence it centred, around the issue whether India was uni-national or bi-national, whether it was uni-cultured or bi-cultured.
In denying the "intermediate groups" the right to existence and in denying "all third parties', in the historical sense", Nehur was not only denying the AIML the right to exist or its due importance. More important: he was denying the Muslims the right to organise themselves politically on a platform of their own or on a platform other than that of the Congress.
In other words, he was denying them their distinct individuality in India's body politics as a religio-political entity.
As against this Jinnah felt that India was multi-national and multi-cultured, that Muslims had the right to maintain their separate entity, that Muslim India represented the "third party" in India's body politic, that it should refuse to be "camp followers of any party", and that, above all, Muslims should organise themselves politically to make the third party claim a fait accompli.
As a corollary to this claim, he demanded equality of status for Muslims. Of course, he repeatedly offered to coalesce with the Congress in the struggle for freedom, but only if the Muslims were "assured of their political freedom".
Thus, he told a meeting at the residence of Syed Ali Zaheer, presided over by the pro-Congress Syed Wazir Hasan, on May 9, 1937, "While we shall not knock at the Government House, we shall not also bow before Anand Bhawan", the Congress headquarters at Allahabad. Six weeks earlier, in late March 1937, he had told the AIML Council in categorical terms why he considered Muslims' merger with the Hindus, and the AIML's with the congress, almost impossible. It was impossible for Muslims to merge with Hindus because "their language.
Culture and civilisation are quite different", he argued. National self-government, he said, was his creed; but Muslims "must unite as a nation and then live or die as a nation" (italics for emphasis).
The Muslims were considered a minority at this stage of India's political evolution. But "minorities", argued Jinnah in the Indian Legislative Assembly on February 7, 1935, while speaking on the Report of the Joint parliamentary Committee on Indian Constitutional Reforms, "means a combination of things. It may be that a minority has a different religion from the other citizens of a country.
Their language may be different, their race may be different, their culture may be different, and the combination of all these various elements - religion, culture, race, language, arts, music, and so forth - makes the minority a separate entity in the State, and the separate entity as an entity wants safeguards. Surely, therefore, we must face this question as a political problem; we must solve it and not evade it".
Thus, what was at issue in the Congress-League, Nehru-Jinnah, controversy was above all, the status of Muslims in Indian politics. Their status in turn depended upon whether India was uni-national or bi-national. The Congress political conduct in 1937, remarked Penderel Moon in his Divide and Quit, means that "there would be no room on the throne of India, save for Congress and Congress stooges".
The developing Congress's policy, thus, gave Muslims a for taste of what Hindu unremitted centralism and hegemonic ambitions meant. Under the sort of nationalist dispensation envisaged by the Congress, Muslims would surely be relegated a back seat. Their values would be at a discount, their cultural identity in jeopardy. Above all, they would have no hope of shaping their spiritual, social, and cultural life according to their own ethos. All this meant culturicide, pure and simple.
The Congress's conduct and rule were, thus, grossly violative of 'minority' rights, civil society, and of adequate, if not good, governance - issues which, under the prevalent Westphalian (1648) model, with it overriding credo of sovereignty of 'nations' and 'sanctity' of borders, had not acquired the measure of importance and criticality which they have since the demise of the Soviet Union (1991), the prime anti-Human Rights paradigm in the twentieth century. All this obviously posed a new and serious challenge to Muslims as a reigio-cultural entity.
In immediate terms, it was this situation, at once despairing and agonising, that turned Muslim thinking towards Pakistan. If the Islamic way of life could not be preserved in an all-India set-up, it should be saved wherever it was possible. Pakistan, or more accurately the demand for it, was thus a last-ditch attempt: an attempt to centralise, to quote Iqbal, "the life of Islam as a cultural force" in a specified territory, so that "the most living portion of the Muslims of India" could develop to the fullest in that territory their "spiritual, cultural, economic and social life according to their own genius", to quote Jinnah - a development which was practically impossible under the type of government envisaged by the Hindu-dominated Congress. Such, in short, were the urges and motivations that, in immediate terms, led to the formulation of the demand for Pakistan.
At another level, with the grim prospect of having been denied a place on the throne of India, what alternative did the Muslims have except for forging a throne for themselves in their majority provinces? And Pakistan simply meant only that much - and nothing more. Hence, in 1940, Muslims had no choice but to go in for the Pakistan platform - unless they were prepared to be decimated as a religio-political entity in India's body politic.
SAID THE QUAID....
Freedom, however, does not mean licence. It does not mean that you can now behave just as you please and do what you like irrespective of the interests of other people or of the State. Now, more than ever, it is necessary for us to work as a united and disciplined nation. What is now required of us all is constructive spirit and not the militant spirit of the days when we were fighting for our freedom. It is far more difficult to construct than to have a militant spirit for the attainment of freedom.
Speech at the Dhaka University Convocation, 24 March, 1948.
The writer was founder Director of the Quaid-i-Azam Academy (1976-89), and authored Jinnah: Studies in Interpretation (1981), the only work to qualify for the President's Award for Best Books on Quaid-i-Azam).