March Twenty-Third is one of the national days of Pakistan. We reiterate our commitment to Pakistan as a nation-state and pay tribute to those who struggled hard for the establishment of Pakistan as a sovereign and independent state.
It is difficult to understand the importance of the Pakistan Resolution passed in the annual session of the All India Muslim League held at Lahore on March 22-24, 1940 without taking a comprehensive view of British India’s history and how and why the Muslim League came to the conclusion that the Muslims of British India needed a separate homeland to protect and advance their civilizational-cultural identity inspired by the principles and teachings of Islam, their rights and interests. The following issues highlight the main features of the historical evolution of Muslim political consciousness and their political experience in British India:
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The Muslims started their political activities with the demand for protection of their civilizational and cultural identity, rights and interests within the constitutional and legal framework established by the British in India.
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The Muslim elite demanded a separate electorate for the Muslims in all elections and, later, they established a separate political party—All India Muslim League—on December 30, 1906, in Dhaka for pursuing the above-mentioned agenda.
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The Muslim League leadership demanded legal and constitutional guarantees and safeguards for their representation in assemblies, cabinets and government jobs.
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A federal system with autonomy to the provinces.
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The Muslims of British India leant from their experience of political interaction with the Congress Party and its sympathizers that their identity, rights and interests could not be secure in a federal system. It is this political learning that led the Muslim leadership to demand a separate homeland for securing the cultural, political and economic future of the Muslims of British India.
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The contents of the separate homeland resolution (March 23, 1940) relate to British India’s political context. The Resolution outlined what the Muslims needed for their future in the political context of British India. It did not offer a formula for constitutional arrangements in their proposed homeland (Pakistan) because only a few people were sure in March 1940 that this proposal would materialize.
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The notion of a separate homeland was fully formulated gradually in 1940-47 as the political movement for Pakistan carried on in these years. One cannot understand the establishment of Pakistan without considering the political developments in the post-1940 years.
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The text of the Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution was fully articulated in 1941-46 as a demand for one sovereign Muslim state in Muslim majority areas of British India.
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The term “Pakistan” was not mentioned in the Resolution. However, various political groups referred to it as the Pakistan Resolution following its approval by the Lahore session of the Muslim League.
Political activism demonstrated by the Muslim elite at the beginning of the 20th Century can be traced to the new state system introduced by British colonial rulers in India after 1857. The new state and its governance systems were based on codified legal and constitutional arrangements with role differentiation for each state institution. The British initiated the teaching of western knowledge and English language in India before 1857 which continued to receive official patronage in the post-1857 period. They introduced recruitment to government jobs through a competitive examination system and launched an electoral process for electing legislative bodies and councils with limited powers. Their composition and role expanded over the years.
The launching of the new state and the governance system redefined the relationship between the colonial state and Indian people and communities. It also increased competition between the Muslims and other communities for becoming relevant to the new politico-administrative setup. This competition became intense with the beginning of the Urdu-Hindi controversy in Banaras (Varanasi) in 1867 and the rise of Hindu revivalist movements in parts of India in the last decade of the 19th Century.
A section of the Muslim elite urged the members of their community to acquire modern western education and avoid active involvement in politics. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan and his colleagues spearheaded this movement and later, they advised the Muslims to stay away from the Congress Party after it was established in 1885. However, under pressure from other communities, the Muslim elite began considering their issues within the context of the evolving state system for safeguarding their community’s rights and interests.
By the beginning of the 20th Century, the major concern of the Muslim elite was how to protect their civilizational and cultural identity, their rights and interest with reference to the opportunities and challenges created by the new state system and the efforts of other communities to push them to the sidelines of the new state system.
In 1905, the British government divided the oversized Bengal presidency, separating the mainly Muslim eastern areas from the predominantly Hindu western region. The Muslim leaders supported the partition, while the Congress Party and other Hindu organizations opposed it and called for the reunification of Bengal to sustain the dominance of the Calcutta-based Hindu elite. The partition was annulled in 1911, which dismayed the Muslims and sharpened the political cleavage between the two communities.
It was against this backdrop that a delegation of 35 prominent Muslims led by Sir Aga Khan lll called on the Viceroy, Lord Minto, in October 1906 at Simla and asked for separate electorate for the Muslims to elect their representatives to all elected councils and bodies. This demand was accepted when the British government enforced the Government of India Act, 1909. The Muslim elite established their political party – All India Muslim League – on December 30, 1906 in Dhaka as a political platform for pursuing Muslim rights and interests with the British Indian government.
From this time onwards, the definitive political goal of the Muslim League was to seek legal and constitutional guarantees for the protection of their civilizational and cultural heritage and identity shaped primarily by the teachings and principles of Islam, their political rights and interests as a distinct community. However, they changed their strategies to achieve these goals keeping in view their political experience and political learning from their interaction with the Congress Party and its allies. Political learning was critical to the changes in their strategies and this factor was instrumental to the realization on the part of the Muslim leadership that their political future could not be secure without having a homeland of their own.
Initially, the Muslim elite demanded separate electorate for electing their representatives to the elected councils. Later, they demanded categorical constitutional safeguards for their representation in cabinets and government jobs by reservation of seats for the Muslims. They also asked for weightage in representation of religious minorities in the assemblies in provinces. This implied that all religious communities would get more representation in provincial assemblies where they were in a minority, i.e., Muslims in non-Muslim majority provinces, and non-Muslims in Muslim majority provinces.
The Muslim League supported a federal system with autonomy to the provinces so that the Muslims get an opportunity in Muslim-majority provinces to govern them according to their societal and political ideals and aspirations.
The Congress Party was dismissive of the Muslim demands and it declined to commit on constitutional guarantees for Muslim demands. The Congress was not willing to accept the Muslims as a separate socio-cultural and religious community with special rights and interests. The Congress Party had agreed in the Lucknow Pact (December 1916) between the Muslim League and the Congress to reservation of seats for the Muslims and weightage to religious minorities in the assemblies. However, when it came to implementing these demands, the Congress Party was not cooperative and the Congress Party’s Nehru Report on Constitutional reforms (1928) rejected the Lucknow Pact altogether. Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah made an unsuccessful bid to get the Nehru Report amended to accommodate Muslim demands. His address to the Muslim League meeting (1929), described as Jinnah’s Fourteen Points, was a concise statement of Muslim political demands and interests. The Congress did not pay heed to it and these two political parties diverged on many issues in the Roundtable Conferences (1930-32).
The most bitter learning for the Muslim League was its experience under the Congress provincial ministries in non-Muslim majority provinces in 1937-39. The Muslim leaders in the United Province (Uttar Pradesh, UP) and other non-Muslim majority provinces complained repeatedly about discrimination against the Muslims in state policies regarding recruitment to government jobs, financial allocations for public welfare, and projection of Hindu religion and heritage in school education and cultural activities in total disregard to the sensitivities of religious minorities, especially the Muslims.
What the Muslim populace experienced under the provincial Congress ministries validated the fears of the Muslim elite that the Muslims would be overwhelmed in political, cultural and economic domains if the Congress acquired state power from the British. The Congress would use “permanent” Hindu electoral majority to dominate the political system on a permanent basis. They feared that this would reduce the Muslims to the status of a permanent minority.
The political experience of Muslim League leadership convinced them that given the political stubbornness of the Congress Party, the federal system would not necessarily protect their civilizational and cultural identity, and their rights and interests. By 1938-39, the Muslim League leadership began to think about reviewing their position on federalism. By March 1940 they concluded that the Muslims of British India needed a separate homeland.
Despite its strong reservations on the political disposition of the Congress Party, the Muslim League expressed its willingness to accept the Cabinet Mission Plan (May 1946) that proposed a loose Indian federation, grouping of Muslim majority provinces into two regional units (these provinces later became Pakistan), an option to review the provincial and unitary relationship with the federation, and the choice of opting out of the federation after ten years. This proposal collapsed because the Congress Party refused to accept the provincial arrangements and the options given to the provinces and their units. The Congress leadership thought that a political order created under the Cabinet Mission Plan would strengthen the Muslim League demand for the establishment of Pakistan. It offered to go the Constituent Assembly without accepting the conditions laid down in the Cabinet Mission Plan about provinces and their units. The Congress Party asserted that it would be free to frame a constitution of its choice. This alarmed the Muslim League leadership, whose experience of interaction with the Congress was characterized by disagreements and distrust because of the Congress Party’s contemptuous attitude towards Muslim League’s political demands and concerns.
The controversy about the Cabinet Mission Plan solidified the conviction of the Muslim League leadership that they needed a separate homeland, as articulated in the pre-Cabinet Mission Plan period (1940-46) to ensure the future of Muslims in post-British India. This conclusion was the result of their political experience of interaction with the Congress Party over years which enabled them to modify their political strategies to respond to the changing political situation in British India. This political learning led them to transition from advocating for constitutional guarantees and federalism to seeking a separate homeland.
This evolutionary process of the Muslim political struggle did not come to an end in March 1940. It continued to evolve in the next over seven years, 1940-47. It was during these last years of the independence movement that the Muslim demand for a separate homeland was refined and fully articulated. It was during the post-1940 years that the Muslim League turned itself into a mass party by mobilizing the Muslim populace for its principal demand of the separate homeland of Pakistan. It contested the 1946 provincial elections on two major points: Muslim League is the sole representative of the Muslim community and that its demand is the establishment of Pakistan as an independent state. The results of the 1946 provincial election showed that the demand for Pakistan was widely shared in Muslim majority provinces of British India. The support gathered by the Muslim League and its leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah in 1945-47 was pivotal for turning the demand for a separate homeland, as initially outlined in the Resolution of March 23, 1940, into a reality in August 1947.
Hasan Askari Rizvi is an Independent Political Analyst who holds the PhD Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. His latest book entitled “Pakistan: Political and Constitutional Engineering” published in 2024.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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