The Pakistan Resolution

IN Pakistan people avoid the word Partition. On August 14, they celebrate their 'deliverance' not so much from British rule as from Hindu domination. Nothing could be more futile now than an argument about who was responsible for the Partition. With the sequence of events stretching back for several decades, such an exercise can only be an academic distraction. But it is clear that the differences between Hindus and Muslims had become so acute by the early '40s that something like Partition had become inevitable.

March 23, 1940, when the Muslim League adopted a resolution demanding the formation of Pakistan, comes to my mind when I think of those days. I was then a student. Lahore, a small city at that time, was agog with excitement that the Muslim League, then headed by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, would ask for a separate country. It was a crowded meeting. Squatting on the floor in the front, I could see Jinnah on the dais, flanked by Sikandar Hayat Khan, the Punjab chief minister, on one side and Fazlul Haq, the Bengal chief minister, on the other. Also present was Liaquat Ali Khan, later Pakistan's first premier.

In his address, Jinnah said that "the Mussalmans are a nation by any definition" and "if the British government is really earnest and sincere to secure the peace and happiness of the people of this subcontinent, the only course open is to allow the major nations separate homelands by dividing India into autonomous national states". Hayat was opposed to Partition because his Unionist Party, then in power in Punjab, was a platform of Hindu-Muslim-Sikh coexistence. But he was in a minority of one.

The operative portion of the Lahore Resolution, or the Pakistan Resolution, adopted was: "That no constitutional plan would be workable in this country or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, namely, that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign." 

Jinnah lived to rue the day the resolution used the phrase 'such territorial readjustment as may be necessary'. Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, used the expression to justify the split of the Muslim majority Punjab and Bengal. Still more catastrophic was the phrase 'independent states' because later the supporters of an independent East Bengal argued that the creation of two independent countries, one in 'North-western' and the other in the 'Eastern' zones of India, was conceived in the Pakistan Resolution itself. Jinnah tried to explain this subsequently by saying that it was a typing mistake that made 'state' into 'states'.

Ismail Khan, a non-League leader, said what astounded him was that "Jinnah ruled the word 'states' was a misprint. How can a chairman disregard the phraseology of the written constitution and base his ruling on his own unrecorded memory?" When I asked Zulfikhar Ali Bhutto in Rawalpindi on March 25, 1972, to comment on the 'misprint' story, he laughingly said: "Quite a costly misprint; I must be careful about my stenographer." 

It appears that the idea of creating two Muslim states was there when the Pakistan demand was first put forward. In the archives in London, there is a report on the findings of a Muslim League Committee constituted to implement the Lahore Resolution. This committee had recommended the formation of two Muslim states: one in the North-west; the other in the North-east. Surprisingly, it did not say a word on Kashmir, which led India and Pakistan to war subsequently.

The Pakistan Resolution did wonders, beyond Jinnah's own expectations. It was an avalanche that swept away all other ideas from the Muslim mind and transformed the League into the Congress of Muslims. Only the Pathans in the NWFP remained unaffected but that was only because they had a secular leader, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan—popularly known as the Frontier Gandhi—to guide them.

From then on, Jinnah went on developing, relentlessly and impassively, his two-nation theory and the Pakistan demand. When his opponents talked of matters like the economic non-viability of the state he envisaged, his reply was: "Then leave us to our fate." And when Hindus referred to the Pakistan demand as 'vivisection of the motherland', he said that for Muslims it was a struggle for survival.

For Muslims, Pakistan became 'the promised land' and Jinnah a Moses. Rich and poor, politicians and civil servants, farmers and shopkeepers, young and old, men and women, rallied behind him. In Pakistan, they saw the realisation of their personal dreams: separation from Hindus, who had more riches and jobs. Still more, they saw in Pakistan the return of the days when Islam was conquering in Spain, Central Asia and elsewhere.

The Muslims began to believe more and more that Islam would be in danger in an India with a vast Hindu majority. Little thought was apparently given to what might happen to Muslims living in the United Provinces, Bihar, Maharashtra, Karnataka or in the other states which were to remain part of 'Hindu Hindustan'. When Jinnah was asked what would happen to the Muslims left behind, he said: "They can take care of themselves." And later, he said elsewhere that there would be after all "Hindus in Pakistan just as Muslims in India". It looked as if to solve one minority problem, he was creating two similar problems in India and Pakistan. How the concept of Pakistan became a reality is another story.