The creation of Pakistan will always remain something bizarre for me, not only because of being an Indian Punjabi, but also because of the way it happened and the people who were leading it. In many ways, several contradictions arise when we talk about the foundational basis of Pakistan and the history of the birth, growth, acceptance and the ultimate realization of the idea of Pakistan.
In this piece I would be talking only about Pakistan as it was envisioned, promoted, justified and subsequently created at that time, without touching on the later attempts to re-define Pakistani nationhood or national identity (which there have been plenty). Those later re-imaginations of Pakistaniyat would require a different post for themselves.
Before we talk of the strange circumstances around Pakistan’s creation, let me give a brief summary of the events as they took place. The demand for Pakistan was led by the All India Muslim League (AIML), commonly called ‘the League’, under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The ideological father of Pakistan is accepted to be Allama Mohammed Iqbal, an Islamic philosopher and poet from Punjab. As late as 1937, the AIML was a minor political group. It gained backing from the British colonial regime after the start of the Second World War, when the rival secular Indian National Congress had condemned the Viceroy of India’s decision to join the war without consulting Indian leaders. The League refused to join the Congress in protesting this and earned some support from the colonial government as a counterweight to the Congress. After the Congress announced the Quit India movement in 1942, it was heavily restricted and all of its major leaders were arrested. This was the time when the Muslim League accelerated its activities, gaining support from local traditional religious leaders and Muslim intellectuals all over British India. By the time the Congress leaders were free again, the League was stronger than ever and aggressively preaching the idea of Pakistan as the only way to safeguard the political rights of Muslims. In the 1946 legislative elections of British Raj, the League won the vast majority of Muslim-reserved seats (the system of separate electorates was in place - with only Muslims voting and contesting in Muslim constituencies). This essentially proved that the League was the legitimate representative of Indian Muslims, and hence India was partitioned to create a Muslim-majority Pakistan separated into two wings.
Now we shift to the contradictions and nuances of this movement.
1. The core supporters of Pakistan: Most experts agree that the All India Muslim League was supported and founded primarily by Muslim elites of the Hindu-majority areas of India. It could be said without much debate that the AIML run on an ideology that traced its roots to the Ganga valley (what is now Uttar Pradesh/ U.P.) and was financed by well-to-do Muslims of Gujarat and Bombay. Although Allama Iqbal is recognised as the first to suggest the idea of a separate country, the basis on which this politics started in the first place was laid down by Syed Ahmad Khan from U.P. in the late 19th century. Much of the dialogue and discussion about this idea took place in institutions like the Aligarh Muslim University. These areas were also the ones which first voted for the AIML in elections and rallied behind the Pakistan movement with the most fervour. Once Pakistan was created particularly in Muslim-majority regions, the Muslims from these regions had to choose between migrating to their homeland or living in a free India, ironically in a politically and demographically weaker position than before. A huge amount of them made the dangerous trip and became known as Mohajirs (migrants) in Pakistan. Those who stayed not only saw their political position weakened but also faced suspicion from their non-Muslim neighbours.
2. Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the leader: Anyone who knew Jinnah personally in the 1920s would laugh if you told them that he would be the founder of the first Islamic Republic in the world. He was a Western-educated lawyer who spent most of his life in Bombay and London, smoked a lot and was as far away from being a “practicing Muslim” as you could imagine. He was not a religious leader in any way. Even while voicing the demand of Pakistan on religious appeals, his personal lifestyle was anything but Islamic.
Jinnah came from a Gujarati Muslim family and was just the third generation of his family to be a Muslim. His grandfather was a Hindu belonging to the Lohana merchant community and started a fish trading business. Since the Lohanas were a strictly vegetarian community, he was expelled from the community and converted to the Nizari Ismaili sect of Islam as a result. Nevertheless, up until Jinnah, his family had practiced a syncretic Hindu-Muslim lifestyle which ended only after Jinnah became conscious of a Muslim identity. His companionship with Allama Iqbal also influenced him to practice non-sectarian (Sunni) Islam instead of the Shia sect his grandfather had converted to (It remained a heated debate in Pakistan later whether Jinnah was Shia or Sunni, involving Supreme Court judgements). This did not transform him into a religious leader either. Despite leading a movement that was religious and communal in nature, he said in his first speech as President of Pakistan that religion was “no business of the state”. This is the reason for a debate that continues to present day in Pakistan - whether Jinnah envisioned an Islamic state or a secular state. If it was really the latter, then his career objective of creating a Muslim country makes little sense.
3. The Two-Nation Theory: The theory that Hindus and Muslims were two entirely distinct, mutually hostile and irreconcilable nations was at the core of the AIML’s ideology. It was that absolute fact on basis of which their entire politics worked. Yet when the partition line was being drawn, and the proposals to divide Punjab and Bengal in two were being discussed, the AIML and Jinnah turned 180 degrees. They argued that Punjab and Bengal must not be partitioned, but both be made part of Pakistan. This was the clearest contradiction of their theory. If Muslims and non-Muslims were sworn enemies of each other, then Punjab with 53% Muslims and 47% non-Muslims needed to be divided, right? But according to Jinnah then, Punjab was an indivisible unit. It could either go entirely to Pakistan or entirely to India, and having a slight Muslim majority, he had no doubts that it belonged in Pakistan. We should recall here that a mass exchange of population was not part of the partition plan. Everyone was just supposed to remain wherever they were. And with this idea of Jinnah, a huge number of non-Muslims would have found themselves in a state created specifically for Muslims. Indeed, this did not happen, and the two mixed provinces were divided, about which Jinnah complained that he was getting only a “moth-eaten Pakistan”. The Viceroy Lord Mountbatten himself found it absurd that Jinnah argued for Punjab and Bengal being indivisible units. I think he either wrote or said on this topic something along the lines of “Then what was the point of the partition and Pakistan?”. Jinnah also tried to convince the Sikh leaders and the Hindu rulers of the Hindu-majority princely states of Rajputana to join Pakistan.
4. The Question of Land: In the initial years of the demand for Pakistan, it was a very vague idea. Since the Muslim population was distributed all over India and the demand was being led by Muslims from Hindu-majority areas, they were never able to explain properly what a Pakistan would mean and where it would be created. The exact boundaries were revealed on 17 August 1947, ofcourse, 2 days after the birth of Pakistan, but the idea was much, much vague earlier. Some historians suggest that the Muslim League did not care about where the country would be created, they just wanted a country. They would all migrate there anyway (which happened as well). In this viewpoint, the AIML’s brand of nationalism detached a nation from its physical land. The reason Pakistan comprises of the regions it does is not that Indian Muslims had some special significance for these areas, but simply that these were the places that happened to have a Muslim majority. The boundaries were not natural at all.
5. The Question of People: One of the main assumptions of the AIML’s movement was that religious identity was the only identity that mattered. It was more relevant than one’s ethnicity, region, language and culture. Those identities were viewed by Jinnah’s League as mere nuisances in the path of a unified Muslim nationality. This is an important point, because “Indian Muslims” have never been a monolith group. Although even in this post, I have been writing “Indian Muslims”, but it means little apart from Muslims who live in India, a massive and diverse subcontinent. Every kind of differences imaginable exist between Muslims in India. There are divisions of sect: Sunni, Shia, Sufi. Within Shias there are the Ismailis and the Twelvers. Even within the non-sectarian Sunni Islam there existed varying interpretations of Deobandi and Barelvi Islam. And these differences were nothing compared to the differences in languages and cultures. It was a stretch to call Indian Muslims a single, unified nation. If you provide justifications over why all Indian Muslims do constitute a nation and why their differences are minor, then I am sure even lesser justification would be required to do the same for Muslims and non-Muslims of the same region, say Punjab. What the League ended up doing was to lay the foundations for a unified identity for all Muslims. Any expression of regionalism in the new Pakistan was seen as a threat to the country’s very existence. In 1948, Jinnah declared in Dhaka that the national language of Pakistan would be “Urdu, and only Urdu”. In his first speech as President too, he had asked the people to stop identifying as Pashtun or Punjabi, and regard Pakistani and Muslim as their only identities. It was simply not possible for such diverse groups to unite into one and destroy their own cultures and languages just under the banner of “being Muslim”. And that was demonstrated by the eventual independence of Bangladesh. Yet the Pakistani state doubled down on its “one nation” policy after Bangladesh, and these regional identities continue to take violent forms in Pakistan to this day.
6. The Question of History: The various Muslim groups of India shared their histories not with each other but with their non-Muslim neighbours. In this circumstance, projecting Pakistan as a single nation that should hence have a shared national history was almost impossible. It was only made more difficult by the fact that Muslim kings in Indian history mostly fought with other Muslim kings and rarely did they operate on a binary “Muslim vs infidel” strategy. A Pashtun conqueror like Ahmad Shah Abdali was a hero for Pashtuns but a villain for Punjabis, whose cities he plundered. The eventual historical narrative for Pakistan required a significant bit of manipulation. It begins with the Arab conqueror Muhammad bin Qasim’s conquest of Sindh in 712. Of course, this is like Jinnah saying that his family’s history began with his grandfather’s friend under whose influence he converted to Islam! Although I admit that this historical narrative was built a few decades after Jinnah. Jinnah himself wanted nothing to do with the past, and start Pakistan with a clean canvas. He did not claim Pakistan as a successor of any historical entity. But eventually Pakistan had to create a historical narrative. And they chose one that began with an invader’s conquest, recognising the invader as the first Pakistani.
I apologise for any unreasonable bias beyond the points I wanted to make. As I said earlier, I am not a Pakistani, but a Punjabi from India. So the history of the partition of India is something that is not foreign to me at all. And I must add that most of the contents of this post are not the common opinion held by people in India. If you have anything to add or have a disagreement with my points, I invite discussion.