Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [33]
The rhetoric of the Khilafat movement was heavily influenced by that of jihad, and the movement’s violent edge led to increasing tension with Gandhi and the Congress. The movement finally collapsed in the face of British repression, and the Caliphate was eventually abolished not by the colonial powers but by Kemal Ataturk and the new Turkish secular republic.
The mass religious enthusiasm which powered the Khilafat movement eventually flowed into the very different strategy of the Muslim League, led in the 1920s by Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1877 – 1938) and from 1936 by Jinnah. A radically simplified account of League strategy in these years would be that it involved selective co-operation with the Congress to put pressure on the British to grant more extensive powers of legislation and self-government to India and the Indian provinces, and selective co-operation with the British to limit Congress’s power and ensure Muslims a guaranteed share of the new legislatures and governments.
The idea of creating a separate state for Muslims in South Asia came only very late. It was first raised by Iqbal in 1930 – and he still envisaged that this state would be part of a wider Indian Confederation. Shortly afterwards, the name ‘Pakistan’ was coined for this proposed state. The so-called ‘Two Nation Theory’ had in a way been implicit in Muslim League ideology from the beginning. This theory holds that Indian Hindus and Muslims have the characteristics of two different ethno-cultural nations. As the example of Lebanon, Northern Ireland and other countries where what are in effect different nations live in one country under a set of arrangements for coexistence, this does not however necessarily dictate territorial separation.
The decisive moment for the demand for Pakistan as a slogan came with the Government of India Act of 1935 and the elections of 1937 which followed. Prior to the elections, Congress had made informal promises to the League that the two parties would form coalition governments in provinces with substantial Muslim minorities. As it turned out, however, Congress’s victories were so overwhelming that – most unwisely – the Congress leadership decided that it did not need to share government with the League, and reneged on its promise.
This Congress ‘treachery’ convinced Jinnah and the other leaders of the League that Muslim parties would be excluded from power in a Congress-ruled independent India, and Muslims reduced to a wholly subordinated community. In the background to all these moves and counter-moves were recurrent ‘communal riots’, in which local issues and religious prejudice led Hindus and Muslims to attack each other, often resulting in heavy casualties.
The eventual result was the Lahore Resolution of 1940, in which, at Jinnah’s call, the Muslim League set out the demand for an independent Muslim state. However, Jinah still spoke not of full separation but rather of ‘dividing India into autonomous national states’ (my italics); and as the distinguished South Asian historian Ayesha Jalal has convincingly demonstrated, this demand was not quite what it seemed.8 As late as 1939, Jinnah was stating that although Hindus and Muslims were separate nations, ‘they both must share the governance of their common homeland’.
Jinnah in the end was bitterly disappointed with the ‘moth-eaten’ Pakistan that he eventually received. Not merely did this exclude almost all the great historic Muslim centres of India, but it left out those areas of north India where support for the Muslim League and the demand for Pakistan had been strongest; and yet for demographic and geographical reasons,