Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [34]
Rather, it seems, Jinnah was using the slogan of Pakistan for two purposes: to consolidate his own control over the League, and as a threat to force Congress to concede what he – and most Muslims – really wanted. This was a united India in which Muslims would be guaranteed a share of power, which in turn would guarantee their rights. On the one hand, this would be a highly decentralized India in which the provinces (including the Muslim-majority provinces) would hold most of the power – a goal shared by the Muslim and indeed Hindu elites of Punjab and Sindh. On the other hand, Muslims would be constitutionally guaranteed a 50 per cent share of positions in the central government, and a large enough share of the central legislature to block any attempts to change the constitution or introduce policies hostile to Muslim interests.
In 2010, such goals may not seem particularly outrageous. In the cases of Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Lebanon and parts of Africa we have become accustomed in recent decades to constitutional arrangements guaranteeing ‘power-sharing’ between different ethno-religious groups, and heavily qualifying strict majoritarian democracy. However, these demands proved unacceptable to the Congress. They threatened Congress’s power, Hindu jobs and the plans of Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru for state-led economic development, something which depended on a strong centralized state. There was also a well-based fear that a loose Indian confederation would soon collapse into appalling civil war. In the end, therefore, Congress preferred – however unwillingly – a smaller but strong and united Congress-dominated India to a larger but weak, decentralized and endangered Indian confederation.
In 1947, with British rule disintegrating and Hindu – Muslim violence increasing, the British agreed with Congress and the League on independence and partition. Pakistan was to consist of two halves separated by almost 1,000 miles of Indian territory: in the east, the Muslim-majority areas of the province of Bengal; in the west, the Muslim-majority areas of the province of Punjab, together with Sindh, the North West Frontier Province and adjoining tribal and princely territories.
To some extent, the movement for Pakistan may have escaped from Jinnah’s hands. As his famous speech to the Pakistani constituent assembly had it, in Pakistan,
Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of every individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.
This passage makes clear that Jinnah expected Pakistan to be a Muslim-majority but essentially secular country in which Muslims would be the ‘people of state’, but large Hindu and Sikh minorities would exist and would have a share of power. Pakistan would also therefore still be part of a wider South Asian unity, in cultural, social and economic terms, with the possibility of some form of confederation between equal partners emerging later.9
However, since Muslim numerical weakness meant that Jinnah and the League could not block Congress’s plans by democratic and constitutional means, they were critically dependent on Muslim street power; and this street power was largely mobilized using the rhetoric of Islam (with strong jihadi overtones harking back to the Khilafat movement) and of communal fear. This then collided head-on with Hindu and especially Sikh street power mobilized in the name of their respective fears and visions.
Jinnah spoke of a secular Pakistan, but on the streets the cry was the Muslim profession of faith:
Pakistan ka naaraah kya?
La illaha illallah
(What is the slogan of Pakistan?
There is no God but God)
This is still the slogan of the Islamist parties in Pakistan