Tradition,
Reform and Modernism in the Emergence of Pakistan
- Part 5 of 6
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
The Unionist Party swept the
provincial elections in the Punjab in 1936-37.
The Indian National Congress and the All India
Muslim League, with their centrist all-India agendas,
were both miserable failures in that election.
Even Allama Iqbal and a few candidates fielded
by him were defeated. Traditional Islam, in cooperation
with traditional Sikh and Hindu elements, emerged
victorious. Sikandar Hayat, as the head of the
Unionist party governed the province until his
death in 1943.
This coalition of traditional Muslim, Sikh and
Hindu elements endured until after World War II.
A student of history may argue that if this coalition
had survived and continued to occupy the central
space in the politics of the Punjab, partition
would probably not have happened. How did this
coalition fall apart?
Arrayed against the traditional agenda of the
Unionist party were the national agendas of the
Indian National Congress and the All India Muslim
League. These centrist agendas meant different
things to the two parties. The Congress party,
dominated by Hindu elements from Northern India
had the luxury of framing its agenda in all-India
nationalist terms because the triumph of this
agenda would in effect mean a Hindu-dominated
central government. The Congress party saw the
Muslims as a minority. Jinnah, deeply suspicious
of Congress rule and distrustful of a dominant
Hindu majority, would not accept this position.
His own disillusionment with the Congress had
led him to believe that the Muslims could not
trust a Hindu majority for safeguarding their
interests. He was convinced that a dialogue between
the Hindus and the Muslims must be a dialogue
between equals and not a dialogue between a majority
and a minority. He championed the two-nation theory,
articulated first by Hindu nationalists, in which
the Hindus and the Muslims each occupied their
own political and social space. Were the Muslims
a minority or a nation, that was the question
dividing the Congress and the League.
Neither the Congress nor the Muslim League position
was without inherent contradictions. By insisting
on a strong central government that by default
would be dominated by Hindus, the Congress party
failed to accommodate the anxieties of the Muslim-majority
areas. The Muslims were a majority in large portions
of the northwest and the northeast. But they were
a small minority in central and southern India.
On the other hand, the position of the Muslim
League had its own contradictions. While it might
have made sense for the League to speak of the
northwestern and northeastern regions as separate
“nations” with Muslim majorities,
the idea of an all-India Muslim “nation”
glossed over the presence of millions of Muslims
in the Indian hinterland who would remain in India,
partition or no partition. Some historians have
argued that the objective of Mohammed Ali Jinnah
was not partition but autonomous Muslim majority
regions in the northwest and the northeast that
were free to govern themselves within a federated
India. In support of this argument they offer
as evidence Jinnah’s acceptance of the Cabinet
Mission Plan (1946) which envisaged three autonomous
regions in a federated India. Two of these, in
the northwest and the northeast would have Muslim
majorities. It was Jawaharlal Nehru who torpedoes
this plan. When the chips were down, Jinnah was
for a united India with a weak center while Nehru
accepted a partitioned India with a strong center.
These positions were a reflection of the philosophical
makeup of the two men, each a giant in his own
right, and each pivotal in shaping the destiny
of the subcontinent. I will elaborate in a separate
series how these conflicting philosophies played
themselves out in the turbulent years immediately
after the World War II, leading to the holocaust
that accompanied partition.
The demise of the Unionist Party and the shift
in allegiance of the sajjada nishins of the Punjab
were not an accident of history. They were a result
of the deliberate and determined policies of the
Muslim League. Jinnah knew that there would be
no Pakistan without the Punjab. But he had a tactical
hurdle before him. The Punjab was ruled by the
Unionist party which was inclusive and had largely
stayed out of the communal frenzy in northern
India. The challenge before him was to break Punjab
loose from the Unionist party and bring the Muslims
of Punjab within an all-India Muslim framework.
The Congress party claimed to represent all sections
of India’s population including Hindus,
Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Parsees. Indeed,
during much of the period for the agitation of
Pakistan, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, a scholarly
Muslim, was the President of the Congress party
(1940-45). The inclusive, all-India posture of
the Congress party was a threat to Jinnah’s
position that the Muslim League alone represented
the interests of all the Muslims of India. This
position may at first seem obdurate. On closer
examination, it was directed less at the Congress
than at the Unionist party of the Punjab. As long
as the Unionist party represented the interests
of the Muslims of the Punjab, the Muslim League
could not negotiate with the British and the Congress
as the sole representative of all the Muslims
of India. Indeed, the Unionist party was a threat
to the very basis of the two-nation theory.
Jinnah proceeded to demolish the Unionist party
in a two-step process. The first step was the
abrogation of the Jinnah-Sikandar Pact that Jinnah
had signed with the Unionist party in 1942. Sikandar
Hayat was the Unionist Chief Minister of Punjab
and was enormously popular in the rural areas
of that vast province. The Jinnah-Sikandar Pact
was a tactical stand-down agreement that enabled
the League to consolidate its position in the
rural areas even while it professed its partnership
with the Unionists. When Sikandar Hayat died in
1944, Jinnah made his move and abrogated the Pact.
Without the strong leadership of Sikandar, the
Unionists came apart at the seams. There were
many defections. Some were co-opted by the League,
some went over to the Congress, yet others to
the Sikh Akali Dal.
The Second World War was rapidly coming to an
end and the British, exhausted from the War, wanted
to divest themselves of the Indian Empire which
was bursting at the seams with nationalist fervor.
They called the Simla Conference of 1945 whose
declared intent was to reconcile the positions
of the Congress and the League so that an Advisory
Committee could be formed to advise the British
viceroy on all matters affecting the governance
of the subcontinent. At the Conference, Jinnah
took a hard stand that only the League, as the
sole representative of all the Muslims of India,
could nominate Muslim delegates to the Advisory
Committee. Jinnah understood very well that the
Congress could not accept this demand. It would
have meant that the Congress could not even nominate
a stalwart like Maulana Azad to the Advisory Committee.
The Simla Conference collapsed. (To be continued)
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