The Two Architects of Pakistan
By Syed Osman Sher
Mississauga, Canada
Historically speaking, the change of heart on the part of some individuals has prompted developments of enormous proportion to alter the course of world civilization and history.
When Jesus Christ started his mission, a man who became one of the most ruthless Jewish persecutors of the followers of Jesus was Saul of Tarsus, the ‘Hebrew of the Hebrews’. He later announced that he had seen Jesus in a vision and was converted as his followers. He took the name Paul for himself and became the most significant evangelist of the early church. He played a large part in the spread of Christianity in Greece and Rome, and later, through this road, throughout the wide expanse of the Roman Empire. Similar is the case with the second Caliph of Islam, Hazrat Umar ibn Al-Khattab. When the Holy Prophet started preaching Islam, Hazrat Umar proved to be a diehard opponent and resolved to defend the traditional polytheistic religion of Arabia. He was intensely feared by the people of Makkah for his harsh temperament. Once, he even proceeded to kill the Prophet with a sword in his hand during the process whereof he converted to Islam. His reforms (ijtehad) and administrative measures were exemplary. The vast region where we find Islam today is mostly the work of his military genius.
Coming to our own country, we find the British rule firmly established in the middle of the 19th century. The War of Independence of 1857 had demonstrated clearly that the British were not welcomed. In order to check that feeling and to prolong their rule, the British acted on the old Roman motto of “Divide et Impera”. The existence of two major religions in the country provided this opportunity to them. With their official and unofficial oratories, administrative policies and actions they successfully split the nation in two parts: Muslims and Hindus, presenting one as a bunch of marauders and the oppressors of the past, and the other as the raging, revenging bull of the majority of the future. Both communities came under the awe of each other, and that fact became helpful in dimming the ugliness of the alien rule.
The post-1857 was a very painful period for the Muslims of India. Since the Indian empire had been snatched away from the Muslims, they were considered by the new rulers as the real enemy. A civil servant, W. W. Hunter, wrote in 1868: "After the Mutiny, the British turned upon the Mussalmans as their real enemies so that failure of the revolt was much more disastrous to them than the Hindus…In every district, the descendant of some line of Muslim prince is sullenly eating his heart out in a roofless palace and weed-choked tanks. The Mussalmans are excluded from the army and the law. The judiciary was either Anglicized or Hinduized; while Permanent Settlement led to wholesale eviction of Muslim landlords."
The bitterness for the loss of political power made the Muslims more prejudiced against the British rule. As a show of non-cooperation, they refused to receive English education. Sharing the common Muslim prejudice, Syed Ahmad, later to be the unquestionable leader of Indian Muslims, too felt the same way, and became averse to learning English. But family circumstances soon changed, as his brother, father and grandfather died in quick succession. To earn a livelihood, Syed Ahmad Khan joined the British judicial service in 1837 as a reader and rising in the service retired as a Sub-Judge in 1876. He was also knighted. In 1878 he joined the Viceroy’s Legislative Council. He came to the conclusion that as the British had shown the ability to destroy the Muslim power, the Muslims had only to learn the ways of the British in order to overcome this misfortune. Indian Muslims must make terms with the British power. He was so convinced in this regard that while rescuing some people of the British community, held prisoner in 1857 by the Nawab of Bijnour, he had to declare, “By God, Nawab Sahib, I say that British sovereignty cannot be eliminated from India”.
In the political arena, Sir Syed, though not anti-Hindu in outlook, was rather a claimant of equality in the treatment of the two communities of Hindus and Muslims. He pinned his hopes on Pax Britannica to maintain a balance between them. He fought against giving democratic rights to the Indians through elections because Sir Syed expressed his fear that “the system of representation by election means the representation of the views and interests of the majority of the population…. [which] would totally override the interests of the smaller community.” Writing in 1888 under the topic, the ‘Present State of Indian Politics’ in the newspaper Pioneer, he commented: ‘I have often said that India is like a bride whose two eyes are the Hindu and the Mohammedan. Her beauty consists in this - that the two eyes be of equal luster’. This statement pointed towards the existence of two nations living in India as equals. He further argued: ‘Suppose that all the English…were to leave India…? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations - the Mohammedans and the Hindus - could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not.” That was purely an advocacy of the Two-nation Theory and a demand for the partition of the country with two separate Governments. Agreeing to his vision, the British gave him, after ten years of his passing away, the Separate Electorate Act of 1909, granting the Muslims the right to elect their own representatives as a separate nation.
Come twentieth century. It was the year 1906 that saw the entry of Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), a young and energetic lawyer of Bombay, into the Indian National Congress as a nationalist Muslim. In the 22nd session of the Congress held in Calcutta in 1906 it was Jinnah who had stated that ‘The foundation upon which the Indian National Congress is based is that we are all equal, that there should be no reservation for any class or community.’ On the invitation of the All India Muslim League he joined that Party in 1913 without giving up his membership of the Congress but with a ‘solemn preliminary covenant that loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way and no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause, to which his life was dedicated.’ But disgusted later with the mixing of religion with politics by the President of the Congress, M.K. Gandhi, he left that Party in 1920. He termed Gandhi as “the one man responsible for turning Congress into an instrument for the revival of Hinduism” and the establishment of “Hindu Raj in the country.” Resigning from Congress, Jinnah seemed to have given up his concern for national causes and concentrated his energy in reorganizing Muslim League and to protect Muslim interests. The policies of the Congress governments in the provinces after the election of 1937, which were mainly Hinduism-oriented, pushed Jinnah further towards protecting the rights of the Muslims.
It was the result of the policies of the Congress that Jinnah had to declare at the session of All India Muslim League of 1940 at Lahore, “Muslim India cannot accept any Constitution which must necessarily result in a Hindu-majority Government. Hindus and Muslims brought together under a democratic system forced upon the Minorities can only mean Hindu raj…Mussulmans are a nation according to any definition of a nation and they must have their homeland, their territory and their state”. Jinnah got a separate homeland for the Muslims of India in 1947.
Thus, the two converts produced Pakistan, one with his vision and cooperation with the British, and the other through his untiring efforts and struggles with the Congress.
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