Tradition, Reform and Modernism in the Emergence of Pakistan - 5
By Professor Nazeer Ahmed
Concord, 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.

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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 torpedoed 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 Parsis. 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)

(The author is Director, World Organization for Resource Development and Education, Washington, DC; Director, American Institute of Islamic History and Culture, CA; Member, State Knowledge Commission, Bangalore; and Chairman, Delixus Group)