In 1899, Rudyard Kipling, the beloved envoy of the British Empire, wrote ‘The White Man’s Burden’, urging the master race to serve the “new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child.” The poem was a hit in India, as it seemed set to rule forever. However, not everyone was for it, with anti-imperialist poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt arguing for a separation of Hindu and Muslim parts of India, if retaining a common British defense.
Blunt’s proposal, which was of “breathtaking novelty” for 1883, came at the close of a century that had seen nonstop tragedy for India’s Muslims. The most searing case had been 1857, which ended in a years-long revenge spree by the Crown, killing natives and driving them from their homes. Punjab’s John Lawrence believed that the Muslims had a more active, vindictive, and fanatic spirit than the Hindus, but these traits are characteristic of the race.
India’s foremost Muslim leader at the time, Sayyid Ahmed Khan, believed that the answer could only be the pen. His lectures to fellow believers to stop spitting on the Union Jack and learn something, get a job, and grow strong along the way were scorned by Muslim conservatives too freshly humiliated to pull focus. Instead of seeing his Aligarh College as an oasis, they dismissed it as an assembly line for British flunkies.
Sayyid Ahmed was a morning star, his thinking too ahead of its time to sway the Muslim mass. He believed that siding with the Crown was a matter of tactics, and guarding against the Hindu majority was a matter of strategy. In 1888, he asked Meerut, “If the whole English army were to leave … then who would be the rulers of India?”
Sayyid Ahmed pointed to the divide at the heart of imperial India, resulting in the expression ‘two nations’.
“After serving as an advocate for Hindu-Muslim unity and then as a frustrated moderate amidst Gandhi fever, Jinnah had completed his two major periods of public life by the 1930s. We all know that accepting the concept of Pakistan was the third stage.“
Hindu sectarian Lala Lajpat Rai in 1924 urged a clear partition into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India, which led to his death by lathi charge four years later. Jinnah, an Indian first and Muslim afterwards, believed that no Indian can serve his country if he neglects the interests of the Muslims.
The third phase of Jinnah’s public life involved embracing the idea of Pakistan and creating a country less than a decade after it was proposed. He believed that no Indian can serve his country if he neglects the interests of the Muslims. The turning point came in 1928 when Gandhi’s populist magic met the cold, black-letter law of the Nehrus. Motilal Nehru, a seasoned lawyer, brought out the Nehru Report, which tossed out Jinnah’s constitutional safeguards.
Jinnah’s skill had gotten even hardliners like Tilak and Lajpat Rai to comfort an anxious minority, promising the Muslims separate electorates and reserving them a third of the central legislature. In 1933, Cambridge student Rahmat Ali’s pamphlet outlined the surest plan for partition and coined the new state a name: ‘Pakistan’ or land of the pure, pulled from Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan.
“Pakistan has been a real idea for a while now, as the Quaid approaches his 150th birthday. However, it’s still unfulfilled today.“
Despite these turning points, leading lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah was still miles short of calling for independence. Poet Iqbal’s famous Allahabad address of 1930 did indeed wish for “Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sindh, and Balochistan” to be “amalgamated into a single state,” but “within the body-politic of India.” Iqbal meant’state’ in the lowercase Indian fashion, as a province.
The Congress of the late 1920s and ’30s was a new beast, as the logic of brute majority began to dawn on winner and loser alike. Even when Jinnah went as far as dropping separate electorates in return for keeping a third of the assembly, it mattered nothing to the Congress bosses. Motilal jeered that even the most advanced Mussalmans had given up such a demand, leaving “the Ali brothers and Jinnah to stew in their own juices.” With such indifference, it became evident that the Congress and the League had fundamentally different visions for India’s future.
Jinnah’s farewell to the nationalist cause at 1928’s end was met with hostility from Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. He pleaded for reason, stating that minorities cannot give anything to the majority and that they should live together. He left the Nehru Report as a ‘Hindu document’, marking the end of unity.
However, Pakistan was yet to beckon. Jinnah spent a lonely wilderness in private practice in London, discussing with Liaquat and letters from Iqbal. From 1937 to 1939, his foes in Congress stirred those separatist waters, hardening his tone with it. He told Patna that Muslims have made up their minds to have their fullest rights, but they shall have them as rights, not as gifts or concessions. By 1940, the tide had come in, and the idea of Pakistan captured the Muslim imagination like none before it.
The extraordinary popularity of the Lahore Resolution led to fresh critiques aimed at the Quaid and the idea he was determined to adopt and now own. While the claim that Pakistan was meant as a bargaining counter for a better deal in undivided India has been rebutted, Jinnah sighed almost every year since the resolution that it is not a counter for bargaining and to remove any idea of a loose federation from his mind.
The debate surrounding Jinnah’s Pakistan post-1940 has been a contentious issue, with no credible source denying his claims. Some argue that the British plot was behind the decision, but this is not entirely accurate. Most empire officials opposed Pakistan for various reasons, including its potential to divide the Indian army and create a buffer zone. The colonizer also longed for India’s unity, as it was a broader trend of the white man’s burden in crisis.
During the war, the Raj reverted to contempt for Jinnah’s party after the Japanese fall. However, this negative sentiment was only countered with a few letters between Jinnah and Churchill, an opposition figure who had never wanted to free India. London’s documented sneering at Pakistan is met with almost-zero evidence to the contrary.
The question of whether Pakistan was meant to be a land where Muslims could breathe free is another significant concern. Jinnah’s answer was to consider the greatest good, which involved deciding whether all Muslim India should be subjected to a Hindu-majority Raj or whether at least six crores of Mussalmans should have their own homeland and shape their future destiny.
Venkat Dhulipala correctly states that Pakistan was not a vague slogan, but rather a popularly envisioned theocracy. The religious right overwhelmingly rejected Pakistan and attacked Jinnah, from Maududi’s Jamaat to the Majlis-e-Ahrar to most of the Deoband school. This sentiment was mutual, as the Muslim modernists that founded the new nation did not believe in a divine mission.
Historian David Gilmartin argues that Pakistan was not a separate state from Israel, as the areas that became Pakistan were already occupied by millions of Muslims. He also notes that calling Pakistan a “Muslim Zion” is an act of historical erasure.
The idea of Pakistan, as envisioned by its founder, Jinnah, has been realized but remains unfulfilled. Despite declaring parliamentary sovereignty, civilian supremacy, and religious pluralism, the military establishment reigns supreme in all five assemblies, and minorities are marginalized. Civil liberties, closer to Jinnah’s heart than anything else, have faded from view. As the Quaid nears his 150th birthday, the idea of Pakistan remains unfulfilled as it has been made real for a while.