BACKGROUND TO PARTITION
The concept of a separate Muslim "nation" or "people," qaum, is inherent in
Islam, but this concept bears no resemblance to a territorial entity. The
proposal for a Muslim state in India was first enunciated in 1930 by the
poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who suggested that the four northwestern
provinces (Sindh, Balochistan, Punjab, and the North-West Frontier Province)
should be joined in such a state. In a 1933 pamphlet Choudhary Rahmat Ali, a
Cambridge student, coined the name Pakstan (later Pakistan), on behalf of those
Muslims living in Punjab, Afghan (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sind,
and Balochistan. Alternatively the name was said to mean "Land of the Pure." (H.R.T.)
BIRTH OF THE NEW STATE
Pakistan came into existence as a dominion within the Commonwealth in August
1947, with Jinnah as governor-general and Liaquat Ali Khan as prime minister.
With West and East Pakistan separated by more than 1,000 miles of Indian
territory and with the major portion of the wealth and resources of the British
heritage passing to India, Pakistan's survival seemed to hang in the balance. Of
all the well-organized provinces of British India, only the comparatively
backward areas of Sindh, Balochistan, and the North-West Frontier came to
Pakistan intact. The Punjab and Bengal were divided, and Kashmir became disputed
territory. Economically, the situation seemed almost hopeless; the new frontier
cut off Pakistani raw materials from the Indian factories, disrupting industry,
commerce, and agriculture. The partition and the movement of refugees were
accompanied by terrible massacres for which both communities were responsible.
India remained openly unfriendly; its economic superiority expressed itself in a
virtual blockade. The dispute over Kashmir brought the two countries to the
verge of war; and India's command of the headworks controlling the water
supplies to Pakistan's eastern canal colonies gave it an additional economic
weapon. The resulting friction, by obstructing the process of sharing the assets
inherited from the British raj (according to plans previously agreed), further
handicapped Pakistan. (L.F.R.W.)
THE TRANSFER OF POWER AND THE BIRTH OF TWO NATIONS
British India in 1947, showing major administrative divisions, the distribution
of the principal. Elections held in the winter of 1945-46 proved how effective
Jinnah's single-plank strategy for his Muslim League had been, as the league won
all 30 seats reserved for Muslims in the Central Legislative Assembly and most
of the reserved provincial seats as well. The Congress was successful in
gathering most of the general electorate seats, but it could no longer
effectively insist that it spoke for the entire population of British India.
In 1946, Secretary of State Pethick-Lawrence personally led a three-man Cabinet
deputation to New Delhi with the hope of resolving the Congress-Muslim League
deadlock and, thus, of transferring British power to a single Indian
administration. Cripps was responsible primarily for drafting the ingenious
Cabinet Mission Plan, which proposed a three-tier federation for India,
integrated by a minimal central-union government in Delhi, which would be
limited to handling foreign affairs, communications, defense, and only those
finances required to care for such unionwide matters. The subcontinent was to be
divided into three major groups of provinces: Group A, to include the
Hindu-majority provinces of the Bombay Presidency, Madras, the United Provinces,
Bihar, Orissa, and the Central Provinces (virtually all of what became
independent India a year later); Group B, to contain the Muslim-majority
provinces of the Punjab, Sind, the North-West Frontier, and Baluchistan (the
areas out of which the western part of Pakistan was created); and Group C, to
include the Muslim-majority Bengal (a portion of which became the eastern part
of Pakistan and in 1971 the country of Bangladesh) and the Hindu-majority Assam.
The group governments were to be virtually autonomous in everything but matters
reserved to the union centre, and within each group the princely states were to
be integrated into their neighbouring provinces. Local provincial governments
were to have the choice of opting out of the group in which they found
themselves should a majority of their populace vote to do so.
Punjab's large and powerful Sikh population would have been placed in a
particularly difficult and anomalous position, for Punjab as a whole would have
belonged to Group B, and much of the Sikh community had become anti-Muslim since
the start of the Mughal emperors' persecution of their gurus in the 17th
century. Sikhs played so important a role in the British Indian Army that many
of their leaders hoped that the British would reward them at the war's end with
special assistance in carving out their own nation from the rich heart of
Punjab's
fertile canal-colony lands, where, in the "kingdom" once ruled by Ranjit Singh
(1780-1839), most Sikhs lived. Since World War I, Sikhs had been equally fierce
in opposing the British raj, and, though never more than 2 percent of India's
population, they had as highly disproportionate a number of nationalist
"martyrs" as of army officers. A Sikh Akali Dal ("Party of Immortals"), which
was started in 1920, led militant marches to liberate gurdwaras ("doorways to
the Guru"; the Sikh places of worship) from corrupt Hindu managers. Tara Singh
(1885-1967), the most important leader of this vigorous Sikh political movement,
first raised the demand for a separate Azad ("Free") Punjab in 1942. By March
1946, Singh demanded a Sikh nation-state, alternately called "Sikhistan" or "Khalistan"
("Land of the Sikhs" or "Land of the Pure"). The Cabinet Mission, however, had
no time or energy to focus on Sikh separatist demands and found the Muslim
League's demand for Pakistan equally impossible to accept.
As a pragmatist, Jinnah, himself mortally afflicted with tuberculosis and lung
cancer, accepted the Cabinet Mission's proposal, as did Congress leaders. The
early summer of 1946, therefore, saw a dawn of hope for India's future
prospects, but that soon proved false when Nehru announced at his first press
conference as the reelected president of the Congress that no constituent
assembly could be "bound" by any prearranged constitutional formula. Jinnah read
Nehru's remarks as a "complete repudiation" of the plan, which had to be
accepted in its entirety in order to work. Jinnah then convened the league's
Working Committee, which withdrew its previous agreement to the federation
scheme and instead called upon the "Muslim Nation" to launch "direct action" in
mid-August 1946. Thus began India's bloodiest year of civil war since the mutiny
nearly a century earlier. The Hindu-Muslim rioting and killing that started in
Calcutta sent deadly sparks of fury, frenzy, and fear to every corner of the
subcontinent, as all civilized restraint seemed to disappear.
Lord Mountbatten (1900-79) was sent to replace Wavell as viceroy in March 1947,
as Britain prepared to transfer its power over India to some "responsible" hands
by no later than June 1948. Shortly after reaching Delhi, where he conferred
with the leaders of all parties and with his own officials, Mountbatten decided
that the situation was too dangerous to wait even that brief period. Fearing a
forced evacuation of British troops still stationed in India, Lord Mountbatten
resolved to opt for partition, one that would divide Punjab and Bengal virtually
in half, rather than risk further political negotiations while civil war raged
and a new mutiny of Indian troops seemed imminent. Among the major Indian
leaders, Gandhi alone refused to reconcile himself to partition and urged
Mountbatten to offer Jinnah the premiership of a united India rather than a
separate Muslim nation. Nehru, however, would not agree to that, nor would his
most powerful Congress deputy, Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), as both had become
tired of arguing with Jinnah and were eager to get on with the job of running an
independent government of India.
Britain's Parliament passed in July 1947 the Indian Independence Act, ordering
the demarcation of the dominions of India and Pakistan by midnight of Aug.
14-15, 1947, and dividing within a single month the assets of the world's
largest empire, which had been integrated in countless ways for more than a
century. Racing the deadline, two boundary commissions worked desperately to
partition Punjab and Bengal in such a way as to leave a majority of Muslims to
the west of the former's new boundary and to the east of the latter's, but as
soon as the new borders were known, no fewer than 10 million Hindus, Muslims,
and Sikhs fled from their homes on one side of the newly demarcated borders to
what they thought would be "shelter" on the other. In the course of that tragic
exodus of innocents, some 1 million people were slaughtered in communal
massacres that made all previous conflicts of the sort known to recent history
pale by comparison. Sikhs, caught in the middle of Punjab's new "line," suffered
the highest percentage of casualties. Most Sikhs finally settled in India's
much-diminished border state of Punjab. Tara Singh later asked, "The Muslims got
their Pakistan, and the Hindus got their Hindustan, but what did the Sikhs get?"
(The following section discusses the history since 1947 of those areas of the
subcontinent that became the Republic of India. For historical coverage since
1947 of the partitioned areas in the northwest and the northeast, see the
articles PAKISTAN and BANGLADESH.)
ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF PAKISTAN
Mohammed Ali Jinnah died in September 1948, within 13 months of independence.
The leaders of the new Pakistan were mainly lawyers with a strong commitment to
parliamentary government. They had supported Jinnah in his struggle against the
Congress not so much because they desired an Islamic state but because they had
come to regard the Congress as synonymous with Hindu domination. They had
various degrees of personal commitment to Islam. To some it represented an ethic
that might (or might not) be the basis of personal behaviour within a modern,
democratic state. To others it represented a tradition, the framework within
which their forefathers had ruled India. But there were also groups that
subscribed to Islam as a total way of life, and these people were said to wish
to establish Pakistan as a theocracy (a term they repudiated). The members of
the old Constituent Assembly, elected at the end of 1945, assembled at Karachi,
the new capital.
Jinnah's lieutenant, Liaquat Ali Khan, inherited the task of drafting a
constitution. Himself a moderate (he had entered politics via a landlord party),
he subscribed to the parliamentary, democratic, secular state. But he was
conscious that he possessed no local or regional power base. He was a muhajir
("refugee") from the United Provinces, the Indian heartland, whereas most of his
colleagues and potential rivals drew support from their own people in Punjab or
Bengal. Liaquat Ali Khan therefore deemed it necessary to gain the support of
the religious spokesmen (the mullahs or, more properly, the ulama). He issued a
resolution on the aims and objectives of the constitution, which began,
"Sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone" and went
on to emphasize Islamic values. Hindu members of the old Constituent Assembly
protested; Islamic states had traditionally distinguished between the Muslims,
as full citizens, and dhimmis, nonbelievers who were denied certain rights and
saddled with certain additional obligations.