Was Partition of India necessary – A Muslim’s Perspective

Time and again it has been contended with much vehemence that a united India would have been more beneficial for the Muslims of India. It is not more than an after thought, devoid of historical analysis, based merely upon whimsical interpretation of the post Partition events.

It is my conviction that keeping in view the pre Partition events, the Partition of India and making of Pakistan was the best option available to the Muslims of the Subcontinent. The Hindu Muslim coexistence as equals was impossible in a United India. And this was and is obvious to anyone who have studied the pre Partition history of the Subcontinent. Whenever the Hindus got their say in matters concerning Muslims, they made sure that the Muslims got the worst deal. Allah Ta’aala says in the Holy Qur’an:

كَيْفَ وَإِن يَظْهَرُوا۟ عَلَيْكُمْ لَا يَرْقُبُوا۟ فِيكُمْ إِلًّۭا وَلَا ذِمَّةًۭ ۚ يُرْضُونَكُم بِأَفْوَٰهِهِمْ وَتَأْبَىٰ قُلُوبُهُمْ وَأَكْثَرُهُمْ فَـٰسِقُونَ

How (can they have a treaty) while if they overcome you, they will not observe any bond or treaty with you. They want to please you with (words of) their mouths, but their hearts refuse. Most of them are sinners.

Surah At-Tawbah: 8

I’ll jot down significant events that inform and endorse my conviction.

1. Partition of Bengal: The Encyclopedia Britannica has this to say

partition of Bengal, (1905), division of Bengal carried out by the British viceroy in India, Lord Curzon, despite strong Indian nationalist opposition……..

East Bengal, because of isolation and poor communications, had been neglected in favour of west Bengal and Bihar………

The Hindus of west Bengal, who controlled most of Bengal’s commerce and professional and rural life, complained that the Bengali nation would be split in two, making them a minority in a province including the whole of Bihar and Orissa……….

Agitation against the partition included mass meetings, rural unrest, and a swadeshi (native) movement to boycott the import of British goods……….

In 1911, the year that the capital was shifted from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Delhi, east and west Bengal were reunited……..

The aim was to combine appeasement of Bengali sentiment with administrative convenience. This end was achieved for a time, but the Bengali Muslims, having benefitted from partition, were angry and disappointed.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “partition of Bengal”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Feb. 2009, https://www.britannica.com/event/Partition-of-Bengal. Accessed 17 July 2022.

2. Shuddhi and Sanghatan

The 1920s in United Provinces were marked by a growing movement of Hindu reformist, religious and communal organisations. The community and nation making discourse of the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha launched the programme of shuddhi and sangathan on a large scale in 1923 in the region………

Sangathan was the answer of the militant Hindu organisations to consolidate the Hindus.

Charu Gupta, Articulating Hindu Masculinity and Femininity: Shuddhi and Sangathan Movements in United Provinces in the 1920s

One of the most salient developments in the 1920s was the launching of the shuddhi movement by the Arya Samaj to bring into the Hindu fold various groups considered outside the pale of what had now come to be defined as ‘Hinduism’, including untouchables and, later, Muslim, Christian and even Sikh communities.

Muslim reactions to the shuddhi campaign in early twentieth century North India
By Yoginder Sikand

The campaign developed with remarkable speed and spread rapidly from Agra to Muthra and Aligarh and neighbouring districts. By May the shuddhi enthusiasts claimed no less than 18,000 converts in Agra and the neighbourhood.31 Another government record stated, “Swami Shraddhanand and his lieutenants threw themselves into the struggle with great zeal to bring back the Muslims in Agra to the fold of Hindu religion…that as many as 300 converts had been obtained form one village alone”.32
More than 30,000 Malkana rajputs were stated to have been converted by the end of 1923 itself and in 1927, it was reported that more than 1,63,000 Malkanas had entered the Hindu fold.33

Charu Gupta, Articulating Hindu Masculinity and Femininity

3. Nehru Report:

The report was not acceptable to Muslims and both the Muslim members of the Committee did not sign it. Syed Ali Imam, due to bad heath could not attend the meetings of the Committee while Shoaib Qureshi refused to sign the repot. In the fourth session of the All Parties Conference convened in December to review the Nehru Report, Jinnah representing the Muslim League presented following four amendments in the report:

There should be no less than one-third Muslim representation in the Central Legislature.
In event of the adult suffrage not being established, Punjab and Bengal should have seats reserved for the Muslims on population basis.
The form of the constitution should be Federal with residuary powers vested in the provinces.
Sind should immediately be made a separate province and the reforms should also be introduced in NWFP and Balochistan at the earliest.

Jinnah’s proposals were rejected when put to vote in All Parties Conference. The Congress managed to get the majority vote in favour of the Report.

Nehru Report (1928)

4. Congress Ministries (1937-39)

     a. Wardha Scheme: Compulsory education for seven years in Hindi and mandatory bowing before picture of Mr Gandhi.

The majority of their [Muslims’] grievances from early 1938 onwards according to government’s own assesment “related to the Education Department and the foremost of them was the Vidya Mandir Scheme” with additional complaints over the neglect of Urdu and compulsory participation in the singing of “Vande Mataram”. 

Muslim Response to the Educational Policy of the Central Provinces and Berar Government (1937 – 1939)

5. Cabinet Mission Plan (1946):

The Plan was:

The Cabinet Mission Plan provided that only three subjects would belong compulsorily to the Central Government. These were Defence, Foreign Affairs and Communications, which I had suggested in my scheme. The Mission however added a new element to the Plan. It divided the country into three zones, A, B and C, as the members of the Mission felt that this would give a greater sense of assurance to the minorities. Section B would include the Punjab, Sind, the N.W.F.P. and British Baluchistan. This would corutitute a Muslim majority area. In Section C, which included Bengal and Assam, the Muslims would have a small majority over the rest.

India Wins Freedom, Orient Longmans, 1959, p 149

The Muslim League accepted the Plan.

He [Jinnah] told the Council that the scheme presented by the Cabinet Mission was the maximum that he could secure. As such, he advised the Muslim League to accept the scheme and the Council voted unanimously in its favour. 

India Wins Freedom, p 150

Congress also accepted the Plan but then Jawaharlal Nehru went back on this decision. Abul Kalam Azad after regretting making Nehru the president of Congress, writes

Now happened one of the unfortunate events which changed the course of history. On 10 July, Jawaharlal held a Press Conference in Bombay in which he made a statement which in normal circumstances might have passed almost unnoticed, but in the existing atmosphere of suspicion and hatred, set in train a most unfortunate series of consequences. Some Press representatives asked him whether with the passing of the Resolution by A.I.C.C., the Congress had accepted the Plan in toto, including the composition of the interim Government. 

Jawaharlal stated in reply that Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly ‘completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise.’ 
Press representatives further asked if this meant that the Cabinet Mission Plan could be modified. 
Jawaharlal replied emphatically that the congress had agreed only to participate in the constituent Assembly and regarded itself free to change or modify the Cabinet Mission Plan as it thought best.

India Wins Freedom, pp 154-155

The above list is by no means exhaustive but captures the communal ethos of pre Partition India, which was evident even to Winston Churchill. He says in 1931 in his speech about the Hindu Muslim communal divide that

If you took the antagonisms of France and Germany, and the antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants, and compounded them and multiplied them ten-fold, you would not equal the division which separates these two races intermingled by scores of millions in the cities and plains of India.

Winston S Churchill – Never Give In – The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, Pimlico, 2004, pp 97-99

The Burden of Conscience

I think this can be a good reminder to someone going the Military control way of the statecraft, that soon after the climax, it invariably is an unfathomable chasm of regret.

Air Marshal Asghar Khan former CAS (23 July 1957 – 22 July 1965), known for writing a letter to General Zia ul Haq to take over the country’s affairs from the then Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, writes in his book ‘We Have Learnt Nothing from History’:

The second time when I had the opportunity to meet Mr Jinnah and to hear his views on an important subject was on 14 August 1947 in Karachi. As the Governor-General of Pakistan, he had given a large reception on the lawns of the Governor-General’s House, now the Governor’s House, in Karachi. I was among the dozen or so officers of the armed forces invited and one of the others was Lt Colonel (later Major-General) Akbar Khan of ‘Rawalpindi Conspiracy’ fame. Akbar Khan suggested that we should talk with the Quaid-i-Azam. The Quaid was moving around meeting his guests and when he came near us he asked us how we were. Akbar Khan replied that we were very happy that he had succeeded in creating a free and independent country and we had hoped that under his leadership our genius will be allowed to flower’. He went on to say that we were, however, disappointed that higher posts in the armed forces had been given to British officer who still controlled our destiny. The Quaid who had been listening patiently raised his finger and said, Never forget that you are the servants of the state. You do not make policy. It is we, the people’s representatives, who decide how the country is to be run. Your job is only to obey the decisions of your civilian masters.

Lt. Gen. Gul Hasan, former COAS (20 December 1970 – 2 March 1972), in his Memoirs writes:

In an army, effective leadership at the top makes all the difference between success and failure: so it is with the Pakistan Army. Our environment went askew because Martial Law became a part and parcel of our very existence, thereby burdening the army with the dual tasks of administering the country and defending it in any emergency. I shall frankly state that we failed miserably in both these undertakings. Our commitment to Martial Law was total in 1971, when in spite of the fact that the Army was all-in-all, there was no communication whatsoever between the Government and the General Headquarters. The void was absolute, and it had to be experienced to be believed.
As far as I can foresee, the spectre of Martial Law will be ever-present in Pakistan, unless she produces political leaders who can look beyond provincial horizons, be above-board possess honesty of purpose, command the solid support of the masses, and be genuinely concerned with their welfare and, last but by no means least, be patriots. (The meaning of the last word is a person who loves, supports, and defends his country and its interests.) This would be a tall order for our political community to fulfill, and it will be equally wishful to console ourselves that one fine day the leadership of the Army may decide to devote themselves wholly to their profession. I am not for one moment bracketing the junior officers with the top ranks. In both the wars with India their performance was magnificent, especially those who were in East Pakistan in 1971. In spite of being utterly isolated from the West Wing, harassed by a not-too-friendly population and surrounded by an implacable neighbour, they stood up to the unremitting strain for over six months with a courage and resolve that is not easy to find in the pages of military history. They were let down by their Government and General Head-quarters and their own senior-most commanders.

General K. M. Arif Vice COAS (1984-1987), in Khaki Shadows has this to say:

The Yahya interregnum, traumatic and turbulent, witnessed Pakistan’s defeat in war and the amputation of its Eastem wing. This monumental tragedy has remained an unexplained affair and the truth has still not emerged regarding Pakistan’s disintegration and military surrender. This would expose the political and military blunders made since 1947, a risk not acceptable to the policy makers. The details of the 1971 war have been written by the winning side in which facts have been falsified, with bias injected in the narration rather generously.
The history of failure in war can be summed up in two words: Too late. Pakistan lagged behind events in East Pakistan, lost the initiative, chased shadows and met her doom. Under the inspiring leadership of Sir Winston Churchill, Great Britain had converted the defeat at Dunkirk into victory. Conversely, Pakistan, reeling under the impact of defeat and the stigma of surrender in 1971, naively consigned its political, diplomatic and military skeletons to the safety closets and marked them TOP SECRET.

Lt. Gen. Asad Durrani former DG ISI (1990 – 1991), in Pakistan Adrift says:

By a strange coincidence, I was again in Kohat (on my way to Bannu where I was posted), when in March 1969 Yahya Khan imposed martial law. Something didn’t seem quite right, but it gave me my first taste, or illusion, of power over civilians. For the next few months, I was heading a summary military court and taking to task anyone carrying an unlicensed weapon—the Army’s pet procedure to restore law and order in the country. The problem was that in the two districts under my jurisdiction, Bannu and Dera Ismail Khan, this covered almost everyone. Of course, only those who were on the wrong side of the law (or its enforcers) were charged and produced before me. I don’t think it did much good for law or order, but it did help the civil administration to show khaki rule in a bad light. That the Army lets itself be duped every time it assumes political power, I was to learn much later. That, as a cog in the military machine, one was contributing to such a design became a pretty discomforting thought.

He also says:

The Army’s takeover of political power, whatever else it may have done to the country, never did any good to the service … After the putsch of 1999, [Musharraf] had all the country’s resources at his disposal, but since he mainly trusted the military, he planted members of the armed forces in many important civil institutions, and thus undid most of the good work done in the previous years to cleanse the armed forces of the unmilitary traits… When serving generals started falling for prime land offered at bargain prices and their palatial houses were built by government contractors, one knew that the fish was now rotting from its head.

Have we failed as a Nation?

Mohammed Ali Jinnah at Mian Bashir Ahmed’s Lahore residence in March 1940, with the founding fathers of Pakistan. (Photo courtesy: m-a-jinnah.blogspot.com)

I had a theory that the dismal political state of affairs of Pakistan is due primarily to the fact that the people who struggled for and gave their sweat and blood in the making of Pakistan could not and did not participate in her infantile years. After Quaid e Azam and Liaquat Ali Khan we don’t see any person at the helms of affairs who could be credited with any role in the freedom movement. Those who could make to the top were thoroughly disgraced; Khawaja Nazimuddin, Huseyn Shaheed Suharwardy, Feroz Khan Noon, Miss Fatima Jinnah. Without naming names and going into details that who did this or why this happened, as this has been well researched and written about, I would like to elaborate a little about my theory.

Just as when a baby is born if she is nurtured by her mother and father, she grows up to be a healthy child and later a balanced person, a nation, right after its birth, needs to be nurtured and sustained by its founding fathers; if that does not happen the nation fails.

While reading the book ‘Why Nations Fail’, this theory of mine was vindicated. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to know in simple terms, why the rich nations are rich and the poor, poor. I share a chapter from the book which juxtaposes two nations US and Mexico, which got independence almost in the same era, in terms of their constitutions. And then elaborates upon the reasons that made the difference between their prosperity and growth. The title of the chapter is “A Tale of Two Constitutions”.

A TALE OF TWO CONSTITUTIONS

It should now be apparent that it is not a coincidence that the United States, and not Mexico, adopted and enforced a constitution that espoused democratic principles, created limitations on the use of political power, and distributed that power broadly in society. The document that the delegates sat down to write in Philadelphia in May 1787 was the outcome of a long process initiated by the formation of the General Assembly in Jamestown in 1619.

The contrast between the constitutional process that took place at the time of the independence of the United States and the one that took place a little afterward in Mexico is stark. In February 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte’s French armies invaded Spain. By May they had taken Madrid, the Spanish capital. By September the Spanish king Ferdinand had been captured and had abdicated. A national junta, the Junta Central, took his place, taking the torch in the fight against the French. The Junta met first at Aranjuez, but retreated south in the face of the French armies. Finally it reached the port of Cádiz, which, though besieged by Napoleonic forces, held out. Here the Junta formed a parliament, called the Cortes. In 1812 the Cortes produced what became known as the Cádiz Constitution, which called for the introduction of a constitutional monarchy based on notions of popular sovereignty. It also called for the end of special privileges and the introduction of equality before the law. These demands were all anathema to the elites of South America, who were still ruling an institutional environment shaped by the encomienda, forced labor, and absolute power vested in them and the colonial state.

The collapse of the Spanish state with the Napoleonic invasion created a constitutional crisis throughout colonial Latin America. There was much dispute about whether to recognize the authority of the Junta Central, and in response, many Latin Americans began to form their own juntas. It was only a matter of time before they began to sense the possibility of becoming truly independent from Spain. The first declaration of independence took place in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1809, though it was quickly crushed by Spanish troops sent from Peru. In Mexico the political attitudes of the elite had been shaped by the 1810 Hidalgo Revolt, led by a priest, Father Miguel Hidalgo. When Hidalgo’s army sacked Guanajuato on September 23, they killed the intendant, the senior colonial official, and then started indiscriminately to kill white people. It was more like class or even ethnic warfare than an independence movement, and it united all the elites in opposition. If independence allowed popular participation in politics, the local elites, not just Spaniards, were against it. Consequentially, Mexican elites viewed the Cádiz Constitution, which opened the way to popular participation, with extreme skepticism; they would never recognize its legitimacy.

In 1815, as Napoleon’s European empire collapsed, King Ferdinand VII returned to power and the Cádiz Constitution was abrogated. As the Spanish Crown began trying to reclaim its American colonies, it did not face a problem with loyalist Mexico. Yet, in 1820, a Spanish army that had assembled in Cádiz to sail to the Americas to help restore Spanish authority mutinied against Ferdinand VII. They were soon joined by army units throughout the country, and Ferdinand was forced to restore the Cádiz Constitution and recall the Cortes. This Cortes was even more radical than the one that had written the Cádiz Constitution, and it proposed abolishing all forms of labor coercion. It also attacked special privileges—for example, the right of the military to be tried for crimes in their own courts. Faced finally with the imposition of this document in Mexico, the elites there decided that it was better to go it alone and declare independence.

This independence movement was led by Augustín de Iturbide, who had been an officer in the Spanish army. On February 24, 1821, he published the Plan de Iguala, his vision for an independent Mexico. The plan featured a constitutional monarchy with a Mexican emperor, and removed the provisions of the Cádiz Constitution that Mexican elites found so threatening to their status and privileges. It received instantaneous support, and Spain quickly realized that it could not stop the inevitable. But Iturbide did not just organize Mexican secession. Recognizing the power vacuum, he quickly took advantage of his military backing to have himself declared emperor, a position that the great leader of South American independence Simón Bolivar described as “by the grace of God and of bayonets.” Iturbide was not constrained by the same political institutions that constrained presidents of the United States; he quickly made himself a dictator, and by October 1822 he had dismissed the constitutionally sanctioned congress and replaced it with a junta of his choosing. Though Iturbide did not last long, this pattern of events was to be repeated time and time again in nineteenth-century Mexico.

The Constitution of the United States did not create a democracy by modern standards. Who could vote in elections was left up to the individual states to determine. While northern states quickly conceded the vote to all white men irrespective of how much income they earned or property they owned, southern states did so only gradually. No state enfranchised women or slaves, and as property and wealth restrictions were lifted on white men, racial franchises explicitly disenfranchising black men were introduced. Slavery, of course, was deemed constitutional when the Constitution of the United States was written in Philadelphia, and the most sordid negotiation concerned the division of the seats in the House of Representatives among the states. These were to be allocated on the basis of a state’s population, but the congressional representatives of southern states then demanded that the slaves be counted. Northerners objected. The compromise was that in apportioning seats to the House of Representatives, a slave would count as three-fifths of a free person. The conflicts between the North and South of the United States were repressed during the constitutional process as the three-fifths rule and other compromises were worked out. New fixes were added over time—for example, the Missouri Compromise, an arrangement where one proslavery and one antislavery state were always added to the union together, to keep the balance in the Senate between those for and those against slavery. These fudges kept the political institutions of the United States working peacefully until the Civil War finally resolved the conflicts in favor of the North.

The Civil War was bloody and destructive. But both before and after it there were ample economic opportunities for a large fraction of the population, especially in the northern and western United States. The situation in Mexico was very different. If the United States experienced five years of political instability between 1860 and 1865, Mexico experienced almost nonstop instability for the first fifty years of independence. This is best illustrated via the career of Antonio López de Santa Ana.

Santa Ana, son of a colonial official in Veracruz, came to prominence as a soldier fighting for the Spanish in the independence wars. In 1821 he switched sides with Iturbide and never looked back. He became president of Mexico for the first time in May of 1833, though he exercised power for less than a month, preferring to let Valentín Gómez Farías act as president. Gómez Farías’s presidency lasted fifteen days, after which Santa Ana retook power. This was as brief as his first spell, however, and he was again replaced by Gómez Farías, in early July. Santa Ana and Gómez Farías continued this dance until the middle of 1835, when Santa Ana was replaced by Miguel Barragán. But Santa Ana was not a quitter. He was back as president in 1839, 1841, 1844, 1847, and, finally, between 1853 and 1855. In all, he was president eleven times, during which he presided over the loss of the Alamo and Texas and the disastrous Mexican-American War, which led to the loss of what became New Mexico and Arizona. Between 1824 and 1867 there were fifty-two presidents in Mexico, few of whom assumed power according to any constitutionally sanctioned procedure.

The consequence of this unprecedented political instability for economic institutions and incentives should be obvious. Such instability led to highly insecure property rights. It also led to a severe weakening of the Mexican state, which now had little authority and little ability to raise taxes or provide public services. Indeed, even though Santa Ana was president in Mexico, large parts of the country were not under his control, which enabled the annexation of Texas by the United States. In addition, as we just saw, the motivation behind the Mexican declaration of independence was to protect the set of economic institutions developed during the colonial period, which had made Mexico, in the words of the great German explorer and geographer of Latin America Alexander von Humbolt, “the country of inequality.” These institutions, by basing the society on the exploitation of indigenous people and the creation of monopolies, blocked the economic incentives and initiatives of the great mass of the population. As the United States began to experience the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century, Mexico got poorer.

ABANDONING INDIA

(This is a transcript of a speech delivered by Winston Churchill on 18 March 1931 at Royal Albert Hall, London. In this speech he is talking about the inherent communal and at times ferocious divide between Hindus and Muslims of India. One is at a loss when he sees that this chasm was obvious to even the Englishmen but the Muslims of Congress and her allies were oblivious of this fact. A video of Winston Churchill around the same era shows the same concerns of Hindu Muslim communal tensions.)

Churchill, who had had many years experience of India as a soldier, was firmly convinced that the effective removal of British power would lead, not only to the demise of the British Empire, but to large scale inter-communal violence and bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims. Tragically, he was to be proved right in this. Nonetheless, by his stand he alienated a large element of the Conservative Party, at a time when, shortly, he would need every friend and political ally he could muster.

To abandon India to the rule of the Brahmins would be an act of cruel and wicked negligence. It would shame for ever those who bore its guilt. These Brahmins who mouth and patter the principles of Western Liberalism, and pose as philosophic and democratic politicians, are the same Brahmins who deny the primary rights of existence to nearly sixty millions of their own fellow-countrymen whom they call ‘untouchable’, and whom they have by thousands of years of oppression actually taught to accept this sad position. They will not eat with these sixty millions, nor drink with them, nor treat them as human beings. They consider themselves contaminated even by their approach. And then in a moment they turn round and begin chopping logic with John Stuart Mill, or pleading the rights of man with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

While any community, social or religious, endorses such practices and asserts itself resolved to keep sixty millions of fellow-countrymen perpetually and eternally in a state of sub-human bondage, we cannot recognise their claim to the title-deeds of democracy. Still less can we hand over to their unfettered sway those helpless millions they despise. Side by side with this Brahmin theocracy and the immense Hindu population – angelic and untouchable castes alike -there dwell in India seventy millions of Muslims, a race of far greater physical vigour and fierceness, armed with a religion which lends itself only too readily to war and conquest. While the Hindu elaborates his argument, the Muslim sharpens his sword. Between these two races and creeds, containing as they do so many gifted and charming beings in all the glory of youth, there is no intermarriage.

The gulf is impassable. If you took the antagonisms of France and Germany, and the antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants, and compounded them and multiplied them ten-fold, you would not equal the division which separates these two races intermingled by scores of millions in the cities and plains of India. But over both of them the impartial rule of Britain has hitherto lifted its appeasing sceptre. Until the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms began to raise the question of local sovereignty and domination, they had got used to dwelling side by side in comparative toleration. But step by step, as it is believed we are going to clear out or be thrust out of India, so this tremendous rivalry and hatred of races springs into life again. It is becoming more acute every day. Where we to wash our hands of all responsibility and divest ourselves of all our powers, as our sentimentalists desire, ferocious civil wars would speedily break out between the Muslims and the Hindus. No one who knows India will dispute this.[i]

[i] Winston S Churchill – Never Give In – The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches, Pimlico, 2004, pp 97-99

The Imran Khan Revolution

Lets compare Imran Khan’s ‘Revolution’ with the standard revolutions.
1. Tyrant
a.Gen Batista for Castro (Cuban Revolution)
b.Zahir Shah for Khomeini (Iranian Revolution)
c.Tzar Nicholas for Lenin (Russian Revolution)
d.King Louis XVI for Robespierre (French Revolution)
e.Gen Franco for the Anarchists (Spanish Revolution)
f. Nawaz Sharif for IK

2. Purpose
All purported to rid the masses of the tyrannical rule of the tyrants.

3. Method
a. Guerrilla Warfare
b. massive & bloody agitation
c. Do
d. Do
e. Geurrilla Warfare
f. Begging NS to step down

As Mao Zedong puts it very aptly, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” [1], no tyrant would ever give away his power to the powerless without use of power against him. By begging NS to step down, is IK trying to bring a revolution or trying to disillusion the true revolutionaries from the very word of Revolution. This kind of botched attempts to overthrow the tyrant arouse revulsions in the intelligentsia of a society – which provide the steam for any revolution – towards any subsequent adventurer who steps forward as the harbinger of change. I don’t want to sound arrogant but the fact is that the intelligentsia of our society is not supporting IK.

It might be argued that the necessary power to dethrone the tyrant would have been offered by the proverbial Third Umpire but that also seems to be out of question by now, but even if that was the power, it would have been very detrimental to the cause of revolution, since it would amount only to the change of tyrants.

Another big factor is the team that would take over the affairs of country after the revolution, and the team that IK has mustered is the same that had been in the Governments for the past thirty or so years. So without judging their current intentions there is a substantial likelihood of their maleficence.

I, for one, want revolution, but a revolution sans intelligence is not my definition of change.

——————

[1] Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party. Yet, having guns, we can create Party organizations, as witness the powerful Party organizations which the Eighth Route Army has created in northern China. We can also create cadres, create schools, create culture, create mass movements. Everything in Yenan has been created by having guns. All things grow out of the barrel of a gun. According to the Marxist theory of the state, the army is the chief component of state power. Whoever wants to seize and retain state power must have a strong army. Some people ridicule us as advocates of the “omnipotence of war”. Yes, we are advocates of the omnipotence of revolutionary war; that is good, not bad, it is Marxist. The guns of the Russian Communist Party created socialism. We shall create a democratic republic. Experience in the class struggle in the era of imperialism teaches us that it is only by the power of the gun that the working class and the labouring masses can defeat the armed bourgeoisie and landlords; in this sense we may say that only with guns can the whole world be transformed. We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun.

— Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II, pp. 224-225

Two Nation Theory – Allahabad Address

Allah Ta’aala has blessed us with countless blessings one of which is Pakistan. No matter what the present liberals propagandize about being the reason of Pakistan’s creation, it is – against all their wishes – the Two Nations Theory. That is, the Indian Subcontinent is inhabited by two distinct major nations, namely Muslims and Hindus, who are by any definition of the word different. And this had been amply proven by the immediate aftermath of the partition in 1947. Even in the recent history several events of communal violence against the Indian Muslims bear testimony to this glaring fact.
But in order to downplay the Two Nation Theory on the behest of Neo-Imperial powers, the liberal media and intellectuals are hell bent upon rewriting the subcontinent’s history. They want to promote secular motives behind the creation of Pakistan, while citing cherry picked passages from Quaid e Azam’s speeches and writings and conveniently omitting the plethora of passages referring to the creation of Pakistan on Islamic principles.
To counter these efforts and to know the ideological basis for the creation of Pakistan we need to study the original sources i.e. articles and speeches of the founders of Pakistan. It is in this vein that I will try to present several excerpts from the famous Allahabad Address by Allama Muhammad Iqbal which would shed some light on the need and foundation of Pakistan.
Allama Iqbal in his Presidential Address at the Annual Session of the All-India Muslim League, on 29th December 1930 at the start said,

“I have given the best part of my life to a careful study of Islam, its law and polity, its culture, its history and its literature. This constant contact with the spirit of Islam, as it unfolds itself in time, has, I think, given me a kind of insight into its significance as a world fact. It is in the light of this insight, whatever its value, that, while assuming that the Muslims of India are determined to remain true to the spirit of Islam, I propose not to guide you in your decisions, but to attempt the humbler task of bringing clearly to your consciousness the main principle which, in my opinion, should determine the general character of these decisions”

The he talks about Muslims in India to be a nation driven primarily by the Islamic injunctions, he said,

“It cannot be denied that Islam, regarded as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity – by which expression I mean a social structure regulated by a legal system and animated by a specific ethical ideal – has been the chief formative factor in the life-history of the Muslims of India. It has furnished those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups, and finally transform them into a well-defined people, possessing a moral consciousness of their own. Indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that India is perhaps the only country in the world where Islam, as a people-building force, has worked at its best. In India, as elsewhere, the structure of Islam as a society is almost entirely due to the working of Islam as a culture inspired by a specific ethical ideal. What I mean to say is that Muslim society, with its remarkable homogeneity and inner unity, has grown to be what it is, under the pressure of the laws and institutions associated with the culture of Islam.”

After this he goes on to explain why the Western model of separation of religion from politics cannot work with Islam, he said,

“The conclusion to which Europe is consequently driven is that religion is a private affair of the individual and has nothing to do with what is called man’s temporal life. Islam does not bifurcate the unity of man into an irreconcilable duality of spirit and matter. In Islam God and the universe, spirit and matter, Church and State, are organic to each other. Man is not the citizen of a profane world to be renounced in the interest of a world of spirit situated elsewhere. To Islam, matter is spirit realising itself in space and time. Europe uncritically accepted the duality of spirit and matter, probably from Manichaean thought. Her best thinkers are realising this initial mistake today, but her statesmen are indirectly forcing the world to accept it as an unquestionable dogma. It is, then, this mistaken separation of spiritual and temporal which has largely influenced European religious and political thought and has resulted practically in the total exclusion of Christianity from the life of European States. The result is a set of mutually ill-adjusted States dominated by interests not human but national. And these mutually ill-adjusted States, after trampling over the moral and religious convictions of Christianity, are today feeling the need of a federated Europe, i.e. the need of a unity which the Christian church organisation originally gave them, but which, instead of reconstructing it in the light of Christ’s vision of human brotherhood, they considered fit to destroy under the inspiration of Luther. A Luther in the world of Islam, however, is an impossible phenomenon; for here there is no church organisation similar to that of Christianity in the Middle Ages, inviting a destroyer. In the world of Islam we have a universal polity whose fundamentals are believed to have been revealed but whose structure, owing to our legists’ [=legal theorists’] want of contact with the modern world, today stands in need of renewed power by fresh adjustments.”

Then after indicating that Nationalism on the basis of race or territory counteracts Islam, he explains the gravity of exploring the future of Indian Muslims as a nation, he says,

“I hope you will pardon me for this apparently academic discussion. To address this session of the All-India Muslim League you have selected a man who is [=has] not despaired of Islam as a living force for freeing the outlook of man from its geographical limitations, who believes that religion is a power of the utmost importance in the life of individuals as well as States, and finally who believes that Islam is itself Destiny and will not suffer a destiny. Such a man cannot but look at matters from his own point of view. Do not think that the problem I am indicating is a purely theoretical one. It is a very living and practical problem calculated to affect the very fabric of Islam as a system of life and conduct. On a proper solution of it alone depends your future as a distinct cultural unit in India. Never in our history has Islam had to stand a greater trial than the one which confronts it today. It is open to a people to modify, reinterpret or reject the foundational principles of their social structure; but it is absolutely necessary for them to see clearly what they are doing before they undertake to try a fresh experiment. Nor should the way in which I am approaching this important problem lead anybody to think that I intend to quarrel with those who happen to think differently. You are a Muslim assembly and, I suppose, anxious to remain true to the spirit and ideals of Islam. My sole desire, therefore, is to tell you frankly what I honestly believe to be the truth about the present situation. In this way alone it is possible for me to illuminate, according to my light, the avenues of your political action.”

Then he comes to the real question of separating politics from Islam and explains why it is impossible to separate the two, he says,

“What, then, is the problem and its implications? Is religion a private affair? Would you like to see Islam as a moral and political ideal, meeting the same fate in the world of Islam as Christianity has already met in Europe? Is it possible to retain Islam as an ethical ideal and to reject it as a polity, in favor of national polities in which [the] religious attitude is not permitted to play any part? This question becomes of special importance in India, where the Muslims happen to be a minority. The proposition that religion is a private individual experience is not surprising on the lips of a European. In Europe the conception of Christianity as a monastic order, renouncing the world of matter and fixing its gaze entirely on the world of spirit, led, by a logical process of thought, to the view embodied in this proposition. The nature of the Prophet’s religious experience, as disclosed in the Quran, however, is wholly different. It is not mere experience in the sense of a purely biological event, happening inside the experient and necessitating no reactions on its social environment. It is individual experience creative of a social order. Its immediate outcome is the fundamentals of a polity with implicit legal concepts whose civic significance cannot be belittled merely because their origin is revelational. The religious ideal of Islam, therefore, is organically related to the social order which it has created. The rejection of the one will eventually involve the rejection of the other. Therefore the construction of a polity on national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim. This is a matter which at the present moment directly concerns the Muslims of India”

Then he reflects upon the possibility of Nation based on territorial demarcations, and analyses the effects of such a formation based upon historical evidence, he says,

“’Man,’ says Renan, ‘is enslaved neither by his race, nor by his religion, nor by the course of rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great aggregation of men, sane of mind and warm of heart, creates a moral consciousness which is called a nation.’ Such a formation is quite possible, though it involves the long and arduous process of practically remaking men and furnishing them with a fresh emotional equipment. It might have been a fact in India if the teaching of Kabir and the Divine Faith of Akbar had seized the imagination of the masses of this country. Experience, however, shows that the various caste units and religious units in India have shown no inclination to sink their respective individualities in a larger whole. Each group is intensely jealous of its collective existence. The formation of the kind of moral consciousness which constitutes the essence of a nation in Renan’s sense demands a price which the peoples of India are not prepared to pay. The unity of an Indian nation, therefore, must be sought not in the negation, but in the mutual harmony and cooperation, of the many. True statesmanship cannot ignore facts, however unpleasant they may be. The only practical course is not to assume the existence of a state of things which does not exist, but to recognise facts as they are, and to exploit them to our greatest advantage. And it is on the discovery of Indian unity in this direction that the fate of India as well as of Asia really depends. India is Asia in miniature. Part of her people have cultural affinities with nations of the east, and part with nations in the middle and west of Asia. If an effective principle of cooperation is discovered in India, it will bring peace and mutual goodwill to this ancient land which has suffered so long, more because of her situation in historic space than because of any inherent incapacity of her people. And it will at the same time solve the entire political problem of Asia.”

After pointing out the reasons of failure in achieving this internal harmony, he shows hope that it can be attained if the principle of free development and mutual regard for every community is adopted, he says,

“[A]s far as I have been able to read the Muslim mind, I have no hesitation in declaring that if the principle that the Indian Muslim is entitled to full and free development on the lines of his own culture and tradition in his own Indian home-lands is recognized as the basis of a permanent communal settlement, he will be ready to stake his all for the freedom of India. The principle that each group is entitled to its free development on its own lines is not inspired by any feeling of narrow communalism. There are communalisms and communalisms. A community which is inspired by feelings of ill-will towards other communities is low and ignoble. I entertain the highest respect for the customs, laws, religious and social institutions of other communities. Nay, it is my duty, according to the teaching of the Quran, even to defend their places of worship, if need be. Yet I love the communal group which is the source of my life and behaviour; and which has formed me what I am by giving me its religion, its literature, its thought, its culture, and thereby recreating its whole past as a living operative factor, in my present consciousness.”

To support his argument he states that for this very reason, even the authors of Nehru report recognize the value of this higher aspect of communalism. He says,

“While discussing the separation of Sind they say, ‘To say from the larger viewpoint of nationalism that no communal provinces should be created, is, in a way, equivalent to saying from the still wider international viewpoint that there should be no separate nations. Both these statements have a measure of truth in them. But the staunchest internationalist recognises that without the fullest national autonomy it is extraordinarily difficult to create the international State. So also without the fullest cultural autonomy – and communalism in its better aspect is culture – it will be difficult to create a harmonious nation.’”

After this he answers the communal question for Muslims of India, he says,

“Communalism in its higher aspect, then, is indispensable to the formation of a harmonious whole in a country like India. The units of Indian society are not territorial as in European countries. India is a continent of human groups belonging to different races, speaking different languages, and professing different religions. Their behaviour is not at all determined by a common race-consciousness. Even the Hindus do not form a homogeneous group. The principle of European democracy cannot be applied to India without recognising the fact of communal groups. The Muslim demand for the creation of a Muslim India within India is, therefore, perfectly justified. The resolution of the All-Parties Muslim Conference at Delhi is, to my mind, wholly inspired by this noble ideal of a harmonious whole which, instead of stifling the respective individualities of its component wholes, affords them chances of fully working out the possibilities that may be latent in them. And I have no doubt that this House will emphatically endorse the Muslim demands embodied in this resolution. Personally, I would go farther than the demands embodied in it. I would like to see the Punjab, North-West Frontier Province, Sind and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single State. Self-government within the British Empire, or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim State appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.”

These last few words are all we get to read about in our Pakistan Studies curriculum, even up to the Bachelors level. So, then, what would we know about the ideology of Pakistan, and due to this ignorance every detractor for Two Nation Theory get his or her way without resistance.
After this Allam Iqbal reiterates the reason for Indian Muslims’ demands, he says,

“[T]hat the Muslim demand is not actuated by the kind of motive he imputes to us; it is actuated by a genuine desire for free development which is practically impossible under the type of unitary government contemplated by the nationalist Hindu politicians with a view to secure permanent communal dominance in the whole of India.”

This brings us to almost the middle of Allama’s address; after this he goes on to explain the practical aspects of implementation of this idea, which is also worth reading. But to explicate the idea of Two Nation Theory according to Allama Iqbal, I would confine myself to the first half of the speech. To read the full transcript of Allama’s address, visit this webpage.