Prospect and Retrospect

“A strong and resurgent India is celebrating its 58th Republic Day on 26 January 2007. This year’s parade will highlight the nation’s achievements in various fields, the military prowess, scintillating display of air power as also our rich and diverse cultural heritage”, says the Government Of India Press Information Bureau website. An article quotes Goldman Sachs Global Research saying “We project India's potential or sustainable growth rate at about 8% until 2020. The implication is that India's contribution to world growth will be even greater (and faster) than implied in our previous BRICs research”. The article goes on to state that India would be second only to China in world economics.

The Indian independence from British rule unfortunately will always bring up the sad memories of partition. There has been much introspection of late into the logic of partition. The romantics of India believe that had the politicians showed some restraint, India and Pakistan would have been united today. However the historical facts indicate towards a different truth, as has been indicated by this excellent article by Sadna Gupta:

“Constitutional/political parity between Hindus and Muslims, or between Hindustan and Pakistan as Jinnah demanded as the price for a united India was an unsustainable option. Even had every last four-anna Congress member signed off on it, such parity would not have been digestible by the general public and would have led to political chaos. As the forced basis for collective decision-making, it would have led to failure to write a constitution for India.

Eventual civil war could also have ensued since the British Indian Army was heavily weighted with the North Western region's minority which was seeking to rein in the political rights of the majority (similar to what happened in East Pakistan in 1971).”

Strangely, the same Jinnah who was so instrumental in creation of Pakistan was known as the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. His views appeared to have changed considerably by 1940, when in his presidential address to the Muslim League at the Lahore Session - where the famous Pakistan Resolution was passed – he said:

It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religious in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality ... The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and literatures. They neither intermarry nor interdine together and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions.

This definitely indicates that Jinnah viewed partition and the creation of a sovereign Muslim state as absolutely necessary. However, on August 11th 1947, in his inaugural address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly - one of his most important and carefully prepared speeches - this is what Jinnah had to say:

“Everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs ... is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations. ... In course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community, will vanish. ... You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. ... We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. ... in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.”

Although it is difficult to fathom how these two diametrically opposed visions of Pakistan could have been articulated by the same person, it appears from the second quote that Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be just like India, with religion as a private issue, no business of the state. But if Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be just like India, then what was the purpose of the Pakistan movement, what was the need to create a new state at such great cost?
In recent years revisionist historians - the most prominent being Ayesha Jalal - have come up with a thesis that goes a long way in explaining Jinnah's actions. According to this thesis, Jinnah never really wanted Pakistan, i.e., a separate sovereign state for Muslims. This was a bargaining counter for Jinnah, against his predominant Hindu representatives of Congress. Jinnah always thought of ‘Pakistan’ as a demand, never as an independent sovereign state, and had evidently not though it through. No wonder then that when the state of Pakistan was actually established in 1947, Jinnah had no idea what this new state was to be all about, and had nothing resembling a long-term vision for it. As Salman Rushdie put it in his novel Shame “Pakistan may be described as a failure of the dreaming mind... Perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined.” The political events unfolding should be analyzed with the clear minds of this generation, sans the bitterness of the generation that had to live through the nightmares of partition. The two-nation theory stated“Muslims and Hindus were two separate nations by every definition, and therefore Muslims should have a separate homeland in the Muslim majority areas of British India, to enable them to live according to the teachings of Islam. The theory was rejected by many in India as many Indians, including Muslims, demanded a secular state which possessed diversity.”
However this theory was proved wrong when Bangladesh was separated from the fellow Muslim country of Pakistan. Pakistan was reduced to believing “Pakistan ka Matlab Kiya? La Illaha Illal Lah” [What does Pakistan mean? No God but One]. To quote from this excellent article from Chapati Mystery

“The ideology of Pakistan, in Zia ul Haq’s Pakistan, was Islam. The narrative history of this ideology was in every history and social studies textbook post-1977 and part of every politician and leader’s arsenal.
This officially sanctioned ideology of Pakistan is historically, teleologically, and dare I say, divinely determined. There are no divergent paths, or counter-memories in this narrative. In this particular past, selections from the history of Muslim League exist merely to fulfill the prophecy of Pakistan.”

India thankfully appears to have bypassed the option of being turned into a Hindu Pakistan, and on the eve of 58^th Republic day can hope to continue learning from others mistakes, as she might not have the time to commit all of them herself.