Magnificent Delusions (3 page)

T
HE EMERGENCE OF
Pakistan as an independent state in 1947 was the culmination of decades of debate and divisions among Muslims in British India regarding their collective future. After British rule was consolidated in the nineteenth century, Muslims found themselves deprived of the privileged status they had enjoyed under the Muslim Mughal empire that had dominated South Asia since 1526. Some of the Muslim leaders embraced territorial nationalism and did not define their collective personality through religion. As opposition to British rule grew, these leaders called for the Muslim population to participate fully in the Indian nationalist movement led by the Indian National Congress of Gandhi and Jawaharlal
Nehru. But others felt that Muslims had a special identity that ethnic and territorial nationalism, centered primarily on the Hindu majority in India, would erase over time.

Coalescing in the All-India Muslim League and led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, these
Muslim nationalists
(as opposed to
Indian nationalists
in the secular Indian National Congress led by Gandhi and Nehru) asserted that India's Muslims constituted a separate nation from non-Muslim Indians and, because of this, demanded the creation of a separate country in areas with a Muslim majority.

British India's Muslim-majority provinces lay in its northwest and northeast, leading to Pakistan comprising two wings that were separated by India until December 1971, when the eastern wing became the new state of Bangladesh.

Pakistan's creation represented the general acceptance of the two-nation theory—that Muslims and Hindus constituted two distinct nations in view of their unique experience in India—a theory that had been periodically articulated long before the formal demand for a Pakistan state in 1940 but had never been fully explained in terms of how it could be applied. Although the creation of Pakistan was intended to save South Asia's Muslims from being a permanent minority within India, it never became the homeland of all of South Asia's Muslims.

One-third of the Indian subcontinent's Muslims remained behind as a minority in Hindu-dominated India even after the 1947 partition. The other two-thirds now live in two separate countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh, confirming the doubts that some expressed before independence about the practicality of applying the two-nation theory. In return for gaining one country of their own, the Muslim “nation” was effectively divided into three separate states.

Until the end of the Second World War, the Indian struggle for independence had received little attention in the United States; instead American interest had focused on the countries flanking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Although India had been crucial to Britain's war effort, it was less significant for American policy. Nonetheless, the United States set up a diplomatic presence in Delhi in 1941,
and a Special Representative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived in 1942.

These American officials sympathized with the demand for Indian independence, leading to strong disagreement with British colonial officials. But US sympathy with the anticolonial sentiment in the subcontinent did not translate into sympathy for Muslim separatism, which most Americans dealing with India found impractical.

According to Special Representative William Phillips, President Roosevelt thought that the idea of partitioning India “sounded terrible” when the British chargé d'affaires, Sir Ronald Campbell, first mentioned it to him. “It reminded the President of the experience of the American civil war,” Phillips recalled. Although Phillips found Jinnah to be “brilliant” and was “personally attracted to him,” he could not agree with the leader's views. “The more I studied Mr. Jinnah's Pakistan,” he concluded, “the less it appealed to me as the answer to India's communal problem, since to break India into two separate nations would weaken both and might open Pakistan, at least, to the designs of ambitious neighbors.”
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From the American perspective, the notion of a significant minority seeking separation rather than safeguards for itself opened doors for perennial conflict. Postcolonial nations all over the world would fragment as a result of similar separatist demands.

The relatively sparse commentary in the US media reinforced the officials' views. Tom Treanor, reporting for the
Los Angeles Times
in March 1943, wrote, “Every instinct will persuade you that there shouldn't be a Pakistan, which means the secession of the Mohammedan portion of India from the Hindu portion.” In his view “Only an old-school Southerner who thinks Appomattox was a shocking bad show could go for Pakistan.” Treanor described Jinnah as “the greatest secessionist since 1865” and suggested that “Jinnah is just an old die-hard South Carolinian at heart who believes Jeff Davis ought to have been President.”
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For supporters of the Pakistan movement, such comments reflected America's lack of empathy and further fueled the sense of insecurity and isolation that had drawn many of them to demand
Pakistan's creation in the first place. From their point of view Jinnah was a combination of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. He had created a country, not divided a nation. To this day Americans tend to know and admire Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, seen as an apostle of peace, far more than they recognize Jinnah.

This contrasts significantly with the Pakistani characterization of Jinnah as “a man of ideals and integrity”
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with “extraordinary qualities of vision.”
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University of California historian Stanley Wolpert would later observe that “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history,” and “Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”
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For Pakistanis, this comment would supersede the opinions of Americans who disparaged Jinnah during his life.

Almost four decades after Pakistan's birth Wolpert pointed out that Jinnah “virtually conjured that country into statehood by the force of his indomitable will.” Wolpert recognized Jinnah's “primacy in Pakistan's history,” saying that it “looms like a lofty minaret over the achievements of all his contemporaries in the Muslim League.” But during the 1940s there was little American sympathy for “conjuring” a new Asian country based on religion.

After the end of World War II Jinnah made a major effort to explain the idea of creating a Muslim state to American officials and to win them over to his argument. Consul general in India, John J. Macdonald, sent a detailed telegram to Secretary of State George C. Marshall after meeting Jinnah on March 5, 1947, at his residence in Bombay. According to Macdonald, Jinnah said he was “anxious to hear” about the American reaction to the British proposal to transfer power to “responsible Indian hands not later than June 1948.”

Jinnah reportedly said that “he could understand the American public's surprise as well as impatience with India for not finding a solution to its political problems following Britain's offer of Independence.” However, Jinnah felt that “news regarding Indian problems in the American press is influenced by false propaganda.” The consul general noted that Jinnah blamed the “highly efficient propaganda
organization” of the Indian Congress Party for turning Americans against Pakistan—a suggestion the US official tried to repudiate.

More significantly, Jinnah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League, shared with Macdonald his disappointment and frustration with the lack of international support for the Indian Muslims' demand for a separate homeland. He spoke of a reception for him in Cairo upon his return from London earlier in the year, where “a group of prominent Egyptians” told him that, their warmth for a brother Muslim notwithstanding, they “found his policy annoying.” The Egyptians accused Jinnah of being “in league with the British instead of working for Indian independence,” a charge that he vehemently rebuffed. The Indian Muslims' Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader) was offended that fellow Muslims outside the subcontinent failed to support his lofty cause.

“He told the accusing group that if the Indian National Congress really wanted to test his sincerity regarding his desire for Indian independence, they should agree to Pakistan,” Macdonald reported. After this agreement Jinnah “would immediately accept the responsibility placed upon him for taking the necessary steps to establish a constitutional government.” The cable quoted Jinnah as saying, “I would be the first to go down to the Gateway of India to wave farewell to the British.” It went on to describe Jinnah's principal argument for dividing the subcontinent.

As narrated by Consul General Macdonald: “The Muslims, according to Mr. Jinnah, cannot accept the idea of united India because in doing so they would merely be substituting a Hindu Raj for the British Raj.” Jinnah described suggestions of a compromise as “foolish,” saying there was no basis for it. In his view the “difference in culture, religion and way of life between the Muslims and Hindus precludes any possibility of a compromise.”

Jinnah asked why “a hundred million Muslims should become a minority in a Hindu dominated Government” and argued that “safeguards for a minority in a united India were worthless because in the event of an appeal by the minority the accused would sit as the judges of the accusers. The only recourse left to the Muslims in such an eventuality would be an appeal to the United Nations.”
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Jinnah's discussion with the US consul general revealed the difficulty he faced when attempting to persuade people outside the subcontinent, including Muslims, of Pakistan's raison d'être. Although Jinnah and most of his colleagues were not known for religious observance, they were espousing a vague Islamo-nationalism that others saw as an ideology that could easily become the basis for more pietistic demands. And as feared, once Pakistan was finally created, the insecurities about Muslim identity in the modern era that led to its creation were absorbed into the identity of the new state, and the bombast about Hindu imperialism and threats to Islam carried on into India-Pakistan relations and how Pakistanis view international affairs.

After all, Pakistan was not just to be a country; it had become a cause. But the outward secular and westernized orientation of the Pakistani elite confused westerners. They assumed that Pakistan's leaders shared Western values and were simply trying to win the hearts of their followers by appealing to religious sentiments. As such, American and British policy makers did not see saying one thing to a domestic and another to a foreign audience as a problem. But this habit had serious consequences, including religious violence in the run-up to Pakistan's independence and the large-scale expulsion of non-Muslims from the Pakistan region.

Once the country had emerged, it encountered difficulty when attempting to reconcile its professed tenets with the demands of pragmatic political and economic considerations. As a result, throughout the country's history Pakistanis have been divided between those who want a greater role for religion in the nation's collective life and those who do not. On the one hand, Islam is described as the uniting factor for Pakistan's disparate ethnicities; on the other, it is also the basis for polarization and sectarian divisions.

Pakistan's independence movement was relatively short. It began with the All-India Muslim League's demand for separate Muslim states in 1940 and ended with the announcement of the partition plan in June 1947. The original demand was for multiple independent states of Muslim-majority provinces of India. The idea of a single Pakistani state evolved later.

Although Pakistan was to be created in the areas where Muslims were a majority (referred to as Muslim-majority provinces), its strongest support and most of its national leadership came from regions where the Muslims were a minority (Muslim-minority provinces). Muslims from the minority provinces were better educated and had greater representation in the British Indian civil services and the military's officer corps than did their coreligionists in the majority provinces. Recognizing this, the original demand for Pakistan did not envisage any mass transfer of populations. After all, one-third of India's Muslims were to remain behind in India after the partition, and privileged Muslims who were not from territories belonging to the new state were to govern Pakistan.

Initially, the call for Pakistan resonated with Muslims in the minority provinces, whereas the landed Muslim gentry of the majority provinces supported provincial parties. Although the Muslim League belatedly won over local notables in the provinces that were to constitute Pakistan, it could not build consensus among its leaders over the new country's future direction. In February 1947, a few months before independence, Khwaja Nazimuddin, who later became Pakistan's second governor-general as well as its second prime minister, candidly told a British governor that “he did not know what Pakistan means and that nobody in the Muslim League knew.”
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This echoed Nazimuddin's discussion with the governor of Bengal, Richard Casey, in September 1945. Casey recorded in his diary that he asked Nazimuddin many questions about Pakistan. “Very little has been discussed or worked out by them,” the Englishman lamented, referring to the Muslim League leaders. In another meeting with Nazimuddin, Casey shared his view that the Muslim League had “had only the most cursory examination and thought given to” the consequences of India's division. “I believed that they relied too implicitly on their leader, Mr. Jinnah—and that, apart from whatever thought he may have given to the subject, I did not believe that any other Muslim had really applied himself to the study of the many problems involved,” he wrote.
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