Magnificent Delusions (4 page)

Sir Bertrand Glancy, the governor of Punjab, the other major province designated to be part of Pakistan, shared similar anxieties
about Jinnah's scheme. Glancy revealed his concerns about the logic of the demand for Pakistan in a secret letter to the viceroy, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, written in August 1946, ahead of elections that would choose India's future leaders. “I must confess that I am gravely perturbed about the situation, because there is a very serious danger of the elections being fought, so far as Muslims are concerned, on an entirely false issue,” he wrote.

“Crude Pakistan may be quite illogical, undefinable and ruinous to India and in particular to Muslims,” Glancy went on, “but this does not detract from its potency as a political slogan. The uninformed Muslim will be told that the question he is called on to answer at the polls is—Are you a true believer or an infidel and a traitor?” Glancy presciently warned that the Muslims would be swayed by “the false and fanatical scream that Islam is in danger” and that “if Pakistan becomes an imminent reality, we shall be heading straight for bloodshed on a wide scale.”
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But the lukewarm British efforts at reconciling the Congress and the Muslim League between the end of the war in 1945 and until 1947 proved ineffective. The Congress leadership failed to guarantee safeguards acceptable to a majority of the Muslim elite. Even if the demand for Pakistan was initially a negotiating stratagem to ensure protections for the Muslim minority in a post-British India, the idea of it had moved millions of Indian Muslims into expecting a separate country. While devoting their energies to pleading for it, Muslim leaders had made no preparations for running that separate state.

Franchise in the 1946 election was limited by several qualifications, such as college education, service in the British government, and property ownership. Thus, only the most elite 15 percent of the population had the right to vote. As a result, the Muslim League swept the Muslim electorate on the basis of the demand for Pakistan, leaving little option for the British but to accede to partition. Issues such as the new nation's constitutional scheme, the status of various ethnolinguistic groups within Pakistan, and the role of religion and theologians in matters of state were barely discussed during the election campaign. No one knew how revenue would be raised, and there was no mention of the future state's foreign policy.

One possible explanation for the ambiguity is that the demand for Pakistan was an instrument with which to bargain for greater political leverage for India's Muslim minority.
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By leaving future plans unspecified, some argue, Jinnah was trying to mobilize the broadest possible support for his position, which was open to change depending on the circumstances.

Nevertheless, following independence Pakistan has developed a clear national ideology and narrative that today is explicitly outlined at all levels of schooling. But during the years leading up to its creation Pakistan meant different things to different people. For some the country was to be a Muslim-majority state where greater economic opportunities would open up for Muslims without competition from non-Muslims; others envisioned a utopia resembling the Muslim empires that dominated the Middle East from the seventh to the twelfth centuries.

Those who looked upon Jinnah as their great leader found a coherence in his exhortations that others dismissed as just clever arguments. Tom Treanor, for example, wondered how Pakistan would help protect the 25 million Muslims who would be left behind in India after Pakistan was created. Jinnah argued, “Because 25 million of my people must suffer should I sacrifice the other 75 million. Should I?”

Jinnah and his lieutenants offered little beyond sharply crafted statements and speeches to explain the idea of Pakistan. “Pakistan is not the product of the conduct or misconduct of the Hindus,” Jinnah explained. “It had always been there, only they were not conscious of it. Hindus and Muslims, though living in the same towns and villages, had never blended into one nation; they were always two separate entities.”
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To this day Pakistani schoolchildren are taught that the roots of Pakistan go back to the arrival of the first Muslim conqueror in the subcontinent in 712 AD.

“We are a nation,” Jinnah argued, “with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions, in short, we have our own distinctive outlook
on life and of life. By all canons of International Law we are a nation.”
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But the Muslim League still did not offer any book-length elaboration of the idea of a separate Muslim homeland and how recognizing Muslims as a separate nation in the subcontinent would work in practice.

The party's official newspaper,
Dawn
, carried polemical pieces about the poor prospects for Muslims under future Hindu domination. These served as exhortations to Muslims to press their claim for separate statehood. But there was virtually no discussion of tough questions about economics, national security policy, and potential interethnic conflict, all of which remained unanswered before independence. This pattern of avoiding details of policy persisted even after Pakistan had appeared on the world map.

Soon after independence differences between East and West Pakistan and ethnic differences among Pakistanis surfaced, but these were papered over with religious grandiloquence. Pakistan was officially described as
Mamlakat Khudadad
, Persian for “Divinely Granted State.” Soon prominent individuals within the government mooted proposals for adopting Arabic as the national language and of changing the script of the Bengali language from its Sanskrit base to an Arabic-Persian one.
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Within a few years the president of the Muslim League, Chaudhry Khaliq-uz-Zaman, announced that Pakistan would bring all Muslim countries together into Islamistan—a pan-Islamic entity.
¹⁸

None of these developments within the new country elicited approval among Americans for the idea of India's partition. The
New York Times
saw the dislocation of millions resulting from partition as a “great tragedy” and attributed it to “the insistence of the Moslem leaders on the partition of an economically homogenous territory along religious lines.” In an editorial the paper argued that “Four hundred million people in both Dominions are paying a high price for a division that is hardly understandable to countries where the political principle of separation of church and state is firmly established.”
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Bourke-White, among others, questioned whether Jinnah had given much thought to the human cost of partition, stating, “More Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim home
land than America, for example, had lost during the entire Second World War.” She also found disturbing that, one month after the country had been created, Jinnah was unwilling to share details of his plans for it. When she asked about the future, all Jinnah said was, “Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion.” Asked to define what he considered democracy, Pakistan's founder declared, “Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning. It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat—our obligation to the poor.”

Jinnah's frequent assertion that “Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century” often drew applause from his Pakistani followers, but this mention of the thirteenth century troubled Americans. Bourke-White noticed that Pakistan's leaders were unwilling to discuss how they would transition from a feudal order to a modern democracy. There had also been no serious discussion of the relationship between “true Islamic principles” and the new nation's laws. All Jinnah told Bourke-White was that the constitution would be democratic because “the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy.”

The two-nation theory, the founding premise of Pakistan, had little appeal outside of Pakistan, just as few outside of Northern Ireland (Ulster) Protestants find the two-nation theory in Ireland appealing. Despite this, in anticipation of independence, Jinnah sought support from other Muslim-majority countries. In 1946 he told a conference in Cairo: “It is only when Pakistan is established that Indian and Egyptian Muslims will be really free. Otherwise there will be the menace of a Hindu Imperialist Raj spreading its tentacles right across the Middle East.”
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But arguments about a “Hindu imperialistic power” suffusing “the British imperialistic power” did not impress the Arab audience.

British Prime Minister Clement Atlee voiced the international consensus at the time when he told the House of Commons of his hope that “this severance may not endure.” He hoped that the proposed dominions of India and Pakistan would “in course of time, come together again to form one great Member State of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
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During the same debate in the British Parliament, the secretary of state for India, Lord Listowel stated his expectation that “when the disadvantages of separation have become apparent in the light of experience, the two Dominions will freely decide to reunite in a single Indian Dominion, which might achieve that position among the nations of the world to which its territories and resources would entitle it.”
²²

Jinnah's rhetoric about “a Hindu empire” rising out of the dust of the British Raj had inflamed Muslim passions in India as had statements about the impending “end of Islam in India, and even in other Muslim countries.”
²³
But outside the subcontinent's inveigled context it meant little and moved few. Soon after independence Pakistan found that some Muslim countries chose to side with India once the Hindu-Muslim division was presented as a Pakistan-India conflict.

During this time most of the Arab world was going through a nationalist awakening. Pan-Islamic dreams involving the unification of Muslim countries, possibly under Pakistani leadership, had little attraction. Likewise, within Pakistan ethnolinguistic nationalism remained alive, challenging the idea of religion-based nationhood within a few months.

Meanwhile, some American observers tried to figure out Pakistan's emerging strategy for survival as a new state. On the one hand, Pakistan sought Western aid and arms to compensate for its initial lack of resources; on the other, it sought to define its nationhood through Islam, pursuing leadership of the Muslim world. “Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent,” Bourke-White wrote scathingly. “Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. Not only the tension between the great powers but the Palestine situation as well held opportunities for profiting from the disputes of others. Pakistan was occupied with her own grave internal problems, but she still found time to talk fervently, though vaguely, of sending a liberation army to Palestine to help the Arabs free the Holy Land from the Jews.”
²⁴

The
Life
reporter also found it strange that Pakistan's leaders found time to comment on distant issues such as Palestine while
there were serious difficulties at home: millions of refugees from India awaited settlement, there was little money in the treasury, and the emigration of Sikh and Hindu merchants out of Pakistan had resulted in a deficit of capital available for investment. But amid all this, “Muslim divines began advocating that trained ex-servicemen be dispatched” in the “holy cause” of Palestine. Bourke-White noticed that
Dawn
, the official government newspaper, condemned the “Jewish state” and “urged a united front of Muslim countries in the military as well as the spiritual sense,” with one editorial asserting, “That way lies the salvation of Islam.”
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Foreign criticism of the very idea of Pakistani nationhood heightened Pakistan enthusiasts' commitment to the new country. A national narrative emerged about the origins and purpose of Pakistan that simultaneously fed paranoia about global conspiracies to eliminate Pakistan soon after its inception. In this way, developments during the first two years of Pakistan's existence as an independent state foreshadowed the path the country was to take in subsequent decades. Pakistan actively sought to become a Western ally, on the one hand, and embraced anti-Western Islamist vocabulary, on the other. Economic and military necessity forced Pakistan to seek an international patron in the United States, whereas an inadequately defined Islamic nationalism made shunning the idea of being that patron's client equally necessary.

The ambiguity about Pakistan's raison d'être that had served well during the struggle for statehood led to internal disharmony soon after its creation. Jinnah and his subordinates had rallied India's Muslims on the basis of perceived threats to their Islamic way of life, but Pakistan's leaders were Westernized individuals not known for religious learning or practice. Soon after partition, the more religious Pakistanis started clamoring for the state to be run in accordance with Islamic Sharia law. Jinnah tried to clarify that the new country was intended as a homeland for Muslims but would not have a role for religion in its governance.

In a landmark inaugural address before Pakistan's constituent assembly on August
11
, 1947, Jinnah declared that “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.”
²⁶
About a year later, in its commentary on his death,
Time
magazine lamented that “the inflammatory preachings of Jinnah the agitator would live on, but the occasionally restraining hand of Jinnah the politician had been removed.”
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