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The election of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1929
in Britain, already weakened by World War I, fuelled new hopes for progress
towards self-government in India. Gandhi travelled to London, claiming to
represent all Indians and criticising the League as sectarian and divisive.
Round-table talks were held, but these achieved little, since Gandhi and the
League were unable reach a compromise. The fall of the Labour government in
1931 ended this period of optimism. By 1930 Jinnah had despaired of Indian
politics and particularly of getting mainstream parties like the Congress to
be sensitive to minority priorities. A fresh call for a separate state was
then made by the famous writer, poet and philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal,
who in his presidential address to the 1930 convention of the Muslim League
said that he felt that a separate Muslim state was essential in an otherwise
Hindu-dominated South Asia.[6][45] The name was coined by Cambridge student
and Muslim nationalist Choudhary Rahmat Ali,[46] and was published on
January 28, 1933 in the pamphlet Now or Never.[47] He saw it as an acronym
formed from the names of the "homelands" of Muslims in northwest India — P
for Punjab, A for the Afghan areas of the region, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh
and tan for Balochistan, thus forming "Pakstan".[48] An i was later added to
the English rendition of the name to ease pronunciation, producing
"Pakistan". In Urdu and Persian the name encapsulates the concept of "pak"
("pure") and "stan" ("land") and hence a "Pure Land". In the 1935, the
British administration proposed to hand over substantial power to elected
Indian provincial legislatures, with elections to be held in 1937. After the
elections the League took office in Bengal and Punjab, but the Congress won
office in most of the other provinces, and refused to share power with the
League in provinces with large Muslim minorities.
Mean while, Muslim ideologues for separatism also felt vindicated by the
presidential address of V.D. Savarkar at the 19th session of the famous
Hindu nationalist party Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. In it, this legendary
revolutionary - popularly called Veer Savarkar and known as the iconic
father of the Hindutva ideology - propounded the seminal ideas of his Two
Nation Theory or Hindu-Muslim exclusivism, which influenced Jinnah
profoundly.
In 1940, Jinnah called a general session of the Muslim League in Lahore to
discuss the situation that had arisen due to the outbreak of the Second
World War and the Government of India joining the war without consulting
Indian leaders. The meeting was also aimed at analyzing the reasons that led
to the defeat of the Muslim League in the general election of 1937 in the
Muslim majority provinces. In his speech, Jinnah criticized the Indian
National Congress and the nationalist Muslims, and espoused the Two-Nation
Theory and the reasons for the demand for separate Muslim homelands.[49]
Sikandar Hayat Khan, the Chief Minister of Punjab, drafted the original
resolution, but disavowed the final version,[50] that had emerged after
endless redrafting by the Subject Committee of the Muslim League. The final
text unambiguously rejected the concept of a United India because of
increasing inter-religious violence[51] and recommended the creation of an
independent Muslim state.[52] The resolution was moved in the general
session by Shere-Bangla A. K. Fazlul Huq, the Chief Minister of Bengal,
supported by Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and other Muslim leaders and was adopted
on 23 March 1940.[7] The Resolution read as follows:
In 1941 it became part of the Muslim League's constitution.[54] However, in
early 1941, Sikandar explained to the Punjab Assembly that he did not
support the final version of the resolution.[55] The sudden death of
Sikandar in 1942 paved the way over the next few years for Jinnah to emerge
as the recognised leader of the Indian Muslims.[43] In 1943, the Sind
Assembly passed a resolution demanding the establishment of a Muslim
homeland.[56] Talks between Jinnah and Gandhi in 1944 in Bombay failed to
achieve agreement and there were no more attempts to reach a single-state
solution.
World War II had broken the back of both Britain and France and
disintigration of their colonial empires was expected soon. With the
election of another sympathetic Labour government in Britain in 1945,
Indians were seeing independence within reach. But, Gandhi and Nehru were
not receptive to Jinnah's proposals and were also adamantly opposed to
dividing India, since they knew that the Hindus, who saw India as one
indivisible entity, would never agree to such a thing.[43] In the
Constituent Assembly elections of 1946, the League won 425 out of 496 seats
reserved for Muslims (and about 89.2% of Muslim votes) on a policy of
creating an independent state of Pakistan, and with an implied threat of
secession if this was not granted.[43] By 1946 the British had neither the
will, nor the financial resources or military power, to hold India any
longer. Political deadlock ensued in the Constituent Assembly, and the
British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, sent a Cabinet Mission to India to
mediate the situation. When the talks broke down, Attlee appointed Louis
Mountbatten as India's last Viceroy, to negotiate the independence of
Pakistan and India and immediate British withdrawal. Mountbatten, of
imperial blood and a world war admiral, handled the problem as a campaign.
Ignorant of the complex ground realities in British India, he rashly
preponed the date of transfer of power and told Gandhi and Nehru that if
they did not accept divivsion there would be civil war in his opinion[43]
and he would rather consider handing over power to individual provinces and
the rulers of princely states. This forced the hands of Congress leaders and
the "Independence of India Act 1947" provided for the two dominions of
Pakistan and India to become independent on the 14th and 15th of August 1947
respectively. This result was despite the calls for a third Osmanistan in
the early 1940s. |
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