The Emergence of Pakistan

Pakistan: A Political History

The roots of Pakistan’s multifaceted problems can be traced to March 1940 when the All-India Muslim League formally orchestrated the demand for a Pakistan consisting of Muslim-majority provinces in the northwest and northeast of India. By asserting that the Indian Muslims were a nation, not a minority, the Muslim League and its leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had hoped to negotiate a constitutional arrangement that provided an equitable share of power between Hindus and Muslims once the British relinquished control of India. The demand for a “Pakistan” was Jinnah’s and the League’s bid to register their claim to be the spokesmen of all Indian Muslims, both in provinces were they were in a majority as well as in provinces where they were a minority. Jinnah and the League’s main bases of support, however, were in the Muslim-minority provinces. In the 1937 general elections, the league had met a serious rejection from the Muslim voters in the majority provinces.

There was an obvious contradiction in a demand for a separate Muslim state and the claim to be speaking for all Indian Muslims. During the remaining years of the British Raj in India neither Jinnah nor the Muslim League explained how Muslims in the minority provinces could benefit from a Pakistan based on an undivided Punjab, Sind, North-West Frontier Province, and Baluchistan in the northwest, and an undivided Bengal and Assam in the northeast. Jinnah did at least had tried to get around the inconsistencies by arguing that since there were two nations in India-Hindu and Muslim-any transfer of power from British to Indian hands would necessarily entail disbanding of the unitary center created by the imperial rulers. Reconstitution of the Indian union would have to be based on either confederal or treaty arrangements between Pakistan (representing the Muslim-majority provinces) and Hindustan (representing the Hindu-majority provinces). Jinnah also maintained that Pakistan would have to include an undivided Punjab and Bengal. The substantial non-Muslim minorities in both these provinces were the best guarantee that the Indian National Congress would see sense in negotiating reciprocal arrangements with the Muslim League to safeguard the interests of Muslim minorities in Hindustan.

 

Despite Jinnah’s large claims, the Muslim League failed to build up effective party machinery in the Muslim-majority provinces. Consequently the league had no real control over either the politicians or the populace at the base that was mobilized in the name of Islam. During the final negotiations, Jinnah’s options were limited by uncertain commitment of the Muslim-majority province politicians to the league’s goals in the demand for Pakistan. The outbreak of communal troubles constrained Jinnah further still. In the end he had little choice but to settle for a Pakistan stripped of the non-Muslim majority districts of the Punjab and Bengal and to abandon his hopes of a settlement that might have secured the interests of all Muslims. But the worst cut of all was Congress’s refusal to interpret partition as a division of India between Pakistan and Hindustan. According to the Congress, partition simply meant that certain areas with Muslim majorities were ‘splitting off’ from the “Indian union.” The implication was that if Pakistan failed to survive, the Muslim areas would have to return to the Indian union; there would be no assistance to recreate it on the basis of two sovereign states.

With this agreement nothing stood in the way of the reincorporation of the Muslim areas into the Indian union except the notion of a central authority, which had yet to be firmly established. To establish a central authority proved to be difficult, especially since the provinces had been governed from New Delhi for so long and the separation of Pakistan’s eastern and western wings by one thousand miles of Indian territory. Even if Islamic sentiments were the best hope of keeping the Pakistani provinces unified, their pluralistic traditions and linguistic affiliations were formidable stumbling blocks. Islam had certainly been a useful rallying cry, but it had not been effectively translated into the solid support that Jinnah and the League needed from the Muslim provinces in order to negotiate an arrangement on behalf of all Indian Muslims.

The diversity of Pakistan’s provinces, therefore, was a potential threat to central authority. While the provincial arenas continued to be the main centers of political activity, those who set about creating the centralized government in Karachi were either politicians with no real support or civil servants trained in the old traditions of British Indian administration. The inherent weaknesses of the Muslim League’s structure, together with the absence of a central administrative apparatus that could coordinate the affairs of the state, proved to be a crippling disadvantage for Pakistan overall. The presence of millions of refugees called for urgent remedial action by a central government that, beyond not being established, had neither adequate resources nor capacities. The commercial groups had yet to invest in some desperately needed industrial units. And the need to extract revenues from the agrarian sector called for state interventions, which caused a schism between the administrative apparatus of the Muslim League and the landed elite who dominated the Muslim League.

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