What are the main events between 1937-47 which create the birth of Pakistan?
Answers
The momentous decade that yielded Pakistan in 1947 began with much fanfare in 1937. That critical year was as much a watershed as the traumatic 1857. If the later signified the final demolition of Muslim power in the subcontinent, the former heralded the beginning of the Muslim ques for power either in a decentralised all-India federation or in the north-west and north-east India. Indeed, its criticality can by no means be emphasised too much.
In that year came into force the provincial part of the Government of India Act 1935, granting autonomy to Indians for the first time in the provinces. In that year the Congress came out as the dominant party in Indian politics: it swept the polls in general constituencies, commanded comfortable majorities and came to power, initially in six provinces, and in the limited provincial arena gave a foretaste of what Congress rule would mean for Muslims.
As a sequel to this the Muslim League under Jinnah’s dynamic leadership came to be revived, turned into a mass organisation, and made their political spokesman at Lucknow in that very year. Simultaneously, on the one hand, Jinnah launched his marathon campaign against the Congress, with the exclusion of Muslims from the portals of power as his most telling theme, he, on the other, boldly promised restitution of political power to Muslim India – a goal which had long haunted it and had long lain close to it. Thus, in that momentous year were launched certain trends in Indian politics whose crystallisation in subsequent years made the partition of the subcontinent inevitable in 1947.
The year started out with provincial elections, and a Congress-League entente. The Muslim League, newly organised, hoped for Congress co-operation in ministry formation even as there was during election time. But the Congress, once it had secured a majority in six legislatures, turned its back on the coalition idea, on the League’s offer for co-operation. The logic of “majority rule” was sought to be strictly enforced, and one-party Congress governments came to be installed.
Nor could the Congress see, on the morrow of its electoral victory, any justification for coalescing with the League. Should the League group (in the various legislatures) be anxious to get some share in the government, it should first disband its party in the legislature, join the Congress Party unreservedly, and submit to its control. Here, after all, it was argued, was a god-sent opportunity for the Congress to absorb the League even as it had previously absorbed the Red Shirts in the Frontier. Then, why should not the Congress suck it into its fold and become the only political organisation in the country?
And the Congress tried with all the resources at its command – but only to be unexpectedly discomfited in the end.
A more sure index to the growing strength of the League was provided by the by-elections in the post-Lucknow period: between 1 January 1938 and 12 September 1942, it won 46 (83%) out of 56 Muslim seats, as against three seats (about 5%) won by the Congress and seven by independents.
By 1940, however, the Muslims had developed “the will to live as a nation.” They also discovered that nature had also endowed them with a territory with a Muslim demographic dominance, which they could occupy and make a state as well as a cultural home for the newly discovered nation.
“We are a nation”, they claimed in the ever eloquent words of the Quaid-i-Azam – “we are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilisation, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and tradition, aptitude 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.”
The formulation of the Muslim demand for Pakistan in 1940 had a tremendous impact on the nature and course of Indian politics. On the one hand, it shattered forever the Hindu dreams of a pseudo-Indian, but, in fact, a “Congress Raj” on British exit from India. On the other, it heralded an era of Islamic renaissance and creativity in which the Indian Muslims were active participants.
The Hindu reaction, was, of course, quick, bitter, malicious. Equally hostile were the British to the Muslim demand, their hostility having stemmed from their belief that the unity of India was their main achievement and their greatest contribution. But the tragedy was both the Hindus and the British missed to consider the astonishingly tremendous response the Pakistan demand had spontaneously elicited from the Muslim masses. Above all, they failed to realise how a hundred million people had suddenly become supremely conscious of their distinct nationhood and their high destiny.
And with the emergence of Pakistan on August 14-15, 1947, the Indian Muslims had come into their own, after a long and ardous struggle.