In 30 Seconds
Story
On 23 March 1940, in Minto Park at Lahore, within sight of the Badshahi mosque and the fort of the Mughals, the All India Muslim League resolved that no constitutional plan for India would be acceptable unless the Muslim majority areas of the north west and east were grouped into independent states, autonomous and sovereign. The Lahore Resolution nowhere contained the word that history attached to it within days, the Hindu press titling it the Pakistan Resolution in derision and the League’s following adopting the title in pride, and the ambiguities of its famous text, states in the plural, the units autonomous and sovereign, no map, no mechanism, have kept scholars at work ever since. What was not ambiguous was the turn. The League of minority safeguards, of weightage, separate electorates and fourteen points, had become the League of the two nation theory, and the demand was no longer a share of India but a separation from it.
The road to Minto Park ran through the previous decade’s education. The elections of 1937 had taught Jinnah that in the province by province game of numbers the League could be locked out everywhere, the ministry years had supplied the grievance file of Congress raj, and the war’s outbreak had restored his leverage, the government courting Muslim cooperation as the Congress departed office. The intellectual materials lay ready, Iqbal’s Allahabad address of 1930 with its consolidated Muslim state in the north west, the Cambridge pamphleteer Rahmat Ali’s coinage Pakstan, schemes of partition circulating through the decade’s confederal pamphlets, and Jinnah assembled them, in his presidential address on 22 March, into the doctrine the resolution enacted. Islam and Hinduism, he told the vast pandal, were not religions in the strict sense but different and distinct social orders, two nations by any definition, who neither intermarried nor interdined, whose heroes and histories opposed, and to yoke two such nations under a single state must lead to the destruction of the fabric of government. The speech’s peroration made minority status itself the thing refused, Muslims were a nation according to any definition, and nations were entitled to homelands, states and destiny.
The resolution, moved by Bengal’s premier Fazl ul Haq, the Sher e Bangla whose peasant party had beaten the League in 1937 and now lent it his province’s weight, seconded from every region, was drawn with a lawyer’s care for coalition. The plural states and sovereign units held together the Punjabi and Bengali provincialists, who read in it their own kingdoms, and the centralists who read one Pakistan, the absence of a map left every boundary negotiable, and the safeguards clause for minorities inside and outside the proposed states kept the Muslims of the Hindu majority provinces, the scheme’s hostages and its most fervent supporters, within the tent. The ambiguity was the strategy, maximal demand, undefined content, and historians have argued, most famously in Ayesha Jalal’s reading, whether Pakistan was for Jinnah a destination or the ultimate bargaining counter for an equal share in an undivided centre, the sole spokesman’s price. The events of 1946 and 1947, the Cabinet Mission accepted and lost, the truncated Pakistan taken, keep the question open, though the movement the resolution unleashed soon outran any instrumental reading, Pakistan preached in the following years as a millennial promise through the mosques and colleges of exactly those provinces that would never join it.
The responses wrote the next seven years’ script. The Congress rejected the two nation doctrine root and branch, Gandhi calling the vivisection of India a sin, Azad answering as a proud Muslim that Islam in India needed no exit from the ancestral land, the nationalist ulema of Deoband holding to composite nationalism, and Sikhs of the Punjab, whose homeland the map, whenever drawn, must cut, declaring resistance from the first hour. The British filed the resolution as a useful complication, the guarantee, formalised in the August Offer within months, that no settlement could bypass the League. And the date entered the calendars twice over, 23 March, the day the Punjab had garlanded Bhagat Singh’s memory, becoming in the neighbouring state Pakistan Day, the coincidence a standing lesson in how differently one province’s histories could run. At Minto Park a minaret now marks the ground, and the argument the resolution opened, whether the two nations were discovered there or manufactured, remains South Asia’s longest running case.
