That is because apart from muslims, no other religion or sect in India demanded a new country.
For those who demonise and dehumanise Muslims, it may be comforting to believe that Muslims as an abnormal, trouble-making community were aberrant in pushing separatist demands in British India. For such intellectually challenged individuals, I might as well whistle in the wind.
But for the more genuinely curious and open-minded, I would make the following argument. Because the Muslim League succeeded in some measure in creating Pakistan, there is a tendency to view its demands as being of a special nature. Yet, when viewed both in its regional and international contexts, the sense of foreboding that the Muslim minority felt and articulated was a far more generalised sentiment. The sense of unease crystallised with the introduction of electoral politics, where numbers mattered.
The Frontier as a Case Study
As a case study, one can look at the Frontier province. Because of its strategic location, popular election of parts of the provincial government was introduced in the settled districts only in 1932 - much later than most other provinces. Legislative politics in the 1930s revolved to a great extent around the apprehension of minorities. Hindus and Sikhs feared that the dominant position they had in government employment would be challenged. The minorities also feared that the Education department would now discriminate against them in grants-in-aid. But, as historian Stephen Rittenberg (
Ethnicity, Nationalism, and the Pakhtuns) has shown, the issue that evoked the greatest controversy was an administrative circular, which made Urdu or English the mandatory language of instruction from the third grade in government aided girls’ schools. This measure had been proposed by English officers to standardise the province’s educational system. It was already in force for boys schools. It did not bar Hindi or Gurmukhi as being taught as second language and the Frontier Muslims were in the same position in that Pashtu or Hindko could not be the primarily mode of instruction either.
Yet, for the Hindus and Sikhs, it became a symbolic matter of utmost importance. One Frontier Hindu, wrote to the government:
“These memoranda forecast the fate of Hindu and Sikh minorities in that Province when full Provincial Autonomy will be introduced under the new Government of India act.”
A Hindi-Gurmukhi Defence committee was formed. Minority members of the provincial legislature boycotted the legislature in in 1935 and explained in a letter:
“We feel that this circular constitutes a grave menace and a direct challenge to our religion and culture.”
One can point to other examples in the Frontier. Even during Khan Sahib’s Frontier Congress led ministry in the years 1937-39, in the aftermath of the granting of limited self-government, disenchantment was expressed with some of the legislation that was enacted. Dr C.C. Ghosh, a founding member of the Frontier Congress, complained to V.D Savarkar, that Hindu support for the organisation had only served to “place them under Muslim majority…Congress (Red Shirt) attitude during the Congress Ministry days towards the minorities were most tyrannous.”
These concerns in many ways mirrored the anxieties that Muslims felt in provinces where they were in a minority.
Bengal and Punjab
The Frontier’s experience was not unique. In the case of Bengal, Joya Chatterji (
Bengal Divided) has argued that with the formation of Muslim majority governments in Bengal, the Hindu Bhadralok felt their traditional dominance was under threat and they began to support partition. Partition was seen as a way to regain influence. In the case of the Punjab, Neeti Nair (
Changing Homelands) has argued that some powerful Hindus also preferred partition as they feared being marginalised as a minority in a Muslim-majority united Punjab.
Within Punjab there was also the rise of Sikh nationalism as Gurharpal Singh and Giorgio Shani have documented (
Sikh Nationalism). This culminated in call for a Sikh state in 1946. The resolution of the Shiromani Akali Dal read:
“Whereas the Sikhs being attached to the Punjab by intimate bonds of holy shrines, property, language, traditions, and history claim it as their homeland and holy land which the British took as a ‘trust’ from the last Sikh ruler during his minority and whereas the entity of the Sikhs is being threatened on account of the persistent demand of Pakistan by the Muslims on the one hand and of danger of absorption by the Hindus on the other, the executive committee of the Shironmani Akali Dal demands for the preservation and protection of the religious, cultural, and economic and political rights of the Sikh nation, the creation of a Sikh state which would include a substantial majority of the Sikh population and their sacred shrines and historical gurdwaras with the provision for the transfer and exchange of populations and property.”
One Sikh nationalist explained the desire for the Sikh state in the following way: “Being a minority, we don’t ask for the rights of a majority. What we ask for is separate existence where we may not complain of being ruled by any other majority nation, nor should any majority nation complain of the veto power being in the possession of a minority.”
Elsewhere in South Asia
In 1944, the leader of the Dalits, Dr. Ambedkar confided to a British officer: “In every village there is a tiny minority of Untouchables. I want to gather those minorities together and make them into majorities. This means a tremendous work of organisation - transferring populations, building new villages. But we can do it, if only we are allowed to [by the British].”
In 1942, the All India Depressed Classes Conference met at Nagpur, bringing together, 70,000 delegates across large parts of India. Christophe Jaffrelot (
Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability), writes that the conference passed the following resolutions:
"The first resolution voted on this occasion demanded a separate electorate for Untouchables; the second sought the establishment of separate villages for Untouchables, 'at a distance from the Hindu villages'; and the third announced the creation of the Scheduled Castes' Federation (SCF).
The creation of the SCF therefore reflected a new mood, a new sense of identity among Untouchables. The Scheduled Castes wished to be recognised as a minority in the same way as Muslims were, and, as a consequence, sought the benefit, not only of a separate electorate, but also of separate territories."
In summary, Dalit leaders too foresaw, in the words of Faisal Devji (
Muslim Zion), the “risk of being submerged within some larger community in a subordinate way, thus illustrating how fragile the categories of majority and minority really were, and how generalised the fears of being swamped by larger numbers. In some sense, then, the Muslim League’s intermittent criticism of these categories, and attempts to avoid them altogether, had a certain political truth about it.”
In the very different context of the north-east of British India in the hill areas of what is now Nagaland, the ‘Naga community’ expressed similar concerns. In 1929, members of the Naga club handed over a memorandum to the British commission. Marcus Franke (
War and Nationalism in South Asia), summarised the concerns in the memorandum:
“Their population was small, compared to those in the plains and a however designed representation on their side would have no weight at all. Their languages were completely different from those of the plains and they had not the slightest social affinities with either Hindus or Muslims…These statements were followed by fear of becoming dominated socially, culturally, politically and economically by the Assamese and Indians, if the Nagas were included under the reforms.”
It was “the realisation—filled with consternation—that their future could lie with the plainsmen who were superior to them in every way, especially in numbers. The fear they might be culturally and economically overpowered by those who despised them,” that led to the people of Naga preferring either autonomy or for the British to remain.
Such concerns were not specific to British India. The introduction of elective principle in Ceylon, for example, sparked concerns amongst the minority Tamil community. Governor Clifford noted in 1926:
“recently the differences between the Sinhalese— especially the low country Sinhalese— and the Tamils on the Council have shown signs of becoming accentuated; the latter suspecting the former of designs to dominate the whole political situation by sheer weight of numbers”
The introduction of universal suffrage in 1931 only enlarged such concerns. In response, in four out of the five seats in the Tamil majority Northern province, elections to the first State Council in 1931 were boycotted.
Beyond South Asia: the Bigger Picture
What needs to be emphasised is how unsettling the rise of nationalism and representative institutions were to minorities. As Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper remind us in their book on Empire: “Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not pretend to represent a single people. Making state conform with nation is a recent phenomenon.”
Empires were of course hierarchical and exclusionary, but loyalty in the final analysis was owed to the ruler and the dynasty and not to an ethnicity. Whereas a state under empire “declares the non-equivalence of multiple populations,” the nation-state by contrast “proclaims the commonality of its people.”
Aamir Mufti (
Enlightenment in the colony) has linked the development of Muslim separatism to the history of the Jewish ‘question’ in Europe. He argued that minoritisation was inherent in the ‘nationalising’ of people, with the Jewish case being an exemplary instance. He perceptively notes how nationalism has historically been quite disruptive:
"nationalism has historically been a great disrupter of social and cultural relations, that its reconstitution of societies and populations in terms of distinct narratives of collective life always implies setting forth an entire dynamic of inclusion and exclusion within the very social formation that it claims as uniquely its own and with which it declares itself identical. Thus the great ‘‘accomplishment,’’ we might say, of nationalism as a distinctly modern form of political and cultural identity is not that it is a great settling of peoples—‘‘this place for this people.’’ Rather, its distinguishing mark historically has been precisely that it makes large numbers of people eminently unsettled. More simply put, whenever a population is minoritised—a process inherent in the nationalisation of peoples and cultural practices—it is also rendered potentially movable."
In linking Pakistan to a much larger story that transcends South Asia, we should also note the collapse of the world order with the onset of World War 2. As Faisal Devji writes, “ideas of multinational federations, autonomous zones and partnerships in empire…were common in the period following the First World War, with its mandates and minority protections guaranteed by the League of Nations.” But the “the collapse of all these arrangements after 1939” had “forced upon men like Jinnah the realisation that however regrettable, such schemes were no longer tenable.”
Unlike many others, the Muslims who supported the demand for Pakistan succeeded in carving out a separate state. They would not have been able to do so had they not had the sheer force of numbers on their side in Bengal and in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent. As a comparison, the case for the Sikh state was scuppered by the reality, which was noted by the secretary of state for India:
“Owing to the fact that in no single district of Punjab do they constitute a majority of the population, it is out of the question to meet their claims by setting up a separate state.”
The fear of majoritarianism, the sense of exclusion from the dominant culture and what this might mean in a country or indeed province ruled by the weight of numbers was an issue for many minorities. The Muslims of India who advocated a separatist path in the age of nationalism were not exceptional.
