The concept of a separate Muslim"nation" or "people," qaum, isinherent in Islam, but this concept bears no resemblanceto a territorial entity. The proposal for a Muslim statein India was first enunciated in 1930 by thepoet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who suggested that thefour northwestern provinces (Sindh, Balochistan, Punjab,and the North-West Frontier Province) should be joined insuch a state. In a 1933 pamphlet Choudhary Rahmat Ali, aCambridge student, coined the name Pakstan (laterPakistan), on behalf of those Muslims living in Punjab,Afghan (North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sind, andBalochistan. Alternatively the name was said to mean"Land of the Pure." (H.R.T.)Birth of the newstate. Pakistan came into existence as adominion within the Common wealth in August 1947, withJinnah as governor-general andLiaquat Ali Khan as prime minister. With West and EastPakistan separated by more than 1,000 miles of Indianterritory and with the major portion of the wealth andresources of the British heritage passing to India,Pakistan's survival seemed to hang in the balance. Of allthe well-organized provinces of British India, only thecomparatively backward areas of Sindh, Balochistan, andthe North-West Frontier came to Pakistan intact. ThePunjab and Bengal were divided, and Kashmir becamedisputed territory. Economically, the situation seemedalmost hopeless; the new frontier cut off Pakistani rawmaterials from the Indian factories, disrupting industry,commerce, and agriculture. The partition and the movementof refugees were accompanied by terrible massacres forwhich both communities were responsible. India remainedopenly unfriendly; its economic superiority expresseditself in a virtual blockade. The dispute over Kashmirbrought the two countries to the verge of war; andIndia's command of the headworks controlling the watersupplies to Pakistan's eastern canal colonies gave it anadditional economic weapon. The resulting friction, byobstructing the process of sharing the assets inheritedfrom the British raj (according to plans previouslyagreed), further handicapped Pakistan. (L.F.R.W.)THETRANSFER OF POWER AND THE BIRTH OF TWO NATIONSBritish India in 1947, showing majoradministrative divisions, the distribution of theprincipal. Elections held in the winter of 1945-46proved how effective Jinnah's single-plank strategy forhis Muslim League had been, as the league won all 30seats reserved for Muslims in the Central LegislativeAssembly and most of the reserved provincial seats aswell. The Congress was successful in gathering most ofthe general electorate seats, but it could no longereffectively insist that it spoke for the entirepopulation of British India. In 1946, Secretary of StatePethick-Lawrence personally led a three-man Cabinetdeputation to New Delhi with the hope of resolving theCongress-Muslim League deadlock and, thus, oftransferring British power to a single Indianadministration. Cripps was responsible primarily fordrafting the ingenious Cabinet Mission Plan, whichproposed a three-tier federation for India, integrated bya minimal central-union government in Delhi, which wouldbe limited to handling foreign affairs, communications,defense, and only those finances required to care forsuch unionwide matters. The subcontinent was to bedivided into three major groups of provinces: Group A, toinclude the Hindu-majority provinces of the BombayPresidency, Madras, the United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa,and the Central Provinces (virtually all of what becameindependent India a year later); Group B, to contain theMuslim-majority provinces of the Punjab, Sind, theNorth-West Frontier, and Baluchistan (the areas out ofwhich the western part of Pakistan was created); andGroup C, to include the Muslim-majority Bengal (a portionof which became the eastern part of Pakistan and in 1971the country of Bangladesh) and the Hindu-majority Assam.The group governments were to be virtually autonomous ineverything but matters reserved to the union centre, andwithin each group the princely states were to beintegrated into their neighbouring provinces. Localprovincial governments were to have the choice of optingout of the group in which they found themselves should amajority of their populace vote to do so. Punjab's large and powerful Sikhpopulation would have been placed in a particularlydifficult and anomalous position, for Punjab as a wholewould have belonged to Group B, and much of the Sikhcommunity had become anti-Muslim since the start of theMughal emperors' persecution of their gurus in the 17thcentury. Sikhs played so important a role in the BritishIndian Army that many of their leaders hoped that theBritish would reward them at the war's end with specialassistance in carving out their own nation from the richheart of Punjab's fertile canal-colony lands, where, inthe "kingdom" once ruled by Ranjit Singh(1780-1839), most Sikhs lived. Since World War I, Sikhshad been equally fierce in opposing the British raj, and,though never more than 2 percent of India's population,they had as highly disproportionate a number ofnationalist "martyrs" as of army officers. ASikh Akali Dal ("Party of Immortals"), whichwas started in 1920, led militant marches to liberategurdwaras ("doorways to the Guru"; the Sikhplaces of worship) from corrupt Hindu managers. TaraSingh (1885-1967), the most important leader of thisvigorous Sikh political movement, first raised the demandfor a separate Azad ("Free") Punjab in 1942. ByMarch 1946, Singh demanded a Sikh nation-state,alternately called "Sikhistan" or"Khalistan" ("Land of the Sikhs" or"Land of the Pure"). The Cabinet Mission,however, had no time or energy to focus on Sikhseparatist demands and found the Muslim League's demandfor Pakistan equally impossible to accept. As a pragmatist, Jinnah, himselfmortally afflicted with tuberculosis and lung cancer,accepted the Cabinet Mission's proposal, as did Congressleaders. The early summer of 1946, therefore, saw a dawnof hope for India's future prospects, but that soonproved false when Nehru announced at his first pressconference as the reelected president of the Congressthat no constituent assembly could be "bound"by any prearranged constitutional formula. Jinnah readNehru's remarks as a "complete repudiation" ofthe plan, which had to be accepted in its entirety inorder to work. Jinnah then convened the league's WorkingCommittee, which withdrew its previous agreement to thefederation scheme and instead called upon the"Muslim Nation" to launch "directaction" in mid-August 1946. Thus began India'sbloodiest year of civil war since the mutiny nearly acentury earlier. The Hindu-Muslim rioting and killingthat started in Calcutta sent deadly sparks of fury,frenzy, and fear to every corner of the subcontinent, asall civilized restraint seemed to disappear. Lord Mountbatten (1900-79) was sent toreplace Wavell as viceroy in March 1947, as Britainprepared to transfer its power over India to some"responsible" hands by no later than June 1948.Shortly after reaching Delhi, where he conferred with theleaders of all parties and with his own officials,Mountbatten decided that the situation was too dangerousto wait even that brief period. Fearing a forcedevacuation of British troops still stationed in India,Lord Mountbatten resolved to opt for partition, one thatwould divide Punjab and Bengal virtually in half, ratherthan risk further political negotiations while civil warraged and a new mutiny of Indian troops seemed imminent.Among the major Indian leaders, Gandhi alone refused toreconcile himself to partition and urged Mountbatten tooffer Jinnah the premiership of a united India ratherthan a separate Muslim nation. Nehru, however, would notagree to that, nor would his most powerful Congressdeputy, Vallabhbhai Patel (1875-1950), as both had becometired of arguing with Jinnah and were eager to get onwith the job of running an independent government ofIndia. Britain's Parliament passed in July1947 the Indian Independence Act, ordering thedemarcation of the dominions of India and Pakistan bymidnight of Aug. 14-15, 1947, and dividing within asingle month the assets of the world's largest empire,which had been integrated in countless ways for more thana century. Racing the deadline, two boundary commissionsworked desperately to partition Punjab and Bengal in sucha way as to leave a majority of Muslims to the west ofthe former's new boundary and to the east of thelatter's, but as soon as the new borders were known, nofewer than 10 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fledfrom their homes on one side of the newly demarcatedborders to what they thought would be "shelter"on the other. In the course of that tragic exodus ofinnocents, some 1 million people were slaughtered incommunal massacres that made all previous conflicts ofthe sort known to recent history pale by comparison.Sikhs, caught in the middle of Punjab's new"line," suffered the highest percentage ofcasualties. Most Sikhs finally settled in India'smuch-diminished border state of Punjab. Tara Singh laterasked, "The Muslims got their Pakistan, and theHindus got their Hindustan, but what did the Sikhsget?" (The following section discusses thehistory since 1947 of those areas of the subcontinentthat became the Republic of India. For historicalcoverage since 1947 of the partitioned areas in thenorthwest and the northeast, see the articles PAKISTANand BANGLADESH.)ISLAMICREPUBLIC OF PAKISTAN Mohammed Ali Jinnah died in September1948, within 13 months of independence. The leaders ofthe new Pakistan were mainly lawyers with a strongcommitment to parliamentary government. They hadsupported Jinnah in his struggle against the Congress notso much because they desired an Islamic state but becausethey had come to regard the Congress as synonymous withHindu domination. They had various degrees of personalcommitment to Islam. To some it represented an ethic thatmight (or might not) be the basis of personal behaviourwithin a modern, democratic state. To others itrepresented a tradition, the framework within which theirforefathers had ruled India. But there were also groupsthat subscribed to Islam as a total way of life, andthese people were said to wish to establish Pakistan as atheocracy (a term they repudiated). The members of theold Constituent Assembly, elected at the end of 1945,assembled at Karachi, the new capital. Jinnah's lieutenant, Liaquat Ali Khan,inherited the task of drafting a constitution. Himself amoderate (he had entered politics via a landlord party),he subscribed to the parliamentary, democratic, secularstate. But he was conscious that he possessed no local orregional power base. He was a muhajir("refugee") from the United Provinces, theIndian heartland, whereas most of his colleagues andpotential rivals drew support from their own people inPunjab or Bengal. Liaquat Ali Khan therefore deemed itnecessary to gain the support of the religious spokesmen(the mullahs or, more properly, the ulama). He issued aresolution on the aims and objectives of theconstitution, which began, "Sovereignty over theentire universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone" andwent on to emphasize Islamic values. Hindu members of theold Constituent Assembly protested; Islamic states hadtraditionally distinguished between the Muslims, as fullcitizens, and dhimmis, nonbelievers who were deniedcertain rights and saddled with certain additionalobligations.SO. PAKISTAN ZINDABAD....
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