Revisiting the \\\'Two-Nation\\\' Theory

Mohammad Ali Jinnah is for a very good reason, a controversial political leader in Bangladesh.  On his ill-fated visit in 1948 to Dhaka, Mohammad Ali Jinnah had said in Dhaka University's Curzon Hall that "Urdu and Urdu alone will be the state language of Pakistan." That insensitive statement, in retrospect, started the process of ending Pakistan that the British created by dividing India into two independent states of Pakistan and India based on religion or the Two-Nation theory. Jinnah's statement gave birth to the Language Movement that eventually broke Pakistan and created the independent state of Bangladesh in 1971.
This, however, is but one side of a complex set of facts and history that shows Jinnah as someone who divided India and then ensured that Pakistan would also be destroyed. Yet, this same political leader had been hailed when he had started his career as a politician in British India in the Congress as the "Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity." The politician who ended becoming the founder of Pakistan, a state based on religion, was all his life, the anti-thesis of Islamic values. Until he picked up some of the traits of a Muslim leader in the tumultuous politics of the 1940s where communalism was widespread, with a Muslim cap and the Sherewani as his trademarks, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the pork-eating, whisky drinking Barrister trained in Britain.
Following the events in Bangladesh since the Shahabag uprising in February this year, Jinnah has come to the attention of a section in Bangladesh and in India to rekindle doubts, first, whether creating Pakistan in 1947 was the right thing to have happened for the people of Bangladesh and second whether the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 was failure of the Two-Nation theory upon which Pakistan was created. Those who raise such doubts argue that Bangladesh would have been better off had Jinnah not led the Muslim League to establish Pakistan.  These sections in Bangladesh and India further argue that the establishment of Bangladesh on secular principle was a clear proof that the Two-Nation theory upon which India was divided was discredited.
The arguments of the Indians against the Two-Nation theory are understandable. They do so from their perception of the mythical Hindu kingdom of Bharat. Those in Bangladesh who argue against the Two-Nation theory argue so from their belief of secularism although they do so without examining the consequences. Indian historians have been responsible for holding Jinnah and the Two-Nation theory guilty for the human disaster accompanied with partition and for dismemberment of India. These historians and political analysts have used the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 to further discredit the Two-Nation theory. In recent times, however, there have been studies that show Jinnah in a different, more positive perspective and blame the Congress for making the Two-Nation theory effective by their arrogance and unfair treatment of the Muslim League and Jinnah.
The BJP leader and former Indian Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani helped turn the tide for a new assessment of Jinnah and the Two-Nation theory to contest the one-sided perspective given by Indian historians. On a visit to Pakistan in 2005, LK Advani said that Jinnah was a   "secular leader, one of the very few who actually create history". He credited Jinnah for his "forceful espousal of a secular state in which every citizen would be free to practice his own religion." Jaswant Singh, Foreign Minister in the BJP Government of 1999-2004 went a step forward and scribed a book on Jinnah titled "Jinnah: India Pakistan Partition". In his book, he portrayed Jinnah the same way as Advani but went much beyond that. He examined and analyzed the events leading to the partition and blamed the arrogance of Pandit Nehru and Sardar Patel for giving meaning to the Two-Nation theory to make Pakistan inevitable.
Renowned US historian Stanley Woolpert in his book "Jinnah of Pakistan" in 1984 examined and analyzed history of India and concluded that the partition of India was the result of a series of events where it was the Congress led by Pandit Nehru and the British, particularly those who came towards the end, Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy and Prime Minister Clement Atlee whose combined actions created the conditions for partition. According to Stanley Woolpert and Jaswant Singh what Jinnah did was react to their actions. Stanley Woolpert also placed Jinnah in a much positive light. In the preface of his book on Jinnah, he wrote: "Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three."
Another historian, a Pakistani-American academic Ayesha Jalal, married to Sugata Bose, grand nephew of Netaji Subash Chandra Bose reached the same conclusion in her book "Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan"; that Mohammad Ali Jinnah is not the politician that mainly Indian historian have made of him. Writing in Outlook, Zeeshan Masani wrote this of Jinnah and the Two-Nation theory based on recent studies: "The vague 1940 Muslim League resolution adopting the goal of Pakistan left wide open whether it would be a single or multiple entity, a sovereign state or an autonomous state within a state... Jinnah's Two-Nation theory was not a territorial concept, but a demand for parity between Hindus and Muslims. Most Muslims, after all, were minorities in Hindu-majority provinces, while the Muslim-majority provinces depended heavily on the commercial and professional skills of prosperous Hindu minorities."
These historians/analysts in their respective works looked at history objectively.  They found that in 1937, after Jinnah had returned to India from his self-imposed exile in Britain, India had provincial elections under the Act of 1935. In the Hindi heartland province of Uttar Pradesh where the Muslims were also present in large numbers, the Congress and Muslim League contested in alliance against the loyalist Taluqdars' party. The Congress won overwhelmingly in the "general" seats and the Muslim League took most of the "reserved seats". The ML naturally expected to share power with the Congress in the provincial government but the Congress led by Pandit Nehru left the ML to rue in the ranks of the opposition thus planting in the minds of the ML the suspicion about their fate if independence were to mean majority rule.
That suspicion was re-established during the Cabinet Mission Plan of May 1946. That Plan envisaged transfer of power from Great Britain to an India confederation where Muslim majority areas in West in what is now Pakistan and in the east in what now Bangladesh and the Hindu majority area in the middle that comprises present day India were to be grouped into 3 different entities with a weak centre to administer only defence, foreign affairs and currency. When the Plan was offered to the Muslim League, it accepted it whole-heartedly because it was the best it could achieve. Even as late as that, the ML was not confident about achieving Pakistan. The Congress disliked the idea of the weak centre and the provision in the Plan that the groups could secede after reviewing the arrangement in a decade from transfer of power. In July 1946 Pandit Nehru arrogantly stated publicly that as Hindus would be majority in post-British India, it would modify the Plan as it pleased to suit the Congress' objective of a united and powerful India. That left the ML with no other option. Direct Action Day followed and the rest is history.
These facts should encourage people in Bangladesh to look at Jinnah beyond what he said in Dhaka about Urdu, which undoubtedly was a historic blunder for a better perspective of the leader and the Two-Nation theory. Without Jinnah and Two-Nation theory, India would still be one country under New Delhi and Bangladesh an Indian province either as a part of West Bengal or at best a separate Indian province like Tripura or Assam.  Instead, thanks to the Two-Nation theory and Jinnah's efforts to create Pakistan, Bangladesh has become an independent and sovereign country with God gifted attributes to become the most successful nation in South Asia; common language and religion binding over 90% of the people; an egalitarian society and liberal traditions inherited from their forefather. Therefore it would not be a bad idea for them to revisit the Two-Nation Theory that a section in the country and in India are trying to dismantle to establish Pakistan was a blunder, put that blame on Jinnah and the Two-Nation theory to conclude that Bangladeshis would have been better off as part of greater India! To do that, it is time to also reconsider whether we would need to examine Jinnah outside the historic blunder he made in 1948 in Dhaka by reading recent works on the subject some of which have been quoted here.
As a food for thought while they dig at these and new books of history, let them spare a while and consider some well established facts. Jinnah was not from Punjab or from any part of Pakistan. He was a Guajarati who hailed from a place not far from where Mahatma Gandhi came. Between Gujarati and Urdu, there is as total absence of similarity as between Bengali and Urdu.   Jinnah spoke neither Urdu nor Bengali. Yet why did he show such support for Urdu as Pakistan's national language? Perhaps it would not be out of place to consider the leaders of Bengal with whom he interacted, leaders who had major contributions in creating Pakistan, leaders like Sher-e-Bangla Fazlul Huq, Khawaja Nazimuddin, HS Surharwardy, et al, who all had a fondness for Urdu that must not have escaped Jinnah's attention. Perhaps that was what gave Jinnah the idea of making Urdu the national language of Pakistan because it was then and even now not the mother tongue of the Punjabis, the Pathans, the Sindhis and the Baluchis.
For those in Bangladesh who look at the Two-Nation theory negatively, they would only need to look at the fate of Muslims in India in general and Paschim Bangla in particular. They should go to the Internet and look for the Sachar Commission or the Indian Minority Commission that New Delhi constituted in 2005 in acknowledgement that Muslims in India are subject to serious discrimination. In Paschim Bangla, that has 25% Muslim population, Muslims have less than 3% representation in government jobs!  If partition had not happened, Bangladesh would have been at best, an independent province of India like Assam, Tripura or be a part of Paschim Bangla and been "blessed" with 2 to 3 % of the government jobs! Against that, today Bangladesh is independent, 8 million of our people are overseas, and we have a GDP well over US$ 100 billion and close to becoming a middle-income country. In fact, had the two political parties not been logged in mindless quarrels, Bangladesh would have attained that status at least a decade ago and now looking towards developments goals that for instance Malaysia is looking at!
Jinnah and the Muslim leaders of undivided Bengal must be thanked for bringing the Muslims in British India together to protect their interests and their future although when they did so, they did not think it would be in a separate homeland.  The Congress and Pandit Nehru must be thanked for the arrogance without which the Two-Nation theory would not have ended getting the Muslims a separate homeland.  A dispassionate look at Indian Muslims would prove how lucky the people of Bangladesh and Pakistan are; not being held responsible by the rest of India for the 800 years Muslims rule India till the British intervened. The façade of secularism that Pandit Nehru and his compatriots tried to build was one that Jinnah had seen decades before 1947 when he was forced to leave the Congress while trying t build Hindu-Muslim unity. In fact, out of frustration with Congress and the venerable MK Gandhi who joined Congress after Jinnah did, he had left India to settle in England till the Muslim League leaders urged him to return to India and help the Muslims find their destiny.
As for secularism upon which Jinnah and the Two-Nation theory are condemned in some quarters in Bangladesh, here is a little more food for further thought. Bangladesh was, is and will be, its Constitution notwithstanding, liberal and non-communal because that is the way our fathers and our grandfathers have been. Our Islam, influenced by Sufism, will not allow Islamic fundamentalists to exert any political influence. Over nearly three quarters of a century, we have successfully kept those who want to do politics with religion, caged without any state power. Religion-based parties never had even seats more than single digit in our parliament and never looks like getting more. Therefore what are we afraid about? It is time to revisit our history and reinforce our commitment to our country and thank our stars for having ourselves potentially the best-poised nation in South Asia to achieve any limit.
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The writer is a retired career Ambassador
Email: [email protected]