Also, Jinnah’s demand for a separate state proved to have some weighting especially in the elections of 1946 because the Jinnah and the Muslim League managed to win a majority of votes in most provinces. The Muslim League managed to win 75% of the Muslim votes, and had won 90% of the Muslim seats in most provinces. It could be argued that the elections validated Jinnah’s demand for a separate state because it demonstrated that a large majority of Muslims wanted to be part of ‘Pakistan’, and hence proved that Congress could not ignored or sidelined Jinnah and the Muslim League any longer.
Furthermore, the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946 enhanced Jinnah’s claim for a separate Muslim State. This is seen by the way that there was a plan for a three-tier system in which provinces would be divided. It did fit in with Jinnah’s expression made in 1940, to have ‘autonomous nation states’, as in more than one state for the Muslims. This is supported by the historian Barbara Metcalf who argues that “This proposal came tantalizingly close to giving Jinnah what he had most wanted – which was not so much an independent state, but a ‘Pakistan’ of provinces.” Metcalf makes a strong argument here because it appeared that whilst this plan suggested that there would one Hindu-Majority group of provinces, the other two groups would contained a majority of Muslims.
However, although Jinnah may have believed in this two-nation theory throughout the 1940’s, this theory was not totally valid because did not really appeal to India’s inhabitants, either Muslims or Hindus. Although Jinnah may have used the two-nation theory to base on his demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims, it could be argued that this did not really mean anything at the time as
“No constitutional plan would be workable in India or acceptable to Muslims unless it is designed on the following basic principles, viz that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North-Western and Eastern Zones of India should be grouped to constituted Independent states in which the constituted units shall be autonomous or sovereign”.
Jinnah undermined his idea that India was made up of two nations because Jinnah was unclear and vague about what he had meant about these “territorial adjustments”. Although he mentioned that the majority of people in the North-Western and Eastern Zones should be clustered together to be independent states, he did not mention when this would happen. Jinnah’s vagueness on the ‘Pakistan’ issue is significant in undermining the two-nation theory as it could emphasise that Jinnah himself did not really believe in this theory, and that he was just trying to maintain Hindu-Muslim unity as he had done so in previous years. The revisionist historian Ayesha Jalal supports this as she see the Lahore resolution as more of a bargaining counter to get the Muslims more representation than anything else. Jalal makes a strong argument because the Muslims prior to 1940 were not well represented, as is seen in their lack of success in the 1937 elections. Therefore, Jinnah’s phrase of “constitution” could suggest that the Muslims should be represented at an all-India level. However, having said this, some historians believe that Jinnah’s vagueness on the ‘Pakistan’ issue demonstrates or enhances the two-nation theory because by keeping the geographical territories a secret, he was able to rouse or rally the Muslims under a banner, and therefore allow them to see that they were not a ‘minority’ but a ‘nation’.
Also, it seemed that the Two-nation theory was something that alternatively did not appeal to many people of India. This is especially seen at the Gandhi-Jinnah Talks in 1944. Gandhi contradicted Jinnah’s claim that India was made up of two nations. Gandhi expressed the Rajagopalachari formula and believed that Muslims should have a self-representation in an all-United India rather than a separate homeland and therefore dismissed partition. However, Jinnah stood steadfast to his Lahore speech in 1940 and believed that Muslims and Hindus cannot reside in the same nation because not only would lead to ‘Hindu Raj’ in which the Hindus dominate the Muslims but also the destruction of India. Therefore the talks had broken. Jinnah’s refusal to answer any awkward questions is significant in once again undermining Jinnah’s demand for a separate state because it shows that his implications were not really thought out about what Pakistan had meant. Also, Gandhi’s reluctance to accept the separate homeland for Muslims that Jinnah was proposing is important because not only does this show that this idea did not appeal to the Hindus. However, Gandhi’s reluctance to compromise with Jinnah on the Pakistan issue further stalled its creation.
The Two-nation theory was also not valid in terms of religion. Although Jinnah insisted that India was made up of Hindus and Muslims, he seemed to have forgotten that India had not only inhabited these two groups, but also those such as the Sikhs and Parsis. The Sikhs were also a minority in India and were mainly inhabited within the Punjab. The Sikhs also believed that they had their own identities within India, and therefore did not want to see this destroyed. This issue that Sikhs wanted their own separate identities was seen in 1942 because they felt that if Muslims could concede their own separate homeland in the form of a Pakistan, Sikhs likewise wanted to inhabit a land of Sikhs or ‘Sikhistan’. Jinnah met the leader of Sikhs, Tara Singh in 1942 and 1943 to discuss the future of the Sikhs and their demands. However, this did not come to fruition as
“Mr Jinnah rejected the idea of a separate state for the Sikhs or for any other minorities within a country that Muslims proclaimed as their homeland. Self-determination for national groups in zones where there is a majority was one thing; Self-determination for scattered minorities was another. There could be little question of separate states for non-Muslim communities in Pakistan as for a scattered Muslim community in the United provinces”.
Jinnah’s rejection in terms of a separate homeland for the Sikhs is significant in undermining the two-nation theory because by determining his theory on religion in which Muslims and Hindus were concerned, Jinnah had overlooked the fact that these were not the only two religious groups in India.
Also, it must be remembered that a nation is defined as a “large aggregate of communities and individuals united by factors such as common descent, language, culture, history, or occupation of the same territory, so as to form a distinct group of people”. The Two-Nation Theory was based on religion alone, and therefore it did not take into account these other features. The Muslims only had a link through Islam. Despite this, The Muslims were divided and did not all share the same culture, language and ethnicity. These issues particularly came to surface where the Bengali Muslims were concerned. The Bengali Muslims did not believe that they had any similarities between themselves and the other Muslims of India. They believed that there was no difference between a Bengali Muslim and Bengali Hindu. Gandhi particularly compared the Bengali Muslims when he had said that
“A Bengali Muslim speaks the same tongue that a Bengali Hindu does, eats the same food, has the same amusements as his Hindu neighbour, They dress alike. I have often found it difficult to distinguish by outward sign between a Bengali Hindu and a Bengali Muslim.”
The Bengali Muslims were ethically and linguistically different because unlike some Muslims, they refused to speak the Urdu language. They did not want a contamination of Bengali nationalism. This idea that the Bengali Muslims had based themselves on national and ethnic identity, rather than religious identity was seen in 1946 at the time of the cabinet mission plan as
“Pakistan means different things to the different people. To the Bengali Muslims it means the independence of Bengal or greater Bengal. In so far as the application of Pakistan involved the partition of the province to fit in with Mr Jinnah’s Muslim state, Bengal Muslims, it is to be believed, would be less enamoured by it.”
It is significant that the Bengal Muslims did not fit in with ‘Mr Jinnah’s Muslim state’ because it demonstrates that Jinnah’s claim for a separate homeland in which Muslims would inhabit it, did not appeal to all Muslims, whether they were from the Punjab or Bengal, and that it seemed some Muslims took their national and ethnic identities as Bengalis rather than their religion of Islam more seriously.
Moreover, Jinnah himself could be seen not to take the two-nation theory seriously because although he after he had created his separate state of Pakistan in 1947, he had said that “Now, I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you find that in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in a religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens as a state.” He further advised that Muslims and Hindus were now free to join any religious, caste or creed that they preferred. This marked a dramatic shift from his idealistic views as Muslims and Hindus as two separate entities or nations. This is because the two-nation theory was based on religious principles and Jinnah had originally expressed that there were distinctions between the two groups. However, by being able to join any “religion, caste or creed” that Muslims and Hindus preferred, this demonstrates that Jinnah himself never had taken this theory seriously and hence suggests, as Stanley Wolpert has argued that he had reverted back to his earlier role of an Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, expressing cordial relations between the two groups.
Finally, the two-nation theory was not effectively put into practice when the Indian Subcontinent was partitioned into the two states of India and Pakistan in 1947. It was estimated that there was nearly hundred million Muslims in the Indian Subcontinent. However, when India was partitioned, it appeared that there were still forty millions Muslims left in India, and therefore India was left with the largest group of Muslims in a non-Muslim state. Furthermore, Jinnah did not really receive the ‘Pakistan’ that he was after all along because the Punjab and Bengal were divided, leaving ‘Pakistan’ with only a proportion of these two provinces in the shape of Eastern Bengal and Western Punjab. Therefore Jinnah was left with something that he had always wanted to avoid, a ‘truncated’ and ‘moth-eaten’ ‘Pakistan’. The division of Bengal and Punjab can be seen to go against the two-nation theory because Jinnah’s ideal of a separate state in 1940 was to consist of an undivided Punjab alongside, other provinces such as Sind and the North-West Frontier.
Although Jinnah may have thought that India was made up of two nations, this was not an actual reality. The theory was based on religion, and religion was not a sole criterion to constitute a nation. Hindus and Muslims differed in the sense that the former preached Hinduism, whereas, the Muslims preached Islam. Apart from this, the two groups, especially the Muslims did not share a different culture, language and ethnicity. Also, although the two nation theory was used as a basis for the separate Muslim homeland, this theory was not effectively put into practice as Jinnah did not receive the Pakistan that he had imagined in 1947. The partition did not reflect the idea of the two groups living peacefully together in their separate homelands as not only did this leave a large proportion of Muslims in India but was also accompanied by a slaughter of millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who tried to safely cross the borders. The two-nation theory had proved to have serious consequences at partition in 1947 and would continue to do so in the near future.
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