February 5, 2002

Prof Sharif al Mujahid explains how the creation of Bangladesh did not militate against the two-nation theory

Iqbal, the ideologue, had diagnosed the malaise of the Muslim world in his famous Reconstruction and had come to the conclusion that “For the present every Muslim nation must sink into her own deeper self, temporarily focus her vision on herself alone, until all are strong and powerful to form a living family of republics”. Extremely consequential was this paradigmatic shift from a universal, indivisible caliphate to a “multi-national neo-pan-Islamism”. It would enable Iqbal to advocate the amalgamation of the four provinces in north-western India “into a single State”, in his Allahabad address (1930), so that the Indian Muslims, though currently designated as a mere ‘minority’ in the larger subcontinental context, could still become, in good time, an integral part of the living family of Muslim republics.

In advocating multinationalism in Islam, Iqbal seemed to have taken the cue from Mustafa Kemal. Imbued with a tremendous sense of realism as he was, Kemal, instead of attempting to resuscitate a universal Islamic empire, envisaged separate sovereign national states for the various Muslim peoples. In a message to the Indian Central Khilafat Committee, dated March 10, 1922, the would-be desmanteler of Khilafat had said:

The dream of the centuries, cherished by Muslims, that the Caliphate should be an Islamic government including them all, has never proved realizable. It has rather been a cause of dissensions, of anarchy, of the war between the believers. Better apprehended, the interests of all have made clear this truth: that the duty of the Muslims is to arrange distinct governments for themselves. The true bond between them is the conviction that “all believers are brethren”.

In thus arguing for multinationalism in Islam, Kemal was ahead of his times. Few at that time, however, could have realized the profound significance of this concept in the context of the prevalent situation in the Muslim world; it is doubtful whether even Kemal himself grasped it or whether he was conscious of what trends he was releasing in the Muslim world.

In any case, as events would have it, the distinct nationhood of Indian Muslims in relation to the rest of the Muslim world till 1947 did not controvert the dictates of Islamic sensibility and Islamic solidarity. By the same token, the distinct nationhood of Bangladesh should not. It did not in 1971, but 1946-47 was not 1971. And for the 1971 development, the prior existence of (a united) Pakistan was a sine qua non.

In the context of subcontinental political taxonomy, such a Pakistan signifies the recognition of the right of demographically dominant Muslim areas to carve out for themselves a separate state of their own. That principle had to be accepted by the other two parties to the Indian constitutional problem — the Congress and the British — and it was done under the June 3, 1947 (Mountbatten) plan.

Prior to that, any deviation from the pan-Indian Muslim national demand for Pakistan would have put the right of the Indian Muslims in the Pakistan areas (including that of Muslim Bengal or East Bengal) to freedom in jeopardy. Hence, Muslim Bengal, coalescing with the rest of Muslim India during the 1940s, was a condition precedent for that principle to be established. Once established, Muslim Bengal, chiefly because of its physical discontinuity, could go its own way, without jettisoning its own or the dominant Muslim western region’s right to an existence separate from the rest of the subcontinent.

This, in part, explains Jinnah’s acquiescence to the independent Bengal scheme when it was mooted by Mountbatten on April 26, 1947. “I am sure they [united Bengal] would be on friendly terms with us”, remarked Jinnah on the occasion. As long as Bangladesh does not adopt a hostile posture — and it has not since Mujib’s exit (1975) — there should be no grouse about its existence, on Pakistan’s part. Nor does its emergence fault the Islamic nationalism or the multinationalism framework enunciated above. What, however, is rather tragic is that the separation was marred by violence. For that, the dominant leadership of both the East and the West were responsible, though in varying measure.

Finally, ideology, to be vibrant and life-affirming, is by no means dependent on the size of the state or territory subscribing to it. All through 1940-47, six provinces were claimed for Pakistan. With the division of the Punjab and Bengal and the exclusion of Assam (except for Sylhet district), Pakistan, when finally established, was about two-third of the area and population originally demanded for it.

This curtailment of area and population did not affect Pakistani adherence to its ideology, the intrinsic value of that ideology, or its importance as an inspiring set of overarching values. Indeed, the ideology underlying Pakistan was greater, much greater, than the reality that goes for Pakistan today, or that was known as Pakistan prior to 1971. By the same token, for the reasons given elsewhere, Bangladesh’s emergence should, by no means, be termed an ideological disruption.

At another level, the snowballing insurgency in India-held Kashmir since 1989, despite fifty-two years of Indian occupation and despite the heavy toll in death, destruction, and human misery, proclaims the haunting hold of the ideology and the charismatic appeal of the two-nation theory. Clearly, the enslaved millions in Kashmir are struggling to get their identity recognized by New Delhi and the world at large. The Kashmir insurgency signifies that the two-nation theory, far from being ‘consigned to the limbo of history’, has thrown the gauntlet in a region long claimed by India as its atut ang (integral part).

In perspective, the two-nation theory, a natural corollary of Jinnah’s “third party” claim (1937), was a reposti to Nehru’s “two-forces” dictum (1936), which, in essence, was a sophisticated version of Hindu hegemonic ambitions, cast in anti-imperialist terms, if only to induce wider acceptance by non-Hindu groups in India’s body politic.

These ambitions, inspired by Hindu atavistic aspirations, have informed New Delhi’s studied policy towards her other, smaller neighbours as well since independence. And, to be sure, these neighbours distrusted New Delhi’s ‘big-brotherly’ posture to a point that when they decided to set up SAARC along with India in 1985, they chose Kathmandu, in far away Nepal, as its headquarters, and not the easily accessible New Delhi. This despite the overriding fact that none of India’s six SAARC neighbours, except for Nepal and the satellite Bhutan, border each other and that they are linked with each other, if only through the sprawling Indian territory.

All told, the euphoria prompted by Bangladesh’s emergence has long evaporated, and New Delhi is back to square one, so far as its relations with the other two major subcontinental powers are concerned.

Excerpts from
Ideology of Pakistan
By Sharif al Mujahid
Islamic Research Institute, International Islamic University, P.O.Box 1035, Islamabad-44000
Email: amzia555@apollo.net.pk
ISBN 969-408-218-8
236pp. Rs250

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