"Two Nations—Basis of Pakistan"

[p. 1] The proposal to divide India into separate Muslim and non-Muslim Zones, each such Zone being constituted into an independent sovereign state, is based on the theory that Hindus and Musalmans constitute two separate nations. ‘Musalmans are a nation,’ said Mr M. A. Jinnah in his Presidential Address at the Lahore session of the Muslim League which adopted a resolution favouring such division, ‘according to any definition of a nation, and they must have their homelands, their territory and their state.’ ‘It is extremely difficult to appreciate why our Hindu friends fail to understand the real nature of Islam and Hinduism. They are not religions in the strict sense of the word, but are, in fact, different and distinct social orders, and it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality, and this misconception of one Indian Nation has gone far beyond the limits and is the cause of most of our troubles and will lead India to destruction if we fail to revise our notions in time. The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, literatures. They neither intermarry nor interdine together, and, indeed, they belong to two different civilizations which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their aspects on life and of life are different. It is quite clear that Hindus and Musalmans derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, different heroes, and different episodes. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other and, likewise, their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.’

'A Punjabi' who has written a book named Confederacy of India has based his thesis on the same theory : 'From our previous discussions we find that the Hindus and Muslims are two absolutely different entities. Their civilizations are pronouncedly individualistic, and although they may have influenced each other, yet they cannot suffer absorption into each other. Their habits and customs, social systems, moral codes, religious, political and cultural ideas, [p. 2] traditions, languages, literature, art and outlook on life are absolutely different from, nay hostile to, one another. These heterogeneous essentials of their respective lives are not the elements which go to the formation of a single nation. They always create mutual distrust and misunderstanding. The basic differences between the communities, the memories of their past and present rivalries, and the wrongs they registered against each other during the last one thousand years form an unbridgeable gulf between them. As we have already observed the only thing common between them for the last few centuries has been the common yoke of a foreign rule. As soon as the cord which binds them in a common allegiance to a foreign state snaps, they will disintegrate and their mutual differences, which are not felt at present as acutely as they should, will show themselves more glaringly.’

Profs. Syed Zafrul Hasan and Mohamad Afzal Husain Qadri of Aligarh who have written a pamphlet in which they have worked out a scheme of division of India are not less emphatic than 'A Punjabi'. They say : 'Its [of the Government of India Act of 1935] fundamental fault is that it does not recognize the undeniable fact that the Muslims of India are a nation distinct from Hindus, vitally opposed to the latter in their outlook and aspirations and incapable of being merged into any other so-called nation, Hindu or non-Hindu.' Again : 'We are convinced that we, the Muslims of India, must insist persistently and strenuously on—among other things—that the Muslims of India are a nation by themselves. They have a distinct national entity wholly different from the Hindus and other non-Muslim groups. Indeed, they are more different from the Hindus than the Sudeten Germans were from the Czechs.'

El. Hamza has written a book Pakistan—A Nation for the purpose of showing (1) that India is not one country but several countries, with widely different human environments, and (2) that the diversity of race and culture of its inhabitants is so great that they cannot be regarded as one nation (in the modern political sense of the word ‘nation’) but must be considered as belonging to several nations. In showing these differences he has become rapturous, idyllic—‘Hinduism is of the monsoon as Islam is of the desert.’ ‘Probably the individuality of the North-West is indicated by no other single fact in so striking a manner as by the distribution of camels over India.’ ‘Our associations with the camel in different directions of thought—geographical, historical and philosophic—are so multitudinous that the history of an epoch in the evolution of civilization can be read in their light. The camel may be taken [p. 3] as the symbol of that great transformation in the historical process which, proceeding from south-western Asia as a spontaneous race-urge, took in its sweep all the known world. Living several hundred years after, we see the brilliant colours of Arab greatness in distant and blurred magnificence ; and throughout this pageant of centuries the caravans of conquest move on camels' backs against a background of Simoom-blown sands. The days of Arab greatness are past, but the camel is still the associate of man in a world distinct in its arid vastness and the essential uniformity of religion and culture of its inhabitants. The land of the camel is still the land of scimitars and tambourines, mosques and muezzins, and domes and minarets.’ Only, the writer does not appear to appreciate the incongruity of argument based on the camel and such-like things for separation of the north-western region which has its camels in common with Arabia no less than with another part of India like Rajputana which is not ' the land of scimitars and tambourines, mosques and muezzins and domes and minarets '. If this argument were to prevail, there should be no ground for the separation of the eastern zone which is tropical in its fauna and flora, its green fields and prolonged and terrific monsoon. Nor should there be any Muslims in the other tropical countries like the Malaya Peninsula.

The weakness of the argument in favour of a north-western Pakistan based on the topographical diversity and such-like things has not been missed by Mr F. K. Khan Durrani who in his book The Meaning of Pakistan holds that ‘ All Muslims, whether they live in Pakistan or Hindustan, constitute one nation, and we of Pakistan must always treat our co-religionists in Hindustan as flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood.’

Dealing with the argument of El. Hamza he writes : 'The author of Pakistan—A Nation bases his whole argument on the geographical peculiarities that distinguish the north-western provinces, the Punjab, Kashmir, the N.-W.F.P., Sind and Baluchistan, from the rest of India. Some provinces get heavier rains than do the others. The staple food of some provinces is wheat ; of others rice. Vegetation in the lands of the monsoon is rank and lush ; in others it is scanty. The flora and fauna of the provinces differ considerably. The dry lands of the North-West are the natural home of the camel, while the wet lands of the South and Assam and Bengal produce the unwieldy elephant. The dry lands of the North-West have given birth to a racial type which in many respects is different from the softer and darker types met with elsewhere. In a large country like India, inhabited as it is by peoples of many races, enclosed within many degrees of latitude and longitude, and exposed to a variety of influences of sea, mountain and desert, such diversities [p. 4] of peoples and produce are natural and unavoidable, and to the politics of Muslim India they are wholly irrelevant ; for were we to follow this line of argument, we of the North-West will have of necessity to wash our hands of the larger portion of the Muslim population of India who live in lands other than those of Pakistan, dress differently and eat food which is not exactly the same as ours. We would have to treat them as aliens, with whom we can have no community of life or interests, a proposition which no Muslim of Pakistan would care to maintain even for a minute, which in fact every Muslim of the Punjab would dismiss forthwith as unthinkable.’

To prove the thesis others—notably Dr B. R. Ambedkar in his book Thoughts on Pakistan—have taken pains to collect together passages from books on history to show how Muslim invaders and rulers of India desecrated and destroyed thousands of Hindu temples and broke into pieces images installed in them and converted them into mosques or removed their building materials like posts and pillars to be used in the construction of Muslim mosques in other places ; how they offered to Hindus who came under their sway the alternative of the sword or the Quran and how thousands of Hindus were tortured or slaughtered on their refusal to accept the Muslim faith. The inference that is drawn is that the Hindus have not forgotten and cannot forget these atrocities and they have indelible marks burnt on their memory which cannot be obliterated. It is further asserted that Hindu-Muslim riots due to some minor cause—such as music before a mosque or the sacrifice of a cow—give further point to the argument that the old hostility persists, and common subjection to the British, and a strong rule by the latter have not succeeded in bringing about a reconciliation between the two communities.

Now, it is somewhat difficult to understand this line of argument for carving out portions of India to be placed under Muslim rule, which after all, is the object of those who advocate such division of India into Hindu and Muslim Zones.

Is it suggested that Islam sanctioned and encouraged those acts of sacrilege and vandalism—sacrilege from the point of view of the non-Muslim and vandalism from the point of view of art? If it sanctioned and justified those acts, then can it be said that it has ceased to sanction and encourage such acts? What evidence is there that there has been a change in the attitude of Islam in these respects? If they were acts of barbarity done by ambitious men professing Islam who took cover under Islam in pursuit of their aim which had nothing to do with the faith of the Prophet of Arabia, what chance or expectation is there that people professing Islam will not arise in the future with similar ambitions and will not [p. 5] utilize the power that they will enjoy in the same way ? Is it suggested that Muslim rule should be established in the segregated portions so that the same atrocities may be committed and perpetuated on those non-Muslims who may have the misfortune to be left there ? If that is so, then none should expect a non-Muslim to be a party to any such scheme.

If all that is not the teaching of Islam and is in fact opposed to its fundamental tenets of peace and tolerance, is it desirable to rake up old history and place those instances before the Muslims and non-Muslims today ? Can it be done without reviving bitter memories which had better be forgotten for the good of all—for the sake of Muslims as a shameful chapter in the history of Musalmans who defiled their faith by such acts in the name of Islam when it did not sanction or justify them and when they committed them for their own aggrandizement and not for the propagation of Islam which depended and depends upon purer and nobler methods for its propagation ; and for the sake of non-Muslims so that the nightmare of a religion which can perpetrate such atrocities for its propagation may be lifted and the era of goodwill and reconciliation may continue and prosper ?

If what is sought to be made out by such quotations is even partially accepted by Muslims and non-Muslims as a part of Muslim rule, then Muslims have to acquire the right to perpetrate and perpetuate them by the same methods by which those who perpetrated them in the past acquired the power to do so. The same sources which furnish these instances and quotations will also show that the Muslims of those days never got that right or power by agreement or consent of their non-Muslim contemporaries. If the passage of centuries and all that has happened in the world during these centuries and world conditions of today have not brought about any change in the attitude of Muslims of India towards the non-Muslims of India and vice versa, why should it be expected that the non-Muslims should change in this one respect and agree to the perpetration of wrongs and atrocities, which are condemned by all civilized persons all the world over, including the Muslims of India? Either such acts are a part of Islamic law and faith or they are not. If they are, no non-Muslim can agree to anything which gives the least opening for their repetition by the establishment of an ‘ideal Islamic state with the ultimate ideal of a world revolution on purely Islamic lines ’—an Islamic state which on the assumptions made above is ex hypothesi out to repeat its history as disclosed in such quotations. If they are not, no useful purpose is served by reviving their memory. They can only further exacerbate the feelings of non-Muslims, and whether one approves of a division or not, further exacerbation of feelings can hardly be the object of [p. 6] any one. If it is intended to show that Hindus and Muslims cannot on account of such dealings in the past agree to live together and must therefore agree to separate, it is worth while remembering that just the opposite effect may be produced. The Hindus may not agree for this very reason to leave millions of their co-religionists in the Muslim area for a repetition of the same deeds against them. Such citations and quotations have thus no value or use in considering the question in a practical way.

Now, the object or utility of such quotations apart, it does not require much industry or acumen to cull together such passages from dry-as-dust books written in the distant past or modern times. Books on history until recently dealt commonly and very largely only with kings and conquerors, their doings and misdoings, their wars and victories, the magnificence of their courts and the intrigues of their palaces. Not much attention was paid by the writers of these books to the common man who was content to lead his hum-drum life in a quiet and peaceful manner, earning his livelihood by the sweat of his brow either in the field with his plough and spade, or in his home with his spinning wheel and loom or adze and chisel or sickle and hammer or needle and thread, and a host of other instruments used in cottages in small industries. The lives and doings of priests and pious men, of savants and sages, of learned men and social reformers, poets and philosophers, painters and musicians have not been given the importance they deserve in the life history of a people. The writers of such books have been not a little influenced by a false notion that the religious zeal of a Muslim king or conqueror could be proved only by such deeds against Kafirs and they owed a duty to these kings and conquerors—whose courtiers they used to be in most cases—and to Islam, to record such incidents with circumstantial details to serve as examples to other rulers to follow and to the conquered people to be frightened by. One need not discount the incidents that are related as exaggerated or false. Only, one must remember that such incidents were not the only incidents worth recording ; and if an equally detailed account of other incidents showing how Hindus and Muslims lived together sharing one anothers’ sorrows and joys for hundreds of years, how the Saints and Sadhus of each influenced and moulded the customs and rites, the lives and environment of the other, how the rites and festivities observed in many Muslim houses in connexion with births and marriages tally with those observed in Hindu homes, how the same rites and customs differ among Muslims living in different Provinces of India as much as they differ among the Hindus, how it was Muslim saints to whom the credit for conversion of large numbers of Hindus should go more than to the fire and sword of the Muslim conquerors and kings, the space occupied by such accounts would be infinitely more than that [p. 7] taken up by the accounts of the oppression and tyranny of the Muslim kings and conquerors. The number of pages taken in writing such a history would bear the same proportion to the pages occupied by the books from which quotations are made and on which textbooks on history are based, as the common people of the country bear to the number of kings and their courtiers, their generals and governors, their harems and their palaces. It bears the same proportion as the days of peaceful life and deeds of goodwill and charity, fellow-feeling and tolerance bear to those of strife and conflict, of riots and hooliganism, of murder, arson and loot committed by members of the one community against those of the other. And yet even today the space occupied in newspapers by the latter is out of all proportion as compared with that of the former ; and if one were to write a history after 500 years, based on such newspaper reports or to quote only these reports, one could easily prove on their basis that there was hardly a day of peace in India even during the prevalence of the Pax Britannica. For comparative lack of appropriate material it is, therefore, not easy to write a complete and comprehensive book dealing with social and cultural movements, their deep and abiding effects on the life, and their intangible and invisible moulding of the make-up of the people concerned.