While the British seemed more occupied by the expansion of Russia, which stormed Chimkent (1864), Tashment (1865), Samarkand (1868) and Khiva(1873), [5] famine, raging in Kashmir, took away three-fifths of the total population of the Valley on account of the continuous rains that destroyed when the French market was lost after the Franco-German war(1871). A year later, the Sunni weavers looted the property of the Shi’a manufacturers and traders. On the other hand, in response to recurring revolts, Gilgit was permanently annexed to Jammu and Kashmir, and agreements were made with the rulers of Hunza and Nagar to guarantee trade safety.

Indian nationalism, on the other hand, grew unevenly in terms of time and momentum. Different communities and regions joined it at different times and in various tempi: The Muslims in the north or the Indu Bengalis in ports, the peasantry or the urban dwellers, the depressed classes or the traditionally wealthy reacted differently and at different times. Those who were galvanized early and those who joined the wagon late thought of themselves as separate groups. The differences were on account of a number of factors such as the proximity to the great cities, the level of economic development or the size of the educated sub-class. Under the circumstances, various groups, with personalities of their own, seemed to develop separately. But all initially believed in a single Indian state, none favouring partition. The future independent state has to be based on some kind of federalism, with the provinces enjoying autonomy.

When various nationalities in India wanted to unite the territories inhabited by their own culture, this longing was only a quest for self-expression, not in conflict with the general union of the whole country. There were several commercial or industrial groups in a number of awakened nationalities however, which incited hatred against their rivals in other national or religious groups by trying to incite the consciousness of the masses and presenting their economic interests under different garbs. Made up of conflicting groups with different interests, the Hindus and the Muslims had common religions as far as their respective communities were concerned. Otherwise, both the Hindus and the Muslims had a class structure with their own landlords, moneylenders, professionals, shopkeepers, peasants and workers. The adherents of these two leading religions were dispersed all over India.

But it was inevitable in this growth of nationalism that the Muslims, the depressed classes, and some other socio-religious groups also developed movements of some identity. None of them spoke the same language, however; nor did they inhabit a definite territory or have a common economic life. In many places, as in Bengal, one could not differentiate a Muslim from a Hindu except for one differential-religion. Hinduism or Islam was an important bond.

With no common territory, language or economic life, the Indian Muslims shared no monolithic interests encompassing all. There were Muslims in Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir and in East Bengal, all reflecting different identities, in addition to a common religion. Similarly, there were Hindu Bengalis, Hindu Biharis or Hindu Marathas. Using a different tongue and living at a particular place, all of them represented a different nationality. But in religious terms, the Indian Muslims of the time, constituting a 90 million group within the 400 million Indian population, was the biggest minority.

It is relevant to remember that the Muslim masses, everywhere in India including Kashmir, were economically weak. The British conquest of India brought down the Moghul Empire and its Muslim aristocracy. While the latter lost its political power and economic positions, a new landlord class was made up of Hindu merchants and money-lenders, who became the mainstay of foreign rule. The Hindus had started to interact with the British much earlier than the Muslims. The first contacts had necessarily been in the ports like Bengal, Bombay and Madras, which were predominantly Hindu, and not in northern India, where the dominant segment of the Muslims lived. It was first in the Hindu areas that the British, supported with roads, new cities and educational facilities, created the new economic system. When the British brought their educational system to India, it was the Hindus, rather some of them, who benefited from this new opportunity, while the Muslims stuck to traditional learning.

The ripening political concept of “Muslim nationalism” reflected the desire of the feudal upper crust of that religious community to regain its privileges, long denied by the colonizing British. Conditions of extremely weak capital formations in most northern India were conducive to channeling local frustrations into the mainstream of religious identity. Although the feudal elements seemed to spearhead this identity, large non-feudal economic classes or groups such as the peasants, small landowners, hatred of the Hindu occupancy in the middle and lower levels of the country’s trade, industry and civil service. The landlord upper crust found in Islam a ready instrumentality that could go to the heart of the masses with whose support they could, above all, protect their own interests. Much later did they rally to the call for the creation of an Indian Muslim state?

The foundations of a Muslim state in parts of India were laid some time before the formation of “Pakistan”. Being late comers in national awakening in India, the Muslim thinkers sought for ways to overcome their limits. One should bear in mind the names of Shah Waliullah (1703-62)[7] Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98) [8] and Muhammad Iqbal (1873-1938),[9] among the outstanding Indian Muslim thinkers, as precursors of the reconstruction of Islam from which the content of Pakistan’s philosophical roots were developed. Waliullah, whome Iqbal defined as “perhaps the first Muslim” [10]who refuted the former interpretations of the Islamic dogma and searched for “purification”, or a reversion to early Islam. This negation of obsolete forms and the desire to return to essentials blended to cause contradictions in Waliullah’s philosophy allowing two opposite trends in later Muslim through to quote him for different purposes.

Syed Ahmad Khan was the first to suggest the principles and the application of a new orientation. Although he personally belonged to the upper stratum of the Indian Muslimfeudal society, his recommendations and achievements aimed to serve a much larger community. After the failure of the so-called “Indian Mutiny” (1857),[11] a popular uprising that further strengthened the anti-Muslim trend of British policy, he suggested a programme for political collaboration with the British and also educational measures to restore the former status of the Muslim community. While the latter sought, in general terms, for a new ways to change the attitude of the British authorities towards them, Syed Ahmad Khan started a movement of Western education amalgamated with Islam. The Muslims had to abandon their antiquated religious dogmas as well as their repugnance towards contemporary Western civilization. The result was the Mahmohan Anglo-Oriental College (1877), now the Aligarh Muslim University.[12] Religion was a means to preserve the community’s indigenous culture, but a new centre had to spread secular education through which the regeneration of the Indian Muslims could be accomplished. Even some verses in the Qur’an, whose form was allegorical, needed new interpretations to be based upon interpretation of religious dogma, earned him the title of (British) Knight, but the Ulama insisted that religious faith ought to be over and above man’s reasoning.

As expressed in Sir Syed Ahmad’s book,[13] the newly educated Muslims were expected to remain loyal to the British. While urging faithfulness to the latter, Sir Syed opposed the Indian National Congress, some of whose early leaders like the Ghose brothers, Pal, Rai and Tilak, stressed the “Hindu ideology” as a weapon against the foreigners. But it hardly appealed to the Muslims; neither did the Congress decision to boycott the British goods, which would promote the Indian industrialists, not the Muslims who did not yet own any mills. It raised the price of the local products manufactured and sold by Hindus.

Indian Muslims of later generations honour Muhammad Iqbal [14] as a great poet, philosopher and a religious reformer. There are journals, societies and an academy that bear his name. Although his impact was felt in the decades after the First World War, the Muslims of the Sub-continent regarded him as their spiritual father because he was, in contrast to Syed  Ahmad Khan, anti-colonial, echoed the disposition of the younger generation by bringing the Islamic teaching closer to the norms of Western thinking, and expressed his ideas in beautiful and impressive verse. While influenced by the Medieval Sufis, and especially (the Turkish) Maulana Jalal-ud Din Rumi (1207-73),[15] Islam needed, in Iqbals’s view, to have its principles expressed in the ideas of modern times. He found some ideas of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) similar to those of Rumi, and was attracted by Friedrich W. Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) ideal of a superman with a strong will.[16]

The divergence of Hindu-Muslim interests provided the colonial power with the opportunities to stimulate different religious groups to follow divergent currents. Devices like separate representation, the central theme of the so-called “reforms” known after the viceroys (Mino-Morley, 1909; Montague-Chelmsford, 1919),[17] were parts of the communal principle in the constitutional machinery of the remade called Indian state. The Indian nationalists criticized the system of separate electorates as a deliberate strategy of Britain to weaken the unity of the Indian peoples. Bengal, for instance, was divided into East and West on the basis of religion and ostensibly for convenience in administration.

Political consciousness thus gathering momentum among the Islamic circles, the Muslim League,[18] a political party, was formed (1906) signifying an important turning point in the history of the country. The British started taking strong measures against them, as the Muslims developed political maturity before, during and after the First World War. They banned Muslim publications and interned their leaders such as Muhammad and Shaukat Ali and Maulana Azad.[19] When the Muslims protested against the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the Greek invasion of Anatolia, the Indian National Congress enthusiastically supported them. What was then called the “Khilafat Movement” united the Hindus and the Muslims to a degree unparalleled before.[20] Sindhi and Pathan Muslims organized a “Hijrat Movement” (migration) to Afghanistan as a reaction to the Treaty of Sevres (1920) that the victors of the First World War wanted to dictate to the Turks. However, the Republican Turks themselves soon abolished the Khilafat and secularized their state and when the Afghan Government refused admission to the Indian Muslims, the wind was taken out of the agitators’ sails, and Hindu-Muslim unity began to shatter. The nationalist leaders failed to offer a programme of principles and actions after the non-cooperation movement against the British. When some leaders, like Gandhi, injected Hindu religious ideas into the nationalist movement, this created the wrong impression in some minds that the Congress was actually a Hindu movement. Cooperation gave place to communal riots, behind which there were the vested interests of groups belonging to different faiths who gave a communal form to their struggle.

Both the Muslim communal tradition and the Hindutva (literally ‘Hinduness’) tradition propounded the “two-nations theory”. As early as 1927, M.A. Ansari saw communalist tendencies not only in some pronouncements of Jayakar, but also of Jinnah.[21] There was a “strange agreement’ in both attitudes.[22]

The Hindu Mahasabha (Great Hindu Association) had no quarrel with Jinnah’s two-nations theory. Gandhi was anathema to both Muslim and Hindu communalists. The British backed the Muslim League in preference to other Muslims who joined hands with the Congress.

The masses, on the other hand, whether Hindu or Muslim, had identical interests. They were not the ones who got the seats in the legislatures or in the bureaucracy. A programme of principles and action to emanate from either side could unite them. The Hindu money-lender oppressed the Muslim debtor, and the Hindu Bengali landlord exploited the back ward Muslim peasant. This relationship was presented as a communal conflict. The money-lender and the landlord suppressed the debtor and the tenant, whether a Hindu or Muslim.

When the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, proclaimed India’s entry into the Second World War without prior consultation with the main political parties, the Congress and the Muslim League were equally desirous to attain independence or at least an immediate transfer of as much power as possible. The British Government looked forward to the cooperation of the Indians in the prosecution of the war, at the end of which they could enter into consulatations with several interested parties to bring the benefits of parliamentary democracy to the peoples of India. The Hindus, who formed three-fourths of the population and were far ahead of the Muslims in terms of wealth, cohesion and education, perhaps inevitably identified their communal interests with Indian nationalism. They built the Indian national Congress, founded in 1885,[23] as a strong political instrument with which neither the moderate Liberal Federation nor the extremist Hindu Mahasabha could compete for authority or representation. Its “mahatmaic” leader, Gandhi, a sincere humanitarian, was nevertheless the very quintessence of Hinduism for the masses.

The Muslims, who were only one-fourth of the total population and a minority everywhere, except in the north-west and the north-east, wanted freedom from British rule as much as the Hindus but considered their lesser status in education, administration, trade and industry not befitting their traditions of greatness and also feared possible Hindu domination in the new social fabric after independence. Jinnah never posed as a man of religion but equaled Gandhi in single-mindness of purpose. The Muslim League leadership, which had already interpreted the formation of the Congress-led governments after the 1937 elections as hostile acts against their interests, stood in awe of a Hindu-dominated future Constituent Assembly. At the Lahore session of the Muslim League, a decision (23 March 1940),[24] moved by the Bengal Chief Minister A.K. Fazl-ul Haq and which came to be known as the “Pakistan Resolution”,[25] stated that no plan would be acceptable to the Muslims unless designed on the principle that “geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, western and eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent States”. [26] Jinnah’s complementary statement[27] on this occasion describing the Hindus and Muslims as belonging to “two different civilizations” based mainly on “conflicting ideas and conceptions” is generally acknowledged as the beginning of the well-known two-nations theory. However, while the Congress leadership rejected it with anger more than displeasure, some extremist circles such as the Hindu Mahasabha had previously referred to the two communities as “two nations”,[28] and some Muslim organizations were against the idea of a separate  sovereign state for the Muslims of India. For instance, the All-India Momin Conference, the Jama’ at-ul Ulama, the Azad Muslim Conference, and the Ahrar Party were all against the Muslim League, and the Khuda-e Khidmatgar of the North-West Frontier Province, the Watan Party of Baluchistan, and the All-India Shi’a Political Conference were pro-Congress. Apart from the Muslim League, only the Communist Party of India, among the significant political parties, recognized the Muslim right to secession. The Pakistan Resolution also implied the partition of Punjab and Bengal.

Home Page