he resolution presented and passed at the All-India Muslim League annual session held in Lahore between March 22 and March 24, 1940, also known as the Pakistan Resolution, proved to be the most significant milestone on the road to freedom of India and the attainment of Pakistan, a separate state for the Muslim majority areas of British India. The resolution, carefully articulated and crafted by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the League’s leadership, presented a formula for the contemporary predicament of the Indian situation during the World War II and Indian freedom movement. The formula contained in this resolution was couched in certain normative principles and operational schemes that could secure the interests of Muslims, a significant minority that had become suspicious of the treatment by the majority Hindus given the impending withdrawal of the Empire.

The introduction of elective principle and electoral politics had transformed the situation by turning the Muslims from rulers of yore to a minority. Muslims feared turning into a permanent minority in a country where religious identification had been brought from a secondary position to prime identity marker in the colonial systemic transformations. The fact of the matter is that the Muslims in India had always been a minority. However, they became a minority in the political sense with the British rule, argues Sikandar Hayat in his acclaimed book The Charismatic Leader.

Jinnah’s reluctance to provide details of the scheme was not intended to bargain the Pakistan demand. The foremost reason the Lahore resolution did not clearly mention one sovereign independent state from the start was tactical. Hayat contends that while “the Congress and the British chased a phantom, Jinnah devised a practical and realisable formula of a separate state, based on the Muslim majority areas of India.”

The idea of demanding a separate country for Muslims was, in fact, quite remarkable because everywhere else countries were demanded after having gone through miseries at the hands of a majority or privileged minority. However, in this case, a country was being demanded pre-emptively by claiming that Hindus would not deal fairly with the Muslims in case of the withdrawal of the Empire. The Muslims were reminded repeatedly by Jinnah and the Muslim League about a short interregnum of Congress provincial governance during 1937-39, commonly known as Congress ministries, where they witnessed their fate in a polity dominated by the Hindu majority who refused to compromise and share power with them.

The Muslim demand for a separate homeland was rooted in an internationally celebrated principle known as the right of self-determination which was introduced by Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States, during peace settlement at the end of World War I. The same principle was later adopted by the United Nations. Therefore, Jinnah insisted that ‘the only course open to us all is to allow major nations separate homelands by dividing India into “autonomous national states.”’ He also argued that history offered many examples where geographical units, even much smaller than the subcontinent, were divided into multiple states among inhabiting nations on the basis of their right of self-determination.

Muslims feared turning into a permanent minority in a country where religious identification had been brought from a secondary position to prime identity marker in the colonial systemic transformations. 

Jinnah insisted in the resolution that Indian Muslims were a nation by any definition of the word ‘nation.’ Therefore, like all other nations, they had every right to develop spiritually, culturally, economically, socially and politically. Highlighting differences and discounting commonalities, Jinnah established his famous Two-Nation Theory. He stated that Muslims and Hindus were not religions in strict sense of the term, rather these were different and distinct social orders. To forcibly tie them together 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 social fabric of the country.

The demand for a separate country in the Lahore Resolution was made amidst a wave of emergence of nation states wherever the Empire was losing its control due to difficult political and economic realities in Europe, from where most contemporary imperial powers originated. It was getting clearer as the war effort prolonged that it would be impossible for the imperial powers to perpetuate their control over vast swathes of lands in Asia and Africa. Indian situation was no exception since it was going through a potent freedom movement already when the British government declared India as part of the international conflict. Therefore, Jinnah’s formula had an irresistible appeal for the Muslims, particularly the young, educated urban middle classes.

A separate country was needed not only because of fear of the Hindu majority government; it was needed primarily to empower the Muslims to live their lives according to the genius of its people. The idea of their “separate state assured them ‘physical protection’ and ‘political survival’ as an independent political community,” writes Hayat. In this sense, the demand for a separate state was a positive doctrine which was neither apologetic nor reactive, but had its own intrinsic value on the basis of universally accepted principles.

It envisaged Pakistan as a confederation, a constitutionally workable plan, and parliamentary form of government conceived with a limited centre and substantial provincial autonomy for federating units. It used the words ‘sovereign’ and ‘autonomous’ for provinces in the blue print stipulated in the form of the Lahore Resolution, hastily damned as ‘Pakistan’ Resolution by the Hindu press since, by then, the print was also communally divided in India. Thus, Jinnah’s call on March 23, 1940, for a separate state for Indian Muslims of the Muslim majority provinces, was clearly dictated by Muslim needs in a political situation where they found themselves at a loss, in a predicament and slipping towards an impending fiasco.

The writer heads the History Department at University of Sargodha. He has been a research fellow at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He can be reached at abrar.zahoor@hotmail.com His X handle: @AbrarZahoor1