With the onset of modernity in the Indian (Muslim) politics, ambivalence came to envelop the socio-political self of the Muslims. The consensual deficit, or the expression ‘ambivalence’ that I am using here for the want of a better word, remained the defining characteristic of the Muslim politics, from Sir Syed Ahmad Khan to Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Its most crystalised signification was Muhammad Ali Jauhar’s articulation at the London Round Table Conference about the duality of identity that he epitomised — the Muslim and the Indian. What it implied was the tenuous connection between the two categories, the Indian and the Muslim.

A decade later, de-Indianisation of anyone proclaiming him/herself a Muslim was a necessary stipulation. Jinnah sahib quite categorically underlined this in his presidential address in Lahore. It also meant the de-historicisation of the Muslim self, thereby raising several questions about its context.

Dissociating the Muslim collective self from its Indian moorings meant doing away with the ‘context’ without which the whole exercise of existence is rendered meaningless. Intellectually speaking, that ambivalence becomes even more entangled, particularly when Islam while flourishing in the subcontinent assumed its distinct manifestation vis a vis the Arab version of it. The question was: how could almost 800 years of its evolution in the Indian environment be repudiated.

To trace the genealogy of this repudiation, getting back to the days of Warren Hastings, the East India Company governor general, would be quite instructive. According to Hastings, as Bernard Cohen noted, “there existed in the subcontinent, “a fixed body of laws, codes that had been set down or established by ‘law givers.’ Over the passage of time these had been adulterated by accretions, interpretations and commentaries.” Thus, Hastings set himself the task of restoring these ‘original’ texts in all their purity so that the British could be freed from dependence upon the Indian legal scholars of Sanskrit or Arabic.

In civil suits regarding marriage, inheritance and the like, Hastings wrote, “the Laws of the Quran with respect to the Muslims (Mohammadans) and those of the Shashter with respect to the Hindus (Gentoos) would be adhered to.” This primacy of the foundational text orchestrated by Warren Hastings in the second half of the 18^th Century was the first and the most crucial step towards de-historisation of the religious aspect of the Muslims.

That gave gradual rise to fundamentalist tendencies among the Muslims. After 1857, the eruption of the reform movements among the north Indian Muslims was not abrupt. They kept on imbibing Hastings’ prescriptions and, finally, attained maturity in 1860s and 1870s. Hastings had the same prescription for the Hindus which resulted in similarly exclusionist tendencies among them.

Such tendencies culminated in the reform movements like Arya Samaj, Hindu Mahasabha and later the RSS. But here we are concerned with the Muslims. They adhered to the textual sources and for reference to their context, connected with loci outside India. Thereby they denied themselves the immediacy of the lived experience that spanned over several centuries.

Consequently, they were caught up in a state of intellectual/cultural ambivalence. ‘Indian’ and ‘Muslim’ became two distinct selves and in a speech by Jinnah sahib on the eve of Pakistan Resolution that distinctness was transformed into a sort of dialectical relationship between the categories. Indian was unequivocally associated with Hinduism, therefore, the Muslim community had to de-Indianise itself.

Another interpretation, that has been professed quite zealously by Sindhi and Baloch nationalists, is that the resolution envisaged a form of confederation rather than a unitary or federal structure.

Several other questions stare us in the face while analysing the Pakistan Resolution after 81 years of its occurrence. We will take those questions up one by one in sequential order.

It is a well-known fact that Pakistan Resolution has been exhaustively written about by scholars of different hues and it has been variously contextualised. The fundamental point of contention was whether the Resolution called for addressing the communal problem through establishing a single nation state for the Muslims or proposed a multi-state solution, considering the ethnic and lingual diversity among the Indian Muslims?

From the text of the Resolution, it was evident that it presented no single state solution. It was as ambivalent as Iqbal’s Allahabad address of 1930. Whether he asked for a single state or states remains a moot point to this day. Probably because Muslims from every corner had convened in Lahore on that occasion, the Muslim League leadership did not consider it advisable to broach the question.

Another interpretation, that has been professed quite zealously by Sindhi and Baloch nationalists, is that the resolution envisaged a form of confederation rather than a unitary or federal structure. Mir Mumtaz Bhutto and Nawab Akbar Bugti always stressed provincial autonomy as the only way to bring about peace and harmony in Pakistan. Mumtaz Bhutto invoked the Pakistan Resolution to plead his case for confederation.

One may argue that the case for Muslim separatism was in an embryonic form in 1940 when the resolution was passed in Lahore. The idea kept evolving over the years and like the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League thought of establishing a state with a strong centre. The idea of a state with a strong centre had a valid justification. With tribalism and landlordism as stark socio-political realities, Pakistan needed intensive reforms that could only be carried out if the centre had vast powers invested in it. The voices calling for a confederal structure wanted to stall such a reform process. Is confederation a workable proposition in a post-colonial polity? A confederation could only have worked effectively had it been established in a united Pakistan (prior to 1971).

Another question that has not yet been raised was about Quaid-i-Azam’s view about Muslims and Islam. The decade of 1930s was marked with an intellectual resurgence among the Muslims throughout the world. Several political theories were propounded in different corners of the Muslim world. Was there any reflection of the events taking place in the Muslim world and beyond in the speech that Quaid-i-Azam made in March 1940? This will form the topic of the next column.

(To be continued)

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore