Jinnah’s demand for undivided Punjab and Bengal in Pakistan

In a recent talk given by noted journalist and intellectual Wajahat Masood at the Pakistani Al-Mawrid society on 21 May 2025, he meandered from one event to another, making peculiar observations to finally, to my very great surprise, propose the thesis that when the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, demanded that the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal be given undivided to Pakistan—while India must be divided on the basis of the two-nation theory—his demand was not about creating an Islamic Pakistan but a secular one, because in both Punjab and Bengal, non-Muslims constituted large minorities. It can be noted that in undivided Punjab, 39% of the population was Hindu or Sikh, while in united Bengal, 48% were Hindu. Although Wajahat Masood’s perspective is original, it is flawed both factually and logically.

Jinnah, in his presidential address at Lahore on 22 March 1940, laid down in a marathon speech that Muslims and Hindus were on no account one nation and to keep them together was an invitation to civil war. On such a basis, he launched an unrelenting campaign at all levels—in public speeches, addresses at educational institutions, press conferences to journalists both local and foreign, and in his writings.

Never at any stage, even obliquely, did he agree to sharing power with the Indian National Congress. He damned its leaders as a caste Hindu-dominated political party determined to exterminate Muslims and annihilate all traces of Islam. I challenge Wajahat Masood or anyone else to bring forth contradictory evidence from Jinnah’s utterances and writings—or for that matter, from the Muslim League. In fact, Jinnah vehemently denounced those who suggested that he was using Pakistan merely as a bargaining chip for more powers to Muslims in a united India.

Wajahat Masood, of course, has not put forth the ludicrous argument that Jinnah did not want partition and that it was the Congress which forced it upon him. His thesis is that had the whole of Punjab and Bengal been given to Pakistan, their large non-Muslim minorities would have made an Islamic Pakistan out of the question. That, of course, assumes that the non-Muslims would have been willing to live in a Muslim-dominated Pakistan, which the facts tell us they did not.

We can now analyse the concept of a nation and its logical implications upon which Jinnah grounded his demand for Pakistan. There are many variations of the definitions of a nation, but logically all can be subsumed under two ideal types: one, the territorial concept of a nation, which includes all bona fide residents of a territory as equal members of the nation irrespective of religion, caste, sect or ethnicity; and two, the ascriptive cultural definition, whereby a certain group constitutes a separate nation based on religion, sect, caste or ethnicity, irrespective of a common territory.

Jinnah’s definition was the cultural ascriptive one. He not only underlined that Muslims and Hindus were two separate nations but that they were two antagonistic nations who, under no circumstances, could live peacefully in one state. Forcing them to do so, he argued, was an invitation to civil war. Upon such a basis, he mobilised Muslim support for Pakistan.

Now we can take into account how non-Muslims perceived his two-nation theory. A week after Jinnah delivered his presidential two-nation speech on 22 March 1940, Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia of the Sikh Nationalist Party declared that the Sikhs would never reconcile to living in a Muslim Pakistan and would demand a partition of Punjab so that areas with Sikh and Hindu majorities could be separated and given to either a separate Sikh state or to secular India. Soon afterwards in Bengal, Hindu Mahasabha leader Syama Prasad Mukherjee demanded a partition of Bengal so that Hindu-majority areas were included in India and not Pakistan. Only in March 1947 did the Congress Party support the Sikh demand for the partition of Punjab, and in April 1947 Mukherjee’s call for partitioning Bengal.

Already in the Motilal Nehru Report of 1928 and at the Round Table Conferences in Britain in 1931–32, it had been pointed out that in Punjab there were contiguous Muslim and non-Muslim districts. In Dr Ambedkar’s book on Pakistan, he again identified the cut-off points in Punjab based on these contiguous populations. In 1944, during the Gandhi–Jinnah talks, Gandhi agreed to Pakistan if a plebiscite were held in Punjab and Bengal to determine whether the people wanted it. Jinnah agreed to the plebiscite but insisted that only Muslims should be allowed to vote.

The truth is that the Cabinet Mission told Jinnah that a Pakistan with large non-Muslim minorities would contradict the logic of his two-nation theory.

In 1947, Jinnah began to clamour for the whole of Punjab and Bengal, claiming that Punjabi Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs and Bengali Hindus and Muslims were indivisible nations because of a shared homeland, culture and traditions. On the all-India level, however, he rejected the idea that Hindus and Muslims were one nation. Such a claim was logically untenable, and Viceroy Lord Mountbatten told him so.

Let me illustrate the fallacious nature of Jinnah’s claims on Punjab and Bengal by applying three basic rules of logic:

Law of Identity

If Indian Muslims were a discrete and distinct nation with nothing in common with Hindus, then that proposition must hold as true.

Law of Non-Contradiction

If Muslims and Hindus were two nations, then the statement that they are not two nations cannot be simultaneously true.

Law of the Excluded Middle

Either Hindus and Muslims are two nations, or they are not. There is no middle ground.

Jinnah, realising the flawed nature of his claim, then in May 1947 demanded a corridor through a thousand miles of Indian territory to connect East and West Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, nobody took it seriously.

The 3 June 1947 Partition Plan, presented by Mountbatten on All India Radio, included provisions that the Punjab and Bengal Assemblies would vote on whether to keep their provinces united in Pakistan or to partition them so non-Muslim areas would be given to India. Thereafter, Nehru, Jinnah, and Sardar Baldev Singh accepted partition, albeit with differing views.

On 21 June, the Bengal Assembly decided to partition the province so Hindu-majority districts would be allocated to India. On 23 June 1947, the Punjab Assembly did likewise.

Now I address another point about which not only Wajahat Masood but many others are confused. Since Jinnah was a modern man whose dietary habits, Western attire and manners were not consistent with those of a pious Muslim, how could such a man want Pakistan to be an Islamic state? He even wanted large non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan. How could such a state be Muslim?

I have explained at length in Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History (over 808 pages) that Jinnah’s main objective was justifying partition. He could not claim it on the basis of a common homeland if Hindus and Muslims were antagonistic nations. Therefore, he aroused fears that Islam and Muslims would be liquidated if India was not partitioned. In reaction, similar fears took root among Punjabi Hindus, Sikhs, and Bengali Hindus of becoming second-class citizens in a Muslim Pakistan.

More importantly, by rejecting Gandhi’s proposal for a plebiscite in Muslim-majority regions, Jinnah destroyed the chances of a peaceful partition. Lord Wavell, an admirer of Jinnah and critic of Gandhi, noted that in the end Jinnah got the same Pakistan Gandhi had proposed—but only after rejecting it. Tragically, this led to communal riots that claimed a million lives and was compounded by floods and disease.

It is no wonder Jinnah’s 11 August 1947 speech about equal rights for all fell flat, especially among Muslims and his closest disciples to whom Jinnah and the Muslim League, along with Barelvi ulema and pirs, had promised a paradise on earth based on Islamic principles of justice and fairness.

Therefore, it is not relevant what kind of Pakistan Jinnah said he wanted; what matters is what his followers believed he was promising: a state for Muslims and for the glory of Islam. On 7 March 1949, East Pakistani Hindus were told in the Constituent Assembly by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan and others that Pakistan would be an ideal Muslim state consistent with Jinnah’s vision. That was, and remains, incontrovertible.

In the 78 years since, Pakistan has not stabilised as an ideal Muslim state. Instead, exclusionary Islamist ideas have trumped democratic norms. I have analysed how and why this happened in several books. My sympathies lie with Wajahat Masood’s intent to resist the Islamist juggernaut—but his reasoning is, in logical terms, flawed.

We must discard invoking Jinnah and instead make a clean break from the foundations upon which Pakistan was historically built. We must develop creative arguments for moving forward, rooted in the best values of the 21st century.

Courtesy: The Friday Times, Pakistan

https://thefridaytimes.com/08-Jul-2025/jinnah-s-demand-for-undivided-punjab-and-bengal-in-pakistan

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