torates for Muslims. AIML and INC also agreed to
support the British in World War I; more than 1
million Indians served in the British armed forces
during this war.
After the war, both organizations participated
in the Khilafat movement (1919–24), but their
relations grew more strained when the move-
ment failed. Muslims continued to participate in
the effort to achieve self-government, but AIML
leadership became increasingly concerned about
their minority status in a democratic republic
where Hindus would be in the majority. They
knew that not only were they in the minority,
but also that the Muslim populace was scattered
across India, speaking different languages and
having different social statuses. Instituting the
sharia
or an Islamic government was not on
their agenda. Rather, they sought ways to create
a sense of common purpose among India’s Mus-
lims to protect their political interests. Whereas
the leadership in Congress favored creating a
centralized federal government elected by the
majority with no guaranteed reservations for
Muslims, AIML leaders wanted more provin-
cial autonomy in parts of India where Muslims
were in the majority. They also wanted at least
a third of the seats in the legislature reserved
for Muslims. Not all Muslim leaders, however,
favored Muslim political advocacy. Indian ulama,
especially the Deobandis, envisioned a Muslim
community who were educated in Islam and
its moral principles living together with other
Indians. Indeed, many supported the INC, as did
several prominent secular Muslims.
As Hindu and Muslim approaches to self-gov-
ernment diverged internally as well as externally,
many Indians joined in opposing British reluc-
tance to surrender power to the Indian people.
In the forefront of those opposed to Indian inde-
pendence was Winston Churchill (d. 1965), an
imperialist and political conservative who would
become England’s heroic prime minister during
World War II. Regarding Indians as children who
needed to be disciplined, the British resorted on
several occasions to the use of brute force to quell
acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent demon-
strations. Nevertheless, Indian political parties
achieved greater voting rights and were able to
hold elections in 1937. This brought the INC to
power for the first time. The AIML had a weak
showing in these elections; even where Muslims
were in the majority, local parties based on class
rather than religious identity did better than the
AIML. The INC, on the other hand, failed to bring
about meaningful changes in the aftermath of the
election, thus limiting its ability to win skeptical
Muslim voters to its ranks.
World War II brought further division between
the two parties. The INC, departing from its pro-
British stance in World War I, refused to support
the British. Subhash Bose (d. 1945), a two-term
INC president, even raised an army with Japanese
support to fight against them, hoping to achieve
independence by bringing about a British defeat.
The mainstream INC leadership, led by Gandhi,
won widespread popular support by mobiliz-
ing large-scale acts of civil disobedience against
the British, known as the Quit India Movement.
Many of the party’s leaders spent the war in prison
as a consequence, but they triumphed after the
war by sweeping the elections of 1945–46. The
AIML, on the other hand, decided to support the
British war effort in the hope that their political
position would improve with the war’s conclu-
sion. In the postwar elections, it, too, could claim
victory. It won all reserved seats in the national
legislature, plus most of the Muslim seats in local
legislatures.
The AIML’s success was a result of a strategy
of reaching out to rural voters through Sufi pirs
and taking advantage of divisions among local
political parties. Jinnah’s party also gained popu-
lar support among Muslims by invoking the ideal
of Pakistan, a “pure land” for all Indian Muslims
where they could be free to realize their ideals to
the fullest. The idea of a political entity to protect
Muslims from domination by non-Hindus had
been articulated earlier by m
Uhammad
i
qbal
(d.
K 356
India
1938), a leading Indian intellectual, past presi-
dent of AIML, and close associate of Jinnah. In
the election’s aftermath, Jinnah claimed to be the
“sole spokesman” for India’s Muslims, but he was
still undecided about whether that state would be
within the boundary of an Indian nation or out-
side it. Most Muslims, in fact, were not calling for
a two-state partition but a self-governing Muslim
entity in a united India. Hindu-Muslim commu-
nal rioting and the inability to find a compromise
solution with INC leadership, particularly with
its chairman, Jawaharlal Nehru (d. 1964), even-
tually convinced Jinnah that a separate Muslim
state in areas where Muslims were in the majority
was indeed necessary. Such an entity would have
to consist of grouped provinces, not fragmented
states scattered across India as some were propos-
ing. The two provinces that would form the new
Muslim state were the Punjab in the west and
Bengal in the east.
The British realized that in their weakened
postwar position they could no longer hold
nationalist forces at bay in India or anywhere
else in the world where they still had colonies
or mandate territories. In March 1946, there-
fore, they sent a high-level delegation to India
to try to mediate the differences between the
contending Indian nationalist parties, hoping
to prevent a two-state partition. This is what
Gandhi desired, too, and he even proposed that
Jinnah be named India’s first prime minister, an
idea that was ignored. Hindu nationalists assas-
sinated him in January 1948 because of their
anger over his efforts to achieve reconciliation
between Muslims and Hindus. In the end, the
British delegation failed, and Lord Mountbatten,
the Crown’s last viceroy, was appointed in Feb-
ruary 1947 to oversee the drawing of political
boundaries and the smooth transfer of power to
the leaders of India and Pakistan no later than
June 1948.
The Punjab region straddled the western bor-
der between the two newly created countries and
became the site where intercommunal hatreds
exploded in a frenzy of mass murder, rape, and
flight during the summer of 1947. Terrified Sikhs
and Hindus fled eastward to India, and terrified
Muslims fled westward to Pakistan. Although
statistics in such turbulent conditions are often
imprecise, it is widely accepted that as many as
10 million were uprooted and 1 million died in
the violence. The reverberations of this painful
moment in Indo-Pakistani history can still be
felt in the streets and byways of both countries.
Pakistani Muslims remember this event as a h
iJra
,
recalling the Hijra of m
Uhammad
from m
ecca
to
m
edina
in 622.
On August 15, 1947, India’s first prime minis-
ter, Jawaharlal Nehru, stood before a large crowd
and proclaimed India’s independence. It was a
bittersweet moment, because it combined the
thrill of independence with the pains of parti-
tion. Nehru chose to raise India’s new flag that
day in front of Old Delhi’s Red Fort, the former
seat of the Mughal rulers. The previous evening,
speaking before the Constituent Assembly in New
Delhi, he had declared, “The past clings on to us
still.” The choice of the site and Nehru’s words
indicate that the founding of the new republic was
done with a keen awareness of how it had taken
shape during a long history of Hindu, Muslim,
and British interaction. It is also worth noting
that not all Indian Muslims migrated to Pakistan.
About half of them stayed, declaring that India
was their true home.
On August 15, 2007, India celebrated its 60th
anniversary. The intervening years were ones
that saw Muslim participation in Indian politics,
including three Muslims who served as president.
They were also a time marked by several conflicts
and near-conflicts with Pakistan. The two coun-
tries still have not reached a settlement on the
question of Kashmir, a borderland Muslim major-
ity state that was officially made part of India at
the time of partition. Nevertheless, Indians and
Pakistanis continue to share a common history
and culture, including a love for romantic poetry,
popular music, curried foods, Bollywood films,
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