The resolution moved on March 23 in the annual session of the Muslim League held in Lahore and unanimously approved on March 24 after speeches by the Muslim League leaders from different parts of British India, was a turning point in their political history. In the past, the Muslim League leadership demanded constitutional guarantees, political safeguards and a federal system with autonomy for the provinces in order to protect and advance Muslim identity, interest and rights. In March 1940, they formally abandoned the notion of seeking security for them within one united India. Instead, they opted for a new solution by demanding a separate country to secure the future of the Muslims of this Sub-continent.
Political continuity and change:
The Muslim League Resolution of March 1940 represented continuity and change so far as the Muslim political struggle in British India was concerned. The continuity was the centrality of Muslim socio-cultural identity, rights and interests to their political struggle. This objective did not change over time. What changed from time to time was their strategy to ensure the achievement of the objective of protecting and advancing the Muslim identity, rights and interests.
Initially, the Muslim elite avoided active politics and concentrated on getting modern education in the post-1857 period. In 1906, they became active in politics and demanded separate electorate for the Muslims as well as established an exclusive Muslim political party, ie All India Muslim League. It started as a forum of Muslim elite for articulating Muslim demands, presenting these to the British government and removing misunderstandings between the British government and the Muslim community. By 1913, the Muslim League revised its strategy and demanded self-rule for India. Later, they began to demand constitutional guarantees and safeguards for the Muslims. They also advocated for a federal constitutional order with autonomy for provinces in India. The major shift came by 1939-40, when they discarded the notion of federalism and demanded a separate state for them because they got convinced that their political future would not be secure in a united federal India. All this represented the continuity of the goal, ie protection and advancement of Muslim identity, rights and interests, and a change in the ways and means to achieve this goal. Thus, the passage of the March 1940 resolution offered a new approach to address the old question of their political future.
We cannot fully comprehend the significance of the March 1940 resolution without paying attention to Muslim politics in British India in the pre-1940 period. How and why they shifted from the demands of "safeguards," "guarantees," and "federalism" to a "separate homeland"? It is also important to study the Muslim politics in post-1940 period because the struggle for the establishment of Pakistan did not end in 1940. It went on for another seven years. It was during these seven years that the idea of separate homeland as floated in March 1940 was fully articulated, removing all ambiguities about what the Muslim League wanted. The historical transition of Muslims from the beginning of the 20th Century to 1947 has to be studied in order to understand what led them to opt for the establishment of Pakistan as an independent state rather than staying in one united and secular India, as advocated by the Congress Party.
All these questions have been comprehensively addressed in the 3rd revised and expanded edition of a book entitled "Aspect of the Pakistan Movement" by Dr Sikander Hayat (Islamabad: 2016). It is a fully documented and excellently argued book that builds a coherent narrative of the context and dynamics of the Muslim struggle for securing their political future in the post-British India. A detailed discussion based on critical appraisal of important political and constitutional developments and their implications for the Muslims makes it an essential reading for comprehending the making of Pakistan.
The discussion of the Muslim League's Lahore Resolution of March 1940 in Dr Sikander Hayat's book is comprehensive, making use of the major writings on the subject. It not only offers a detailed backdrop and the follow-up of the Resolution but also addresses the objections raised on it by different writers and responds to what is sometimes described as ambiguities in the Resolution. He rightly pointed out that "Jinnah declared that he, too, stood unequivocally for the freedom of India. But this freedom, he observed, must be freedom for all India and not freedom of one section, or worse still of the Congress caucus and slavery of Musalmans and other minorities." (p.161). He also argues that the Muslim demand for a separate homeland was based on Jinnah's "fundamental premise that the Muslims face an existential threat. They were doomed in Hindu India. The only way that they could be saved and indeed be free, empowered, and secure was to demand their own separate state of Pakistan. In this sense, the Pakistan demand or, for that matter, the Lahore resolution itself was a simple, straightforward case of Muslim right of self-determination." (pp.169-170)
The March 1940 Resolution used modern political terminology to outline Muslim demands in the context of India's political and constitutional developments. The demand for a separate homeland was purely worldly for securing the political future of Muslims of British India. By demanding a homeland for the Muslims, the Resolution rejected the federal model for India.
Muslim political experience
The change in the mindset of the Muslim League leadership from "federalism" to an "independence and sovereign state" was the outcome of the political experience since the late 1920s. Jinnah was a great champion of Hindu-Muslim unity but while working for this unity he wanted that the Congress Party should provide iron-clad constitutional guarantees for Muslim socio-cultural and historical identity, rights and interests. However, the contents of the Nehru Report (1928) disappointed him because the Congress was not willing to accommodate any political demand of the Muslim. He attempted to seek modification in the Nehru Report by restating Muslims concerns and demands in 1929, often described as Jinnah's Fourteen Points, which was a charter of cultural, political and economic demands of the Muslims. The Congress refused to accommodate these demands which alienated Jinnah and a number of other Muslim leaders from the Congress Party. The neglect of the Muslim demands by the Congress also manifested in the course of the Roundtable Conferences in London (1930-32).
The Congress attitude hardened towards the Muslim League after the Congress emerged victorious in the 1937 provincial elections in most non-Muslim majority provinces and the Muslim League performed poorly in the Muslim majority provinces. What really convinced the Muslim League leadership that the Congress Party was working on a plan to overwhelm Muslims as a distinct socio-cultural and political community was the disposition of the Congress governments in the non-Muslim majority provinces in 1937-39. The Muslim elite and especially the educated Muslims felt that cultural and educational policies of the Congress governments at the provincial level were working towards overwhelming their distinct socio-cultural identity and that the discriminatory policies of these governments minimised their chances of getting government jobs.
It was in 1938-39 that the Muslim leaders began to talk about reviewing their support to the federal model for India in view of their bitter experience under the Congress provincial governments. They lost confidence in the pure and simple federal parliamentary system because they learnt from their experience that it enabled the non-Muslim majority to rule in total disregard to the political sensitivities and demands of Muslim minority. Jinnah used Islamic idiom and discourse to project the Muslims of British India as a nation with a distinct "outlook of life and on life." He argued that the constitutional arrangements must recognise that there are two nations in India.
The Resolution
The Muslim League, therefore, demanded in the Resolution of March 1940 that the new constitution of India should be framed keeping in view the following principles.
1. The federal system of government as envisaged in the Government of India Act, 1935 "is totally unsuited to and unworkable in the peculiar conditions of this country and is altogether unacceptable to Muslim India."
2. The Muslims of India want that the existing constitutional plan should be totally "reconsidered" and that they would not accept any new constitutional plan "unless it is framed with their approval and consent."
3. The Muslims would not accept any constitutional plan unless it was it incorporated the principle "that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted, with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary, that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in the North Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign."
4. The Resolution also underlined that "adequate, effective and mandatory safeguards should be specifically provided in the constitution for minorities in these units and in the regions for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights and interests in consultation with them, and in other parts of India where the Mussalmans (Muslims) are in a minority adequate, effective and mandatory safeguards shall be specifically provided in the constitution for them and other minorities for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights and interests in consultation with them."
5. The Muslim League session authorised the Working Committee "to frame a scheme of constitution in accordance with these basic principles, providing for the assumption finally by the respective regions of all powers such a defence, external affairs, communications, customs and such other matters as may be necessary."
This Resolution advocated a new strategy for the Muslim political struggle for protection and advancement of their socio-cultural identity, rights and interests in British India. The Muslim League in its session in Madras (now renamed as Chennai) in April 1941 not only adopted the March 1940 resolution as one of its fundamental objectives but also added the word "together" after the word "grouped." (See no.3 above).
As the strategies of the Muslim League in its political struggle changed over time, we need to take into account the next seven years (1940-47) to understand the Muslim transition towards full independence. When the March 1940 Resolution was passed in Lahore, various schemes for Muslim homelands were in circulation that envisaged several territorial units for the Muslims in British India. Further, Muslim political parties other than the Muslim League were politically strong in Muslim majority provinces and the Muslim League did not want to alienate them by presenting a narrowly well-defined territorial sketch of the new state. It used the words like "states" and "autonomous and sovereign,' so that these Muslim parties that were used to hearing about multiple homelands are not alienated. However, as the Muslim League gained ground it began to argue that there would be a single sovereign state. By 1942, the word "state" had become a part of the Muslim League discourse. One of Jinnah's letters to Mahatama Gandhi in 1944 specially states that. As the Muslim League established its representative character in the 1946 provincial elections, the meeting of its parliamentarians held in Delhi in April 1946 was categorical in the demand for a sovereign and independent state of Pakistan. In other words the dynamics of the Muslim struggle for the protection and advancement of their identity, rights and interests cannot be understood without acknowledging its evolutionary nature. It evolved gradually from a rights movement to an independence movement.
Another important aspect of the March 1940 Resolution is that it reflected Muslim concerns and their future agenda in the context of British Indian politics. It was based on "Two Nations" formula as an alternate to the Congress nationalism that emphasised "One-nation" "One country" and "Secularism" as the basis of the new constitution for India. The Congress was unable to understand the impact of Islamic socio-cultural heritage and civilizational pride on the making of Muslim mindset and rejected their relevance to the struggle for securing independence from the British. However, the Muslim League wanted clearly laid down constitutional guarantees for the Muslims as a pre-condition for cooperation between the Congress and the Muslim League. As the Congress Party had some Muslims in its fold, it thought that it could bypass the Muslim League and its demands for constitutional safeguards and a separate state. This was a mistaken notion of the unity of India.
It was in this political context that the March 1940 Resolution was presented to redefine Muslim agenda for the future. This resolution did not suggest any constitutional formula for the projected state of Pakistan.
(The Author is an independent political analyst who holds PhD in Political Science/International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.)