Pathway to India's Partition: Volume III: The March to Pakistan 19371947 (Hardcover)

CHAPTER I

the Ground 1937-1939 (I): War on Congress and Intensified Stress on Muslim Nationhood

AS NOTED IN THE previous volume, the desire for Partition and the creation of a sovereign Muslim State or States, based on the Muslim-majority provinces of India, had been in the air, particularly in the Punjab, since the mid 1920s and had been later forcefully articulated by a Punjabi student in Britain, Choudhary Rahmat Ali. The latter's ideas soon travelled to India and won quite a few adherents among the Muslim intelligentsia and youth, as testified to by the writings in the press, both in the Punjab and Bengal. Even more significant was the fact that by the summer of 1937 Jinnah and Iqbal-one, the tallest Muslim politician in India and the leader of the largest political organ- ization of Indian Muslims, and the other, long since acclaimed as the greatest poet-philosopher of Muslim nationalism and at that time holding the position of the President of the Muslim League in the Punjab had begun, on their own testimony, cherishing the new goal, though not yet proclaiming it publicly, obviously for political reasons, before the beginning of the final phase of negotiations between the leaders of the Congress and the League in 1937 regarding the formation of a popular ministry in UP under the Act of 1935; whose failure is even now considered by many as having been responsible for turning the minds of the League leaders, for the first time, towards Partition. This is proved beyond doubt by Iqbal's letters to Jinnah in May-June 1937, and Jinnah's foreword to the booklet containing Iqbal's letters to him, brought out through Jinnah's own initiative in 1943.