indian muslims (muhajirs) rather than punjabis are more enthusiasitic about the creation of pakistan?
-------------------------------------------
The Pakistan Movement did not receive uniform support from the regions of India that became Pakistan. Its staunchest supporters were the Muslims of central India who had moved to Pakistan as muhajirs (refugees). The Muslims of East Bengal and their leaders were strong supporters, but support in Punjab came late, and in the NWFP the Pathan leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was opposed to Jinnah and a close ally of Mahatma Gandhi and the nationalist Congress. In independent Pakistan, as Alavi notes, there was "no automatic and universal translation of the attribute of Muslim faith or Muslim by descent to an automatic assertion of Muslim ethnic identity.39 Once the issue of faith was set aside, national politics invariably came to reflect the ethnic cleavages within the country.
National integration was made difficult by the country's physical division and the absence of a common language. Urdu was the language of Muslims of central India, and Jinnah's declaration making it Pakistan's national language sparked a vernacular movement in East Bengal. It sowed the seeds of ethnic Bengali nationalism that would eventually, when added to other grievances, lead to the separatist movement among the Bengalis and the making of Bangladesh. But most importantly, the growth and persistence of ethnic nationalism in Pakistan reflected the weakness of representation at the center in a federal system.
The long hiatus between independence and the enactment of the first constitution in 1956 entrenched the dominant role of civil-military bureaucracy in state institutions. Unrepresentative government by an oligarchy of senior civil-military administrators alienated the people from national politics. The dominant role of Punjab within this oligarchy, in association with the majority of the Urdu-speaking refugees from India who settled in West Pakistan, was resented by the rest of the country. It was in this context of maintaining or perpetuating domination by one province and ethnic group that all subsequent schemes of East-West representation prior to 1971 were proposed by the civil-military elite and its allies, and repeatedly found unacceptable by the majority. Representation according to population meant that East Bengal (formally designated East Pakistan in 1955), which contained the largest segment of the population, would have proportionally the largest representation in the federal parliament.
Unable to deny this in principle, Punjabi politicians, with the support of civil-military oligarchs, sought to eviscerate East Bengal's parliamentary majority. The One Unit scheme of 1955, which was introduced by the governor-general to amalgamate the four western provinces into one political and administrative wing and place East and West Pakistan on an equal basis of representation, was designed to deny East Pakistan its majority population status.40 This scheme was also contrary to the spirit of Islamic brotherhood, of the claim that Muslims-by faith and not ethnicity-constituted a nation, and was the basis for the partition of India. The One Unit idea was retained in the 1962 constitution and contributed to the increasing sense of political disparity among the Bengali vernacular elite. In the 1973 constitution that followed the break-up of Pakistan, the federal system was restored by dissolving the One Unit scheme.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------
The Pakistan Movement did not receive uniform support from the regions of India that became Pakistan. Its staunchest supporters were the Muslims of central India who had moved to Pakistan as muhajirs (refugees). The Muslims of East Bengal and their leaders were strong supporters, but support in Punjab came late, and in the NWFP the Pathan leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was opposed to Jinnah and a close ally of Mahatma Gandhi and the nationalist Congress. In independent Pakistan, as Alavi notes, there was "no automatic and universal translation of the attribute of Muslim faith or Muslim by descent to an automatic assertion of Muslim ethnic identity.39 Once the issue of faith was set aside, national politics invariably came to reflect the ethnic cleavages within the country.
National integration was made difficult by the country's physical division and the absence of a common language. Urdu was the language of Muslims of central India, and Jinnah's declaration making it Pakistan's national language sparked a vernacular movement in East Bengal. It sowed the seeds of ethnic Bengali nationalism that would eventually, when added to other grievances, lead to the separatist movement among the Bengalis and the making of Bangladesh. But most importantly, the growth and persistence of ethnic nationalism in Pakistan reflected the weakness of representation at the center in a federal system.
The long hiatus between independence and the enactment of the first constitution in 1956 entrenched the dominant role of civil-military bureaucracy in state institutions. Unrepresentative government by an oligarchy of senior civil-military administrators alienated the people from national politics. The dominant role of Punjab within this oligarchy, in association with the majority of the Urdu-speaking refugees from India who settled in West Pakistan, was resented by the rest of the country. It was in this context of maintaining or perpetuating domination by one province and ethnic group that all subsequent schemes of East-West representation prior to 1971 were proposed by the civil-military elite and its allies, and repeatedly found unacceptable by the majority. Representation according to population meant that East Bengal (formally designated East Pakistan in 1955), which contained the largest segment of the population, would have proportionally the largest representation in the federal parliament.
Unable to deny this in principle, Punjabi politicians, with the support of civil-military oligarchs, sought to eviscerate East Bengal's parliamentary majority. The One Unit scheme of 1955, which was introduced by the governor-general to amalgamate the four western provinces into one political and administrative wing and place East and West Pakistan on an equal basis of representation, was designed to deny East Pakistan its majority population status.40 This scheme was also contrary to the spirit of Islamic brotherhood, of the claim that Muslims-by faith and not ethnicity-constituted a nation, and was the basis for the partition of India. The One Unit idea was retained in the 1962 constitution and contributed to the increasing sense of political disparity among the Bengali vernacular elite. In the 1973 constitution that followed the break-up of Pakistan, the federal system was restored by dissolving the One Unit scheme.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comment