The great human tragedy of hundreds of thousands of lives lost at the time of Partition had more to do with the partition of the province of Punjab than the division of India. The primary responsibility for the loss of life at Partition should thus lie with those who sought to tear asunder the unity of this historic province. Congress is squarely to blame for these partitions and by this I mean both the division of India and the partitions of Punjab and Bengal. On both counts, the Congress leadership was callously unconcerned with the toll it would take.

Anyone who has studied the events of the 1940s knows one immutable truth: Jinnah and the Muslim League would have agreed to a suitably federal and consociational India with an autonomous “Pakistan” within it. As Anil Seal and H. M. Seervai have pointed out—and this must be underscored—it was the Congress leadership that partitioned India, not Jinnah or the Muslim League. Even Maulana Azad grudgingly admits this in his memoir. Even in the aftermath of the Partition, Jinnah told Hashoo Kewal Ramani: “Look here, I never wanted this damn Partition! It was forced upon me by Sardar Patel. And now they want me to eat humble pie and raise my hands in defeat.”

Second was the question of partition of Punjab and Bengal. It was the Congress which argued that if there must be a partition of India, the logic should be extended to constituent units as well. Punjab and Bengal, unlike United India (which was a British creation), were primordial entities that predated British rule. India had never been a single political entity in its history except briefly under Asoka and Aurangzeb. A united India thus had to be formed by the consensus of federating units. Whatever number of federations that were to be born from within the British Indian Empire was to have the consent of these federating units as a whole, i.e., all of Punjab and all of Bengal.

Even if we accept that the maximum demand of the Muslim League was the creation of a separate federation of Muslim majority provinces, there was no legal or constitutional inconsistency in asking for a division of India (division, not partition) into two federations and the proposition that provinces should stay together as a whole. Indeed, it was the correct constitutional and legal position. Provinces were constituent units and sovereign under the Government of India Act 1935. Any federations, one or two or more, had to be formed with the consent of these provinces. That was the constitutional logic, as is apparent to anyone who has read the history of constitutional development in that all-important decade of the 1930s.

Bhai Kalachand As Sant And Servant Of Pre-Partition Hyderabad

It is true that Iqbal in his famous address in 1930 had spoken of territorial adjustment. Ambedkar had later written about the need to redraw the boundaries of Punjab and Bengal. Still, the demand as posited by the Muslim League in the Lahore Resolution spoke of constituent units, and these units were the provinces, not districts or tehsils. One is not oblivious to the apparent inconsistency in the demand for a Muslim national state and the retention of large populations of Hindus and Sikhs as minorities. However, it may be stated here that as much as many imagined Pakistan as a homogenous Muslim national state as opposed to a........

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