The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

Confusingly, Jinnah spoke to both sides of the argument. In addresses to Muslim community leaders, the Quaid spoke of an ‘Islamic state’ and embraced the ‘Two-Nation Theory’ – the idea that Islam and Hinduism were distinct social and cultural orders that could never coexist. ‘La ilaha il-Allah!’ chanted his supporters. ‘There is no God but Allah!’ But in newspaper interviews, Jinnah was far vaguer about the role of religion in any future state, and he appeared to shield his true intentions and personal beliefs behind lawyerly formulations. Jinnah’s ideological tango on Islam foreshadowed an ambiguity that would become the refuge of Pakistani leaders for decades to come, mostly to disastrous effect. And Jinnah may not even have wanted a country at all. The historian Ayesha Jalal has unearthed evidence that, for many years, the demand for Pakistan was little more than a bargaining ploy, a threat to wring concessions from the reluctant Congress Party. It was a risky strategy. The talks with Nehru spluttered, stalled, and then were rapidly overtaken by events on the ground. The Calcutta riots, in August 1946, sounded the alarm for India’s slow-boil political tensions. Four thousand people died in frenzied clashes between Muslims and Hindus; foreign reporters arriving in Calcutta compared the heaped corpses with the horrors they had recently witnessed at Auschwitz. The unrest spread, and soon the poison of communal hatred was pumping through the veins of British India. Hindus c...