In 1906 an Official Wrote to Lady Minto That the Viceroy Had Pulled 62 Million Muslims Back From the 'Seditious Opposition.' Historians Still Disagree on Whether Britain, the Congress or Jinnah Himself Brought Pakistan About

On 1 October 1906, in the ballroom of Viceregal Lodge at Simla, thirty-five Muslim notables sat in a horseshoe facing the Viceroy’s chair while the Aga Khan read out an address. The Simla correspondent of the Indian Daily Telegraph counted them. Lady Minto, the Viceroy’s wife, slipped in by a side door with her daughters to listen, and that night she wrote in her journal that someone had called the day “an epoch in Indian history.”

The address gave the number of Muslims in India as “over sixty-two millions” and asked that Muslims be represented in any elected body as a community. Lord Minto replied that he was “entirely in accord” and that any electoral system in India that granted “a personal enfranchisement regardless of the beliefs and traditions of the communities composing the population of this continent” would be “doomed to mischievous failure.”

The same evening, Lady Minto’s journal says, she received a letter “from an official.” It reads: “I must send Your Excellency a line to say that a very, very big thing has happened to-day. A work of statesmanship that will affect India and Indian history for many a long year. It is nothing less than the pulling back of sixty-two millions of people from joining the ranks of the seditious opposition.”

The journal does not name the writer. Abhinav Chandrachud, in Republic of Religion, thinks it was probably the Viceroy’s private secretary, Dunlop Smith. V. P. Menon’s 1957 history of the transfer of power credits the sentence to Lady Minto herself, which her journal does not support. The sixty-two million was the deputation’s own figure, which Chandrachud ties to the census of 1901.

Chandrachud finds in the letter and the correspondence around it “some evidence” of a divide-and-rule policy. The historian Syed Razi Wasti, who appears below, calls that reading a distortion. How colonial rule designed India’s divide and the partition of Bengal in 1905 have their own pieces here. This one takes a narrower question, what pushed Mohammad Ali Jinnah from separate electorates to Pakistan, and sets three answers side by side: British policy, Congress policy and Jinnah’s own conviction. Each has a named historian and a paper trail, and each has documents that cut against it.

Who built the deputation

Minto wrote to the Secretary of State, John Morley, on 28 May 1906 that he had been “thinking a good deal lately of a possible counterpoise to Congress aims.” The remedy he sketched in that passage was a Council of Princes, and he did not mention Muslims. Morley answered on 6 June that his advisers, Walter Lawrence, Valentine Chirol and Sidney Low, all sang the same song: “Be sure that before long the Mahommedans will throw in their lot with the Congressmen against you,” and added, “I don’t know how true this may be or may not be.”

From the correspondence, Chandrachud reconstructs the summer that followed. Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk, secretary of the Aligarh college, asked its British principal, W. A. Archbold, on 4 August whether a Muslim deputation should wait on the Viceroy. Letters passed between Archbold and Dunlop Smith on 9 and 10 August, and Dunlop Smith told him permission had been obtained. Archbold then advised Mohsin-ul-Mulk to prepare a memorial, offered to draft or revise it because “I know how to phrase these things in proper language,” and added, “in all these views I must be in the background.” Dunlop Smith and Archbold, Chandrachud writes, advised Minto to give a “reassuring reply.”

Critics saw design from the first. The Amrita Bazar Patrika wrote on 4 October 1906 that the affair looked “a got-up affair and fully engineered by interested officials.” Maulana Mohammad Ali, who was Congress president in 1923, called it a “command performance.” Morley’s letter to Minto of 26 October shows what the reply was worth in London. It had “completely deranged the plans and tactics of the critical faction here,” he wrote, meaning his Radical critics at home, because it had stopped them “representing the Indian Government as the ordinary case of a bureaucracy versus the people.”

The other side is argued by the historian Syed Razi Wasti, whose evidence Belmekki summarises. Wasti calls the charge of engineering a distortion that underrates “the integrity and intellectual capability of Muslim leadership.” He points to Minto’s letter to Morley of 10 September 1906, which says “from what I hear, the Address is likely to be moderate in tone,” and reads it as showing that the Viceroy had no knowledge of its contents. League papers at Karachi, he also found, show that Mohsin-ul-Mulk borrowed money at 7 per cent from a lending company, King, King and Co., to pay for the deputation. Khursheed Aziz found no evidence that Muslims had been made to ask for separate electorates against their will, and allowed that some British officials probably took advantage of the divergence, since otherwise they “would have been more than human.”

Chandrachud concedes that the administration did not manufacture Mohsin-ul-Mulk’s fear of being outvoted in the new councils, and he quotes the historian B. R. Nanda: “what is surprising is not that the Muslim leaders should have wanted to lead a deputation and submit a memorial to the Viceroy, but that they should have been so warmly welcomed and given such wide-ranging assurances so hastily.”

Separate electorates, 1908 to 1932

The Government of India told London in October 1908 that “the Indian Muhammadans are much more than a religious body. They form in fact an absolutely separate community, distinct by marriage, food and custom, and claiming in many cases to belong to a different race from the Hindus.” Morley, Menon records, “was at first opposed to the principle of separate electorates, but ultimately gave in.” The Indian Councils Act of 1909 gave Muslims separate representation in Madras, Bombay, Bengal, the United Provinces and Eastern Bengal and Assam, and the Lucknow Pact of 1916 between the Congress and the League accepted separate electorates for Muslims.

Lady Minto’s published journal adds a conversation with Gandhi at a London party during the Round Table Conference. In her account he told her: “The Minto-Morley Reforms have been our undoing. Had it not been for the separate Electorates then established we should have settled our differences by now.” She says she answered that Gokhale had proposed them.

The Communal Award of 1932 carried the principle further. By Menon’s table, Muslims, 57 per cent of the Punjab’s population, received 86 of 175 provincial seats, and Sikhs, 13.2 per cent, received 32. In Bengal Muslims were 54.7 per cent of the population and received 119 of 250 seats.

Uttar Pradesh, 1937

The Muslim League won 108 of 485 Muslim seats in the provincial elections of 1937, Menon records. The Congress contested 58 Muslim seats and won 26. The Congress had a clear majority in the United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh, and the League leaders Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Ismail Khan expected places in the ministry.

Maulana Azad, who went to Lucknow to form the government, writes in India Wins Freedom that they “naturally expected that the Muslim League would have some share in the new Government.” He had held out hopes that both would be taken in. Then, he writes, “Jawaharlal had written to Choudhari Khaliquzzaman and Nawab Ismail Khan that only one of them could be taken into the Ministry.” Azad called it “a most unfortunate development.” Had the League’s offer been accepted, he wrote, “the Muslim League party would for all practical purposes have merged in the Congress,” and instead Jinnah “took full advantage of the situation and started an offensive which ultimately led to Pakistan.” Nehru, he says, argued that with “a strength of only twenty-six” the League could not claim more than one seat.

Khaliquzzaman remembers the terms differently. His memoir says that in July 1937 Azad, with Govind Ballabh Pant, soon to be the province’s premier, beside him, handed him a two-page typed note to sign. The note said that “the Muslim League group in the United Provinces Legislature shall cease to function as a separate group” and that the League’s parliamentary board “will be dissolved.” He called it a “death warrant” for the League and refused. The two League leaders had signed a note promising cooperation before he left Lucknow, Azad says. The two accounts do not fit together.

The Congress case is documented here from two sources. Nehru wrote in Ahmadnagar prison in 1944 that non-Congress partners were “usually politically and socially conservative” and might “tone down our whole social programme,” and that the decision against coalitions “was a natural and logical decision for us.” He added: “Nevertheless it is true that the consequences of it on the communal question were unfortunate and it led to a feeling of grievance and isolation among many Moslems.” Bipan Chandra and his co-authors argue that Jinnah was “a full-fledged liberal communalist” before the rebuff, that the League had raised the cry of “Islam in Danger” in the May 1937 by-elections before any talks began, that the Congress Socialists and Communists pressed Nehru to refuse a coalition, and, quoting Sarvepalli Gopal, that “any coalition with the League implied the Congress accepting a Hindu orientation and renouncing the right to speak for all Indians.” None of the sources we could open prints Nehru’s own letter to Khaliquzzaman of 1937.

Menon called the refusal of coalitions “the beginning of a serious rift” that “induced neutral Muslim opinion to turn to the support of Jinnah.” Ayesha Jalal, in an interview for the seventieth anniversary of Partition, said the Congress’s “eager embrace of the idea of non-negotiable and indivisible sovereignty” foiled Jinnah’s efforts “to win a large share of power for Muslims in an undivided and independent India.”

Linlithgow’s meetings with Jinnah, 1939 to 1940

The Congress ministries had resigned in October 1939, and the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, was seeing Jinnah often. At their meeting of 6 February 1940, in Menon’s account, Linlithgow warned Jinnah that it would be a mistake to think responsible British opinion would accept that “to stand still, much less to go back, was the right solution of their difficulties,” and said there was a need for “some positive and constructive effort.”

The historian V. N. Datta reads that as pressure and writes that at several meetings Linlithgow “urged him to produce an alternative to the Congress demand for Independence and the Constituent Assembly.” Datta quotes the Viceroy’s letter to the Secretary of State after the 6 February talk, “it was useless to appeal for support in Great Britain when policy was negation,” and concludes: “A month and a half later, the alternative was there, the Pakistan resolution.” The text we could read gives no archive reference for the letter.

On 13 March, a few days before the Lahore session, Menon says Jinnah told the Viceroy that if the British could not improve on their solution he and his friends “would have no option but to fall back on some form of partition of the country.” Linlithgow stayed non-committal, but “could not dispel the conviction from his mind that the Muslim attitude was undoubtedly hardening.” The League’s resolution at Lahore asked that the Muslim-majority zones of the north-west and east “be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.” Jinnah’s address said “it is a dream that the Hindus and Muslims can ever evolve a common nationality,” and described the “artificial unity of India” as dating “back only to the British conquest” and maintained “by the British bayonet.” The resolution did not use the word Pakistan.

The Pakistani historian Farooq Ahmad Dar argues that the League needed no prompting. The Sind Provincial Muslim League, with Jinnah presiding, had called at Karachi in October 1938 for separate federations of Muslim and non-Muslim states. Khaliquzzaman discussed separate Muslim states with the Secretary of State, Lord Zetland, in March 1939. Dar says Linlithgow had told Jinnah he was against partition, and cites the Viceroy’s papers for a letter of early April 1940 saying that Indian unity after British withdrawal was still the government’s aim. Asad Rahim Khan, in Dawn, quotes another, of 6 April: “I am myself disposed to regard Jinnah’s partition scheme as very largely in the nature of bargaining.”

Two offers in wartime

After the Congress passed its Ramgarh resolution in March 1940, Menon writes, the Viceroy “definitely turned his back on the Congress” and “felt that he should not alienate Muslim opinion or rub Jinnah the wrong way.” When Churchill took office in May, Menon says, Linlithgow told London it remained as important as ever to give “the fullest weight” to the Muslim position, since Muslims, in the Viceroy’s view, “were providing 60 per cent of the army.” The August Offer of 8 August, in Menon’s summary, said Britain could not transfer its responsibilities to any system of government “the authority of which was denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life.” The League’s Working Committee replied that the British government had “on the whole, practically met the demand of the Muslim League for a clear assurance that no future constitution, interim or final, will be adopted by the British Government without the Muslim League’s approval and consent.”

The Cripps draft declaration of March 1942 offered the right of “any province of British India that is not prepared to accept the new constitution to retain its present constitutional position, provision being made for its subsequent accession, if it so decides.” Linlithgow’s first reaction to the Cabinet’s draft, Menon writes, was that he “had himself fought shy of advertising local option,” which was almost certain to bring protests from Hindus in Bengal and the Punjab, from the Sikhs and probably from Bengal Muslims. The League’s Working Committee still rejected the draft on 11 April, saying “the only solution of India’s constitutional problem is the partition of India into independent zones,” and objecting that the right to stay out had been given to provinces formed “for administrative convenience and on no logical basis.” Gandhi wrote on 13 April that the proposal “contemplated Pakistan, and yet not the Pakistan of the Muslim League’s conception.”

The Cabinet Mission and Nehru’s press conference

The Cabinet Mission of 1946 proposed a federal centre limited to three subjects, with provinces grouped in three sections. Azad writes that the League accepted it because “this represented the utmost limit to which the British Government would go,” and that Jinnah told his Council he recommended acceptance “only because nothing better could be obtained.” Once the All-India Congress Committee had voted to accept the plan, Nehru told a press conference in Bombay that, in Azad’s wording, the Congress would enter the Constituent Assembly “completely unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise.”

Azad wrote: “I must place on record that Jawaharlal’s statement was wrong.” The League Council met in Bombay at the end of July and rejected the plan. Jinnah said, in Menon’s record, “This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods.” Menon adds that Jinnah had never been given an assurance on the five-five-two split of the interim government that the League resolution cited, and that Congress leaders afterwards explained their objection had been to a province being forced into a section by a larger neighbour. Azad called Nehru’s 1946 mistake “even more costly” than the one in Uttar Pradesh.

Dhulipala, summarising Jalal, says she argued that the plan “came close to what Jinnah really wanted” and was rejected by Congress leaders, whom he says she implied were “the real perpetrators” of Partition. Chandra and his co-authors, answering the wider claim that Jinnah could have been won over, say the Congress made every effort to negotiate with him from 1937 to 1939, that he “refused to tell the Congress leaders what the demands were,” and that by 1947 “perhaps, there was no other option.”

Attlee’s date and Mountbatten’s

Attlee told Parliament on 20 February 1947, in Menon’s summary, that Britain would transfer power “by a date not later than June 1948,” and said that if no agreed constitution emerged it would consider handing power over “whether as a whole to some form of central Government for British India, or in some areas to the existing provincial Governments, or in such other way as may seem most reasonable.” Menon records that Khizr Hyat Khan, the Unionist premier of the Punjab, resigned on 2 March because the statement made a League coalition essential, and that the League was “naturally jubilant.” The Congress Working Committee then proposed dividing the Punjab. Nehru wrote to Wavell on 9 March, in Menon’s summary, that if the League stayed out of the Constituent Assembly “the division of Bengal and the Punjab would become inevitable.”

Mountbatten told a press conference on 4 June, Menon records, “I think the transfer could be about the 15th of August.” Nisid Hajari writes that Mountbatten later boasted of having “plucked the date out of thin air,” quotes his chief of staff, Hastings Ismay, calling him a man “in need of front-wheel brakes,” and adds that the British did not seem to intend one hard deadline for both countries, since India could take power in August and Pakistan later. Nehru also wanted the British out quickly. Stanley Wolpert’s Shameful Flight, in the summary of the book reprinted by the 1947 Partition Archive, describes Britain’s “precipitous and ill-planned disengagement from India in 1947” and places the blame largely on Mountbatten. Anita Inder Singh, in the same archive’s summary of her book, holds that Britain’s long-term strategic interests were against partition while short-term tactics encouraged it. Gandhi said at his prayer meeting after the plan: “The British Government is not responsible for partition. The Viceroy has no hand in it.” The line drawn through the Punjab and Bengal is the subject of another piece here.

Bargaining counter or conviction

Jalal’s 1985 book The Sole Spokesman argued that Pakistan was Jinnah’s bargaining counter, a claim for parity with the Hindus inside a united India. Mushirul Hasan, as Asad Rahim Khan quotes him in Dawn, wrote that “the bargaining counter theory was a favourite one with British officials” and that “one is constrained to suggest that Ayesha Jalal has probably borrowed the idea from, among other sources, the British documents at the India Office Library.” Menon records that after Lahore “the best the average Muslim could say was that Jinnah did not mean it and was using it only as a bargaining weapon.”

Jinnah’s own words go the other way. On 21 September 1940, Asad Rahim Khan reports, he said: “It is not a counter for bargaining.” On 2 March 1941 he told the Muslim Students Federation at Lahore that the contest was “not only for material gain, but also for the very existence of the soul of the Muslim nation.” Ambedkar wrote, in the second edition of his book dated January 1945, that the Hindus thought Pakistan a bargaining manoeuvre, that the Muslims repudiated the suggestion, and that “it does seem that the Musalmans are devoted to Pakistan and are determined to have nothing else.”

The League’s convention of 7 to 9 April 1946, Dar reports, resolved that the Muslim zones “be constituted into a sovereign independent State,” singular where Lahore had said “States.” Dhulipala quotes Jalal’s description of Pakistan as an “undefined slogan” and argues, from Urdu journals and the writings of the ulama (Islamic scholars), that it was debated in concrete terms in the 1940s.

Menon records the League’s results. In 1937 it won 108 of 485 Muslim seats in the provinces, and in the elections to the central Assembly in December 1945 it won all thirty Muslim seats, with 86.6 per cent of the votes cast in Muslim constituencies.