THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND THE PARTITION OF INDIAJinnah, Rahmat Ali and the idea of PakistanThe Round Table Conferences in London once more provided a congenial
political arena for Jinnah. He actually settled down in London for several
years and practised law, making a good deal of money. To many
contemporary observers it might have seemed as if he had left Indian
politics for good and would spend the rest of his life in England. He was,
after all, nearly 60 years old. While he was in England he was confronted
with a scheme proposed by another expatriate Indian Muslim, Rahmat Ali,
who lived in Cambridge where he had founded the Pakistan National
Movement.
Rahmat Ali was a Panjabi who had made some money early in life as a
legal advisor to a rich Baluchi landlord; he had then gone to Cambridge as
a student. He was inspired by Mohammad Iqbal’s call for the
establishment of a Muslim state in northwestern India, a proposal which
Iqbal had made in his presidential address to the Muslim League session of
- But he felt that Iqbal’s proposal had been too vague. Moreover,
when Iqbal attended the Round Table Conference he had refrained from
pressing this issue. Thus Rahmat Ali felt called upon to spell out more
clearly what would be entailed by an autonomous Muslim state in north-
western India; he also found a name for it: Pakistan. This was an acronym
composed of the first letters of Panjab, Afghan Province (i.e. Northwest
Frontier Province), Kashmir and Sindh and the last syllable of Baluchistan.
Issuing a flood of pamphlets, Rahmat Ali saw to it that his ideas were
noticed everywhere—particularly in certain British circles, and, of course,
among his countrymen at home.
Jinnah disliked Rahmat Ali’s ideas and avoided meeting him. To Jinnah,
himself a diaspora Muslim, this Panjabi scheme must at this time have
resembled a counsel of despair rather than the bright hope of the future,
for it completely disregarded the Muslims in the Muslim minority
provinces. In fact, Rahmat Ali had not even considered the other Muslim
majority province, Bengal, and only when this was later pointed out to him
did he coin the term ‘Bangistan’ and advocated the establishment of
another state like Pakistan. It was an irony of fate that Jinnah, despite his
initial abhorrence of the scheme, subsequently had to adopt most of
Rahmat Ali’s programme without giving him credit for it. But before this
happened, Jinnah had hoped for a political comeback under the
Government of India Act of 1935; it was only when this hope was
disappointed that he changed his views.
Jinnah had been elected once more to the Central Legislative Assembly
in October 1934 while he was still in London. His constituency was the
Muslims of Bombay and there was no other contestant; he could therefore
win this election even in absentia. He had earlier intended to enter
Parliament on a Conservative Party ticket, but the Tories did not want him