History of Pakistan (1947–present)
Pakistan began on 14 August 1947 when the country came into being in the form of the Dominion of Pakistan within the British Commonwealth as the result of the Pakistan Movement and the partition of India. While the history of the Pakistani Nation according to the Pakistan government's official chronology started with the Islamic rule over the Indian subcontinent by Muhammad bin Qasim[1] which reached its zenith during Mughal Era. In 1947, Pakistan consisted of West Pakistan (today's Pakistan) and East Pakistan (today's Bangladesh). The President of the All-India Muslim League and later the Pakistan Muslim League, Muhammad Ali Jinnah became Governor-General while the secretary general of the Muslim League, Liaquat Ali Khan became Prime Minister. The constitution of 1956 made Pakistan an Islamic democratic country.
Pakistan faced civil war and Indian military intervention in 1971 resulting in the secession of East Pakistan as the new country of Bangladesh. The country has also unresolved territorial disputes with India, resulting in four conflicts. Pakistan was closely tied to the United States in Cold War. In the Afghan-Soviet War, it supported the Sunni Mujahideens and played a vital role in the defeat of Soviet Forces and forced them to withdraw from Afghanistan. The country continues to face challenging problems including terrorism, poverty, illiteracy, corruption, and political instability. Terrorism due to the War of Afghanistan damaged the country's economy and infrastructure to a great extent from 2001 to 2009 but Pakistan is once again developing.
Pakistan is a nuclear power as well as a declared nuclear-weapon state, having conducted six nuclear tests in response to five nuclear tests of their rival Republic of India in May 1998. The first five tests were conducted on 28 May and the sixth one on 30 May. With this status, Pakistan is seventh in the world, second in South Asia, and the only country in the Islamic World. Pakistan also has the sixth-largest standing armed forces in the world and is spending a major amount of its budget on defense. Pakistan is the founding member of the OIC, the SAARC, and the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition as well as a member of many international organizations including the UN, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Commonwealth of Nations, the ARF, the Economic Cooperation Organization, and many more.
Pakistan is a regional and middle power that is ranked among the emerging and growth-leading economies of the world and is backed by one of the world's largest and fastest-growing middle classes. It has a semi-industrialized economy with a well-integrated agriculture sector. It is one of the Next Eleven, a group of eleven countries that, along with the BRICs, have a high potential to become the world's largest economies in the 21st century. Many economists and think tanks suggested that by 2030 Pakistan become Asian Tiger and CPEC will play an important role in it. Geographically, Pakistan is also an important country and a source of contact between the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia.
Important leaders in the Muslim League highlighted that Pakistan would be a "New Madinah", in other words, the second Islamic state established after the Prophet Muhammad's creation of an Islamic state of Madinah which was later developed into the Rashidun Caliphate. Pakistan was popularly envisaged as an Islamic utopia, a successor to the defunct Islamic Caliphate, and a leader and protector of the entire Islamic world. Islamic scholars debated over whether it was possible for proposed Pakistan to truly become an Islamic state.[2][3]
Another motive and reason behind the Pakistan Movement and Two Nation Theory is the ideology of pre-partition Muslims and leaders of the Muslim League including Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Iqbal is that, to re-establish Muslim rule in South Asia. Once Jinnah said in his speech:
That is why Jinnah is considered the "great Muslim ruler" in the Indian subcontinent after Emperor Aurangzeb by Pakistanis.[6] This is also the reason that the Pakistani government's official chronology declares that the foundation of Pakistan was laid in 712 AD[1] by Muhammad bin Qasim after the Islamic conquest of Sindh and that these conquests at their zenith conquered the entire Indian subcontinent during Muslim Mughal Era.
While the Indian National Congress's (Congress) top leadership had been imprisoned following the 1942 Quit India Movement, there was intense debate among Muslims over the creation of a separate homeland.[3] The All India Azad Muslim Conference represented nationalist Muslims who, in April 1940, gathered in Delhi to voice their support for a united India.[7] Its members included several Islamic organizations in India, as well as 1400 nationalist Muslim delegates.[8][9] The Deobandis and their ulema, who were led by Husain Ahmad Madani, were opposed to the creation of Pakistan and the two-nation theory, instead promulgating composite nationalism and Hindu-Muslim unity. According to them, Muslims and Hindus could be one nation and Muslims were only a nation of themselves in the religious sense and not in the territorial sense.[10][11][12] Some Deobandis such as Ashraf Ali Thanwi, Mufti Muhammad Shafi, and Shabbir Ahmad Usmani dissented from the position of Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and were supportive of the Muslim League's demand to create a separate homeland for Muslims.[13][14] Many Barelvis and their ulema,[15] though not all Barelvis and Barelvi ulema,[16] supported the creation of Pakistan.[17] The pro-separatist Muslim League mobilized pirs and Sunni scholars to demonstrate that their view that India's Muslim masses wanted a separate country was in the majority, in their eyes.[14] Those Barelvis who supported the creation of a separate Muslim homeland in colonial India believed that any cooperation with Hindus would be counterproductive.[18]
Muslims who were living in provinces where they were demographically a minority, such as the United Provinces where the Muslim League enjoyed popular support,[19] were assured by Jinnah that they could remain in India, migrated to Pakistan, or continue living in India but as Pakistani citizens. The Muslim League had also proposed the hostage population theory. According to this theory, the safety of India's Muslim minority would be ensured by turning the Hindu minority in proposed Pakistan into a 'hostage' population who would be visited by retributive violence if Muslims in India were harmed.[3][20]
The Pakistani demand resulted in the Muslim League becoming pitted against both the Congress and the British.[21] In the Constituent Assembly elections of 1946, the Muslim League won 425 out of 496 seats reserved for Muslims, polling 89.2% of the total votes.[22] Congress had hitherto refused to acknowledge the Muslim League's claim of being the representative of Indian Muslims but finally recognized the League's claim after the results of this election. The Muslim League's demand for the creation of Pakistan had received overwhelming popular support from India's Muslims, especially those Muslims who were living in provinces where they were a minority. The 1946 election in British India was essentially a plebiscite among Indian Muslims over the creation of Pakistan.[23][24][25]
The British, while not approving of a separate Muslim homeland, appreciated the simplicity of a single voice to speak on behalf of India's Muslims.[26] To preserve India's unity the British arranged the Cabinet Mission Plan.[27] According to this plan, India would be kept united but would be heavily decentralized with separate groupings of autonomous Hindu and Muslim majority provinces. The Muslim League accepted this plan as it contained the 'essence' of Pakistan but the Congress rejected it.[28] After the failure of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jinnah called for Muslims to observe Direct Action Day demand the creation of a separate Pakistan. Direct Action Day morphed into violent riots between Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta. The riots in Calcutta were followed by intense communal rioting in Noakhali, Bihar, Garhmukteshwar, and Rawalpindi.
The British Prime Minister Attlee appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten as India's last viceroy, who was given the task to oversee British India's independence by June 1948, with the emphasis of preserving a United India, but with adaptational authority to ensure a British withdrawal with minimal setbacks.[29][30][31][32] British leaders including Mountbatten did not support the creation of Pakistan but failed to convince Jinnah.[33][34] Mountbatten later confessed that he would most probably have sabotaged the creation of Pakistan had he known that Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis.[35]
Soon after he arrived, Mountbatten concluded that the situation was too volatile for even that short a wait. Although his advisers favored a gradual transfer of independence, Mountbatten decided the only way forward was a quick and orderly transfer of independence before 1947 was out. In his view, any longer would mean civil war.[36] The Viceroy also hurried so he could return to his senior technical Navy courses.[37][38] In a meeting in June, Nehru and Abul Kalam Azad representing the Congress, Jinnah representing the Muslim League, B. R. Ambedkar representing the Untouchable community, and Master Tara Singh representing the Sikhs, agreed to partition India along religious lines.
On 14 August 1947 (27th of Ramadan in 1366 of the Islamic Calendar) Pakistan gained independence. India gained independence the following day. Two of the provinces of British India, Punjab and Bengal, were divided along religious lines by the Radcliffe Commission. Lord Mountbatten is alleged to have influenced the Radcliffe Commission to draw the lines in India's favor.[39][40][41] Punjab's mostly Muslim western part went to Pakistan and its mostly Hindu and Sikh eastern part went to India, but there were significant Muslim minorities in Punjab's eastern section and light Hindus and Sikhs minorities living in Punjab's western areas.
There was no conception that population transfers would be necessary because of the partitioning. Religious minorities were expected to stay put in the states they found themselves residing in. However, an exception was made for Punjab which did not apply to other provinces.[42][43] Intense communal rioting in Punjab forced the governments of India and Pakistan to agree to a forced population exchange of Muslim and Hindu/Sikh minorities living in Punjab. After this population exchange, only a few thousand low-caste Hindus remained in Pakistani Punjab and only a tiny Muslim population remained in the town of Malerkotla in India's part of Punjab.[44] Political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed says that although Muslims started the violence in Punjab, by the end of 1947 more Muslims had been killed by Hindus and Sikhs in East Punjab than the number of Hindus and Sikhs who had been killed by Muslims in West Punjab.[45][46][47] Nehru wrote to Gandhi on 22 August that up to then, twice as many Muslims had been killed in East Punjab than Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab.[48]
More than ten million people migrated across the new borders and between 200,000 and 2,000,000[49][50][51][52] people died in the spate of communal violence in Punjab in what some scholars have described as a 'retributive genocide' between the religions.[53] The Pakistani government claimed that 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men and similarly, the Indian government claimed that Muslims abducted and raped 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women.[54][55][56] The two governments agreed to repatriate abducted women and thousands of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women were repatriated to their families in the 1950s. The dispute over Kashmir escalated into the first war between India and Pakistan. With the assistance of the United Nations (UN), the war was ended but it became the Kashmir dispute, unresolved as of 2021.
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