The rise of the League

The election of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government in 1929 in Britain, already weakened by World War I, fuelled new hopes for progress towards self-government in India. Gandhi travelled to London, claiming to represent all Indians and criticising the League as sectarian and divisive. Round-table talks were held, but these achieved little, since Gandhi and the League were unable reach a compromise. The fall of the Labour government in 1931 ended this period of optimism. By 1930 Jinnah had despaired of Indian politics and particularly of getting mainstream parties like the Congress to be sensitive to minority priorities. A fresh call for a separate state was then made by the famous writer, poet and philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal, who in his presidential address to the 1930 convention of the Muslim League said that he felt that a separate Muslim state was essential in an otherwise Hindu-dominated South Asia.[6][47] The name was coined by Cambridge student and Muslim nationalist Choudhary Rahmat Ali,[48] and was published on January 28, 1933 in the pamphlet Now or Never.[49] After naming the country, he noticed that there is an acronym formed from the names of the "homelands" of Muslims in northwest India — P for Punjab, A for the Afghan areas of the region, K for Kashmir, S for Sindh and tan for Balochistan, thus forming "Pakstan".[50] An i was later added to the English rendition of the name to ease pronunciation, producing "Pakistan". In Urdu and Persian the name encapsulates the concept of "pak" ("pure") and "stan" ("land") and hence a "Pure Land". In the 1935, the British administration proposed to hand over substantial power to elected Indian provincial legislatures, with elections to be held in 1937. After the elections the League took office in Bengal and Punjab, but the Congress won office in most of the other provinces, and refused to share power with the League in provinces with large Muslim minorities.

Mean while, Muslim ideologues for separatism also felt vindicated by the presidential address of V.D. Savarkar at the 19th session of the famous Hindu nationalist party Hindu Mahasabha in 1937. In it, this legendary revolutionary - popularly called Veer Savarkar and known as the iconic father of the Hindutva ideology - propounded the seminal ideas of his Two Nation Theory or Hindu-Muslim exclusivism, which influenced Jinnah profoundly.

In 1940, Jinnah called a general session of the Muslim League in Lahore to discuss the situation that had arisen due to the outbreak of the Second World War and the Government of India joining the war without consulting Indian leaders. The meeting was also aimed at analyzing the reasons that led to the defeat of the Muslim League in the general election of 1937 in the Muslim majority provinces. In his speech, Jinnah criticized the Indian National Congress and the nationalist Muslims, and espoused the Two-Nation Theory and the reasons for the demand for separate Muslim homelands.[51] Sikandar Hayat Khan, the Chief Minister of Punjab, drafted the original resolution, but disavowed the final version,[52] that had emerged after protracted redrafting by the Subject Committee of the Muslim League. The final text unambiguously rejected the concept of a United India because of increasing inter-religious violence[53] and recommended the creation of an independent Muslim state.[54] The resolution was moved in the general session by Shere-Bangla A. K. Fazlul Huq, the Chief Minister of Bengal, supported by Chaudhry Khaliquzzaman and other Muslim leaders and was adopted on 23 March 1940.[7] The Resolution read as follows:

No constitutional plan would be workable or acceptable to the Muslims unless geographical contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary. That the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign ... That adequate, effective and mandatory safeguards shall be specifically provided in the constitution for minorities in the units and in the regions for the protection of their religious, cultural, economic, political, administrative and other rights of the minorities, with their consultation. Arrangements thus should be made for the security of Muslims where they were in a minority.[55]

In 1941 it became part of the Muslim League's constitution.[56] However, in early 1941, Sikandar explained to the Punjab Assembly that he did not support the final version of the resolution.[57] The sudden death of Sikandar in 1942 paved the way over the next few years for Jinnah to emerge as the recognised leader of the Indian Muslims.[45] In 1943, the Sind Assembly passed a resolution demanding the establishment of a Muslim homeland.[58] Talks between Jinnah and Gandhi in 1944 in Bombay failed to achieve agreement and there were no more attempts to reach a single-state solution.

World War II had broken the back of both Britain and France and disintigration of their colonial empires was expected soon. With the election of another sympathetic Labour government in Britain in 1945, Indians were seeing independence within reach. But, Gandhi and Nehru were not receptive to Jinnah's proposals and were also adamantly opposed to dividing India, since they knew that the Hindus, who saw India as one indivisible entity, would never agree to such a thing.[45] In the Constituent Assembly elections of 1946, the League won 425 out of 496 seats reserved for Muslims (and about 89.2% of Muslim votes) on a policy of creating an independent state of Pakistan, and with an implied threat of secession if this was not granted.[45] By 1946 the British had neither the will, nor the financial resources or military power, to hold India any longer. Political deadlock ensued in the Constituent Assembly, and the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, sent a Cabinet Mission to India to mediate the situation. When the talks broke down, Attlee appointed Louis Mountbatten as India's last Viceroy, to negotiate the independence of Pakistan and India and immediate British withdrawal. Mountbatten, of imperial blood and a world war admiral, handled the problem as a campaign. Ignorant of the complex ground realities in British India, he rashly preponed the date of transfer of power and told Gandhi and Nehru that if they did not accept division there would be civil war in his opinion[45] and he would rather consider handing over power to individual provinces and the rulers of princely states. This forced the hands of Congress leaders and the "Independence of India Act 1947" provided for the two dominions of Pakistan and India to become independent on the 14th and 15th of August 1947 respectively. This result was despite the calls for a third Osmanistan in the early 1940s.