The Archives of the All-India Muslim League and other contemporary sources have been used in this comprehensive study of the Party that led the movement for the creation of Pakistan. The book encompasses the organizational structure of the All-India Muslim League, its financial and propaganda resources, its mobilization strategies, and different aspects of its struggle. Dr Afzal presents the account in a simple and lucid style. It is indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand the dynamics of the pre- and post-Independence history and politics of Pakistan, Bangladesh and India.
In this book, the author takes Pakistan as a case study in a search for better definitions of nations and nationalism, arguing that it exhibits the three essential ingredients for a successful national movement. These are a distinctive integrated community, a particular set of circumstances, and purposeful leadership.
Under what conditions are some developing countries able to create stable democracies while others have slid into instability and authoritarianism? To address this classic question at the center of policy and academic debates, The Promise of Power investigates a striking puzzle: why, upon the 1947 Partition of British India, was India able to establish a stable democracy while Pakistan created an unstable autocracy? Drawing on interviews, colonial correspondence, and early government records to document the genesis of two of the twentieth century's most celebrated independence movements, Maya Tudor refutes the prevailing notion that a country's democratization prospects can be directly attributed to its levels of economic development or inequality. Instead, she demonstrates that the differential strengths of India's and Pakistan's independence movements directly account for their divergent democratization trajectories. She also establishes that these movements were initially constructed to pursue historically conditioned class interests. By illuminating the source of this enduring contrast, The Promise of Power offers a broad theory of democracy's origins that will interest scholars and students of comparative politics, democratization, state-building, and South Asian political history.
The issues concerning the Partition of India in 1947 have long been debated both by Indian and Pakistani historians, but now a leader directly responsible for the Defence and Foreign Affairs of India has come forward with a historical appraisal that helps both countries come to a better understanding of the contentions between them. Jaswant Singh has not written a hagiography of Jinnah, but focused on him as a key figure in the final deliberations preceding Independence.
The main purpose of this study is to trace the course of Hindu-Muslim relations in India from the Lucknow Pact of 1916 to the demand for Pakistan made by the All-India Muslim League in 1940. The basic features of the evolving Hindu-Muslim relations, beginning from a description of the differences in culture between the two communities, are sketched. These comprise the establishment of a unitary government by the British East India Company and the British government, the rise of nationalism as a result of the cultural renaissance in the nineteenth century, and the struggle for constitutional reform that ended with Partition in 1947. From 1906, at which time the Hindus and Muslims were separately organized, until shortly before partition in 1947, the two communities and the British government hoped for a communal agreement. This led to proposals for a federation, on the basis that would best suit the type of plural society that existed in India. Negotiations between Hindus and Muslims broke down because the former demanded agreement before the discussion of a constitution and the latter considered the constitution as a means of bringing about agreement. The situation was such that the British government could make use of the policy of divide et impera, regardless of whether or not it did so deliberately. Accusations were made that it encouraged and deepened the communal rift, in order to continue its control over India. At any rate, in the end, the only solution to the problem of plural societies in India was partition.
