Why would a Gujarati Muslim, or a Maharastrian Muslim or a Kerelite Muslim or a Tamil Muslim go to a place where he does not belong, and had no say in its creation?
Wrong. You should read some history to start with.
Share Question Twitter • 2 Facebook • 9 Google+ Related Topics Continents Asia South Asia India Historical India Why did a large number of Indian Muslims decide to stay in India after partition of British India post independence? Then why was Pakistan created in the first place? This question is asked in good faith and out of curiosity about the mindset of Muslims who stayed in India despite Mohammed Ali Jinnah and his colleagues' accusation of discrimination against Muslims which led to the partition. Do not treat this as some kind of discriminatory comment. Any Muslim whose grandparents and parents have shared stories of that time are requested to comment. Thank You. Comment1 50 Answers Som Bhatta Som Bhatta, A shared culture... Upvoted by Murtaza Aliakbar, Ismaili Muslim Anon OP, I shall assume that this is a question asked in good faith. Per se I am no great fan of community based biases otherwise. From that POV, at least two of the (thankfully) collapsed answers are sheer delight. Also please note that this is a rational view. For the record, I am neither Muslim nor Pakistani. I must also note that no matter how short I try to make this, it would never be a TL;DR answer. But I can still try a TL:DR graphic, based on set theory and independent intersections of different sets.
Now, on to the long answer. Partition became inevitable because of personality clashes between three prominent figures in the drama of the Indian Independence struggle: Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru on one side and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (founder of Pakistan) on the other. And while Jinnah's later stand as well as the ideology he switched to were both flawed, I can't blame him overmuch. In his place, even I would have had something to beef about.
If such complex events as the politics of the Indian independence movement movement can be abridged, I shall try. Jinnah was, to begin with, a staunch moderate and a strong proponent of Hindu-Muslims unity. He was also a pillar of the Indian Independence movement for years by the time Gandhi came back to India from South Africa and entered the political scenario. And then Gandhi, no matter how great his contribution to the Indian Independence movement, did something that I have never figured out: Very subtly he assumed notional leadership position while at the same time undermining that of Jinnah.
Gandhi was a veritable force, a one man army with unstoppable personal charisma, so he naturally got ahead in comparison to the highly rational but hardly engaging personality of Jinnah. At the same time, Gandhi was notably soft on Nehru, Jinnah's political arch rival and competitor. So while Gandhi himself had no ambitions of any formal position in the post independence Indian government, he did push Nehru's case against Jinnah's. And predictably, this did nothing to endear either of them to Jinnah.
One also needs to look at the demographics and pre British colonial history of India. Muslims were not the numerical majority at any time in India, and at the time of the Independence movement they were about one third of the population. But despite that, India had been ruled by Muslim rulers for centuries before the British, and the upper class Muslims had got accustomed to seeing themselves as the nobility and the ruling class.
All that had mostly been obliterated by the British colonial rule, but at least the British did extend their patronage to the Muslim princes and upper class. However, with the departure of the British imminent, the Indian Muslim elite were in a fix. Neither could they get colonial patronage, nor hope for anything akin to their old nobility status in an independent democratic India where Hindus outnumbered them two to one. Their solution? The Indian Muslim League and later, the Two Nation Theory. The TNT held that India had never been a single nation, but the two numerically significant communities could each be counted as one.
As I have already observed, Jinnah would initially not hear of this absurdity, for an absurdity it was. Nation states are not formed on religious grounds, but by natural geographic and demographic boundaries. Religion is never the distinguishing feature, but population descent lines and culture certainly are. And this had (and still has) much in common between the Indian Hindus and Muslims. However, he got thoroughly embittered and disillusioned by the Gandhi-Nehru combo, both of whom also happened to be Hindu.
Now Jinnah had enormous mental strength and was also a very stubborn man. He would rarely change his basic stand. Unfortunately, in case of Hindu Muslim unity and partition he did, though for all the wrong reasons, fed by the already existing Muslim aristocracy fears as indicated above. And once he did switch over to the idea of the Two Nation Theory and a separate homeland for the Indian Muslims, there would be no second U turns for him. Moreover, the Brit colonials had always used the divide and rule strategy to suit their own interests, and in the end it took the form of the ghastly and lethal sequence of the partition horrors that history records in great detail.
But the other notable Muslim leader of the Independence movement, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, had no such illusions. Even after Jinnah had made his turnaround, Kalam still warned of the consequences of the Two Nations fallacy. He predicted even before Pakistan was a political reality that it would be riddled by faction fights between Muslims, a denial of basic identity, a professed hatred of everything Indian, the rise of military dictatorships and extreme right wing fanaticism. Subsequent history proves him right on all those counts, as everyone can see.
Here one can see Maulana Azad in the foreground, with Gandhi and Vallabh Bhai Patel in the background.
The earmarked Muslim homeland was the areas where the Muslims were a numeric majority - The north western part of India as well as the Eastern part, what are now Pakistan and Bangladesh respectively. But even after the Radcliffe line was drawn, the large majority of Muslims residing in other geographic areas chose to stay on. There was no reason or compulsion for them to leave, because India chose to remain steadfastly secular then and ever since, while Pakistan went on to become the Islamic Republic as it calls itself now. Just sayin' that personality fights of big time politicos ain't necessarily the common man's views.
Make no mistake: the present day Indian Muslim is just as Indian as I am.
Note: My thanks to Murtaza Aliakbar for his suggestion to hyperlink the names of all the four prominent personalities mentioned here to the respective eponymous Quora topics. Some of it he has done himself.
31,707 views • 478 upvotes • Updated 17 Oct, 2012 Downvote Comments25+ More Answers Below. Related Questions
Why did large numbers of Hindus and Muslims migrate immediately after India gained its independence?
What percentage of Punjabi, Sindhi, and Bengali Muslims stayed in India after the partition?
India Post Independence: What are some of the biggest losses of India post independence?
Partition of India (1947): Was the creation of Pakistan a mistake?
India: Am I a true Indian if I do not hate Pakistan or Muslims?
Gaurav Upadhyay Gaurav Upadhyay Not patriotism but compulsion-mostly. Disclaimer: I am not commenting on the patriotism of Indian Muslims presently. Indeed, their claim to patriotism is as strong as anyone else's. I am merely trying to dispassionately answer your question.
The truth remains that the overwhelming majority of Muslims of undivided India voted for partition. As you may be aware, the elections in India since 1909 were being held on the basis of "separate electorates". What this meant was that certain seats were earmarked such that from these seats only Muslims could stand and only Muslims could vote. The 1946 provincial elections were held to select the Constituent Assembly of undivided India. They were the last elections in undivided India.The Congress and Muslim League were the two principle parties. The Muslim League had been fighting for Pakistan for quite some time.The elections were a de facto referendum on whether the undivided India should be partitioned. There were a total of 492 Muslim seats. Do you know how many of these the Muslim League won? 429!!
Thus, an overwhelming majority of Muslims supported partition. Why then did a good number of them decided to remain in India? There may have been many reasons, ranging from economic to security. Leaving all your property and migrating to an unknown land and starting all over again is not something most can do. The process of partition was messy. Approx 6 lakh people were killed in the ensuing violence. This would have acted as a deterrent for many. Some Muslims no doubt stayed over because they did not support the idea of partition.