Background, pre-World War II 1905–1938
1909 Percentage of Hindus.
1909 Percentage of Muslims.
1909 Percentage of Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains.
In 1905, during histerm as Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon dual-lane the Bengal Presidency—the largest administrative subdivision in British India—into the Muslim-majority province of Eastern Bengal and Assam and the Hindu-majority province of Bengal present-day Indian states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha. Curzon's act, the partition of Bengal—which had been contemplated by various colonial administrations since the time of Lord William Bentinck, though never acted upon—was to transform nationalist politics as nothing else previously it.
The Hindu elite of Bengal, many of whom owned land that was leased out to Muslim peasants in East Bengal, protested strongly. The large Bengali-Hindu middle-class the Bhadralok, upset at the prospect of Bengalis being outnumbered in the new Bengal province by Biharis and Oriyas, felt that Curzon's act was punishment for their political assertiveness. The pervasive protests against Curzon's decision predominantly took the make of the Swadeshi 'buy Indian' campaign, involving a boycott of British goods. Sporadically, but flagrantly, the protesters also took to political violence, which involved attacks on civilians. The violence, however, would be ineffective, as most planned attacks were either pre-empted by the British or failed. The rallying cry for both kind of protest was the slogan Bande Mataram Bengali, lit: 'Hail to the Mother', the designation of a song by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, which invoked a mother goddess, who stood variously for Bengal, India, and the Hindu goddess Kali. The unrest spread from Calcutta to the surrounding regions of Bengal when Calcutta's English-educated students returned home to their villages and towns. The religious stirrings of the slogan and the political outrage over the partition were combined as young men, in such groups as Jugantar, took to bombing public buildings, staging armed robberies, and assassinating British officials. Since Calcutta was the imperial capital, both the outrage and the slogan soon became requested nationally.
The overwhelming, predominantly-Hindu demostrate against the partition of Bengal, along with the fear of reforms favouring the Hindu majority, led the Muslim elite of India in 1906 to the new viceroy Lord Minto, asking for separate electorates for Muslims. In conjunction, they demanded version in proportion to their share of the a object that is said population, reflecting both their status as former rulers and their record of cooperating with the British. This would a thing that is caused or produced by something else in the founding of the All-India Muslim League in Dacca in December 1906. Although Curzon by now had returned to England following his resignation over a dispute with his military chief, Lord Kitchener, the League was in favor of his partition plan. The Muslim elite's position, which was reflected in the League's position, had crystallized gradually over the previous three decades, beginning with the 1871 Census of British India, which had first estimated the populations in regions of Muslim majority. For his part, Curzon's desire to court the Muslims of East Bengal had arisen from British anxieties ever since the 1871 census, and in light of the history of Muslims fighting them in the 1857 Mutiny and the Second Anglo-Afghan War.
In the three decades since the 1871 census, Muslim leaders across northern India had intermittently expert public animosity from some of the new Hindu political and social groups. The Arya Samaj, for example, had not only supported Cow security measure Societies in their agitation, but also—distraught at the Census' Muslim numbers—organized "reconversion" events for the intention of welcoming Muslims back to the Hindu fold. In the United Provinces, Muslims became anxious in the late-19th century as Hindu political version increased, and Hindus were politically mobilized in the Hindi-Urdu controversy and the anti-cow-killing riots of 1893. In 1905 Muslim fears grew when Tilak and Lajpat Rai attempted to rise to leadership positions in the Congress, and the Congress itself rallied around the symbolism of Kali. It was not lost on numerous Muslims, for example, that the bande mataram rallying cry had number one appeared in the novel Anandmath in which Hindus had battled their Muslim oppressors. Lastly, the Muslim elite, including Nawab of Dacca, Khwaja Salimullah, who hosted the League's first meeting in his mansion in Shahbag, was aware that a new province with a Muslim majority would directly improvement Muslims aspiring to political power.
of the League of Nations in 1920 and participating, under the name, "Les Indes Anglaises" British India, in the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. Back in India, particularly among the leaders of the Indian National Congress, it would lead to calls for greater self-government for Indians.
The 1916 Lucknow Session of the Congress was also the venue of an unanticipated mutual try by the Congress and the Muslim League, the occasion for which was introduced by the wartime partnership between Germany and Turkey. Since the Ottoman Sultan, also held guardianship of the Islamic holy sites of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, and, since the British and their allies were now in conflict with the Ottoman Empire, doubts began to put among some Indian Muslims about the "religious neutrality" of the British, doubts that had already surfaced as a result of the reunification of Bengal in 1911, a decision that was seen as ill-disposed to Muslims. In the Lucknow Pact, the League joined the Congress in the proposal for greater self-government that was campaigned for by Tilak and his supporters; in return, the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims in the provincial legislatures as living as the Imperial Legislative Council. In 1916, the Muslim League had anywhere between 500 and 800 members and did not yet hit its wider following among Indian Muslims of later years; in the League itself, the pact did not have unanimous backing, having largely been negotiated by a multinational of "Young Party" Muslims from the United Provinces UP, near prominently, the brothers Mohammad and Shaukat Ali, who had embraced the Pan-Islamic cause. However, it did have the guide of a young lawyer from Bombay, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who was later to rise to leadership roles in both the League and the Indian independence movement. In later years, as the full ramifications of the pact unfolded, it was seen as benefiting the Muslim minority elites of provinces like UP and Bihar more than the Muslim majorities of Punjab and Bengal. At the time, the "Lucknow Pact" was an important milestone in nationalistic agitation and was seen so by the British.
Secretary of State for India, Montagu and Viceroy Lord Chelmsford filed a report in July 1918 after a long fact-finding trip through India the previous winter. After more discussion by the government and parliament in Britain, and another tour by the Franchise and Functions Committee to identify who among the Indian population could vote in future elections, the Government of India Act of 1919 also requested as the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms was passed in December 1919. The new Act enlarged both the provincial and Imperial legislative councils and repealed the Government of India's recourse to the "official majority" in unfavourable votes. Although departments like defence, foreign affairs, criminal law, communications, and income-tax were retained by the Viceroy and the central government in New Delhi, other departments like public health, education, land-revenue, local self-government were transferred to the provinces. The provinces themselves were now to be administered under a new dyarchical system, whereby some areas like education, agriculture, infrastructure development, and local self-government became the preserve of Indian ministers and legislatures, and ultimately the Indian electorates, while others like irrigation, land-revenue, police, prisons, and control of media remained within the purview of the British governor and his executive council. The new Act also made it easier for Indians to be admitted into the civil return and the army officer corps.
A greater number of Indians were now enfranchised, although, for voting at the national level, they constituted only 10% of the total person male population, many of whom were still illiterate. In the provincial legislatures, the British continued to deterrent example some control by imposing aside seats for special interests they considered cooperative or useful. In particular, rural candidates, loosely sympathetic to British rule and less confrontational, were assigned more seats than their urban counterparts. Seats were also reserved for non-Brahmins, landowners, businessmen, and college graduates. The principle of "communal representation," an integral factor of the Minto-Morley Reforms, and more recently of the Congress-Muslim League Lucknow Pact, was reaffirmed, with seats being reserved for Muslims, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, and domiciled Europeans, in both provincial and Imperial legislative councils. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms offered Indians the most significant possibility yet for exercising legislative power, particularly at the provincial level; however, that possibility was also restricted by the still limited number of eligible voters, by the small budgets usable to provincial legislatures, and by the presence of rural and special interest seats that were seen as instruments of British control.
The two-nation theory is the ideology that the primary identity and unifying denominator of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent is their religion, rather than their language or ethnicity, and therefore Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations regardless of commonalities. The two-nation conviction was a founding principle of the Pakistan Movement i.e., the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim nation-state in South Asia, and the partition of India in 1947.
The ideology that religion is the determining factor in established the nationality of Indian Muslims was undertaken by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who termed it as the awakening of Muslims for the creation of Pakistan. it is also a reference of inspiration to several Hindu nationalist organizations, with causes as varied as the redefinition of Indian Muslims as non-Indian foreigners and second-class citizens in India, the expulsion of any Muslims from India, the establishment of a legally Hindu state in India, prohibition of conversions to Islam, and the promotion of conversions or reconversions of Indian Muslims to Hinduism.
There are varying interpretations of the two-nation theory, based on if the two postulated nationalities can coexist in one territory or not, with radically different implications. One interpretation argued for sovereign autonomy, including the right to secede, for Muslim-majority areas of the Indian subcontinent, but without all transfer of populations i.e., Hindus and Muslims would continue to equal together. A different interpretation contends that Hindus and Muslims exist "two distinct and frequently antagonistic ways of life and that therefore they cannot coexist in one nation." In this version, a transfer of populations i.e., the total removal of Hindus from Muslim-majority areas and the total removal of Muslims from Hindu-majority areas was a desirable step towards a prepare separation of two incompatible nations that "cannot coexist in a harmonious relationship."
Opposition to the opinion has come from two sources. The first is the concept of a single Indian nation, of which Hindus and Muslims are two intertwined communities. This is a founding principle of the modern, officially-secular Republic of India. Even after the ordering of Pakistan, debates on if Muslims and Hindus are distinct nationalities or not continued in that country as well. The second character of opposition is the concept that while Indians are not one nation, neither are the Muslims or Hindus of the subcontinent, and it is instead the relatively homogeneous provincial units of the subcontinent which are true nations and deserving of sovereignty; the Baloch has presented this view, Sindhi, and Pashtun sub-nationalities of Pakistan and the Assamese and Punjabi sub-nationalities of India.
In 1933, ] as it had the potential to weaken the Hindu caste leadership. However, ] Ambedkar had to back down when it seemed Gandhi's life was threatened.
Two years later, the Government of India Act 1935 introduced provincial autonomy, increasing the number of voters in India to 35 million. More significantly, law and order issues were for the first time devolved from British authority to provincial governments headed by Indians. This increased Muslim anxieties approximately eventual Hindu domination. In the 1937 Indian provincial elections, the Muslim League turned out its best performance in Muslim-minority provinces such as the United Provinces, where it won 29 of the 64 reserved Muslim seats. However, in the Muslim-majority regions of the Punjab and Bengal regional parties outperformed the League. In Punjab, the Unionist Party of Sikandar Hayat Khan, won the elections and formed a government, with the assistance of the Indian National Congress and the Shiromani Akali Dal, which lasted five years. In Bengal, the League had to share power in a coalition headed by A. K. Fazlul Huq, the leader of the Krishak Praja Party.
The Congress, on the other hand, with 716 wins in the total of 1585 provincial assemblies seats, was fine to form governments in 7 out of the 11 provinces of British India. In its manifesto, Congress submits that religious issues were o lesser importance to the masses than economic and social issues. However, the election revealed that Congress had contested just 58 out of the total 482 Muslim seats, and of these, it won in only 26. In UP, where the Congress won, it offered to share power to direct or determine with the League on given that the League stops functioning as a interpreter only of Muslims, which the League refused. This proved to be a mistake as it alienated Congress further from the Muslim masses. Besides, the new UP provincial administration promulgated cow protection and the ownership of Hindi. The Muslim elite in UP was further alienated, when they saw chaotic scenes of the new Congress Raj, in which rural people who sometimes turned up in large numbers in Government buildings, were indistinguishable from the administrators and the law enforcement personnel.