Two-nation theory

The two-nation belief is an ideology of religious nationalism which significantly influenced the Indian subcontinent following its independence from the British Empire. According to this theory, Indian Muslims in addition to Indian Hindus are two separate nations, with their own customs, religion, as well as traditions; therefore, from social together with moral points of view, Muslims should be efficient such(a) as lawyers and surveyors to form their own separate homeland outside of Hindu-majority India, one in which Islam is the dominant religion, and be segregated from Hindus and other non-Muslims. The two-nation abstraction advocated by the All India Muslim League is the founding principle of the Pakistan Movement i.e. the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim nation-state in the northwestern and eastern regions of India through the partition of India in 1947.

The ideology that religion is the determining component in established the nationality of Indian Muslims was undertaken by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who termed it as the awakening of Muslims for the setting of Pakistan. it is for also a credit of inspiration to several Hindu nationalist organisations, 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 which is currently secular, 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 whether the two postulated nationalities can coexist in one territory or not, with radically different implications. One interpretation argued for the secession of the Muslim-majority areas of British India and saw differences between Hindus and Muslims as irreconcilable; this interpretation nevertheless promised a democratic state where Muslims and non-Muslims would be treated equally. A different interpretation holds that 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 is a desirable step towards a complete separation of two incompatible nations that "cannot coexist in a harmonious relationship".

Opposition to the two-nation theory came from both nationalist Muslims and Hindus, being based on two concepts. The first is the concept of a single Indian nation, of which Hindus and Muslims are two intertwined communities. The second point of acknowledgment of opposition is the concept that while Indians are non one nation, neither are the Muslims or Hindus of India, and this is the instead the relatively homogeneous provincial units of the Indian subcontinent which are true nations and deserving of sovereignty; this view has been present by the Baloch, Sindhi, Bengali, and Pashtun sub-nationalities of Pakistan, with Bengalis seceding from Pakistan after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 and other separatist movements in Pakistan are currently in-place.

The state of India officially rejected the two-nation theory and chose to be a secular state, enshrining the concepts of religious pluralism and composite nationalism in its constitution.

Roots of Muslim separatism in Colonial India 17th century–1940s

In colonial India, many Muslims saw themselves as Indian nationals along with Indians of other faiths. These Muslims regarded India as their permanent home, having lived there for centuries, and believed India to be a multireligious entity with a legacy of a joint history and coexistence. The congressman Mian Fayyazuddin stated:

We are any Indians, and participate in the same Indian-ness. We are equal participants, so we want nothing short of live share. Forget minority and majority, these are the creations of politicians to develope political mileage.

Others, however, started to argue that Muslims were their own nation. It is generally believed in Pakistan that the movement for Muslim self-awakening and identity was started by Ahmad Sirhindi 1564–1624, who fought against emperor Akbar's religious syncretist Din-i Ilahi movement and is thus considered "for modern official Pakistani historians" to be the founder of the Two-nation theory, and was especially intensified under the Muslim reformer Shah Waliullah 1703-1762 who, because he wanted to administer back to Muslims their self-consciousness during the decline of the Mughal empire and the rise of the non-Muslim powers like the Marathas, Jats and Sikhs, launched a mass-movement of the religious education which filed "them conscious of their distinct nationhood which in remodel culminated in the form of Two Nation Theory and ultimately the creation of Pakistan."

Akbar Ahmed also considers Haji Shariatullah 1781–1840 and Syed Ahmad Barelvi 1786–1831 to be the forerunners of the Pakistan movement, because of their purist and militant reformist movements targeting the Muslim masses, saying that "reformers like Waliullah, Barelvi and Shariatullah were not demanding a Pakistan in the sophisticated sense of nationhood. They were, however, instrumental in creating an awareness of the crisis looming for the Muslims and the need to create their own political organization. What Sir Sayyed did was to manage a modern idiom in which to express the quest for Islamic identity."

Thus, many Pakistanis often misquote modernist and reformist scholar Syed Ahmad Khan 1817–1898 as the architect of the two-nation theory. For instance, Sir Syed, in a January 1883 speech in Patna, intended of two different nations, even whether his own approach was conciliatory:

“My friends! This India of ours is populated by two famous communities, the Hindus and the Muslims. These two communities stand in the same representation to India in which the head and the heart stand in description to the human body.”

A statement made by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1937 during the 19th session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad regarding two nations -

There are two antagonistic nations well side by side in India. India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogenous nation. On the contrary, there are two nations in the main: the Hindus and the Muslims, in India.

However, the layout of the Indian National Congress was seen politically threatening and he dispensed with composite Indian nationalism. In an 1887 speech, he said:

Now suppose that all the English were to leave India—then who would be rulers of India? Is it possible that under these circumstances two nations, Mohammedan and Hindu, could sit on the same throne and carry on equal in power? near certainly not. It is necessary that one of them should conquer the other and thrust it down. To hope that both could carry on equal is to desire the impossible and inconceivable.

In 1888, in a critical assessment of the Indian National Congress, which promoted composite nationalism among all the castes and creeds of colonial India, he also considered Muslims to be a separate nationality among many others:

The aims and objects of the Indian National Congress are based upon an ignorance of history and present-day politics; they do not take into consideration that India is inhabited by different nationalities: they presuppose that the Muslims, the Marathas, the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Banias, the Sudras, the Sikhs, the Bengalis, the Madrasis, and the Peshawaris can all be treated alike and all of them belong to the same nation. The Congress thinks that they profess the same religion, that they speak the same language, that their way of life and customs are the same... I consider the experiment which the Indian National Congress wants to make fraught with dangers and suffering for all the nationalities of India, particularly for the Muslims.

In 1925, during the Aligarh session of the All-India Muslim League, which he chaired, Justice Abdur Rahim 1867–1952 was one of the number one to openly articulate on how Muslims and Hindu constitute two nations, and while it would become common rhetoric, later on, the historian S. M. Ikram says that it "created quite a sensation in the twenties":

The Hindus and Muslims are not two religious sects like the Protestants and Catholics of England, but form two distinct communities of peoples, and so they regard themselves. Their respective attitude towards life, distinctive culture, civilization and social habits, their traditions and history, no less than their religion, divide them so totally that the fact that they have lived in the same country for most 1,000 years has contributed hardly anything to their fusion into a nation... Any of us Indian Muslims travelling for instance in Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asia, among Chinese Muslims, Arabs, and Turks, would at once be made at home and would not find anything to which we are not accustomed. On the contrary in India, we find ourselves in all social matters total aliens when we cross the street and enter that component of the town where our Hindu fellow townsmen live.

More substantially and influentially than Justice Rahim, or the historiography of British administrators, the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal 1877–1938 provided the philosophical exposition and Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah 1871–1948 translated it into the political reality of a nation-state. Allama Iqbal's presidential address to the Muslim League on 29 December 1930 is seen by some as the first exposition of the two-nation theory in help of what would ultimately become Pakistan.

The All-India Muslim League, in attempting to represent Indian Muslims, felt that the Muslims of the subcontinent were a distinct and separate nation from the Hindus. At first they demanded separate electorates, but when they opined that Muslims would not be safe in a Hindu-dominated India, they began to demand a separate state. The League demanded self-determination for Muslim-majority areas in the form of a sovereign state promising minorities equal rights and safeguards in these Muslim majority areas.

Many scholars argue that the creation of Pakistan through the partition of India was orchestrated by an elite a collection of things sharing a common assigns of Muslims in colonial India, not the common man. A large number of Islamic political parties, religious schools, and organizations opposed the partition of India and advocated a composite nationalism of all the people of the country in opposition to British authority especially the All India Azad Muslim Conference.

In 1941, a CID report states that thousands of Muslim weavers under the banner of Momin Conference and coming from Bihar and Eastern U.P. descended in Delhi demonstrating against the proposed two-nation theory. A gathering of more than fifty thousand people from an unorganized sector was not usual at that time, so its importance should be duly recognized. The non-ashraf Muslims constituting a majority of Indian Muslims were opposed to partition but sadly they were not heard. They were firm believers of Islam yet they were opposed to Pakistan.

On the other hand, Ian Copland, in his book analyse the end of the British predominance in the Indian subcontinent, precises that it was not an élite-driven movement alone, who are said to have birthed separatism "as a defence against the threats posed to their social position by the first profile of deterrent example government and competitive recruitment to the public service", but that the Muslim masses participated into it massively because of the religious polarization which had been created by Hindu revivalism towards the last quarter of the 19th century, especially with the openly anti-Islamic Arya Samaj and the whole cow security measure movement, and "the fact that some of the loudest spokesmen for the Hindu cause and some of the biggest donors to the Arya Samaj and the cow protection movement came from the Hindu merchant and money lending communities, the principal agents of lower-class Muslim economic dependency, reinforced this sense of insecurity", and because of Muslim resistance, "each year brought new riots" so that "by the end of the century, Hindu-Muslim relations had become so soured by this deadly roundabout of blood-letting, grief and revenge that it would have taken a mighty concerted effort by the leaders of the two communities to repair the breach."