Story of The Two Nation Theory: The Long Dispute Between India and Pakistan

The Two-Nation Theory, which posits that Muslims and Hindus constitute two distinct nations, was more than a religious or political ideal; it was an ideological force that ensured the partition of India in 1947 and continues to shape the geopolitical landscape of South Asia.

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Although the theory is traditionally associated with powerful Muslim thinkers such as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and subsequently Mohammad Ali Jinnah, its intellectual development and strategic articulation owed a significant debt to British colonial policy. J Sai Deepak's India, Bharat and Pakistan highlights how theory operates as both a colonial construct and as a civilizational challenge, with the intent of dividing into two ideological camps.

COLONIAL ORIGINS AND BRITISH ENGINEERING

Following the Revolt of 1857, when Hindus and Muslims united against British rule, the British Empire changed its tactics to divide Indians, not unite them. According to British ruler B.R. Ambedkar, British rulers  “Began to preach that Hindus and Muslims were separate nations".

With separate electorates (begun in the Morley-Minto Reforms of 1909) and communal census categories, the colonial state made religious identity official. Marxist historians like Irfan Habib and Bipin Chandra argue that the British policies were meant to deepen communal polarisations to destabilise the anti-colonial freedom movement. 

The Creation of the Muslim league in the year 1906 was having an active support of the British as it aligned with its interests and opposition to congress‘s nationalism, agreeing with the colonial motives thesis but take it further to argue that the British suppressed India's civilizational self—designated as Bharat—and replaced it with artificially engineered dichotomies of "Hindu" and "Muslim" political realms.

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY AND POLITICAL MOBILISATION

Both accounts agree that identity politics overwhelmed the Two-Nation Theory. For Marxist intellectuals, this mobilisation was led by Muslim elite classes—landowners, nawabs, and clerics—who saw a democratic India threatened with loss of privilege. Jinnah's Pakistan call in the 1940 Lahore Resolution, in this view, was elite fears rather than popular will.

For instance, intellectuals like Ram Manohar Lohia opposed the 2 nation theory, stating it as multidimensional accountability, stating it not only as a British strategy and calling it Congress fatigue. In his book (Guilty Men of India’s Partition), he states that the partition was the nail on the coffin for the British‘s divide and rule policy. 

The argument (by J Sai Deepak) that the Two-Nation Theory rests on an even more profound ideological foundation: the conflict between Abrahamic exclusivism and Dharmic pluralism. From the Indian, Bharat, and Pakistani context, Islam is political and expansionist in character as against Hinduism, and hence, living together but not together was difficult on a civilizational ground.

The argument that colonial powers and Islamic separatists both had an interest in denying India's civilisational continuity and thus bringing it down to an administrative region. 

CONGRESS, COMPROMISES, AND PARTITION

Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi ensured that through their leadership maintained the unity of the Congress party. The political concessions of the Congress are criticised by right- and left-wing historians. Left-wing intellectuals believe that the inability to bring the Muslim masses into the nationalist fold enabled communalism. The rejection of the Muslim League's initial demands for safeguards by the Congress also isolated them.

Right-wing thinkers, however, refer to how the Congress's secularism—tendentiously compliant to minority sentiments—neglected the civilisational identity of the majority. Nehru's vision for India as a "nation in the European mould," which failed to decolonise the Indian mind and persisted with the identical Western juridical system that legitimised separatism, like Article 370 in Kashmir.

GEOPOLITICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE THEORY

The geopolitical logic of partition was convenient to British interests. Partitioning out Pakistan kept Britain safe in South Asia during the Cold War and had the benefit of a Muslim ally near the Soviet border. The Mountbatten Plan ( The white man's withdrawal policy ) led to the acceleration of the partition without adequate security, leading to the loss of lives and millions being displaced.

Right-wing historians consider that the creation of Pakistan was to strip a subcontinent in half and stop its civilisation's continuity. They believe that India's failure to regain its pre-colonial identity has enabled Pakistan's continued exploitation of religious identity, elaborated through proxy wars, insurgencies, and strategic narratives in international discourse.

CRITIQUES AND LASTING LEGACY

Modern-day historians are still at variance about the nature of the legacy of the Two-Nation Theory. Left-liberal historians argue that the theory died with the establishment of Bangladesh in 1971, when ethnic identity over Islamic identity won out. Right-wing historians, however, retort that the theory is still alive as long as the Indian polity is ready to accept religion-based separatist demands.

The constitutional yearning for equality warns that unless India is willing to accept its Bharatiya heritage—its civilizational awareness—it will never be free from the threat of disintegration. He is a proponent of an epistemic decolonisation of Indian institutions and believes that unless India reaffirms its cultural and historical identity, the ideological fault line that led to partition will persist in new forms.

The conclusion is that the Two Nation Theory was not a rehearsed communal uprising, but a calculated move played by the political elite, utilising deep communal fault lines and manipulation. Left analyses concentrate on class mobilisation and colonial divide-and-rule politics, the Right interprets the theory as a part of a larger civilizational conflict between Bharat and foreign ideologies. 

Diverse perspectives on the 2 nation theory conclude this fact that the British colonial power deliberately exploited the communal divisions in the Indian subcontinent. The intent was not just to manage its empire, but to ensure that the new independent state of India remained entangled in regional conflicts, diverting it from global power ambitions.

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BY KS AARYA

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