Pakistan before Pakistan—Addendum When Nehru spoke of one nation

Re-reading a forgotten debate through primary sources

“…And yet some people still talk of the Muslims as a group dealing with Hindus or others as a group, a medieval conception which has no place in the modern world. We deal with economic groups today and the problems of poverty and unemployment and national freedom are common for the Hindu, the Muslim, the Sikh and the Christian”—Jawaharlal Nehru, Presidential Address to the All India Convention of Congress Legislators, March 19, 1937

The conclusion of this series does not close the historical inquiry. On the contrary, while examining original issues of Tolu-e-Islam, another primary document of exceptional historical significance became known: Jawaharlal Nehru’s presidential address to the All-India Convention of Congress Legislators delivered on March 19, 1937. The discovery is significant because Tolu-e-Islam referred readers to Nehru’s speech, yet later historical discussions generally relied upon isolated quotations rather than the complete text.

The full address deserves careful reading before judging either Nehru or his critics. Nehru had just emerged from the provincial elections held under the Government of India Act, 1935. The Congress had achieved notable electoral success, but Muslim seats largely remained outside its influence. Rather than attributing this solely to religious differences, Nehru offered a political explanation. He stated:

“Only in regard to the Muslim seats did we lack success. But our very failure on this occasion has demonstrated that success is easily in our grasp and the Muslim masses are increasingly turning to the Congress. We failed because we had long neglected working among the Muslim masses and we could not reach them in time. But where we reached, especially in the rural areas, we found almost the same response, the same anti-imperialist spirit, as in others. The communal problem, of which we hear so much, seemed to be utterly nonexistent, when we talked to the peasant, whether Hindu, Muslim or Sikh… I have no manner of doubt that they are turning to the Congress to seek relief from their innumerable burdens, and their future cooperation is assured, provided we approach them rightly and on the basis of economic questions”.

Read in its historical context, this was neither a communal speech nor an expression of hostility towards Muslims. It reflected Nehru’s conviction that class, poverty and anti-imperialism constituted the primary basis of Indian politics and that communal divisions would gradually disappear through economic transformation.

Nehru’s reasoning was internally coherent. It was also consistent with the Congress conception of a single Indian nation struggling collectively against colonial rule. This understanding becomes even clearer elsewhere in the address where Nehru repeatedly emphasised maintaining the “all-India character” of Congress politics and warned against provincial or sectional fragmentation.

The historical significance of these passages lies not in their correctness or otherwise but in the political philosophy they represent. For Nehru, territorial nationality preceded religious identity.

For Muhammad Ali Jinnah after 1937, and increasingly for Ghulam Ahmad Parwez writing in Tolu-e-Islam, the opposite proposition gradually emerged: religious civilisation created a distinct political community, which could not simply be absorbed into territorial nationalism.

It was precisely this conception that Maulana Husain Ahmad Madani had articulated in his famous doctrine of Muttahida Qaumiyat (Composite Nationalism), arguing that nationhood in the modern world rested upon common territory rather than religion.

Parwez devoted sustained attention to this debate, arguing that Islam recognised a distinct millat founded upon a common moral and constitutional order rather than merely territorial association.

The January 1939 issue of Tolu-e-Islam opened one of the earliest systematic discussions of this question, and the controversy continued through subsequent issues and publications.

Later, Parwez mentioned these debates in Tehreek-e-Pakistan ke Mukhalif Ulema, where he revisited the disagreement with Madani and other scholars over the constitutional meaning of Muslim nationhood.

Seen from today’s perspective, however, the debate deserves another layer of historical reflection. Neither Nehru’s confidence nor the Muslim League’s constitutional theory ultimately unfolded exactly as either side anticipated.

The creation of Pakistan in 1947 appeared to vindicate the political demand for separate Muslim statehood. Yet the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 demonstrated that religious identity alone could not permanently sustain a nation-state where language, culture, economic grievances and democratic aspirations diverged profoundly.

This does not mean that the Pakistan Movement was historically “wrong”, nor does it prove that Nehru’s theory was entirely “right”. Rather, it reminds historians that political slogans often simplify realities which later history makes more complex.

The Two-Nation Theory functioned primarily as a constitutional doctrine for partitioning British India rather than as a comprehensive theory of state-building after independence.

Governing a modern state after independence, however, required additional foundations: constitutionalism, federalism, linguistic accommodation, democratic participation and economic justice. Bangladesh demonstrated that shared religion, although politically powerful, could not by itself substitute for those institutions.

Conversely, Nehru’s expectation that economic issues alone would dissolve communal consciousness also proved overly optimistic. Religious identity remains politically potent across South Asia, including both India and Pakistan, even after nearly eight decades of independence.

The forgotten debate preserved in Tolu-e-Islam, Tarjuman-ul-Qur’an and Madani’s writings therefore deserves renewed attention not because it identifies permanent victors or losers, but because it records one of the twentieth century’s most sophisticated constitutional conversations on the relationship between religion, territory and nationhood. Historians should reproduce that conversation faithfully before passing judgment upon it.

The next task is even more challenging: to examine how the constitutional debates that produced Pakistan were themselves transformed by Pakistan’s own constitutional experience after 1947. That inquiry belongs to the next series—Pakistan after Pakistan.

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Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.