Conception of Pakistan
On December 29, 1930 Sir Muhammad Iqbal delivered his monumental presidential address to the All India Muslim League annual session. He said:
| “ | I would like to see Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), Sindh and Balochistan amalgamated into a single state. Self government within the British Empire or without the British Empire, the formation of a consolidated North-West Indian Muslim state appears to me to be the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India. | ” |
Sir Muhammad Iqbal did not use the word "Pakistan" in his address. According to some scholars, Iqbal had not presented the idea of a separate Muslim State; rather he wanted a large Muslim province by amalgamating Punjab, Sindh, NWFP and Baluchistan into a big North-Western province within India. They argued that "Iqbal never pleaded for any kind of partition of the country. Rather he was an ardent proponent of a 'true' federal setup for India.... And wanted a consolidated Muslim majority within the Indian Federation".
Another Indian historian Tara Chand also held that Iqbal was not thinking in terms of partition of India but in terms of a federation of autonomous states within India. Dr. Safdar Mehmood also asserted in a series of articles that in the Allahabad address Iqbal proposed a Muslim majority province within an Indian federation and not an independent state outside an Indian Federation.
On January 28, 1933, Choudhary Rahmat Ali, founder of Pakistan National Movement voiced his ideas in the pamphlet entitled "Now or Never; Are We to Live or Perish Forever?" The word 'P In a subsequent book Rehmat Ali discussed the etymology in further detail. "Pakistan' is both a Persian and an Urdu word. It is composed of letters taken from the names of all our South Asia homelands; that is, Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh and Balochistan. It means the land of the Pure".
The British and the Indian Press vehemently criticized these two different schemes and created a confusion about the authorship of the word "Pakistan" to such an extent that even Jawahur Lal Nehru had to write:
| “ | Iqbal was one of the early advocates of Pakistan and yet he appears to have realized its inherent danger and absurdity. Edward Thompson has written that in the course of conversation, Iqbal told him that he had advocated Pakistan because of his position as President of Muslim League session, but he felt sure that it would be injurious to India as a whole and to Muslims especially. | ” |
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