The first political organization was that of the Karens, a largely Christian, non-Burman people on the Thai border and in Lower Burma. Political activity among the Burmans them- selves, beginning in 1916, is outlined in the chronology accom- panying map (b) of plate VIII.C.4 and in the notes on the map itself.

Shown below the map is a chart depicting the composition of the two houses of Parliament established under the Burma Act of 1935, annexed to the Government of India Act of the same year. The description of the latter in the text for plates VIII.B.3 and 4 will also throw some light on the Burmese par- liamentary system, which was limited to Burma proper, the tribal areas, including the Federated Shan States, being desig- nated "excluded areas." (For results of the 1936 election to the Burmese House of Representatives, see plate VIII.C.5).

Sources (in addition to those in the General Bibliography and citations for plate VIII.C.2)

General References (all for various years)

Asian recorder; Ceylon handbook; Keesing's contemporary ar- chives; Times of India directory and yearbook.

For the Indian National Congress

D. Argov (1967); J. M. Brown (1972); P. C. Ghosh (1960); Indian National Congress (1934, 1935); K. Iswara Dutt (1967); G. Johnson (1973); B. Majumdar and B. P. Mazum- dar (1967); B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya (1946, 1947); M. V. Ramana Rao (1959); A. Seal (1968); J. S. Sharma (1959, listed under Bibliographies); N. Sinha (1968); A. Tripathi (1967); W. Wedderburn (1913).

For the Muslim League

C. M. Ali (1967); K. K. Aziz (1967); L. Bahadur (1954); P. Hardy (1972); M. Mujeeb (1967); S. S. Peerzada (Pirzada) (1963), S. S. Peerzada, ed. (1969–70); A. B. Rajput (1948); K. B. Sayeed (1968); W. C. Smith (1946).

For Minor Parties in India

G. S. Deol (1969); R. L. Hardgrave (1965); E. F. Irschick (1969); B. R. Nayar (1966); G. D. Overstreet and M. Wind- miller (1960); I. Prakasha (1966); B. D. Shukla (1960); L. P. Sinha (1965).

For Ceylon (relates also, in part, to VIII.C.1)

S. Arasaratnam (1964); Ceylon (1928, listed under Govern- ment Documents); K. Jayawardena (1964, listed under Un- published Works); J. Kotelawala (1956); E. F. C. Ludowyk (1966); G. C. Mendis (1948a); S. A. Pakeman (1964); P. Ramanathan (1916); M. Singer (1964); I. D. S. Weera- wardene (1951); W. H. Wriggins (1960).

For Burma (relates also, in part, to VIII.C.1)

Ba Maw (1968); G. E. R. G. Brown (1925); J. F. Cady (1958); J. L. Christian (1942); F. S. V. Donnison (1970); J. S. Furnivall (1948); U Htin Aung (1967); A. Ireland (1907); F. B. Leach (1936); U Maung Maung (1962); A. D. Moscotti (1974); E. Sarkisyanz (1965); D. E. Smith (1965); R. L. Solomon (1969); F. N. Trager (1966); D. Woodman (1962).

Acknowledgments

The help of the following individuals is gratefully acknowl- edged: Margaret W. Fisher, Institute of International Studies, University of California, for material on the Indian National Congress; Samuel Burke, I.C.S. and P.C.S. (ret.) and Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada, attorney general for Pakistan for mate- rials on the Muslim League; and Michael Roberts, Department of History, University of Ceylon, for materials on Ceylon.

VIII.C.4, Maps (c)–(I). Proposals for the Partition or Political Reorganization of India, 1930–46

The first audible call for a separate state for the Muslims of northwest India was sounded by the philosopher-poet Muham- mad Iqbal in a speech delivered from the platform of the Mus- lim League in December 1930. It was echoed, several years later, by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, an Indian Muslim student at Cambridge University, who in 1933 coined the name "Paki- stan" (P for Punjab, A for the Afghan Province [i.e., the North-West Frontier], K for Kashmir, S for Sind, and TAN for the last syllable of Baluchistan), and who acted thereafter as a propagandist for the new nation he envisaged. Sentiment in favor of the idea, however, grew notably only in the late 1930s, when India's prospects of attaining independence be- gan to brighten; and it was not until the historic Lahore Reso- lution of 1940 that it received the official endorsement of the Muslim League. In the political climate of the time it was only natural that imaginative minds should begin to conceive of what shape the future map of India might take, or, if not India as a whole, the part with which they most identified. Maps (c)–(l) of palte VIII.C.4 attempt to portray some of those conceptions: (c)–(e) referring to proposals for one or more Islamic states; (f)–(h) focusing on the Punjab and certain Sikh proposals for its future; (i)–(l) relating to a variety of schemes whereby the Indian Union might have been main- tained.

Not all the publications in which the proposals we have mapped appeared were precisely worded, and not all of them incorporated maps; furthermore, in some that did include maps, the cartography was not of a professional standard. We have tried, however, to make our presentations as true as pos- sible to both the letter and the spirit of the proposal, in those cases when they were ambiguously worded or inadequately depicted, taking care to note on our own maps where our boundaries are conjectural.

Of the proposals put forth for a Muslim state in India, Iqbal's (map (c)) appears to have been the most modest, as it related only, it appears, to the British provinces of Punjab, Sind, the North-West Frontier Province, and Baluchistan, and within Punjab, only to the Muslim majority areas. Bengal was not mentioned, nor was Kashmir or any other princely state. Rahmat Ali's "Pakistan" proposal of 1933 (map (d)), though also limited to northwestern India, included the whole of Pun- jab, Kashmir, and other princely states in the region. The ideas he put forward in 1940 took into account other areas with a Muslim majority, including Bengal as a whole; the prominent, Muslim-ruled state of Hyderabad, for which he deemed the name "Usmanistan" appropriate and in which Muslims con- stituted only a small fraction of the population; and Assam, which, though neither Muslim-ruled nor a Muslim majority area, had very close economic and cultural associations with Bengal and would have been cut off from the rest of India had his hypothetical eastern state of "Bang-i-Islam" been estab- lished in Bengal alone. Whether he sought a federation or three separate fully sovereign states in calling for three independent Muslim "nations" joined in a "triple alliance" is not clear; but the historical context suggests the latter interpretation. Among the interesting aspects of Rahmat Ali's 1940 proposal are his gratuitous recommendations for the future division of what he envisaged would be left of India.

Although we have no basis for drawing a map outlining the intentions of the Muslim League in its aforementioned Lahore Resolution of 1940, it is important to note that it stated that "the North Western and Eastern Zones of India" should be- come " 'Independent States' in which the constituent elements shall be autonomous and sovereign." Two separate states, therefore, seem clearly to have been implied at the time. (The recollection of the resolution was later to bolster the resolve of East Pakistanis to attain autonomy within Pakistan, at the very least, and for many nothing less than full independence.) Only in 1946, as independence loomed large on the Indian horizon, did circumstances require the League leadership to advance a definite proposal for the future shape of Pakistan. Quite simply, this was to include the entire area of all the Muslim-majority provinces of British India and, for reasons noted above, Assam as well. As all official thinking, pursuant to the spirit of the Government of India Act of 1935, antici- pated the princely states' deciding whether or not to join in any post-independence union or unions, no claims were ad- vanced with regard to such areas, whatever their population or the religion of their ruler. The probability, however, that a number of states would choose to join Pakistan, were it to be established, was presumably implicit in the League's thinking.

Of the three Sikh proposals relative to the Punjab that we depict (maps (f)–(h)), all were too ambitious to have been taken seriously by the British or to have been acceptable either to Congress or to the Muslim League. In no district and in only one small princely state. Faridkot, did Sikhs make up an abso- lute majority of the population, and in only one other state, Patiala, and a single district, Ludhiana, were they the largest community. None of the three proposed Sikh states expressly included either Faridkot or Patiala (or any other princely state), and within the limits of none would Sikhs have consti- tuted more than 21 percent of the in situ population.

By and large, proposals for a radical reorganization of the political map of a unified, independent India (maps (i)–(l)) were paid little heed in the final years of the colonial period. To most Muslim leaders the creation or noncreation of Paki- stan was the overriding issue; to Hindus, who looked toward both independence and unity, the internal territorial map was a secondary consideration that might best be addressed—as in- deed it was—after the primary goal, freedom, was attained. Nevertheless, there were some Muslims, among them Dr. Syed Abdul Latif and Sir Sikander Hyat Khan, who put forward proposals, each in 1939, for a politically reorganized Indian federation in which Muslim interests would be adequately rec- ognized. Of the two plans Dr. Latif's was much the more imaginative. It envisaged a federation of four Muslim and eleven Hindu "cultural zones." The former were based in part on the religion of the population, in part on established eco- nomic and social ties (i.e., that of Assam to Bengal within a "Northeast Block"), in part on the dominant religion of the ruling prince (i.e., Hyderabad, as the essential component of the "Deccan Block"), and in part on historical associations with Muslim rule and the importance of the Muslim cultural pres- ence (i.e., in the "Delhi-Lucknow Block"). The eleven Hindu zones were to comprise whatever was left over once allowance was made for a Muslim corridor to the sea from the Deccan Block, the persistence of Muslim princely states as enclaves within the regions of Hindu culture, and the establishment of Ajmer as a "free city." Once the blocks were established, "vol- untary" population transfers would effect a desired measure of cultural homogeneity. How many millions of people such trans- fers might have affected was not stated. We are aware of no evidence that any political figure of prominence took this scheme seriously.

A less audacious proposal was put forward by the popular leader of the National Unionist Party, whose ministries domi- nated Punjabi politics from 1921 to 1947. It called for a loose federation of seven regions, each of which would itself be a federation of then-existing British provinces and princely states. Two of the proposed provinces, none of which Hyat Khan named, would presumably have been Muslim-dominated and five presumably Hindu-dominated. All would have had sufficient population to forge a viable regional government, and no region would be so large as to preponderate, in itself, over any other. While there was no compelling rationale, except political expediency, to assign certain significant non-Muslim majority areas to regions 1 and 7, it is conceivable that with good will the plan would have worked. Good will, regrettably, was in short supply at the time.

Of proposals put forward by the British we note but two, one suggested in 1943 by the Indian census commissioner M. W. Yeatts, which had no official backing; the other, the "Cabinet Mission Proposal" of 1946. The Yeatts plan had a generic similarity to that of Hyat Khan in that it envisaged a small number of large, populous, and viable regions, including two, with slight Muslim majorities, in both northwestern and northeastern India. The number of Hindu-majority regions would also have been only two, as against five in the scheme previously noted. The rationale, however, ostensibly had noth- ing to do with communal balance; rather, it concerned the effective management of resources and planning within geo- graphic zones defined largely, though quite imperfectly, on the basis of drainage areas. Again, we are not aware that Yeatts's ideas aroused much interest.

Finally, we have in the proposal of the Cabinet Mission, presented to the British Parliament in a White Paper of May 1946, a design Indian leaders could not ignore. This pro- posal envisaged a Union government in India whose center would deal only with foreign affairs, defense, communications, and their financing, which thereby would leave little or no scope for the Hindu majority to ride roughshod over the in- terests of the Muslim minority, as the latter feared it might. More competent in most governmental affairs would be re- gional "groups" that would be freely entered into by provinces of British India after the drafting of the Union constitution. In anticipation of that time the country was to be divided into three "sections," each of which could, if it wished, itself be- come a group. Two of the sections, "B" and "C," approxi- mately the same as those areas shown in the Muslim League 1946 proposal, were to be predominantly Muslim in popula- tion; the third, "A," was to be predominantly Hindu. Each section was to deliberate separately in the proposed constituent assembly, and provinces could opt out of their respective sec- tions only after the first general election under the new consti- tution. Provisions for entry of the princely states into the Union were to be subsequently determined. The initial re- sponse of both the Muslim League and Congress to this in- genious plan was favorable; but in the increasingly acrimonious cabinet discussions that ensued in India, with an eye to pro- viding for its implementation, it became clear that there was little hope for a lasting Union. Reflecting the discord in high governmental circles, wave on wave of communal violence swept over much of India, and by the spring of 1947 it was apparent that Congress leaders were at last willing to acquiesce in the creation of Pakistan to quell the bloodshed, while the League in turn was willing to accept a Pakistan which would be notably smaller than the Cabinet Mission's sections "B" and "C."

Sources (in addition to those in the General Bibliography)

M. M. Ahluwalia (1965); Aziz Ahmad (1967); R. Coup- land (1944); M. L. Gwyer and A. Appadorai (1957); S. A. Latif (1939); B. R. Nayar (1966); S. S. Peerzada (Pirzada) (1963); S. S. Peerzada, ed. (1969–70); Rajendra Prasad