Welcome To www.Merapakistan.tk

Political aides of the Punjab's Chief Minister, Sir Sikander Hayat Khan tried to dissuade the Quaid-i-Azam from holding the momentous Muslim League convention in Minto Park on March 23. But no power on earth could deter the Quaid from holding the Muslim nation's tryst with destiny on the appointed day. He had launched the battle for Pakistan, he had cast the dice and there was no going back for him. The battle lines were to be drawn up in the ML's Lahore session on the morrow Begum Shah Nawaz said to me that the Quaid infused tremendous enthusiasm in all the members of the Reception Committee and hundreds of their followers in Lahore who deemed it a matter of personal honour to make the March 23 ML session a thundering success.

Hundreds of press correspondents from all over and many from abroad had congregated in Lahore to cover the ML's Lahore session on March 23. The Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's political stock as the voice of Muslim India had risen high. Foreign journalists who flocked to India and sought interviews with Mr Jinnah. Eminent British author, Beverly Nichols in his book 'Verdict on India', described Mr Jinnah as a giant among the leaders of Asia. Noted American journalist, John Gunther, lavished praise on Mr Jinnah in his 1940 best selling book 'Inside Asia'. The Quaid commanded an important place in the reportage from India, which appeared in many popular newspapers in Asia, Europe and the USA. Thus the world's eyes were on Lahore on March 23, 1940, and the decisions to be taken in the Muslim League session were awaited with bated breath in the capitals of Commonwealth countries, the Muslim world, Asia and Europe. The Quaid and his ML aides spent the whole day in looking into the arrangements for the Muslim League session. They also helped in guiding the foreign newsman who had rushed to Lahore for news coverage and for interviewing the Quaid-i-Azam. In December 1939, the New York Times in the USA had published a series of articles on the overall political scenario in the subcontinent. In these articles the Muslim League and its head, the Quaid-i-Azam, received substantial coverage. Soon after the midday congregational prayers, crowds of Muslims from Lahore and other parts of India began moving into the huge Pandal in the Minto Park. On duty were hundreds of attractively dressed Muslim League National Guards holding aloft shimmering swords. The giant Pandal was beautifully decorated with festoons and buntings in green and white, favourite colours with the Muslims Leaguers. The Quaid deployed a squad of volunteers to manage and guard the loudspeaker system and electricity lighting. Teams of selected volunteers kept round-the-clock vigil on the shamianas erected for seating the participants. My mother Begum Syed Abdul Hafiz, who attended the 23rd March session in Lahore as a member of the ML delegation from the United Provinces (UP) led by Choudhry Khaliquzzaman told me that vast numbers of Lahore Muslims who owned cars, gave free motor rides to Muslim participants wanting to go to Minto Park. Their politeness and courtesy were remarkable; some said they were doing a national duty as proud citizens of the Muslim-majority province of the Punjab determined to make the Muslim League convention in Minto Park a resounding success.

More than 100,000 Muslims from every part of India were jam-packed in the huge Pandal while the Quaid was seated on the impressive dais with his close party aides and his sister Miss Jinnah. The sun had gone down and the setting sun gave a bright crimson glow to the Lahore skyline that cast a halo on the huge Pandal and its teeming occupants - all keyed to listen to the oration of their beloved leader Jinnah. Quaid-i-Azam Zindabad, Muslim League Zindabad yelled the milling crowd showing utmost respect and regard to the Great Leader who they knew would lead the Muslims of India to the promised homeland whose vision would unfold in the Quaid's speech and in the resolution that was being shaped into a historic article of Faith for Muslim India by the Subjects Committee having India's best Muslim and its gifted leader Mr Jinnah. The Subjects Committee members had sought the Quaid's guidance and inspiration before hammering into shape the historic Lahore Resolution demanding separate Muslim statehood for Muslim India. Although the word Pakistan was not injected into the Resolution; history has immortalised it by naming it the Pakistan Resolution.

In 1955, I learnt from one of the leaders of the Punjab Provincial Muslim League, Begum Jehanara Shah Nawaz the details of the arrangement made by the Punjab Muslim League Reception Committee for the 23rd March ML Convention in Lahore, Begum Shah Nawaz was then a member of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. She was visiting Karachi for the Assembly's session. She: was with the Nawab of Mamdot in his Muslim League office in Lahore. When the Quaid phoned from Delhi to inquire whether the ML session was being held as scheduled despite the disturbances in the city. Begum Shah Nawaz told me that she took the telephone receiver from her brother, Mian Bashir Ahmed, General Secretary of the Punjab Muslim League who told the Quaid that the ML session would be held as scheduled on 23rd March in the Minto Park and arrangements for it were in full swing. The Khaksars had promised that they would create no hurdles provided the Quaid visited their wounded in the hospital soon after reaching Lahore and the ML session passed a resolution condemning the police firing on the Khaksars and demanded a judicial inquiry for the police firing on the Khaksar rally in Lahore on March 20. Begum Shah Nawaz personally spoke to the Khaksar Chief Allama Mashriqi and took his words for peace and cooperation with the Muslim League, in holding the 23rd March session.

The Quaid's train reached Lahore around midday. After greeting and speaking to the welcoming crowd, the Quaid motored to the Mayo Hospital to offer sympathy to the wounded Khaksars and appealed to them for their cooperation in making the ML convention on March 23, a resounding success and a superb demonstration of Muslims' solidarity and unity in shaping a bright future for the Muslim nation in a Muslim majority state in the subcontinent. The Khaksars who were pacified greeted the Quaid with thunderous acclamation. They offered to do guard duties at the 'Pandal' in the Minto Park. The Quaid had won the first round in the mission to ensure the peaceful holding of the ML session in Lahore. He and his ML colleagues then went to Minto Park to see the arrangements for the ML session. A lakh of people were expected to be present in the session, including many hundreds of delegates from other parts of the subcontinent. There was a great enthusiasm among Muslims throughout India and the provincial, district and City Muslim Leagues were sending delegates in large numbers to Lahore for the ML session.

The highlight of the March 23 session of the ML in Lahore was the stirring address of nearly two and a half hours of the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. After speaking to the huge audience in Urdu for a quarter of an hour, he switched to English but his admiring audience, despite the fact that some did not know the English language sat in silence, listening to his impressive speech, the Quaid did not interrupt the flow of his oration when the crowd of his listeners, about 100,000 in number, raised full-throated cries of "Quaid-i-Azam Zindabad and" Muslim League Zindabad". The crowd knew that the Subjects Committee meeting under the chairmanship of Bengal Muslim League leader A K Fazlul Haq was busy giving final shape to the resolution that would promise them an independent Muslim-majority State in the subcontinent for which Cambridge-based Muslim scholar Choudhry Rehmat Ali had coined the name of Pakistan. Although the name Pakistan was not mentioned in the Lahore Resolution that was adopted amid thunderous applause in the early hours of the morning, the concept of Pakistan was writ large in the sprit of the resolution.

The Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah gave a new image to Muslim India when he thundered in his history-making address to his teeming followers in the mammoth audience that India's 100 million Muslims were not a minority but judged by all tokens of full nationhood they constituted a separate nation in the fold of the subcontinent. The Quaid said: "The Mussalmans are not a minority. The Mussalmans are a nation by any definition". The audience greeted this historic pronouncement of their great leader with full-throated acclamation. The Quaid's moving words were music to their ears. The Muslims were glad to be rid of their minority status. They wanted to be treated on par with the Hindus in any plan of constitutional settlement framed by the British rulers. Mr Jinnah's lungs bore the impact of his full-throated oration remarkably well, another demonstration of his steely will power.

In loud resonant words, Mr Jinnah declared on the microphone standing from the podium "that the problem in India was not of an inter-communal character but manifestly of an international character". "So long as this basic and fundamental truth is not realised, any constitution that may built will prove harmful, destructive not only to the Mussalmans but also to the Hindus and the British".

In words of utter clarity, Mr Jinnah thus expounded his case for separate Muslim statehood: "The only course open to us all is to allow the major nations separate homelands, by dividing India into "autonomous national states." Mr Jinnah's biographer, Stanley Wolpert, in his write up on the ML's Lahore Convention opines that by the spring of 1940, Mr Jinnah after giving the most thorough consideration to the Hindu-Muslim problem had come to the conclusion that partition was the only long-range solution of India's Hindu-Muslim problem. "Jinnah's Lahore address lowered the final curtain on any prospects for a single united independent India". Greeted and honoured as the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity by India's renowned poetess Sarojini Naidu in 1916, Mr Jinnah had been so savagely short-changed by the hardcore Hindu leadership of the Congress, and often baffled by its swiftly shifting stand on national issues that he felt compelled to demand the partition of India to carve out a separate independent state for the Muslims of India.

The soul and essence of the Lahore Resolution adopted by the huge congregation in the ML's Lahore session were in these guiding lines: "that geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial adjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North Western and the Eastern Zones of India, should be grouped to constitute independent States in which the constituted units shall be autonomous and sovereign." There is no evidence to warrant the belief that the Lahore Resolution envisioned two separate, autonomous independent states, one in the North West and the other in the Eastern zone of India.

Although A K Fazlul Haq, Chairman of the Subjects Committee was said to be in favour of two independent Muslim States, one in the North West and one in the East in Bengal, there is no evidence to support the view that he injected this formulation in the Lahore Resolution. With the crack of dawn and the adoption of the Resolution by the concourse, the Quaid-i-Azam looked at the parapets of the Moghul-built Badshahi Mosque and said aloud "how happy Allama Iqbal would be in the Heavens that we have taken the path of independent statehood for India's Muslim which he had advocated in the Allahabad session of the ML in 1930. The Quaid-i-Azam was a great admirer of Allama Iqbal, his inspiring poetry. His political sagacity and his impeccable character and political integrity.