On June 3, 1947, All India Radio broadcast the live address of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah on the British government plan, or the Mountbatten Plan as it was also known, for the Partition of India.
We listened to the speech in Simla (now Shimla) where we were with our parents and where senior officials of the central government moved from Delhi every summer.
We had followed the comings and goings of political leaders in Simla for meetings with the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, at the Viceroy House in Simla.
Our favourite memory is of an immaculately dressed Jinnah, wearing a top hat, arriving on occasions for meetings in a rickshaw pushed by four men, which the steep ups-and-downs of Simla roads made necessary.
The speech left us euphoric.
However, while there was enormous passion and fervour for a Muslim homeland, mass migration of Muslims from India to the new state was not, until then, the focus, nor foreseen.
The Muslim demand for Pakistan was not founded on threat to their religion, Islam, in independent India with a decisive Hindu majority. It was founded on the veracity of biases and unfairness towards Muslims.
This foreboding was an outcome of the experience of 1937 when the Congress won the 1936/7 provincial elections held under the Government of India Act 1935 in 8 out of 11 provinces — the exceptions being Sind, Punjab and NWFP — and formed governments in these which it could retain for less than two years or until the start of WW2 in 1939.
The Muslim demand for Pakistan was not founded on threat to their religion, but on the veracity of biases and unfairness towards Muslims
During the short tenure of the Congress provincial governments, while there was no hindrance or interference with Muslims practicing their religion, or with azans and prayers in mosques and Muslims marking their festivals, nor with Muslim personal and family laws, there was a strong and distinct bias against Muslims in business, in services, in admissions to schools, in courts, in public affairs and other dealings.
When the time came, the All India Congress — to which many Muslims also belonged — showed itself to be in essence a Hindu Congress. Muslims resented being discriminated for their Muslimness rather than being assimilated as Indians. East Pakistan breaking away was for much the same reasons with East Pakistanis resenting being discriminated as Bengalis rather than being assimilated as Pakistanis.