Source: TW
The Pakistan Movement was, in the context of the Third World, both a reactionary movement and in a sense a vision of its future. During the mid 20th century the ideas of anti-imperialism, socialism, secularism, and decolonization were spreading like wildfire amongst the peoples of the Third World. These revolutionary ideas would stipulate the unity of cultural and ethnic groups, who were to work together in one unit to shed the prejudices of the past and work together for a progressive future which would do away with the legacies of Western colonial rule upon their regions.
For the most part, the Pakistan Movement rejected all of that. It did not share the same hatred for the West that Nehru and his National Congress did, as could be seen with Jinnah urging Muslim soldiers in the British Indian Army to continue fighting at a time when the Indian National Congress was spending its time with the Quit India Movement, demanding an end to British rule at the height of the war. This can also be seen with Pakistan’s founding fathers in the late 1940s and 1950s building up an alliance between Pakistan and the United States.
It would also reject secularism. While Jinnah was in private a secular person the Pakistan Movement was in practice a Muslim nationalist movement. From Direct Action Day to the religious cleansing of Hindus and Sikhs from the country after independence (Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, was 51% Hindu before Pakistan’s independence) to the Objectives Resolution being adopted by Pakistan’s founders (which stated sovereignty of the state belongs to God) to an environment so hostile to the Hindu population early on that Jogendranath Manal, one of the few non-Muslims to have ever served in a high ranking governmental position in Pakistan’s history, would end up being forced to migrate to India in 1950, it would be clear that the personal lives of Pakistan’s founder are unimportant in understanding what the Pakistan Movement truly was.
After destroying the pan-Indian secular socialist movement (led by the flawed Nehru, his flaws probably being the reason for partition in the first place), disputes arose between the other leftist nationalist movements of the Third World. Pakistan’s movements with the Arab Nationalist states were rather cold due to the former’s support of the US and the latter’s support of the USSR, becoming colder due to Pakistan joining the Baghdad Pact. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s it saw worse relations with the Ba’athists in both Syria and Iraq, the former recognizing India’s claim over Kashmir and funding leftist militants against Zia ul-Haq and the latter also maintaining a good relationship with India and funding Baloch separatists against both Pahlavi Iran and Pakistan in the 1970s.
By contrast, the Muslim Brotherhood was rather fond of Pakistan, as could be seen in this picture of Hassan al-Banna meeting with Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Pakistan also maintained good relations with the right-wing Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan, the latter of which Pakistan would send soldiers to in order to fight against leftist Palestinian militants during Black September in 1970.
So too would there be problems between Pakistan and the pan-African movement. Nkrumah and Azikiwe would both rail about “Pakistanism”, calling what had happened in India a tragedy, and urging Africans not to fall for the same trap that South Asian Muslims did. Pakistan, for its part, would try to replicate the Partition of India in South Africa by urging the creation of a separate Indian Muslim community in the Apartheid state, which would receive fairer treatment than non-Muslim Indians, in exchange for Pakistan being friendlier to Apartheid South Africa than India.
Pakistan’s relations with Yugoslavia were also pretty cold, as Josep Broz Tito would join with Nehru’s Non-Aligned Movement and criticized Pakistan’s conduct during the 1971 Bangladesh War. “Pakistanism”, while being a dirty word in the context of pan-African politics, ended up being used favorably by future Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who called for Bosniak Muslims to follow the “Pakistan Model” as he called it. And that’s where the second point of the thread lies - that the Pakistan Movement, though reactionary, proved to be a vision of the Third World’s future.
The movements of pan-Arab, pan-Slavic, pan-African, and pan-Indian nationalism would fade away for one reason or another, being replaced by religious and ethnic politics of one form or another, rejecting those ideas. Be it Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Fertile Crescent of the 2010s, or India and West Africa in the 2020s, ethnic, religious, and other hatreds which the Third World movements of world sought to quell ended up being the forefront of their countries’ politics, whereas said movements would end up being relegated to history. The Hindu Nationalists which the All-India Muslim League had allied with before independence would end up taking control of all of India, the Muslim Brotherhood which supported Pakistan ended up building a secret empire within the Arab World during the 1980s and 1990s which only after the Arab Spring has started to deteroriate, and the Bosniak Muslims which admired Pakistan (and received support of them in the 1990s) ended up getting their own state, all the while the pan-Africanists which rued Pakistanism would end up losing power whereas the partition of their countries looks ever the more likely - the politics of the Partition of India ended up being replicated across the Global South one way or another.
What could this mean? Was the Pakistan Movement a creation of the British (as many Indians believe in), meant to be the first round of an eventual Western campaign to eventually get rid of all pan-nationalist secular socialist movements outside of the West, or do we accept the claims of Pakistanis, that the Pakistan Movement’s leaders simply understood South Asia better than the idealistic Nehru did, and in the process extrapolate that into believing that all these movements were idealistic and that collapse was inevitable? I leave this to you.