Dominion of Pakistan

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dominion of Pakistan was born on the 14th of August 1947, carved out of British India by an act of parliament that simultaneously created two nations where one had stood before. For just under nine years, it existed as a federal dominion within the British Commonwealth, a constitutional monarchy that shared its king with the United Kingdom itself. Then, on the 23rd of March 1956, it became something else entirely: a republic, with a new constitution and a new identity. What happened in those nine years reveals a country assembling itself from scratch, under enormous pressure, while managing the most catastrophic mass migration in recorded history. How did a nation with a literacy rate of just 10 percent, a single major port, and two geographically separated halves try to become a functioning state? What role did language play in tearing it apart from within? And why did the queen of England, at her coronation in 1953, make a specific promise to the people of Pakistan?

• 2. The Birth of Partition

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  Section 1 of the Indian Independence Act 1947 was precise in its language: from "the fifteenth day of August, nineteen hundred and forty-seven, two independent dominions shall be set up in India, to be known respectively as India and Pakistan." Muslims had been pushing for a separate state since at least 1940, when the Lahore Resolution put that demand formally on the table. The fear was of becoming second-class citizens in a Hindu-majority India.

  The human cost of what followed was almost impossible to comprehend. More than ten million people crossed the new borders. Between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people died in communal violence across the Punjab. Scholars have called it a retributive genocide between religions. The Pakistani government claimed that 50,000 Muslim women were abducted and raped by Hindu and Sikh men; the Indian government made a parallel claim that Muslims abducted and raped 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women. Both governments eventually agreed to repatriate the abducted, and thousands of women from all three communities were returned to their families throughout the 1950s.

  The Radcliffe Award, which specified the actual border between the two countries, was not even published until the 17th of August 1947, two days after independence. The Radcliffe Line, drawn by a commission seeking to separate Muslim-majority regions from Hindu-majority ones, required cutting through two provinces that had no uniform majority: Bengal and Punjab. The western half of Punjab became Pakistani; the eastern half became Indian. Bengal was split the same way.

  Muhammad Ali Jinnah became the first governor-general and speaker of the State Parliament, while Liaquat Ali Khan became the country's first prime minister. Lord Mountbatten had offered to serve as governor-general of both India and Pakistan, but Jinnah refused.

• 3. A Nation in Two Pieces

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  At the start, the dominion was a federation of five provinces: East Bengal, West Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh, and the North-West Frontier Province. Each province had a governor appointed by the governor-general. But this description understates the strangeness of Pakistan's geography. The country's two halves were separate exclaves with no shared land border, divided by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory.

  Over the year following independence, the princely states that covered a significant area of West Pakistan acceded one by one, as their rulers signed Instruments of Accession. These states, which had previously held subsidiary alliances with the British, included Bahawalpur, Khairpur, Swat, Dir, Chitral, and the Khanate of Kalat. They retained internal self-government for several years before being gradually absorbed into the provinces.

  The First Census of Pakistan in 1951 counted 75.64 million people, making the country the seventh most populous nation in the world at that time. About 55.6% of those people lived in East Pakistan; 44.4% lived in West Pakistan. The population density stood at 208 persons per square mile. And despite Urdu being designated as the state language, 54.43% of the population identified Bengali as their mother tongue, making Bengalis the single largest language group in the country. Urdu speakers accounted for only 3.25% of the population.

• 4. Language and Violence

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  In a 1948 speech, Jinnah declared that "Urdu alone would be the state language and the lingua franca of the Pakistan state." He also called for Bengali to serve as the official language of the Bengal province. But that partial concession did nothing to stop tensions building in East Bengal, where the majority of the country's population lived and where almost no one spoke Urdu as a first language.

  Jinnah died in 1948 before the crisis fully erupted. Bengali leader Sir Khawaja Nazimuddin, born in 1894, succeeded him as governor-general. Then in 1951, during a massive political rally, Prime Minister Ali Khan was assassinated, and Nazimuddin stepped into his role, becoming the second prime minister.

  In 1952, East Pakistani police opened fire on students protesting in the streets for Bengali to receive equal status with Urdu. The situation forced Nazimuddin to issue a waiver granting Bengali equal status. That right was eventually codified in the 1956 constitution. But the damage was not only cultural: the 1954 elections made the ideological split between the two halves unmistakable. East Pakistan fell under the influence of a communist alliance including the Awami League and the Shramik Krishak Samajbadi Dal. West Pakistan went the opposite direction, with the pro-American Republican Party ousting the Pakistan Muslim League government.

  In 1953, a different kind of unrest arrived. Religious parties instigated anti-Ahmadiyya riots that led to many Ahmadi deaths. A two-member court of inquiry investigated the events in 1954. The riots triggered the first instance of martial law in the country's history, opening a pattern of military intervention in civilian affairs that would define Pakistani politics for decades.

• 5. The Crown Over Karachi

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  From 1947 to 1952, George VI was the sovereign of Pakistan, the same person who wore the British crown. When George VI died on the 6th of February 1952, his elder daughter Princess Elizabeth was in Kenya at the time. She became Pakistan's new monarch on the spot. The following year, at her coronation in 1953, Elizabeth II was crowned as Queen of seven independent Commonwealth countries, Pakistan among them. In her Coronation Oath, she promised "to govern the Peoples of... Pakistan... according to their respective laws and customs." The Standard of Pakistan at that coronation was borne by Mirza Abol Hassan Ispahani.

  The relationship was not without its tensions. When Pakistan eventually adopted its republican constitution on the 23rd of March 1956 and abolished the monarchy, the Queen sent a personal message to President Mirza. She wrote that she had "followed with close interest the progress of your country since its establishment" and that it was "a source of great satisfaction to me to know that your country intends to remain within the Commonwealth." Pakistan did remain in the Commonwealth, becoming a republic within it rather than leaving altogether.

  The 1956 constitution that ended the monarchy also formally split the country into West Pakistan and East Pakistan as administrative units, and confirmed the country's status as an Islamic republic. Two notable figures assumed power at that moment: Huseyn Suhrawardy became prime minister leading a communist-socialist alliance, and Iskander Mirza, who had served as the last governor-general, became the first president of Pakistan.

• 6. An Economy Built From Nothing

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  Pakistan's economy in 1947 was almost entirely agricultural: farming made up 53% of GDP and contributed 99.2% of exports. About 65% of the labor force worked the land. With a population of approximately 30 million, only around 6 million lived in urban areas. Per capita income in 1950 stood at around $360 in 1985 international dollars, and the literacy rate was 10%.

  Partition had hollowed out the non-agricultural economy. Over 6 million refugees arrived from India, while skilled non-Muslim artisans and workers left for India. Insurance companies, manufacturers, clinics, and educational institutions lost their Hindu staff. India inherited most of British India's industrial infrastructure and ports. Pakistan's only major port was Karachi. Poverty rates in West Pakistan ranged from 55% to 60%.

  Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan presented Pakistan's first five-year plan to the Constituent Assembly in 1948. It established the State Bank of Pakistan, the Federal Bureau of Statistics, and the Federal Board of Revenue. In the fiscal year 1949-50, the national savings rate was 2%, the foreign savings rate was 2%, and the investment rate was 4%. Manufacturing contributed just 7.8% to GDP. The trade deficit ran to 66 million rupees in the period spanning 1949/50 to 1950/51.

  Despite that unpromising start, the plan produced results. Major urban centers including Karachi, Dacca, and Khulna grew substantially. Educational institutions multiplied. Health services expanded. Housing was developed for about 500,000 refugees, though thousands remained unhoused and basic services like water supply were stretched thin. A trade war with India, triggered by the British devaluation of the pound sterling in September 1949, ended in February 1951 when India agreed to recognize the Pakistani rupee. Import bans on cotton textiles and luxury goods imposed in 1952, followed by comprehensive import regulations in 1953, helped push the country into the ranks of the fastest-growing nations at the time.

• 7. Islam and the State

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  The first formal step toward making Pakistan an ideological Islamic state came in March 1949, when Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan introduced the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly. The resolution declared that sovereignty over the entire universe belongs to Allah. Behind that language stood significant religious authority: Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a Deobandi scholar who held the position of Shaykh al-Islam in Pakistan in 1949, and Maulana Mawdudi of Jamaat-i Islami.

  Pakistan's foreign policy pursued a parallel vision. After independence, the country sought leadership of the Muslim world, or at minimum a leading role in achieving its unity. The Ali brothers projected Pakistan as the natural leader of the Islamic world, drawing on the country's large population and military strength. A senior Muslim League leader, Khaliquzzaman, went further, declaring that Pakistan would bring together all Muslim countries into a pan-Islamic entity he called Islamistan.

  The United States opposed this idea. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee voiced the international mood by saying he wished India and Pakistan would reunite, rather than seeing a unified Muslim world emerge. The Arab world, in the middle of a nationalist awakening, showed little interest in Pakistan's pan-Islamic project. Some Arab governments viewed it as a Pakistani bid for regional dominance. Pakistan shifted its energies toward championing self-determination for Muslims elsewhere: its support for the independence movements of Indonesia, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Eritrea built early ties with all of those countries. When Huseyn Suhrawardy became the first Bengali prime minister in 1956, he led not a religiously oriented government but a communist-socialist alliance, a reminder of how far East Pakistan's political identity had drifted from the founding vision.