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The League’s propaganda, on the other hand, routinely underscored the negative. It refused to define the nature of Pakistan that was to be, and also never attempted to place the full picture of Pakistan either before the Muslims or those who were to concede it; it refused to define what Pakistan meant even geographically, for this could just not be done. No matter how the boundaries of Pakistan were drawn, Muslims being so distributed all over India, a substantial portion of them would still be left behind. The League was well aware that if Pakistan were defined: ‘it would at once lose its attraction for the millions of Muslims who would then obviously be [geographically] left out of its benefits’. Ultimately when Pakistan did finally get defined it was only by the division of India, through a ‘surgical operation’. This was entirely because the idea of Pakistan did not easily bear analysis, though it did become an excellent battle- cry, and that is how it had to be kept, a ‘bright and undefined ideal’. And so, when Dr Rajendra Prasad in a statement on 16 April 1941, invited the League president to present the proposition in specific terms so that the Congress could discuss it, Jinnah con temptuously rejected the offer, saying that it is the ‘principle’ of a partitioning India that must first get accepted by the Congress. The League’s intransigence was the trump card of the Raj. For so long as there existed a possibility of maintaining their power in India, the British encouraged but did not identify themselves with the League’s Pakistan demand. It was to be used mainly as a threat against Congress nationalism. However, as the League became more and more conscious of its value to the British power, it insisted on having its pound of flesh which the British were unwilling, at that stage, to give. But for the time being, each needed the other. ‘The forces represented by the League needed British support for their continued existence [and] imperialism in India needed the support of those forces’. And so the tacit alliance between the two continued despite the divergence of their aims and the resulting occasional jolts.

Excerpted from Page 305 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh