Why Pakistan’s founder Jinnah was opposed to the name India for the independent Indian nation

Some critics of the decision to replace India with “Bharat” in official communication about the President and Prime Minister have sought to argue that the opposition to the word “India” is actually a Pakistani construct. Is this true?

We take a look at how the issue panned out during Independence and Partition.

Jinnah wanted the new Muslim nation to be called ‘Pakistan’.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father, always wanted the new Muslim homeland to be called Pakistan, the “land of the pure”. Even though Pakistan would be carved out of the original India, he did not want the name of the new country to have anything to do with ‘India’.

“No tussle over the word ‘India’ is reported because Jinnah preferred the newly coined and very Islamic-sounding acronym that is ‘Pakistan’,” historian John Keay wrote in India: A History (Harper Press, 2000).

The term ‘Pakistan’ was coined by Choudhary Rehmat Ali in 1933, and was actually an acronym for the five northern provinces of India — Punjab (P), North-West Frontier Province or Afghan Province (A), Kashmir (K), Sindh (S) and Balochistan (‘tan’). By the time the movement for a separate Islamic state in the subcontinent picked up in the 1940s, the name became ubiquitous in Muslim League speeches and correspondence. By the time Partition became a certainty, ‘Pakistan’ was the name of the choice for the new Islamic-majority state.

However, he did not want independent India to be called ‘India’.

“He [Jinnah] was under the impression that neither state (India or Pakistan) would want to adopt the British title of ‘India’. He only discovered his mistake after Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had already acceded to Nehru’s demand that his state remain ‘India’. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, was absolutely furious when he found out,” Keay wrote.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah sits on his dais during ceremonies following his swearing-in as President of the Assembly and Governor-General of the new Dominion of Pakistan at Karachi on Aug. 14, 1947. (AP Photo)

Jinnah had a persistent insecurity about India, both about the new nation and its name.

In his paper ‘Islam and the Constitutional Foundations of Pakistan’, Martin Lau, professor of South Asian law at SOAS, quoted from a letter Jinnah wrote to India’s first Governor General Lord Mountbatten, complaining that the name ‘India’ is “misleading and intended to create confusion”. (Lau in ‘Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity’, eds. Rainer Grote and Tilmann Röder, Oxford University Press, 2012).

Jinnah was never really happy with how the Partition panned out. Despite the Muslim League’s claims, Pakistan received far less land than expected. For Jinnah, there was a very real danger of Pakistan becoming subordinate to India. His views on the term ‘India’ flowed from the same fears.

“The use of the word implied a subcontinental primacy which Pakistan would never accept,” John Keay wrote.

Moreover, the etymological origin of the term ‘India’ referred to lands that, post-Partition, primarily lay on Pakistan’s side of the border. For a nascent nation state that no one had even imagined even 15 years earlier, laying claim to this “history” (or at least not letting ‘Hindustan’ claim it) was paramount.

“It also flew in the face of history, since ‘India’ originally referred exclusively to territory in the vicinity of the Indus river (with which the word is cognate). Hence it was largely outside the republic of India but largely within Pakistan,” Keay wrote.

Lastly, Jinnah wanted India to take the name of ‘Hindustan’ to make clear the religious bases for the Partition and consequently, the new nation states. But as Lau observes in a footnote, “the provisions of the Indian Independence Act did not make Pakistan an Islamic states … nor did the Indian Independence Act of 1947 make India a Hindu Raj”.

What “had convinced Jinnah that neither side would use it [India],” Keay wrote, “stemmed from its historical currency amongst outsiders, especially outsiders who had designs on the place.” Jinnah felt that the term ‘India’, carried with it, the baggage of being an “object of conquest”, something that would dissuade Nehru from laying claim to it.

Jinnah protested, but to no avail.

Close to the end of her book The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 1985), the Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal of Tufts University noted in passing that “until the bitter end the [Muslim] League continued to protest against Hindustan adopting the title ‘Union of India’”, which, she said, could be seen as “a commentary…that Jinnah never quite abandoned his strategy of bringing about an eventual union of India on the basis of Pakistan and Hindustan”.

“Jinah’s irritation at the fact that the new Dominion of India was not called “Hindustan” (the land of the Hindus), became visible in an exchange of letters with…Mountbatten,” Lau wrote.

“In September 1947, Mountbatten invited Jinah to become the honorary president of an exhibition of Indian art in London. Its announcement was to include the explanation that “the Exhibition includes exhibits from the dominions of India and Pakistan”,” Lau wrote.

According to him, “Jinah rejected the invitation” because of the use of the name ‘India’, writing to Mountbatten that, “It is a pity that for some mysterious reason Hindustan have adopted the word “India” which is certainly misleading and is intended to create confusion”. He suggested that in order to avoid misleading people, the description should read “exhibition of Pakistan and Hindustan art”.

“This”, Lau said, “proved unacceptable to Mountbatten, and in the end Jinah accepted the invitation”. (Jinnah Papers (n 50) Vol. 5, 358)

Two years later, in September 1949, when the Constituent Assembly of India began to discuss the draft Constitution of India, the name “Hindustan” was also on the table, but was quickly rejected. Article 1 of the Constitution uses “India” and “Bharat” interchangeably in its English version, and “Bharat” is used in the Hindi version.