Political Arguments with a Margin of Error: A Minority Report

This paper examines an extremely influential text on the partition of India, Thoughts on Pakistan (1940), written soon after the passing of the Lahore Resolution of the All India Muslim League in March 1940 which formally demanded "independent states" for Muslim majority regions and "safeguards" for Muslim minorities in the rest of India. Thoughts on Pakistan was written by Bhimrao Ambedkar, the formidable dalit leader who had stood in opposition to Gandhi and is regarded as one of the most vital critics of caste society. However, in this rather exceptional text he responded to the "Muslim question" in India and provided some of the most substantive political arguments for "partition." How should we read this text today? Although he considered his arguments as a commentary on the "Indian Political," the text is as much his account of the anti-colonial Indian experience as it is a reading of European history and interwar political science, and it is from this intersection that he thinks with concepts of "homeland", "national self-determination" and the potential of "minority." If "partition" is to be historicized as a globe-trotting, traveling theory we must ask what kinds of guides and translations (or mis-directions and mis-translations, an attention to the margin of error), shaped it at different intersections - and rather than seeing each iteration as bound to time and place - Ireland 1922, Palestine 1937/47, India 1947 - and influencing each other sequentially - the tensions between anti-colonial intent and perceptions of European precedence and shared historical predicaments could help us constitute a more fraught global history for national ideas, as nationalisms continue to be remade (with political consequences) over the historically predetermined ground of "partition" narratives.