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PAKISTAN : PAKISTAN AND COMMUNAL PEACE
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greater intent the Communal Question relates to the deliberate creation of Muslim Provinces. At the time of the Lucknow Pact, the Muslims only raised the Communal Question in its lesser intent. At the Round Table Conference, the Muslims put forth, for the first time, the plan covered by the Communal Question in its greater intent. Before the Act of 1935, there were a majority of Provinces in which the Hindus were in a majority and the Muslims in a minority. There were only three Provinces in which the Muslims were in a majority and the Hindus in a minority. They were the Punjab, Bengal and the North-West Frontier Province. Of these, the Muslim majority in the North-West Frontier Province was not effective, because there was no responsible government in that province, the Montagu-Chelmsford Scheme of Political Reforms not being extended to it. So, for all practical purposes, there were only two provinces—the Punjab and Bengal—wherein the Muslims were in majority and the Hindus in minority. The Muslims desired that the number of Muslim Provinces should be increased. With this object in view, they demanded that Sind should be separated from the Bombay Presidency and created into a new selfgoverning Province, and that the North-West Frontier Province, which was already a separate Province, should be raised to the status of a self-governing Province. Apart from other considerations, from a purely financial point of view, it was not possible to concede this demand. Neither Sind nor the North-West Frontier Province were financially self-supporting. But in order to satisfy the Muslim demand, the British Government went to the length of accepting the responsibility of giving an annual subvention to Sind* and North-West Frontier Province† from the Central Revenues, so as to bring about a budgetary equilibrium in their finances and make them financially self-supporting.
T h e s e f o u r P r o v i n c e s w i t h M u s l i m s i n majority and Hindus in minority, now functioning as autonomous and self-governing Provinces, were certainly not created for administrative convenience, nor for purposes of architectural symmetry—the Hindu
*Sind gets an annual subvention of Rs. 1,05,00,000.
†North-West Frontier Province gets an annual subvention of Rs. 1,00,00,000.