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PAKISTAN : NATIONAL FRUSTRATION
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There is another explanation for this delay in putting forth the scheme of Pakistan. It is far more possible that the Muslim leaders did not until very recently know the philosophical justification for Pakistan. After all, Pakistan is no small move on the Indian political chess-board. It is the biggest move ever taken, for it involves the disruption of the state. Any Mahomedan, if he had ventured to come forward to advocate it, was sure to have been asked what moral and philosophical justification he had in support of so violent a project. The reason why they had not so far discovered what the philosophical justification for Pakistan is, equally understandable. The Muslim leaders were, therefore, speaking of the Musalmans of India as a community or a minority. They never spoke of the Muslims as a nation. The distinction between a community and a nation is rather thin, and even if it is otherwise, it is not so striking in all cases. Every state is more or less a composite state and there is, in most of them, a great diversity of populations, with varying languages, religious codes and social traditions, forming a congeries of loosely associated groups. No state is ever a single society, an inclusive and permeating body of thought and action. Such being the case, a group may mistakenly call itself a community even when it has in it the elements of being a nation. Secondly, as has been pointed out earlier, a people may not be possessed of a national consciousness although there may be present all the elements which go to make a nation.
Again from the point of view of minority rights and safeguards this difference is unimportant. Whether the minority is a community or a nation, it is a minority and the safeguards for the protection of a minor nation cannot be very different from the safeguards necessary for the protection of a minor community. The protection asked for is against the tyranny of the majority, and once the possibility of such a tyranny of the majority over a minority is established, it matters very little whether the minority driven to ask for safeguards is a community or is a nation. Not that there is no distinction between a community and a nation. The difference indeed is very great, it may be summed up by saying that a community, however different from and however opposed to other communities, major or minor, is one with the rest in the