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PAKISTAN : MUST THERE BE PAKISTAN ?
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of communal feeling in India between—say 1920 and 1935 ? As has been recorded in the preceding pages, the history of India from 1920 upto 1935 has been one long tale of communal conflict in which the loss of life and loss of property had reached a most shameful limit. Never was the communal situation so acute as it was between this period of 15 years preceding the passing of the Government of India Act, 1935, and yet this long tale of antagonism did not prevent the Hindus and the Musalmans from agreeing to live in a single country and under a single constitution. Why make so much of communal antagonism now ?
Is India the only country where there is communal antagonism ? What about Canada ? Consider what Mr. Alexander Brady* has to say on the relations between the English and the French in Canada:—
“Of the four original provinces, three, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario had populations substantially of the same Anglo-Saxon stock and traditions. Originally a by-product of the American Revolution, these colonies were established by the 50,000 United Empire Loyalists who trekked north from persecution and cut their settlements out of the wilderness. Previous to the American Revolution, Nova Scotia had received a goodly number of Scotch and American settlers, and in all the colonies after the Revolution the Loyalist settlements were reinforced by immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland.”
* * * *
“Very different was the province of Quebec. French Canada in 1867 was a cultural unit by itself, divorced from the British communities, by the barriers of race, language and religion. Its life ran in a different mould. Stirred by a Catholic faith mediaeval in its intensity, it viewed with scant sympathy the mingled Puritanism and other-worldliness of a Protestantism largely Calvinistic. The religious faiths of the two peoples were indeed poles apart. In social, if not always in religious, outlook, English Protestantism tended towards democracy, realism and modernism : the Catholicism of the French leaned to paternalism, idealism and a reverence for the past.”
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“What French Canada was in 1867 it remains substantially today. It still cherishes beliefs, customs, and institutions which have little hold on the English provinces. It has distinctive thought and enthusiasm, and its own important values. Its attitude, for example, on marriage and divorce is in conflict with the dominant view, not merely of the rest of Canada, but of the remainder of Anglo-Saxon North America.”
- Canada—Chapter L