Jinnah did not create Pakistan, British geopolitics did: Senior Advocate Rakesh Dwivedi

Pakistan was not the political creation of Mohammed Ali Jinnah but the outcome of British geopolitical strategy in the final years of colonial rule in India, Senior Advocate Rakesh Dwivedi said on Friday at the launch of his book Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India: A Saga of Monstrous British Barbarism around the Globe..Dwivedi argued that the political and electoral realities of 1946 made it impossible for Jinnah to have independently created Pakistan, contending that it was the British government that “prepared the dough and baked the cake” of Pakistan. The book was released at the India International Centre in New Delhi by former Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, in the presence of Senior Advocate and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal and Solicitor General Tushar Mehta..Speaking about the book’s thesis, Dwivedi said his research into transfer of power documents led him to conclude that Jinnah did not build Pakistan.He said that electoral outcomes in the 1946 provincial elections, where Congress governments were formed in multiple provinces and the Muslim League did not hold decisive authority across the subcontinent, undercut narratives that attribute Pakistan’s creation solely to Jinnah."I found so many documents of what was happening behind the scenes. Politicians say one thing, outside. What is happening inside is quite different. I believe, after reading all this in the transfer of paper documents, that Jinnah is not the Quaid-e-Azam. He did not build Pakistan. In the 1946 elections, after the World War was over, everybody was released from Congress, elections took place. Eight provinces, Congress government. Two provinces in the northwest, Punjab, coalition government, which is non-Muslim. In northwest Punjab province also it was Congress government. How could Jinnah build Pakistan? There was no question. He had no authority, no power. The people were not behind him. So it is the British who prepared the dough and baked the cake of Pakistan," he remarked. .Dwivedi also addressed the scale of violence that accompanied European colonial expansion, saying it far exceeded the atrocities usually associated with twentieth-century dictators.“The kind of devastation which happened, the genocide which happened in the American soil..... What Hitler did is nothing,” he said. He was referring to the genocide in the Americas during early colonial conquest. “At least 100 Hitlers are required to understand what devastation was done by these Europeans on the American soil. But what they did there was repeated with much worse intensity in Africa, and equally in India," he observed. .Former Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud, while releasing the book, said it interrogates how colonial power explained and legitimised itself through repeated narratives of order, civilisation and governance. He observed that imperial histories often framed domination as an administrative necessity rather than describing it as a conquest, gradually converting contested claims into accepted truths through repetition and confidence rather than evidence.Justice Chandrachud said the book’s strength lay in placing India’s colonisation within a wider global pattern, drawing parallels with Africa, Ireland and the Americas to show how similar justificatory frameworks were deployed across continents. He noted that Dwivedi’s method resembled a sustained constitutional enquiry, identifying recurring propositions in imperial writing and testing them against economic history, geopolitics and comparative colonial experience rather than treating colonial narratives as settled accounts..Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, speaking about the book’s approach, said it treats history not as a simple catalogue of events, but as a process of enquiry into why and how events unfolded.“History is not about facts because we know what happened. History is about knowing why it happened. History is about knowing how it happened,” he said.Referring to the book’s central argument, he said it shifts the focus from individual leaders to the broader geopolitical forces at play during decolonisation.“The book makes the point that the real Quaid-e-Azam (founder) was the British government,” Sibal said..Solicitor General Tushar Mehta described the book as dismantling what he called the “comforting fiction of empire”, arguing that colonial rule was often presented as progress while masking large-scale violence and exploitation. He said the book was particularly unsparing in its treatment of the partition, portraying it not as an inevitable communal rupture but as the result of calculated imperial decisions taken in pursuit of geopolitical interests. The SG added that the work was significant for viewing history through a post-1947 Indian lens rather than colonial historiography.He also remarked that the book ought to be read outside India, particularly in Britain. He said he intended to personally send several copies to acquaintances in England so they could see how India views its colonial past after Independence. The SG said the book exposes how British colonial conquest was historically sanitised through narratives of governance and progress, and added that it would be instructive for British readers to understand how “post-1947 India perceives them”..Follow Bar and Bench channel on WhatsAppDownload the Bar and Bench Mobile app for instant access to the latest legal news.