From Ayesha Jalal's Sole Spokesman

From the 'Sole Spokesman-Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan', Cambridge University Press, 1985.

The Cabinet Mission sought to solve the problem of British strategic interests in India by 'giving both the claimants some part of what they wanted...'a Pakistan trimmed to the bone[Scheme B], or a central government stripped of most of its real powers, and not 'worth much'[Scheme A]...

Once the Cabinet had given the go-ahead[in March-April 1946], the way was clear to offer Jinnah the alternatives of a small Pakistan with sovereign rights and treaty relations with Hindustan, or a larger Pakistan(with some minor boundary adjustments and only excluding Assam) inside a federation with Hindustan.

The great merit was that in such a federation 'Pakistan' would have equal status with Hindustan in those two matters over which a rather emasculated all-India centre was to be given authority. There was to be no union legislature and any question at the centre on which the two federal units failed to agree would be referred back to their respective group legislatures. Agreement would not be imposed by central dictate, but by agreement between two federated governments.

To make this all-India federaton even more attractive for Jinnah, it was clearly stated that the Muslim-majority areas would have complete control over all their affairs except those specifically given to the centre; and at the centre 'they would meet the Hindus on a level where it was States which counted and not the number of individuals in them.' This principle of equality, which was exactly what Jinnah had been fighting for all along was, he was now told[by Lord Pethick Lawrence], 'the essence of the proposal'.

..Now the [Cabinet] Mission offered [Jinnah] the substance of what he was really after. It was not the impractical 'Pakistan' of fantasy for which the man in the street or the mullah in the mosque was wont to cry, nor was it the 'mutilated and moth-eaten' Pakistan which was outlined in Scheme B and which finally emerged in 1947.

His Pakistan did not intend to throw the advantages of an undivided Punjab and Bengal to the winds, nor did it plan to leave the Muslims in Hindustan unprotected. Undivided provinces and protection for minority Muslims could only be achieved inside the framework of an union with an effective centre where the League had an equal say.

So we must carefully assess why Jinnah did not jump more openly and more enthusiastically at what the Mission now offered in its Scheme A...It was only by pressing for even more than he had been offered that Jinnah hoped to persuade the Congress to accept the Mission's proposed all-India federal scheme as a lesser evil. Then there were his own followers to consider. Few among them would understand that the Mission had dealt them a royal flush or that equality at an all-India federal centre outweighed the advantages which a sovereign but truncated Pakistan would bring.

So the game was played in Jinnah's usual manner. He argued that equality at the centre was all very well on Cabinet paper, but would never work in Khadi practice. Equality could hardly be assured inside a system of government where one party had the big battalions, and the other the small.

What Jinnah needed was to get all the parties to agree to dissolve the existing centre, in principle if not in fact, and then immediately to recreate it on the basis of a sovereign Pakistan. In his opinion, this alone would ensure Muslims equal treatment at the centre, since it would be an equality underwritten by the law of nations:a treaty between sovereign states. In return he was prepared to give up parts of the six Muslim provinces(though Assam could hardly be considered a Muslim province) to which he had laid claim.

But unless and until Congress came forward with a clear 'yes'. he would not say what he was willing to give up'. He wanted to make terms with the Congress, but only if it gave him a 'viable' state, not if it 'struck at the heart of Pakistan'. If Congress refused to budge, then Jinnah wanted the Mission to impose a settlement, and thought they were in a 'position to do it'.

In fact he would have preferred the British to give him what they had offered and what he was ready to accept by an award, since the Congress was unlikely in the end to concede such a degree of sovereignty to Pakistan which his scheme demanded. So the British should impose their solution and stay on for a few years to make it stick. Union here and now between the League and Congress provinces was all very well only provided the British remained to supervise fair play to the weaker partner represented by the League..

[As revealed later in the Simla conference in May 1946] ..Both parties had diametrically different conceptions of what power the union centre should possess. Finance was the nub of the matter, since power comes out of the drawers of the till. Congress wanted a self-supporting centre, with control over subjects to do with revenue. Jinnah claimed he wanted a centre with no real financial powers, a mere agent for the federations, dependent on doles from the provinces. He did not want the centre to have authority to levy taxes upon the groups.

The union would have to be given a budget for defence, but that budget was to be kept to the minimum in line with previous expenditure by the two federations who would have to agree on what to give. If the union needed more money, Jinnah wanted its budget to go to the group legislatures for their approval. Not surprisingly, Nehru retorted that the Congress could never accept such a 'vague and airy Centre.'.

By his implacable opposition to an union legislature, Jinnah showed what he was really after. He would have preferred even foreign affairs and defence, the union centre's two responsibilities, to be discussed and settled in the group legislatures and he conceded with reluctance that this was neither logical nor practical.(*Note below).

But if there was to be a union legislature, parity for the League was of the essence: different legislatures would be entitled to elect an equal number of representatives to the union legislature, and the balance between the League and the Congress would be made immune to any changes, even if the princes were to come in later...

*Ms Jalal's note below here- "The Secretary of State asked the Leaguers whether they envisaged India's foreign minister trotting off like some peripatetic envoy to two or three legislatures, attempting to justify his policy to three different sets of interests; and whether India's guns would have three barrels swivelling round to three points of the compass according to the conflicting demands of three houses. Jinnah thought he had made his point when he drew an analogy between the foreign policy of the British Commonwealth of Nations and the new India he wanted; but someone reminded him that the Commonwealth did not have a common foreign policy."