Who raised the cry “Divide and Quit”?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, M.A. Jinnah. The phrase is a retort, and it only makes sense as one. In August 1942 the Congress demanded that the British Quit India, leaving a single undivided country behind them. The Muslim League's answer, in three words, was that they should divide first and then quit — independence yes, but not to one successor state. The Commission, disposing of objections to this question on 31 October 2025, placed Jinnah's retort after the Congress's Quit India call of August 1942 and reached the answer by elimination rather than by citation: M. A. Ansari and Jawaharlal Nehru were Congress leaders opposed to the partition of India, and Muhammad Iqbal had died in 1938, two years before the Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution in 1940. Be told plainly what this card will not do. We could not verify from any primary or scholarly source the session, the place or the date at which Jinnah used these words, so no such detail is supplied here; the attribution rests on the Commission's own published reasoning and on the fact that no other name on the list can carry it. The elimination itself is airtight, and on two of the three it is stronger than the Commission needed. Ansari was not merely a Congressman opposed to Partition — he had been dead since 10 May 1936, six years before the Quit India call. Iqbal died on 21 April 1938. Nehru fought Partition to the last and signed on to the 3 June Plan of 1947 only when the alternative had run out. That leaves the one man on the list whose entire political programme from 1940 onwards was exactly this proposition. Guard against one confusion that trips up half the internet: Divide and Quit is also the title of a 1961 memoir of Partition by Sir Penderel Moon, a British Indian Civil Service officer who served in Punjab and Bahawalpur. The book borrowed the slogan; it did not create it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong twice over, and the second reason is decisive. Dr Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari was a Congress nationalist — President of the Indian National Congress in 1927-28, President of the All-India Muslim League as early as 1920-21, and a founder and then Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia — who stood for a composite India and against separatist politics. He also could not have said it: he died of a heart attack on 10 May 1936, on a train travelling from Mussoorie to Delhi, six years before the Quit India call to which this slogan replies.  (c) The opposite of his position. Nehru was a Congress leader who resisted the partition demand throughout, called the Lahore Resolution 'Jinnah's fantastic proposals', and accepted the 3 June Plan of 1947 only as the last option left. He was also in prison from 9 August 1942 along with the rest of the Congress Working Committee, arrested precisely for making the Quit India demand that 'Divide and Quit' was framed to answer.  (d) The most tempting wrong answer, because his 1930 Allahabad Address to the Muslim League is routinely described as the intellectual seed of a separate Muslim homeland, so a candidate reaching for 'the man behind the Pakistan idea' lands on him. But he was a poet and philosopher, not the League's negotiator, and the chronology forbids it: Sir Muhammad Iqbal died on 21 April 1938 — nearly two years before the Lahore Resolution of 1940 and more than four years before the Quit India call of August 1942.

Concept: The last decade of the Raj was fought in slogans, and each was written against another. 'Divide and rule' was the nationalist charge against British policy, from the partition of Bengal in 1905 through separate electorates under the Indian Councils Act 1909 to the Communal Award of 1932. 'Quit India' was the Congress demand of 8 August 1942: leave, and leave one country. 'Divide and Quit' was the counter-demand — accept the same departure but perform a partition on the way out. Behind the three words sits the two-nation argument the Muslim League had been building since Jinnah broke with the Congress in the 1920s: his Fourteen Points of 1929, framed as the Muslim reply to the Nehru Report of 1928, which he had dismissed as a 'Hindu Document'; Iqbal's Allahabad Address of 1930; and then the Lahore Resolution of 1940, which committed the League to independent states in the Muslim-majority regions of the north-west and the east. From 1940 the two demands ran in parallel and could not both be met, which is why the endgame moved so fast once the British decided to go: Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946, the League's entry into the interim ministry in October 1946, Attlee's announcement of 20 February 1947, Mountbatten's 3 June Plan of 1947, and finally the Indian Independence Act, which received Royal Assent on 18 July 1947 and split the country on 15 August. Jinnah became Pakistan's first Governor-General.

State PCS 2025 Q79 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q79 — History PYQ with Answer