In 1975 the British General Medical Council ceased to recognize Indian medical degrees as sufficient qualification for practice as a doctor in Britain. For several years previously the G.M.C. had refused to grant automatic recognition to the degrees of the new Indian medical colleges, and this had soured relationships between the G.M.C. and its Indian counterpart, the Medical Council of India. In retaliation for the British move, the M.C.I. ceased to recognize British medical degrees, and higher qualifications from Britain awarded after 1976 would not be accepted from candidates for promotion in medical colleges and other public sector jobs. This controversy was not as novel as recent commentators have supposed. Indian medical degrees had been refused recognition once before—in 1930—and the issue of G.M.C. recongnition had been at the heart of a dispute between the Indian medical colleges and the British medical authorities which had raged from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second.

When in August 1933 the German Minister to China, Dr Oskar P. Trautmann, reported to Berlin, ‘daβ die Völkerbundsmelodie politisch hier ausgespielt hat’, he had jumped to a conclusion too soon. When two years later the Journal Round Table commented, ‘to-day the League of Nations is no longer a political factor in the Far East’, this assessment was vindicated by evidence of every description. The two years between had witnessed the peak and decline of the League of Nation's ‘technical co-operation’ with the National Government of China. This episode plays its part as one of the major accomplishments of the League during the dismal second decade of its existence. It figures, however, only marginally in the history of twentieth-century China. Western works on modern Chinese history tend to neglect it altogether, and the most comprehensive scholarly treatment of China's foreign relations during the Republican period does not even deem it worth a reference in passing. On the other hand, the one authoritative textbook on modern Chinese economic history published in the People's Republic of China devotes ample space to the denunciation of the League's Chinese enterprise.

Sun Yat-sen arrived in Shanghai in August 1922 after suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of his former ally, Ch'en Chiung-ming. In the next five months, he negotiated with Russian and Chinese Communists for their collaboration with the Kuomintang. His effort was fruitful, On January 26, 1923, he issued a joint manifesto with the Soviet emissary, Adolf Joffe, who assured the Chinese revolutionary leader—in the name of the ‘Russian people’—of their ‘warmest sympathy for China’ and their ‘willingness to lend support.’.

In this paper an attempt has been made to delineate the background of the religious support for the Pakistan movement in the Punjab by looking in particular at the connections between the structure of religious leadership and the structure of Muslim politics in 20th century Punjab. Only the rough outlines of these connections have been provided, but nevertheless some important patterns have emerged. From the time of the conversion to Islam of much of the western Punjab at the hands of sufi saints, religious leadership in the rural areas was focused on the hereditary sajjada nashins of the shrines of these saints. The position of these hereditary religious leaders was tied closely into the political organization of the rural areas, and this produced a considerable unity of political and economic interests between the religious and the secular leaders of rural society. Such common interests were strengthened by the British, who, in molding a system of rural administration in the Punjab, recognized the sajjada nashins of these shrines as part of a single ruling class of hereditary rural leaders. When the Unionist Party emerged in the 1920s as a party of rural interests led by this class of rural leaders, the sajjada nashins as a group were strongly disposed, therefore, to support it and to oppose the religious attacks on the Unionists which emanated from primarily urban reformist leaders.

As a result of a widespread revival of sufi. influence in western Punjab in the post-Mughal era, however, many of the sajjada nashins in twentieth- century Punjab had also developed very strong religious commitments to spreading a deeper awareness of Islam. This revival had spread initially through the Chishti order but was later widened by the development of the Ahl-e-Sunnat-o-Jamaat group of ulama who gave religious legitimacy to the continuing emphasis on the forms of religious influence centered on the shrines. The sajjada nashins who drew on this revival tradition were not satisfied with the secular basis of the political system developed by the Unionists, but due to their structural grounding as sajjada nashins in the rural political milieu, they did not generally give the Unionists active opposition. The Unionist Party was thus able, with tacit religious support in the rural areas, to build a strong system of political authority based on rural control, and this propelled the Party to its sweeping victory in the 1937 elections.

With the emergence of the Muslim League, however, which transcended the political question of rural interests versus urban, the revivalist sajjada nashins saw the opportunity to put rural politics on a more solid religious foundation. The concept of Pakistan was seen by them in traditional terms as the establishment of a religious state, ruled by the traditional leaders of rural society but firmly based on the Shariat. In the elections of 1946 the revivalist sajjada nashins provided the vanguard of religious support for Pakistan and played an important role in carrying the Muslim League to triumph over the Unionist Party. The victory was a sweeping religious mandate for Pakistan and marked the most important step on the road to Pakistan's formation.

The important role of the sajjada nashins in the Muslim League's election victory was also an important pointer to the nature of the Pakistan state which was to emerge. Structurally, the revivalist sajjada nashins were themselves deeply rooted in rural society and their support for the Muslim League in no way represented a repudiation of the class of landed leaders who had long wielded power in western Punjab under the Unionist banner. The victory for Pakistan represented only, a call for a new religious definition of the old rural order, not for a new alignment of political power such as the reformist ulama had called for. The further definition of this system, however, remained to be developed in the new Muslim state.