Who wrote the book "Pakistan or the Partition of India"?

Concept — Authorship of a political tract is fixed by its publication record: the name printed on the title page, the imprint of its first edition, and the author’s own preface. The subject of a book and the author of a book are independent facts, because a study of a political demand is very often written by a critic standing outside the movement that raised it.

Application — The volume was published at Bombay in 1945 by Thacker & Co. as the enlarged second edition of "Thoughts on Pakistan" (1940), and both editions carry Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar on the title page. In it he examines the Muslim League’s Lahore Resolution demand of 1940, sets out the case for and against a separate Pakistan, and analyses the communal, military and administrative consequences that partition would carry.

Cross-check — Test each of the other named figures against the same publication record:

• Muhammad Iqbal died in 1938, two years before the Lahore Resolution and seven years before this 1945 volume appeared; his own titles are works of poetry and philosophy such as "Asrar-e-Khudi" (1915) and "The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam" (1930).

• Muhammad Ali Jinnah appears in the book as its subject rather than on its title page; his own corpus was issued as collected speeches, statements and correspondence, compiled by editors such as Jamil-ud-Din Ahmad.

• The title page names one author. Therefore only one of the individually named people can satisfy the authorship question; the set-level responses “More than one of the given options” and “None of the given options” are excluded by the same record.

Result — "Pakistan or the Partition of India" (1945) was written by Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.