Jaswant Singh’s tome on Jinnah has ruffled feathers in the Bharatiya Janata Party, but it offers some original and shocking perceptions on our troubled past.
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Jinnah hated the Congress, not Hinduism
.... why Partition and how are ‘Muslims a separate nation’? Unarguably, all this had started just over a hundred years ago, (Simla delegation, 1906), with separate electorates but it is on this narrow foundation had finally got built the assertion of separate 'nation-hood' on which Mohammed Ali Jinnah had achieved that near impossible, of willing into being what he enunciated: 'Muslims are a separate nation'. That 'nation' came into existence on 14 August 1947.
That controversial call through a persistent repetition of which Jinnah succeeded in carving out a separate land, how do we now, ex-post facto assess it? Did the birth of Pakistan conclusively prove Jinnah's thesis?
Or was there actually a rejection of this thesis in the emergence of Bangladesh? This, and other similar ones are rather worrying questions.
Did Jinnah's death empty the core of this idea? Also, this concept, propounded by Jinnah and the path on which he had set his creation - Pakistan — does the reality of it tally with those early fundamentals? With the coming into being of Pakistan did Jinnah's journey end? Or is the past of this idea actually a forerunner of our future?
Towards the end (1940-47), Jinnah was both a self-avowed and the actual political leader of almost the entire Muslim community of undivided India.
He had started his political life as an early champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, along with the total commitment to the cause of freedom from the British.
During that period he stood unambiguously for a united India; yet when he sought a Muslim ‘nation’, that was in terms of a separation from India, as a separate entity.
M R A Baig, for some years Jinnah’s secretary, has written in Jinnah: ‘Islam, as such, came very little into his thinking, and if asked how a mere belief in a common faith’, by people of essentially the same ethnic stock could make a nation, he always gave the example of ‘Americans [having proven] that nationalism was purely subjective.
If the Muslims thought themselves a nation, [well then] they were a nation, and that was all there was to it’.
This was not just a lawyer's argument, it was Jinnah’s assertion of his belief in the ‘power of faith, which he held to be the foundation of nationhood’.
Even though this kind of reasoning remains riddled with infirmities, for Jinnah this was the needed and the only philosophical (at least so it sounded) platform, a kind of a much needed ideological ‘cap’, wearing which an idea [such as this] could be pushed.
His opposition was not against the Hindus or Hinduism, it was Congress that he considered as the true political rival of the Muslim League, and the League he considered as being just an ‘extension of himself’.’
The Muslim community for Jinnah became an electoral body; his call for a Muslim nation in his political platform; the battles he fought were entirely political - between the Muslim League and the Congress; Pakistan was his political demand over which he and the Muslim League could rule.
Religion in all this was entirely incidental; Pakistan alone gave him all that his personality and character demanded. If Mr. Jinnah was necessary for achieving Pakistan, Pakistan too was necessary for the fulfilment of Mr. Jinnah.
Philips Talbot, as an eyewitness, (and he is perhaps the only one still alive) has assessed: 'Jinnah organised and hastened the development of Muslim solidarity with master strategy.
By shrewd, brainy bargaining, cold-blooded astuteness, an absolute refusal to be panicked, and perceptive recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of both himself and his opponent, he has turned every opportunity to the advantage of the League.
In negotiations he has considerably proved a match for the Congress high command with all its talent. "I am constitutionally and by long habit a very cold-blooded logician," he told an adulatory Muslim gathering last November'. No one could have analysed him better.
The Muslim League’s revival was a mistake
On 15 December 1947 the residual Muslim League in India adopted a resolution about reviving itself. Gandhi advised them not to, instead to lend their support to the Congress party. This was wise counsel, welcomed even by Suhrawardy.
Sadly, though, Azad failed to rise to the occasion, a demoralised and confused Muslim community in India was his to lead, he did address them, in that much acclaimed oration of 23 October 1947 at the Jama Masjid, but that speech was far too layered over with the language of taunt and reproach, ‘I hailed you; you cut off my tongue’.
Leaders of the Muslim League in the Constituent Assembly had then, rather mindlessly, demanded not only a reservation of seats but separate electorates as well.
This provoked Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel into delivering remarks that would have, on any other occasion been better left unsaid, but then with the country's partition wounds still raw, any such claim of reservations being raised again rubbed those wounds afresh and made them bleed all over again.
The Sardar, in pain and in anger, admonished: ‘I do not know whether there has been any change in their (the Muslims) attitude to bring forward such an amendment, even now, after all this long reflection and experience of what has happened in this country. But I know this that they have got a mandate from the Muslim League to move this amendment.
I feel sorry for them. This is not a place today for acting on mandates. This is a place today to act on your conscience and to act for the good of the country.
For a community to think that its interests are different from that of the country in which it lives is a great mistake.
Assuming that we agreed today to the reservation of seats, I would consider myself to be the greatest enemy of the Muslim community because of the consequences of the step in a secular and democratic State....[Those] who do not trust the majority cannot obviously come into the Government....
Accordingly, you will have no share in the Government. You will exclude yourselves and remain perpetually in a minority. Then, what advantage will you gain?’
Is that why there is in this a sense of disappointment and tragedy? Perhaps yes, but also perhaps because we continue to repeat the great errors of those epochal decades.
Take ‘minoritism’, again. M J Akbar, in an erudite and magisterial essay analyses the challenges of it convincingly, in a yet to be published work The Major Minority: ‘At what point in the story of the last thousand years did Indian Muslims become a minority?
The question is, clearly, rhetorical. Muslims have never been in a numerical majority on the Indian subcontinent’.
In becoming an Islamic state, Pakistan became a jehadi one …
Partition had to be claimed, yes, but for what? Was it for security, communal order, peace? As none of these were sufficiently sustainable points for a division of India, there then arrived the thesis: ‘Muslims are a separate nation’.
On first hearing, this sounded so absolutely, totally, illogically wrong, so unacceptable; and yet, it acquired a beguiling resonance, through constant repetition as if some high principle was being enunciated, any refutation of which would be both unjust and a complex task when and if attempted; besides this slogan, through ersatz, was sufficiently high sounding.
Ultimately, both the Congress, the League and the departing British tried so much, so assiduously, so continuously, so hard and for so long to break India, that India had finally to divide.
And in the end the physical act of partitioning became just a shabby, graceless and an indefensibly cruel 'give and take' of numbers: 'You have this, I'll take this'.
And thus was fractured the great unity of this ancient land: a divide that could simply not bring any peace in its wake; it first compartmentalised and then tightly sealed Hindu-Muslim animosities, cementing festering grudges into near permanent hostilities; what was domestic — Hindu-Muslim, became international — India-Pakistan; we made global our domestic disagreements.
For Pakistan, it became the policy plank — ‘perpetual and induced hostility towards India that became its premiere state polity’, it could scarcely be otherwise.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was, to my mind, fundamentally in error proposing ‘Muslims as a separate nation’, which is why he was so profoundly wrong when he simultaneously spoke of ‘lasting peace, amity and accord with India after the emergence of Pakistan’; that simply could not be.
Perhaps, late General Zia-ul-Haq was nearer reality, when asked as to why ‘Pakistan cultivated and maintained this policy of so much induced hostility towards India?’, he replied (some say apocryphally, but tellingly) that, ‘Turkey or Egypt, if they stop being aggressively Muslim, they will remain exactly what they are — Turkey or Egypt.
But if Pakistan does not become and remain aggressively Islamic it will become India again. Amity with India will mean getting swamped by this all enveloping embrace of India.’ This worry has haunted the psyche of all the leaders of Pakistan since 1947....the ‘idea of Pakistan’ has often got usurped, which is why Pakistan’s friends have so often become its masters, and which is also why the ‘state’ of Pakistan continues to remain fragile, so unsure, so tense.
However, there were other factors, too. Pakistan, founded on the notion of separateness, a ‘nation’ distinctly apart from India, could do no more than to continuously affirm its Islamic identity. It therefore adopted the identity of being an Islamic Republic. This seemingly direct and logical evolution from
India should have given more to Pakistan at Partition’
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