The Hindu Business Line : From Jinnah to Hafiz Saeed

Jinnah shared a common interest with the British in ensuring that there was a weak central government in India incapable of holding the country together. His aims were thus not very different from those of the Jamat-ud-Dawa’s Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, who keeps harping on the ‘disintegration’ of India, says G. PARTHASARATHY.

Addressing a gathering of tens of thousands of zealots at the headquarters of the Jamat-ud-Dawa (earlier called the Lashkar-e-Taiba), on November 3, 2000, the Amir of the Lashkar, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed had thundered: “Jihad is not about Kashmir only. About 15 years ago people might have found it ridiculous if someone had told them about the disintegration of the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Today, I announce the break-up of India, Inshallah. We will not rest till the whole of India is dissolved into Pakistan”.

Saeed has been regularly publicly pronouncing a war that would encompass the whole of India. Till the terrorist outrage of 26/11 no one took him seriously. Shortly after his November 2000 speech, Saeed sent his “Mujahideen” into the very heart of New Delhi, to attack the historic Red Fort on December 22, 2000. Addressing a gathering of political leaders from Islamic parties shortly thereafter, Saeed proudly proclaimed that he had unfurled the green flag of Islam in the historic Red Fort.

Hafiz Mohammed Saeed was and is no ordinary person. He enjoyed the patronage of former Pakistani Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who had sent the Governor of Punjab, Shahid Hamid, and his Information Minister, Mushahid Hussein Syed, to personally call on and pay their respects to Saeed in 1998. The Wahabi/Salafi school of Islam propagated by Saeed was, after all, patronised by Nawaz Sharif’s father Mian Mohamed Sharif, through the Tablighi Jamat.

Moreover, at grassroots levels, the Lashkar is closely linked to the Pakistan army and the ISI, which provides weapons, training and logistics support to the extremist group. But is Saeed’s talk of “disintegration’ of India merely the rhetoric of an isolated individual, or does it reflect a wider strategic vision within Pakistan, particularly its armed forces?

Fomenting separatism

While the “idea” of Pakistan was first enunciated by Chaudhuri Rehmat Ali in 1933 and given shape in the Lahore Resolution of the Muslim League in 1940, the hope and belief in Pakistan, even after it was born, was that India would be a loose confederation, with units like the Nizam’s domain in Hyderabad and even a “Dravidistan” going their own separate ways. Jinnah often spoke contemptuously of upper caste Hindus, while fostering separatism by highlighting a separate linguistic and ethnic Dravidian identity, as characterising the ethos of people in South India.

While Mahatma Gandhi tried to address centuries of exploitation and alienation of Dalits in India, together with leaders like Dr B. R. Ambedkar, Jinnah endeavoured to foment Dalit alienation. He went to the extent of encouraging elements in princely States such as Jodhpur and Travancore-Cochin to declare independence. The aim, very clearly, was to balkanise India and ensure domination of the sub-continent by a Muslim majority State.

Jinnah shared a common interest with the British in ensuring that there was a weak central government in India incapable of holding the country firmly together. His aims regarding India were thus not very different from those of Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, though he was a virtually agnostic Ismaili (whom the likes of Saeed would today categorize as a ‘kaffir’) and who, according to his biographer Stanley Wolpert, liked Scotch Whisky and ham sandwiches.

Saeed, however, espouses rabid Wahabi causes. He makes no secret of his contempt for parliamentary democracy based on the principle of “one man, one vote”. But is Jinnah’s demand for a disproportionate share of parliamentary seats for his community, on the basis of their having been the “rulers” of India before the British arrived, also not a negation of the concept of ‘one man, one vote” that is the fundamental principle of parliamentary democracy? It was Jinnah’s quest for “parity’ for a minority that forms the basis of Pakistan’s unrealistic quest for parity with India — a quest that has led Pakistan to disaster.

Unity of Indian people

Jinnah’s successors, from Liaqat Ali Khan to Gen Pervez Musharraf, have conducted relations with India in the belief that India’s unity is fragile. “Field Marshal” Ayub Khan launched the 1965 conflict believing that Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was a weak leader facing serious separatist problems, because of the Punjabi Suba movement in Punjab and anti-Hindi riots combined with the rise of Dravidian parties in the South, apart from continuing insurgencies in the North-East.

The Pakistani establishment was taken aback by the unity the people of India displayed in the wake of unprovoked aggression by their neighbour. Gen Zia ul Haq set up an elaborate network to encourage separatism within India and laid special stress on creating a Hindu-Sikh communal divide in Punjab. This effort failed primarily because Hindus and Sikhs alike saw through Pakistan’s game plans.

The ISI effort to “bleed” India in Jammu and Kashmir is but a continuation of the strategy to “weaken India from within” that Pakistan has followed since its birth.

One, therefore, finds it shocking when Indians who should know better, seek to extol Jinnah’s professed qualities of head and heart. Merely because he was once “secular”, does not condone his culpability in the communal holocaust he unleashed by his call for ‘direct action’.

British interests

In his meticulously researched book The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of Partition former diplomat Narendra Singh Sarila has revealed that well before the Cabinet Mission arrived in India in May 1946, two successive British Viceroys, Lord Linlithgow and Lord Wavell, had decided to partition India by creating a Muslim majority state in its north-west, bordering Iran, Afghanistan and the Sinkiang Province of China, in order to protect British interests in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah was co-opted to further this British objective even in 1939. After he achieved his ambitions, Jinnah’s efforts to impose Urdu as the sole national language of Pakistan sowed the seeds of Bangladeshi separatism and of Pakistan’s disintegration in 1971.

His assumption of office as an unelected executive head of state who presided over the Cabinet, led to his successors arbitrarily dismissing Prime Ministers and to the takeover of Pakistan by a military dominated feudal elite — a malady the country suffers from even today. It is this ruling elite that adopted policies that has led to Pakistan today being described as the “epicentre” of global terrorism. This, in the ultimate analysis, is Jinnah’s legacy to the world and to the sub-continent, in which we all live.

The statesmanlike visit of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to the “Minar e Pakistan” in Lahore signalled that India has no intention of reversing the Partition of 1947 and that we wish the people of Pakistan well. Challenges that Pakistan’s establishment poses will be overcome when the values of secularism, pluralism and inclusive democratic development are established as being more enduring than the fantasies of nationhood based exclusively on religion, which Jinnah propounded, or the hate and bigotry of fanatics like Hafiz Mohammed Saeed.

(The author is a former High Commissioner to Pakistan. blfeedback@thehindu.co.in)

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