The Hindu Business Line : A tale of two animosities

“Mujhe India nahi aana hai, waha par toh schools mei Quaid-e-Azam pe laanat boltey hai. (I don’t want to come to India because in Indian schools Quaid-e-Azam is cursed).”

I was taken aback to get this comment from the eight-year-old son of a friend in Karachi about eight years ago, when I casually invited him to visit India. I then spent the next 15 minutes telling the adults in the room there was no such animosity against Mohammed Ali Jinnah in India, least amongst school kids, who probably didn’t even know about him and didn’t care.

But events remind you that wounds left behind by the Partition, even after long decades, are fresh enough to rankle and create a furore in India at the proposition that Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam was a secular and (Indian) “nationalist” man with modern and liberal views, and was pushed to the point of no return by Congress leaders.

Jaswant Singh, the author of the book Jinnah — India-Partition-Independence, been bundled out from the BJP for daring to say so, and holding Sardar Patel, along with Jawaharlal Nehru, responsible for the Partition. Narendra Modi’s Gujarat has banned the book, raising the Patel bogey, and most right-wing journalists and commentators have seen red at the very idea of a “rank communalist” like Jinnah being praised in the book.

Political biography

Singh tells us he thought of writing a political biography of Jinnah while accompanying Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee to Lahore in 1999. Many people he spoke to about this venture wondered why he was doing it; and some even cautioned him. But he persisted as “it was a journey of my own”.

Setting out on “an interpretative account of Jinnah’s evolution as the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan”, Singh says Indian Muslims were, and are, not a homogenous, monolithic community and Jinnah’s Khoja community of traders was not known for “combative Muslimness” and had kept away from politics.

But Jinnah was different; a self-educated, self-made man without assets of “birth, lineage or social status”, he was determined and combative. “His nationalism was not born of any self-interest; it was a by-product of his free-spirited nature, his exposure to England, his thriving legal practice, which he had earned on his own merit.”

The first few chapters describe the dilemma of the young man, still in his 30s, on how to relate with the newly formed Muslim League, even while being a committed member of the Congress. When Jinnah did join the League in 1913, he insisted that his “loyalty to it and Muslim interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his (Jinnah’s) life was dedicated”. But he attended the 1921 Ahmedabad Congress session for the last time.

So why did a man, a votary of Hindu-Muslim unity, make a dogged and determined quest for a separate Muslim nation? History has the answer, Singh tells us. By 1920, six years after returning from South Africa, Gandhi grew from strength to strength and became “the rallying spirit behind India’s freedom movement”; a status that Jinnah never attained. As Gandhi’s influence in the Congress grew, the author wonders if Jinnah was “outwitted, outmanoeuvred”. Or, even more tragically, was his being a Muslim a great disadvantage? In this “heartless race” Jinnah was always handicapped,” he concludes.

Gandhi and Jinnah

The most interesting passages in Singh’s book, for obvious reasons, pertain to comparisons between Gandhi, who went on to become India’s Mahatma, and Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam. The two were strikingly different; Gandhi, after return from South Africa, speedily shed his identity “as an English gentleman … donned the clothes and style of the common man, then later shed even these for the bare minimum of the poorest villager”. Jinnah remained committed to his “three-piece suits, his lorgnette, his cigarette holder and the King’s English. No Gujarati for him, and no political language that invoked religion”.

One was devoutly and expressly Hindu, the other but a “casual votary of Islam. One shaped religion to his political ends. The other shunned it on grounds of principle… Gandhi led his personal life publicly; Jinnah led even his public life close to his chest.”

As these two stalwarts engaged with the British on the destiny of India, Jinnah was “progressively repelled and increasingly convinced that Gandhi was a demagogue and a fake. For decades Jinnah resented and resisted Gandhi’s common man politics.” And yet over the years he had developed a wary respect for the man who, for most of his political career, outshone and outgunned him. But, says Singh, there was a big difference in the way Jinnah looked at Gandhi and Nehru. Gandhi, unlike Nehru, did not want Congress to assume power in an independent India and said Congress should be disbanded as it was only a “vehicle for the independence movement.” Seizing and using State power was something that Nehru wanted, not Gandhi, and hence Gandhi told Mountbatten that he should ask the League to form the interim government and Jinnah to be its prime minister. Hence Jinnah never looked at Gandhi with “the kind of animosity and distrust” he had for Nehru.

Communal divisions

The Hindu-Muslim unity for which both Gandhi and Jinnah had fought is illustrated in the account of Swami Shraddhanand being welcomed by the large congregation at Delhi’s Jumma Masjid in April 1919, which chanted after him: ‘Om shanti, Ameen’. But this “tide of togetherness” soon ran out; by 1926, this architect of the shuddhi movement had been shot down by a Muslim fanatic.

‘The Turbulent Twenties’ chapter traces the growing Hindu-Muslim discord and clashes. By 1933 Jinnah’s political idiom had changed, and he said, “I am convinced there is no hope for India without real and genuine Hindu-Muslim unity which can only be achieved by Hindus who are in a majority. There must be a real change of heart.”

In 1938, speaking to students of the Aligarh Anglo-Muslim College, an anguished Jinnah said at the meetings of the Round Table Conference “I saw the face of danger, the Hindu sentiment, the Hindu mind, the Hindu attitude… (it) led me to the conclusion that there was no hope of unity. I felt very pessimistic about my country. The Mussalmans were like dwellers in No-Man’s land: they were led either by the flunkeys of the British government or the camp followers of the Congress.”

Disappointed and depressed, he had noted that he had even thought of settling down in London, not because he did not love India but because he felt so “utterly helpless.”

The Muslim League’s dismal performance in the 1936-37 elections taught Jinnah a vital political lesson and strengthened the idea of a separate Muslim nation. Further, failure to get assurance of constitutional safeguards and proportionate representation for Muslims in an independent India hardened his resolve.

Lahore Resolution

The definitive resolution from the League came on March 23, 1940 in Lahore, asking for a Federation of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan with complete autonomy and sovereign powers, along with other States in the East (now Bangladesh).

Towards the end of September 1944, the talks between Gandhi and Jinnah broke down; this chapter (Sunset of the Empire), in a book whose length tests the reader’s patience, is racy. Notes Singh: “Gandhi continued to have the highest regard for Jinnah’s single mindedness, his great ability and integrity which nothing could buy. Surely, Jinnah — the patriot — would not insist on freedom to engage in a fratricidal war or to do things that would weaken the two parts taken as a whole.”

An interesting passage in the book is Ram Manohar Lohia’s account of the June AICC meet of 1947, where the Mountbatten Plan on India’s partition was accepted. Barring Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, “none spoke a single word in opposition to partition.” Lohia says Gandhi turned to Patel and Nehru and complained that they had not informed him of the partition scheme before committing to it. At first Nehru denied this but when Gandhi challenged him again he altered his earlier observation. He said: “Noakhali (where Gandhi had fasted protesting against the communal carnage) was so far away and that, while he may not have described the details of the scheme, he had broadly written of partition to Gandhiji”. Lohia says he believed Gandhi when he said he was not told about partition before “Nehru and Patel had committed themselves to it.”

He adds: “Nehru and Patel were offensively aggressive to Gandhiji at this meeting” and only later he could understand “the exceedingly rough behaviour of these two chosen disciples towards their master. There was something psychopathic about it… whenever they scented that Gandhiji was preparing to obstruct them, they barked violently”.

Small wonder that the BJP and the Congress are so displeased with Singh’s book!

BJP thrashing Singh for going against its “core ideology” also has to do with this passage: “Those Muslims who remained or were left behind in India now find themselves as almost abandoned, bereft of a sense of real kinship of not being ‘one’ in their entirety with the rest. This robs them of the essence of psychological security; as indeed the remaining Hindus suffer in Pakistan and/or Bangladesh; even as they are slowly, silently but continuously driven out.”

The immediate aftermath of the Partition, the violence and bloodshed, the disappearance and rape of women, the different journeys on which India and Pakistan set out, politically, socially and economically, the wars we fought, the Pak-sponsored terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and beyond, and the rancour and hostility that continues to rage in both the countries, are issues that have engaged the attention of the entire world.

Singh completes the journey of Jinnah in an independent Pakistan, where he lived for barely a year as the rapidly advancing tuberculosis, a heavily guarded secret from Indian leaders prior to the Partition, took its toll on the frail man. The account of his failing health and death is poignant.

Experts have passed strictures on Singh’s account; some have rubbished it altogether, and some have suggested what he should cover in a subsequent edition. To this columnist, its biggest challenge is its length; the text could have been better edited and tightened, some long-drawn quotes running into pages reduced, and the book’s appeal could have been genuinely enhanced. Then, its reprints would not have depended on the political controversy and the brutal treatment meted out to its author by the BJP.

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A tale of two animosities