Jinnah’s Communalism: Sieving Facts from Fiction
Dr Vijay Rana, 20 August 2009, London How can Jinnah, the lifelong campaigner for separate communal electorate, the advocate of two-nations theory, the opponent of 'Hindu Tyranny' and the initiator of India’s first mass violence campaign, the Direct Action Day, be described as a secular leader? Dr Vijay Rana tells the true story of Jinnah. The Indian admirers of Muhammad Ali Jinnah have long tried to put him at par with Gandhi and Nehru. Recently, the pro-Jinnah chorus has grown into such a crescendo that many Indians are genuinely confused and think that partition was really the fault of Nehru and Patel. Gandhi and Nehru were secular. They believed in communal harmony. Despite our numerous differences and mind-boggling diversities they managed to lay the foundations of a secular and democratic India. On the other hand Jinnah’s vision was narrow and tactics uncompromising. He used both religion and violence to achieve his sectarian state of Pakistan. How can any leader who uses religion and violence to divide a people be either secular or democrat? When we make Nehru and Gandhi villain and Jinnah a hero, that’s where problem begins – the problem of an inverted and politicised history. We Indians need to understand what Jinnah did to us and had we followed his path where we could have ended. The Indian admirers of Jinnah need to answer, how could they respect a man without respecting his legacy and life work. And what was Jinnah’s legacy – that ‘Hindus and Muslims are two nations’. And what was his life’s work – the creation of ‘the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’. The supporters of Jinnah’s secularism also need to be reminded that Jinnah’s speeches and writings are not written in undecipherable
Indus script. They are available in print, in audio, in video and now on google. A supporter of communal electorate It’s true that Jinnah began his political career as a Congressman believing in secularism and Hindu-Muslim unity. But once he joined the Muslim League in 1913 he shared the League’s vision of the separation of Hindu and Muslim interests. Three years later, as the main architect of Congress-League Lucknow pact, we find him championing the cause of separate and communal electorate. After 1937, he began using provocative language against Congress, particularly Gandhi. We find him openly asking Indian Muslims to ‘fight and shed blood’ to achieve their political goals. We also find him increasingly referring to the prophet, the Quran, and Islam to polarize Muslims opinion. Interestingly, Pakistani accounts of Jinnah do not hide the communal face of Jinnah. They repeatedly quote his speeches in which he invokes the glory of Islam to liberate Muslims from what he calls the ‘brute Hindu tyranny’. Imagine what kind of democracy we would be having in India – Muslim only voting for Muslim candidates and Hindus voting for only Hindus. In Jinnah’s India Congress would have become a communal Hindu party because one of his main demands was that only Muslim League could represent Muslims and League would have the exclusive right to Muslim ministers in any future government. Supporters of Jinnah produced a huge body of work, particularly during June 2005 when Advani praised Jinnah’s secularim. For example, the scholarly lawyer AG Noorani writing in the Frontline (13 June 2005), argued that Jinnah was ‘truly a great man. His political record from 1906 to 1939 reveals a spirit of conciliation and statesmanship, which Congress leaders did not reciprocate.’ ‘Indians must begin to acknowledge, advised Noorani, ‘his greatness and the grave injustice the Congress leaders did to him’. Noorani skipped any mention of Jinnah’s words or actions relating to his most active years, 1940-47. Because it was during these years Jinnah was spreading
fear among Muslims telling them in Gandhi’s India Muslims will be ‘absolutely wiped out of existence’. But the most ingenious distortion of history came from the British author Patrick French. He wrote in the Outlook (June 2005) that ‘Gandhi was a wily politician and Jinnah remained a secularist till his death.’ He argued that partition occurred because the Congress refused to accept Jinnah’s ‘justifiable demands’. Ayasha Jalal, the Pakistani professor of history at the Tufts University, USA, also wrote in the Outlook: ‘It was the Congress backed by the Hindu Mahasabha which plumped for a partition of the two main Muslim-majority provinces of India, the Punjab and Bengal, opposed by Jinnah and the League.’ Prof. Jalal must belong to the fictional school of history, dreaming Nehru and Patel conspiring with Hindu Mahasabha to achieve partition. Can anyone really believe this? Interestingly, none of these protectors of Jinnah’s secularism mentioned, for once, the Direct Action Day, 16 August 1946, when Jinnah unleashed an unprecedented wave of communal killings in the human history. Journey towards communalism and partition Jinnah’s conversion from a secularist to communalist was quick and continuous. After finishing his studies in England, Jinnah returned to India in 1896. In December 1906, he joined the Congress as the personal secretary of the party president Dadabhai Naoroji. He believed in Hindu-Muslim unity and vigorously opposed the Muslim League demand of separate Muslim electorate as divisive, soon winning praise from poetess Sarojini Naidu as ‘the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. Four years after he entered into politics Jinnah unwittingly took his first step towards communalism. In 1910, he contested and won election for the central legislature assembly as a Muslim member under the newly introduced system of separate electorate.
In 1913, he joined the Muslim League, a party whose leadership was avowedly communal and staunchly anti-Congress. Within seven years of his entry into politics, a secular Jinnah has become, as Prof. Bipin Chandra puts it, ‘a communal nationalist’. Jinnah was one of the main driving forces behind the CongressLeague pact of 1916. But we must also look at the price our ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity was demanding. He managed to persuade the Congress party, now led by Tilak, to accept separate electorate, communal weightage and one-third representation for Muslims in the legislatures. Pakistani sources describe Lucknow Pact as a major milestone on the road to Pakistan. Congress acceptance of the notion of separate electorates was later interpreted as its approval of ‘Two-Nation Theory.’ In 1936, Jinnah himself asked: “When the Hindus accepted a separate identity for the Muslims through the Lucknow Pact in 1916, how can they now object to Pakistan?” Interestingly, many history books, taught in our schools, describe the Lucknow Pact as a major triumph of Hindu-Muslim unity. Jinnah admirers believe that in 1920 he resigned from the Congress due to Gandhi’s support for Khilafat movement for retaining the prewar status of the Ottoman Caliph. But the real reason was his opposition of Gandian politics of mass civil disobedience. He considered Gandhi a pseudo-religious upstart. When Gandhi launched non-cooperation movement in 1920, Jinnah, until now a member of both parties, walked out of the Congress, telling his friend, journalist Durga Das that in Gandhi’s Congress there was no place for him as ‘Gandhi worships cow and I eat it’, an argument he later repeated in many public speeches. He continued to pay lip service to notion of Hindu-Muslin Indian unity. But he always insisted that in a united India a separation of Hindus and Muslims was needed to safeguard Muslims interest. According to Prof Chandra Jinnha had now transformed ‘from a nationalist into communal nationalist and then into liberal communalist’.
In the year 1930, both the Congress and the League redefined their political objectives. Congress launched civil disobedience for ‘poorn swaraj’ or complete independence. And the League’s vision was expounded by another ex-ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity poet Muhammad Iqbal, the author of Tatana-e-Hindi - ‘Saare Jahan se Achcha Hindustan hamaara…’ Iqbal proposed that the Muslim majority provinces of Punjab, NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan should be converted into one province as a ‘self governing unit’. He said that was the only way to stop recurring Hindu-Muslim riots. Meanwhile, the communal relations were deteriorating fast due to the aggressive anti-Muslim stance of the groups like the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Ye the League largely remained a party of feudal elite and it wasn’t growing as Jinnah wished. So frustrated was he that in 1931he left Indian politics and decided to set up his legal practice in London. But then in 1935 he moved back to Bombay. In the 1937 elections the League performed poorly, only getting 4.6 percent of the Muslim votes, whereas the Congress was able to form governments in seven of the eleven British Indian provinces. Sadly, it was Maulana Azad, our great icon of secularism, who initially blamed Nehru for the partition of India. Had Nehru agreed to give a couple of seats to the League while forming a ministry in UP in 1937, argued Maulana Azad, the League could have been pacified and could have renounced its separatist path. Many Indian scholars have supported this theory. They rather naively believe that a substantial movement like Muslim League could be rolled back through a power sharing arrangement in a province of India. Meanwhile, Iqbal and Jinnah were deliberating on the future direction of the League. In 1937, Iqbal wrote eight letters to Jinnah telling him that he was the ‘only Muslim in India’ who could ‘safely guide the community through the storm’. He advised Jinnah to turn the League ‘into a body representing the Muslim masses’ and to demand the creation of ‘a free Muslim state or states’. Iqbal died shortly after writing these letters.
Pakistani scholar Prof. Akbar Ahmed writes, ‘Until now, Jinnah had spoken of separate electorates, minority representation and constitutional safeguards. Now he would use Islamic symbolism to represent Pakistan. The moon of Pakistan is rising, he would say. He would choose the crescent for the flag of Pakistan. Something had clearly changed in the way Jinnah was looking at the world.’ Over the years a great myth had been created that Jinnah really didn’t ask for Pakistan. That the word ‘Pakistan’ does not figure in the famous 1940 Lahore resolution and that the resolution was just a bargaining counter. But let’s look at the speech Jinnah made accompanying this resolution. He traced the history of ‘mutually separate’ cultural and religious traditions of Hindus and Muslims. ‘The cow that Hindus worship, Muslims eat, the villains that Hindus malign, Muslims idolize and so on … The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs, literatures,’ Jinnah concluded. During the 1940s his tone, language and argument, while opposing Gandhi, Congress and Hindus, was brimming with anger and even abuse. The liberal communalist had now graduated to become a fullfledged fundamentalist. His speeches were remarkably similar to the speeches of Hindu fundamentalists like Savarkar and Golwalkar. If Jinnah’s Islam was in danger of Hindu raj, so was Golwalkar’s Hindutva in danger of Islam. The only difference was that Jinnah drew crowds much bigger than Golwalkar or Savarkar ever did. In March 1940, Jinnah in a speech at Aligarh Muslim University accused Gandhi ‘to subjugate and vassalize the Muslims under a Hindu Raj’. Similarly, in a scathing attack on Gandhi, the RSS chief MS Golwalkar said: “Those who declare ‘no Swaraj without HinduMuslim unity’ have thus perpetrated the greatest treason on our society.” While Golwalkar blamed Gandhi for asking ‘Hindus to submit meekly to the vandalism and atrocities of the Muslims’, Jinnah in his presidential address to the League, in April 1941, said, in a united India ‘Muslims will be absolutely wiped out of existence.’ He said
Pakistan was essential ‘to save Islam from complete annihilation in this country.’ In March 1944, addressing the students of the Ailgarh Muslim University Jinnah declared: “Pakistan was born when the first Muslim landed in India in 712 A. D.” He asked the students to be prepared to shed their blood, if necessary, for achieving Pakistan. British backing for Jinnah’s Pakistan While preparing for ‘shedding the blood’ Jinnah was still officially negotiating with the Congress. Though the British pretended to be the honest brokers, every time they put forward a proposal for transfer of power, Jinnah’s goal of Pakistan looked increasingly probable. In the August offer of 1939, the British resolved not to leave India unless the minorities approved of any future constitutional arrangement. This was described as ‘communal veto’. Indian freedom was now subjected to Jinnah’s endorsement. The 1942 Cripps proposals offered ‘provincial option’, allowing provinces to opt out of the future Indian federation. That’s what exactly Jinnah was fighting for, the Muslim provinces’ right to opt out of India. In the 1945 Simla Conference, Jinnah fought for Hindu-Muslim parity in any future government. He also insisted that in any interim government all the Muslim ministers would have to be nominated by the League. Jinnah personally abused the Congress president Maulana Azad by refusing to shake hands with him and also by calling him a ‘Congress show boy’. During the 1946 elections Jinnah openly used Islam to garner votes for Pakistan. ‘League meetings were often held in mosques after Friday prayers’, writes Prof Bipin Chandra. ‘Pakistan, it was promised, would be ruled under the Sharia… The Quran was widely used as the League’s symbol and the Leauge’s fight with the Congress was portrayed as a fight between Islam and Kufr (infidelity).’
In 1946, the British government sent a mission of three cabinet ministers for a final rapprochement between the Congress and the League. The Cabinet Mission plan provided for a loose center controlling only defence, foreign affairs and communications. Provinces were to be divided in three groups. Group A comprised of Hindu majority provinces of UP, Bihar, CP, Orissa, Madras and Bombay. Group B included the Muslim majority Punjab, Sind and NWFP and Group C consisted of the Muslim majority Bengal and Assam. Each group was to have its own constitution. The provinces were allowed to opt out of these groups after the first general election. And after ten years a province could ask for the reconsideration of its group as well as the union. Initially the Congress and the League both accepted the plan. Many believed, and some still rather deludingly believe, that Jinnah had thus abandoned the idea of Pakistan. But let’s not fool ourselves and have a look at the League’s acceptance document drafted by Jinnah. The League had accepted the plan with its own spin, ‘inasmuch as the basis of and the foundation of Pakistan are inherent in the Mission’s plan by virtue of the compulsory grouping.’ Even this acceptance was hastily withdrawn after Nehru pointed out that it would be the newly formed constituent assembly that would finally decide the composition of provincial groups. Nehru was really farsighted to reject the Cabinet Mission plan. An India with a week center and provinces hopping from one group to another was a recipe for disaster. Such an India could not have lasted for more than five years. That’s why Jinnah admirers blame Nehru for wrecking this final bid to save India from partition. They argue that for Jinnah the demand of Pakistan was just a bargaining counter and he was actually prepared to settle for a lot less. If the idea of Pakistan was just a bargaining counter then Jinnah comes out as a duplicitous figure instigating his followers to fight against the Hindu domination at one hand and negotiating power sharing deals with the same Hindu Congress on the other hand.
A few moths later he breached another boundary of sober politics. The one time advocate of constitutional propriety now espoused violence and even terror. On 16 August 1946, Jinnah made his final bid for Pakistan by launching the Direct Action Day: “This day we bid good-bye to constitutional methods…We have forged a pistol and we are prepared to use it.” Jinnah threatened, “We shall have India divided or we shall have India destroyed.” Frenzied League mobs rampaged Hindu neighbourhoods in Calcutta. Ten thousand innocent lives were lost in just five days in the Great Calcutta Killings. Hindu communal groups retaliated with equal brutality. Quickly the fires of communal hatred spread from Bengal to Punjab consuming millions of lives. After Direct Action Day any hopes of Indian unity were dead and buried forever. Nehru, Patel and many other Congress leaders were by now convinced that it was impossible to create a secular and democratic India as long as Jinnah and Muslim League were there and that partition, painful though it might be, was the only way ahead. Once Jinnah got his ‘Islamic state of Pakistan’ he made a dramatic uturn. On 11 August 1947 in a virtual denial of his two-nations theory he advised the Muslims in Pakistan to live peacefully with their Hindu neighbours. Pakistani’s were confused and wondered if it was not possible for them to live with Hindus in India, how could they allow Hindus to live Pakistan. They never listened to him. While in India Nehru government fought hard to protect Muslim lives from the frenzied Hindu and Sikh mobs, ethnic cleansing continued in Jinnah’s Pakistan. When Pakistan was born in August 1947, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians formed 26 percent of its population. Today less then three percent of them are left in Pakistan. This is not ancient history buried under the multiple layers of unexcavated earth. Any honest historian with elementary knowledge of research methods can find this evidence. If Jinnah’s admirers like Jaswant Singh still think that Jinnah was not communal and was not responsible for India’s partition, what else one can say, it’s history written with head and mind both deeply buried in the sand.
Ends Vijay Rana is the editor of www.nrifm.com. He made a special study of the British proposals for transfer of power in India during the 1940s, while doing his D Phil from Allahabad University.