Was Jinnah an Indian patriot? Of course, he was
TO The Times Of India TOI 2nd Nov, 21 21:52 IST
SUDHEENDRA KULKARNI
INDIA
Akhilesh Yadav's 'controversial' statement about the founder of Pakistan is factually correct. There's no denying that Jinnah is one of the most misunderstood leaders of India's freedom struggle
Nearly 75 years after India's Partition, Mohammed Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), the architect of Pakistan, never seems to fade away from our country's political discourse. Was he one of the nayaks (leaders) of India's freedom struggle or only its khalnayak (villain)? Or was he both? There is no place for the first or the third answer in today's highly polarised social and political atmosphere, where Muslims and Pakistanis have been made the 'other'. With nuance and uncomfortable facts having been banished from the reading of history, any contention that Jinnah was once an ardent Indian patriot invites the charge of being a
deshdrohi' (anti-national). Even LK Advani, the second-tallest leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the pre-Modi era, had to pay a heavy price for speaking the truth. During his visit to Pakistan in 2005, Advani went to Jinnah's mausoleum in Karachi and wrote the following words in the visitor's book: "There are many people who leave an irreversible stamp on history. But there are few who
actually create history. Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual." Advani praised Jinnah when he visited Pakistan in 2005
Sarojini Naidu, a leading luminary of the freedom struggle, described Jinnah as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. His address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 is really a classic and a forceful espousal of a secular state in which every citizen would be free to follow his own religion. The State shall make no distinction between the citizens on the grounds of faith. My respectful homage to this great man." Every word in this tribute is factually true. Yet, Advani was forced by his own party and ideological parivar to resign as president of the BJP Now, it is the turn of Akhilesh Yadav, president of the Samajwadi Party, to be pilloried for a remark he made on Jinnah on Sunday. At his party's rally in Uttar Pradesh, he said, "Sardar Patel, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Jinnah studied at the same institute and became barristers. They fought for India's freedom."
He is factually correct. But, in BJP's historiography, it is unacceptable. BJP leaders have slammed him as "Akhilesh Ali Jinnah" for "eulogising a person who divided India". Some even accused the SP chief of having a "Talibani mindset"! But let's examine the main points about the history of Partition. Was India's Partition a monumental tragedy? Indeed, it was. Was Jinnah culpable for it? Of course, he was. He bears principal responsibility for it, although many other personalities, parties and factors also contributed to India's division at the very moment when it gained freedom from British rule. However, to attribute this complex historical development to the "evil designs" of one individual- and that too for the purpose of communal polarisation of a
state heading to a crucial assembly election-is a vile attempt at falsification of history. Jinnah is one of the most misunderstood leaders of India's freedom struggle. This is true in both India and Pakistan-and for opposite reasons. Most Hindus in India regard him as the villain who was responsible for India's division. What they disregard, as much out of ignorance as out of prejudice, is that Jinnah tried his utmost to prevent Partition. While strenuously fighting for Muslim rights, and for a fair and honourable share of power for them in a post-British constitutional framework, he sought almost until the very end, that these demands be met within a united India. He also strove for Hindu-Muslim unity with sincerity and conviction, more so in the early part of his political life (until the mid-1930s). Never a religious fanatic, Jinnah presented the vision ofa tolerant, plural, non-theocratic and democratic Pakistan after Partition became a reality. Jinnah is misunderstood in Pakistan because his vision for the nation challenges those who sought to Islamise it right from its
inception. Jinnah's guru at the beginning of his political career was Gopal Krishna Gokhale (Pic: Wikimedia)
After his death, within 13 months of Pakistan's birth, his enlightened vision left little influence both on the country's internal nation-building process and its relationship with India. Since
Jinnah's successors wanted to make anti-indianism the raison d'etre of the newly established
Muslim nation, amity between the two neighbours somethingJinnah deeply desired became a casualty. There is a mountain of evidence to show that Jinnah was an Indian patriot for the longest period in his political ife, until the final phase of the freedom movement when his politics took a communal turn. Briefly, here are some irrefutable facts. a) Jinnah's political guru, at the beginning of his public life, was Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a widely respected Congress leader. In his superb biography Jinnah: A Life, Pakistani scholar Yasser Latif Hamdani tells us that he wanted to be remembered as the "Muslim Gokhale, a voice of reason and moderation".
b) Jinnah joined the Congress in 1906, whereas he joined the Muslim League only in 1913. Unbelievable though it may seem today, he remained an active member of both parties until 1921.
c) Jinnah, a rising star in Mumbai's (then Bombay) legal fraternity, was the defence lawyer for Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak in 1908, when the British sent the latter to Burma for a six-year prison term on sedition charges. d In 1916 in Lucknow, he was instrumental in forging a historic partnership between the Congress and the Muslim League, which came to be known as Tilak-jinnah Pact. Had its spirit survived, there would have been no Partition.
e) Addressing a meeting in Bombay in November 1917, Jinnah said: "My message to the Mussalmans is to join hands with your Hindu brethren. My message to Hindus is to lift your backward brother up."
f Pakistan-born historian Ayesha Jalal, in her widely acclaimed book The Sole SpokesmanJinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, tells us some revealing things about Jinnah's thought process in the final years of the freedom movement. Initially, he was not in favour of Pakistan as a nation separate from India. He did not even like the word Pakistan'.
His true intention was not to have the kind of Pakistan that ultimately got founded"a shadow and a husk, a maimed, mutilated and moth-eaten Pakistan" he called it in dejection -
but a variant of Hindustan-Pakistan Confederation, which he preferred to call India.
Remarkably, all through the Partition debate, he referred to India as the "motherland" of both
Muslims and Hindus. Even after Jinnah promised and demanded, Pakistan as a separate and sovereign "Muslim nation" for Muslims in India, he was also prepared to accept, at different points of time between 1940 and 1947, various kinds of federal or confederal constitutional arrangements that would keep Pakistan within India. For instance, in June 1946, he accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan proposed by the British, which specifically ruled out the partition of India. In
June 1947, Jinnah proposed that the constituent assemblies of India and Pakistan should meet in New Delhi to give concrete shape to this plan. This was the last chance to keep India united. And Jinnah was willing to accept it. It is only after the Congress rejected the Cabinet Mission Plan that the Muslim League also withdrew its acceptance. Jinnah (third from right, first row) was instrumental in signing the Lucknow Pact between the Indian National Congress and Muslim League
iD Jinnah is undoubtedly guilty of resorting to reprehensible and communal muscle-fexing,
such as when the Muslim League (whose president he was) gave a call for Direct Action on August 16, 1946. It proved to be a "black day" in the history of India, with mob violence plunging Calcutta into a whirlpool of murder and terror. More than 5,000 people, mostly Hindus, were killed.
) Jinnah had several close Hindu friends. He poured out his unhappiness and agony before one of them, Ramkrishna Dalmia, a prominent industrialist of those times. "Look here, I never wanted this damn Pakistan! It was forced upon me by Sardar Patel. And now they want me to eat the humble pie and raise my hands in defeat."
k In his address to the All India Muslim League Council meeting in Karachi in December 1947, he stated: "I tell you that I still consider myself to be an Indian. For the moment I have accepted the Governor-Generalship of Pakistan. But I am looking forward to a time when I will return to Îndia and take my place as a citizen of my country."
D Jinnah's heart was not in his Government House in Karachi but in the beautiful mansion he had built for himself at Malabar Hill in Bombay. He wanted to return to Bombay and live in that house. An authentic and fascinating account of this is given by Sri Prakasa, India's first High Commissioner to Pakistan, in his memoirs Pakistan: Birth and Last Days. m) On February 26, 1948, Paul Alling, the first US ambassador to Pakistan, met Jinnah, who was then the governor general of Pakistan. He asked him: "What kind of relations do you desire between India and Pakistan?" Jinnah's reply-"I want Pakistan-India ties to be as close and cooperative as those between USA and Canada"-is something that the people and politicians in our two countries should honestly ponder over.