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Introduction: “Hindu-Muslim riots were Jinnah’s contribution to Indian Independence”
It is natural we are debating Mohammad Ali Jinnah again. But it is unthinkable that the BJP is divided on Jinnah. Fifty-eight years ago, Independent India had buried the ghost of Jinnah. With all the macabre memories of lies, hatred, mayhem, bloodshed and mountains of dead bodies when Pakistan was born in culmination of the two-nation theory. Pakistan became a theocracy. India became a secular republic. India opted to be secular to rebutt the two-nation theory of Jinnah, which spoke of not Pakistan and India but that Muslims are a separate nation, who cannot live in India with Hindus. So, in the early seventies when Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan with some help from India, we rejoiced the requiem of the two-nation theory. There is more to relate to people than religion, we asserted. Now on Kashmir, India’s position is getting weakened by the wilful prevarication of the political class. The scenario of the 1930s is staring us in the eye in Kashmir as Jinnah’s ghost is being resurrected. Some read history not to repeat it; some only to repeat it. After all, history is made not only of facts but also of perceptions.
Jinnah’s name was a taboo in Independent India. There were not many books written or published in India about Jinnah. The Muslims carefully avoided taking his name. Even the Indian Union Muslim League till recently used to claim that it had nothing to do with Jinnah and that theirs was a different entity as opposed to the one that fought for Pakistan.
Jinnah had a brief crash with nationalism, when he was politically insignificant, looking for a role in the elite political club. A careful study of Jinnah would reveal that he was a complex personality, lacking in both idealism and ideology. A man guided entirely by an overweening ambition, single-minded obsession to self-interest, egoist to the core and irrational. He was not a good practicing Muslim—the clergy hated him.
Jinnah succeeded in carving out a State on false claims, untruth and highly exaggerated fears of the Muslims. In this he played into the hands of the British.
So long as attainment of freedom seemed questionable, Jinnah romanced with the fight, but when the attainment of Dominion status was assured by the British and seemed only a matter of time, he began to press for the special interests of the Muslims.
The resurrection of Jinnah on the contemporary Indian political discourse is a dangerous development reminiscent of pre-partition days. Competitive minorityism seems to be the main plank of both UPA and NDA. The latter may not make any gains but for the BJP it is a situation of tail wagging the head with smaller parties in unabashed disdain promoting the Jinnah debate. In the context it is necessary to have a quick look into Jinnah’s progress in communal politics.
In 1929, he formulated his 13 points. This was before his incarnation as the undisputed leader of the League. He knew that some of these demands would be totally unacceptable. Jinnah’s “guru” Iqbal went further and demanded Muslim India.
Jinnah fixed August 16, 1946 as the day on which ‘direct action’ would begin. The massacre of Hindus started in Calcutta and spread into a civil war. “Hindu-Muslim riots were Jinnah’s contribution to the cause of Indian Independence”, says Wilhelm von Pachhammer in his book India’s Road to Nationhood. Jinnah hardly had any contribution to make to the freedom struggle.
It was not the Sangh that portrayed Jinnah the Khalnayak of Indian politics. Jinnah is a topic on which there is a rare national consensus cutting across the political divide. To say that Jinnah is secular is like saying that Ravana is a symbol of goodness. Every nation has its icons and every nation loves to hate some hate figures.
Indians have a long and collective memory. We as a people preserved our culture, our literature and faith through this collective memory.
Many years ago I read The Siege Within by M.J. Akbar. There he writes that it was not the victorious Akbar the Great, in the battle of Haldighati, but the defeated Rana Pratap who became the hero of Indian folklore. Similar was the case with Prithviraj Chauhan, who lives in our dreams through centuries. The left historians would say Mohammad Ghaznavi was a patron of art and literature in his country with the wealth he looted from Hindu temples and Mohammad of Ghori patronised the slaves. And we have it on the authority of Valmiki, how great Ravana was. Yet he is the symbol of evil, whose effigy we burn to mark the victory of good over evil.
All the pseudo secular efforts to whitewash Jinnah cannot wash. He is the latest hate figure in our history. And across party line, Sangh, Congress, CPM all hate him, for, he made no contribution, but did incalculable harm to our nationhood, polity and social fabric.
In 1930 Jinnah retired to London in voluntary exile, disillusioned by lack of success. From this exile he was recalled in 1934 by the Muslim League which had sunk into insignificance and which thought that Jinnah was the man best fitted to advance their special interests. Jinnah came because he recognized that the situation had become favourable. Besides the League had received assurances from the British as early as 1906. Similar assurances were given by the Congress, first in 1916 in Lucknow, when Jinnah himself had acted as the messenger of peace between the two communities.
The active participation of the League in the freedom struggle was restricted to the brief intermezzo of the Khilafat Movement. Even then, very few Muslims had actively participated in the struggle. Jinnah had contemptuously declined to take any part personally, as he did not believe in courting jail to achieve political objectives. The active struggle he left to the Congress, but he reaped the advantages of its struggle with the British by siding now with the British and now with the Congress, as and when he deemed it opportune to do so. Besides, Jinnah had never subscribed to the principle of ‘non-violence’. Therefore at the decisive moment he advised his followers to resort to ‘direct action’, which led to bloody encounters between the two communities. Jinnah was only concerned with the immediate success of the cause he had espoused, and did not bother about the long-term effects of such success, says Pachhammer.
The secular India cannot accept Jinnah, the Hindu India too cannot, and the secular India is the Hindu India. Look at the type of politicians appreciating Jinnah in India—Ram Vilas Paswan, Lalu Prasad, Mulayam Singh, Sharad Yadav—who always refused to see the national point of view, who built their career on Muslim appeasement. It also shows how far the BJP has travelled, away from its moorings. Politicians cannot survive refusing to appreciate the sentiments of their core constituency. The BJP is lucky that it has retained so much of its cadre base.
In the unnecessary controversy over Jinnah, the country has totally ignored the dangerous game Hurriyat has been playing in Pakistan. As a national party the BJP should have been on the forefront exposing their mischief. Giving political cover to Manmohan Singh’s Pakistan mission—if there is one—is not BJP’s role. The party was born on the slogan of One Nation, One People and a promise to ensure the full integration of Kashmir with the rest of the country. What was happening in the last fortnight totally cancelled out all these promises. Diplomatic courtesies have their own nuances. One cannot imagine the US President appreciating Hitler’s role in the Second World War because he was visiting Germany or a British leader hailing the damages of Napoleanic Wars in France.
The RSS was right in stopping the
BJP’s Jinnah binge in time. The day India appreciates Jinnah, will be the
end of its existence as a Hindu majority secular nation.
Secular Jinnah's demands on Nehru in 1929
The Thirteen Points drafted by the Jinnah League in 1929:
1. The Congress should accept the
communal award and refrain from terming it as a negation of nationalism
2. The Muslim quota in the Provincial
Services should be fixed by statutory enactments in the constitution
3. The statute should guarantee
Muslim Personal Law and Muslim culture
4. The Congress should take up
the agitation regarding the Shahidganj Mosque and see that it is handed
over to the Muslims
5. The Muslims should have an unrestricted
right to perform religious rituals
6. In any future redistribution
of provinces, the Muslim majority should not be adversely affected
7. The Congress should give up
‘Vande Mataram’ as a national anthem
8. Urdu should be the national
language
9. Communal electorates should
be given to the Muslims in elections to the local bodies
10. Muslims should be given the
freedom to slaughter cows
11. The Congress should change
the tricolour flag and give equal importance to Muslim League flag
12. The Congress should recognise
Muslim League as the sole representative body of the Muslims
13. The Congress should form coalition
ministries with the League everywhere. (A Bunch of Old Letters p. 413 quoted
in Islam: Indian's Transition to Modernity By M.A. Karandikar)
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