Author: KPS Gill
Publication: PIONEER
Date: June 11, 2005
The opportunistic falsification
of history has been one of the gravest and most persistent follies of the
Indian political leadership and intellectual elite. We demonise and iconise
at will, with no concern for facts or for reality, yielding to expediency
or the fashions of the moment. So it is, now, in the current controversy
over Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the creator of Pakistan and, overwhelmingly,
of the carnages of partition.
We may quibble over Mahatma Gandhi's
eccentricities and Jawaharlal Nehru's 'intransigence', in apportioning
'blame' for partition, but it must be clear that Jinnah, and Jinnah alone
among the prominent leaders of undivided India, sought this 'solution',
passionately and often violently-witness the call for 'direct action' in
August 1946, which resulted in thousands of innocent deaths-advocating
his disgraceful 'two-nation theory' of communal ghettoisation.
The argument that he was neglected
or marginalised in the Congress, and this 'forced' him to an extreme position
is no more a justification than is claimed by other groups that commit
communal carnage in the name of present 'neglect' or past wrongs.
It is useful, here, to reiterate
that Gandhi is, today, recognised as one of the most visionary leaders
of the 20th century, and though he now appears to inspire few among India's
own leadership, his ideas and example have catalysed-and continue to impact
on-some of the great transformations of history across the world. Nehru,
too, despite his many failings and notable errors of judgment, was immensely
influential, both within India and internationally. We may dispute elements
of his legacy-but we cannot deny its enormity.
But Jinnah, today, is historically
dead; utterly irrelevant. His vision and his legacy are fractious icons
of failure, lawlessness and discord. Outside the sub-continent, few have
even heard of him; within it, he is reviled everywhere but in the fractured
land of his creation-and even there, more and more are questioning his
bequest with the passage of time.
Did Jinnah make a grand speech on
his great vision for a 'secular Pakistan' where he declaimed, "You may
belong to any religion or caste or creed-that has nothing to do with the
business of the state"? Did he speak of a Pakistan where, "in the course
of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims,
not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each
individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state"? Of course
he did. But that was because he could not see the malignant aberration
his vision and murderous actions had shaped; or because, in his dying days,
he sought to confine or moderate the monster he had created.
Did Jinnah eat pork, drink whiskey
and violate other Islamic commandments? Again, of course, he did. But he
systematically used and abused the Islamic identity and the idea of jihad
to secure his short-term political ends. British administrators recorded
the use of the idea of jihad during the 'Direct Action' movement, and the
fact that much of the inflammation occurred in mosques, with active participation
of extremist mullahs.
It is on record that Jinnah exhorted
and funded Iskandar Mirza, a civil servant who resigned to foment disorders
in the NWFP in 1947 on his direct command, to start a jihad in the frontier
province, which was dominated by Badshah Khan's committed and secular 'Red
Shirts'. The secular forces that existed in the Punjab at that time, moreover,
found it impossible to stand up to the militant Islamist forces of the
Muslim League, and to prevent or mitigate the great slaughter of Partition.
There are vivid accounts of Nehru's
acute and manifest distress at the sight of Muslim bodies after riots in
Old Delhi. Indeed, Nehru's anguish at the massacres of Partition even led
him, however briefly, to consider the possibility of asking the British
to resume control of affairs in the country, so that the slaughters could
be brought to an end. But no such act of regret, compassion or contrition
has ever been attributed to Jinnah at any point of time during the massacres
of Sikhs and Hindus in then newly formed Pakistan.
The consequences are unsurprising,
and a nation born out of an ideology of hatred has become the fountainhead
of a universal ideology and movement of terrorism-the current and international
Islamist jihad. It is useful, in this context, to notice that, despite
its prominence in Islamist rhetoric, it was not Palestine that gave birth
to the current movement of global terrorism.
Indeed, the many other movements
of 'Islamic jihad'-Chechnya, Algeria, the Kurds, Uighur and Uzbek-are essentially
sub-national movements, articulating local ethnic rivalries and targeting
their own Governments under the guise of a jihad. It is Pakistan that brought
together forces from across the Arab and Muslim world into its terror camps
in Afghanistan and on its own soil, to fashion this global movement of
terror; it is Pakistan that created the Taliban, the Al Qaeda and the myriad
groups that have ranged out across the world to commit appalling and unforgivable
acts of terror.
Notice, also, that non-Muslims,
who formed 23 per cent of the population of West Pakistan at the time of
Partition, had been reduced to three per cent by 1991-the last census in
which minority population data was given-and are believed to have fallen
well below two per cent now. This is the Pakistan Jinnah created, his occasional
and wavering statements of commitment to opportunistic secularism notwithstanding.
There are very grave lessons to
be drawn from this. In the delusional euphoria that 'peace processes' generate,
it is easy to lose sight of reality; to the extent that this is happening-and
it seems to be the pervasive trend in Indian politics across party lines
today-we will be condemned to pay for our folly in a manner that is too
horrifying to contemplate.
General Pervez Musharraf has skilfully
manipulated our perceptions, our hopes and our vulnerabilities to secure
the most unlikely endorsements for Pakistan's 'change of heart'. But thousands
still fall to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism each year; dozens of ISI-backed
terrorist modules are identified and disrupted every year, across India,
outside Jammu & Kashmir; the infrastructure of terrorism remains intact
in Pakistan; and, worst of all, the ideology of communal hatred continues
to be taught in extremist madarsas and state run public school alike, and
to be advocated from the mosque and political pulpit without restraint.
Some of the methods are changing-
adapting to transformations in the international context-but the ends remain
constant, unwavering. It is, consequently, imperative that we do not allow
the militant minority in Kashmir-concentrated in just part of the Valley,
which, in turn, is just a small fraction of the total area of the State-openly
backed by Pakistan, to dictate and jeopardise the future of the whole region.
We are, today, listening to Islamist fundamentalists and terrorists in
Kashmir because they use extreme and indiscriminate force-not because they
have reason or popular will or right on their side.
That, precisely, is the weakness
Jinnah exploited, using random and excessive violence to make the unreasonable
and iniquitous seem acceptable and necessary; that is the failure that
led to Partition; that, again, is the strategy, and the characteristic
myopia of the Indian response that the Pakistani establishment is capitalising
on today; and that is the blindness that is building up to another potentially
dire crisis in South Asia.