Author: Dr. Koenraad Elst
Publication: Voi.org
Date: August 30, 2009
URL: http://voi.org/index2.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=221&pop=1&page=0&Itemid=214
The Narendra Modi government's ban on Jaswant
Singh's Jinnah book is one sign too many of the Hindutva predisposition to
solving debates by means of muzzling. This flies in the face of the ancient
Hindu tradition of open debate, and brings dishonour to the heirs of Yajnavalkya,
the Buddha, Shankara and other great debaters. However, on contents, Modi
was right to disapprove of the book's misrepresentation of history, and this
not only regarding the role of Gujarat's hero Sardar Patel.
On one point, though, Jaswant Singh is right:
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was truly a great man, -- but for the opposite reason
than the one he gives. It was not for his purportedly being a "secular"
guardian of Muslim interest (note the Nahruvian-secularist contradiction in
terms here: a guardian of one community's interests is by definition communalist,
even if he does so by peaceful and cooperative means, as Jinnah did in the
1916 Lucknow Pact), but for being a determined and highly successful Muslim
communalist. After all, he achieved the territorial realization of Muslim
communalism, viz. Partition. Jinnah was a man of impressive strength, for
he forced a political arrangement on an unwilling majority, on his colonial
overlords and even on a large part of his own community.
Contrary to what Congress secularists and
Hindu nationalists including Jaswant Singh claim, the British did not engineer
nor even favour partition. India's numerous white-supremacists, of both the
secular and the Hindutva variety, refuse to concede agency to mere natives
and insist that anything of consequence must have a white hand behind it.
In this case, they have been insisting since 1947 that crafty British divide-and-rule
machinations were behind the Partition, which was only superficially the handiwork
of their puppet, Jinnah. But in reality, Jinnah was very much his own man,
not at all a British stooge, and he pursued the non-white agenda of Islam.
Viceroys Linlithgow and Wavell told Jinnah
they would never countenance the division of their neat and well-integrated
empire. Their successor Mountbatten only gave in under Jinnah's forceful pressure,
which made Partition seem inevitable. As an exiting power, Britain no longer
felt motivated to impose its will against the formidable odds of a Muslim
wave of violence far larger than the one they had to put down in Kerala during
the Khilafat movement (the Moplah rebellion). Additionnally, the changing
world situation after WW2 with the incipient Cold War made the British government
see emerging opportunities in a partitioned India (viz. to enlist Pak in the
Western alliance), so they reconciled themselves to it. But all through, the
initiative for Partition was with Jinnah.
In comparison, Gandhi and the Congress leaders
were small men, or at any rate very ineffective strategists. They had the
majority with them, the British and a section of the Muslims, yet they failed
to achieve their objective of keeping India united. They had all the trump
cards, yet they lost and Jinnah won. One of their main weaknesses was the
one still afflicting Jaswant Singh, Advani and most Sangh people: a complete
failure (or refusal) to understand Islam and its political agenda. With that
mindset, they had no chance of defeating a determined Islamic offensive.
Of course there is a difference between a
failure to outwit Jinnah so as to prevent Partition, of which failure the
Congress leaders were indeed guilty, and a deliberate complicity in the Partition,
of which Jaswant Singh (along with Nathuram Godse) falsely accuses them. They
opposed Partition but grudgingly buckled under Muslim pressure.
As for the massive bloodshed accompanying
Partition, here guilt is a bit more evenly divided. At the time, Dr. Ambedkar
had floated the suggestion of a complete exchange of population, making India
as Muslim-free as Pakistan would (eventually) becomre Hindu-free. Jinnah,
who in his young days had rejected Gandhi's mass campaigns because of their
capacity for violence, was by then quite willing to shed some blood, but preferably
not more than politically useful. So he was willing to consider Ambedkar's
proposal, along with Rajaji, Patel, Morarji Desai and others. Nehru, whose
focus then was on securing his own PM ambitions, would have gone along, but
the man who put his foot down against this lives-saving proposal was Gandhi.
Much as I respect Arun Shourie and his veneration for Gandhi, my study of
the events only tells me that Gandhi bears an enormous guilt for making the
Partition, once accepted, far bloodier than it need have been. Moreover, the
non-exchange of population has led to the continuation of Hindu-Muslim violence
long after Partition, including the Hindu genocide of 1971 in East Bengal,
and we haven't seen the end of it yet. Partition could have made sense if
implemented to the full, with the community that refused multicultural coexistence
in one state resettled completely in the country of its own making. Not a
nice principle and not one that I would advocate for any country today, but
it was a logical component of the Partition principle that Gandhi had accepted
and forced India to accept. By preventing the lesser evil of an organized
and pre-planned exchange of population, which even the much-maligned Jinnah
accepted, Gandhiji has a sea of blood on his hands. The Congress leaders are
indirectly guilty in that they kept on defering to him and didn't park him
in a cave in the Himalaya or at least tell him to keep out of politics.
Except for Ambedkar, few people at the time
reasoned: "We'd be better off without the Muslims." Hindus including
the Hindu Mahasabha were too multicultural ("secular") for that.
Pakistan, by contrast, was built on the Muslim rejection of multicultural
coexistence. Imagine what India could have been today for Hindus if the exchange
had taken place. No Hindu-Muslim riots, no terror against Hindus in Sindh
and East Bengal. No Babri Masjid complications, Hindu sacred places would
of course have been under Hindu control. Sanskrit could have taken its rightful
place. One modern civil code for all. Bollywood cinema would have Hindi films
in actual Hindi rather than Urdu. But far more importantly, issues could have
been debated and policies decided on their own merits without always having
to be sidetracked by communal considerations.
The late Girilal Jain was of course right
to say that Partition gave Hindu society another lease of life, which Muslims
in a united India would never have conceded to them. But that window of opportunity
doesn't last forever. If they allow power equations to develop similar to
those of the 1940s, the outcome may be similar to Jinnah's victory on 14 August
1947. This is all the more likely if Hindu leaders cultivate the same babes-in-the-wood
approach of their 1940s predecessors. Of that mentality, Jaswant Singh's book,
like Advani's earlier Jinnah comments, is a sad example. Not because he extols
Jinnah and depreciates Nehru and Patel, but because his analysis is informed
by a total ignorance of Islamic politics.
Most Muslim leaders at the time were motivated
by the communal concern for furthering Muslim interests, but this could take
very different forms depending on their analysis of the power equation. Jinnah
as a modern man estimated that democracy was here to stay, and that consequently
numbers were decisive. In this view, Muslims in a Hindu-majority country would
be out of power and should secede from it to create a state for themselves
or at least one in which they would be the majority. But the religiously orthodox
Deoband school reasoned differently: in the Middle Ages, Muslims were a far
smaller minority and yet they ruled over the Hindus. Damn democracy and restore
the Islamic empire, was the position of Deobandis like Maulana Maudoodi. And
of the most famous Deobandi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, often falsely presented
as a "nationalist Muslim", but in fact a clever Islamist strategist
who exploited Gandhi's and Nehru's eagerness to somehow find a nationalist
Muslim somewhere. With his direct experience of the Congress leaders' gullibility
regarding Islam, he knew that there was no "Hindu majority" that
would oppress the Muslims. On the contrary, Muslims were getting all kinds
of priviliges (Gandhi, with Azad's support, even offered Jinnah the option
of forming an all-Muslim government as reward for abandoning the Partition
scheme), and if they played their cards well, they could become the dominant
community with their 25%, percentage which would only grow and become a majority
in the end.
Jinnah wanted Pakistan as a secure basis from
which a later generation could perhaps conquer the rest of India, Azad wanted
to give the Muslim community a strond and eventually dominant position in
a united India. Both were cynical and determined Muslim communalists, but
their strategies were different. With hindsight, we may judge that Azad was
a more far-sighted strategist, for the conduct of Hindu politicians in remainder-India
proves that they are no match for any Muslim pressures, not from the one in
seven in remainder-India, let alone from a Muslim community that would comprise
one in three inhabitants of a united India. Those are the angles from which
the Jinnah phenomenon can be understood: the inter-Muslim debate over which
scenario would best serve Muslim interests. But no one is bringing them up
in the present quarrels over personalized matters such as the relative merits
and demerits of Nehru and Patel. Just as the Congress leaders back then failed
to weigh the situation in those terms, with the result that their attempts
to prevent partition were based on sentiment rather than on a proper facts-based
analysis, and were doomed to be ineffectual.
In all the reactions to Jaswant's Jinnah book,
this same ignorance and incomprehension of (or at least indifference to) Islamic
politics remains in evidence. On this topic, the whole of India seems to be
in the dark. Not even "groping in the dark", for someone who is
groping at least understands that he lacks something and needs to find it.
Most Indians in this debate seem perfectly satisfied with their ignorance.
