M A Jinnah: South Asia's Clarence Darrow

[ylh]

Since an interactor on this board has been falsely attributing a quote by Maulana M. Ali to Mr Jinnah of Pakistan... I thought I'd start of my debut on this board by an article I wrote on Mr Jinnah.

--------------

Jinnah: South Asia's Clarence Darrow

57 years since his death and he still ends up on the front page of every major newspaper in India for several days repeatedly. I think it is about time the subcontinent came to terms with one of its most illustrious sons and certainly the most interesting.

An anglicized barrister who ended up founding a separate Muslim majority state is an apparent paradox but not really so, because had this urbane lawyer been any more religious he would have been unable to maintain unity amongst the ranks of his constituents, the deeply fractured and disjointed millions in the Muslim community. He would either be denounced as a Sunni or Shia or Barelvi or a Deobandi or something else.

Throughout his struggle for the Muslims, he maintained a very deliberate distance from them, for had he fraternized with one section, the other section would be alienated. Jinnah had to be quintessentially aloof and isolated, in an unapproachable ivory tower of impartiality. This, which was his greatest strength, is often presented as a paradox i.e. the paradox of a Bond street gentleman with no apparent hint of religiosity leading the unwashed and deeply religious masses of the subcontinent.

Indeed this was his solution to the deep divisions between Indians and India that had been his first and most important love. The young Lincoln`s Inn returned Barrister, perhaps the youngest to be called to bar, could not find any reason why a United India could not work. He had opposed his co-religionists on the issue of separate electorates. Walking in the footsteps of Dadabhoy Naoroji and Gokhale, he saw himself as an Indian first, second and last. Such was his unwavering faith in this national goal that he made it a pre-condition to his joining the Muslim League in 1913 while remaining
simultaneously a Congressman.

His advocacy of Hindu Muslim Unity won him the accolades of his countrymen and he was widely hailed as the Best Ambassador of "Hindu Muslim Unity." At the height of his legal career he represented Tilak against the sedition charges leveled by the British government. It was around this time that he led a successful protest against Lord Wellingdon, which the British broke up by sending the police. In his honor there stands the Jinnah Memorial hall and education trust even today, serving each and every community equally and fairly, in the city that he loved the most - Bombay.

What was the nature of his relationship with the British rulers?

He was their harshest critic but never a rebel. While the Indian nationalist movement increasingly cried out "Free India or sink to our level", Jinnah said "Free India or raise us to your level". His vigorous campaigning got Indians the right to serve in army as officers and equals of the British.

Mahomed Ali Jinnah was by nature and role a lawyer and a legislator. He was instrumental in passing of such monumental bills as the restraint of child marriages, which he did so against the will of the obscurantist elements within the Muslim community, declaring forcefully as he had always done that legislation had nothing to do with religion and this certainly wasn`t a religious matter. On several occasions he rose to defend some Indian dissident or the other, none more famous than Bhagat Singh, the young Sikh revolutionary who had been left high and dry by the so called national leadership.

In what was in my estimate his finest speech, he castigated the British for ignoring the long held standards of British justice and what he considered tyranny of the worst kind.

And what of his most famous rival, the one the world considers one of the greatest ever? Jinnah respected Gandhi as a man of conviction but was uncomfortable with his style of mass politics. Gandhi had the finger on India`s pulse. He gave up his western dress and law practice to become the "Mahatma" of the masses. He became one with them and in doing so he released, perhaps inadvertently, those dark forces that Jinnah had always feared.

Not only did Gandhi appeal to religious superstitions of the Hindu masses who were ready to worship him like a God, but he also encouraged Muslim divines to topple secular leadership like Jinnah and take matters into their own hands. Perhaps the approach would have worked, but the benefits were short lived as soon the dark forces turned on each other.

It was not out of some temporary irritation or annoyance that Jinnah, this secular and nationalist Congressman, turned to separatism, as some would have us believe. Nor was it some opportunism. H V Hodson ruled it out by saying that even his doughtiest opponents acknowledged his incorruptibility and steadfast idealism. He was supremely a man of honor and integrity, prompting Dr. Ambedkar to say that there was no other politician in the whole of South Asia to whom the word "incorruptible" more fittingly applied.

In the mid 1930s when a group of Muslim students visited Jinnah in London with their "Pakistan scheme", he is supposed to have told them to "stay away, before I think of you as stooges of British imperialism". Then what changed? Why did Jinnah become the separatist mass politician that he himself had once despised? This question awaits its historian, but Woodrow
Wyatt offers a simpler explanation. In an interview with Christopher Mitchell, the producer of a documentary on the life of Mr. Jinnah, Wyatt said that Jinnah was a lawyer brought up in England and lawyers brought up in England have a funny habit of fighting for justice.

Having taken up the case of the Muslim salariat and nobility in 1937, Jinnah slowly broadened the base of his litigants to include the entire Muslim community. This he was forced to do after the Congress party had refused to share power with the Muslim League in places where it had won all Muslim constituencies. In what was to seal the fate of a United India, Jawaharlal Nehru had taunted the Muslim League and its leader challenging them to find their own inherent strength.

It was then, that for the first time Jinnah had concluded that the Muslim minority of South Asia could no longer depend on small mercies by the majority. Like any good lawyer, and he considered him exactly that, he thus set out to win the case but what was the brief? The nuanced idea of a secular state with a Muslim majority is not always easy to relate to. Even harder is the idea of such a demand being a bargaining counter for ironclad safeguards within the union. It is here that Jinnah is cut down to size by occam`s razor into a Darth Vader like figure, which he never was.

"My father never wanted separation," declared Dina Wadia famously. Recent discoveries seem to favor her assertion. Jinnah`s idea was of a loose federal union of India constituting Hindu majority and Muslim majority areas, which was to many a logical solution to a communal problem that had existed for centuries and a problem that Jinnah certainly did not invent or ascribe to at any point in his life.

But one thing is clear. Throughout his agonizing last few years, dying of Cancer and Tuberculosis, he was forced to take on not just the Congress Party or the British but also the Mullahs, who in large numbers opposed the Pakistan demand using the most humiliating and disgraceful language against him. There was pressure from within to declare an Islamic state based on Quran and Sunnah which he resisted tooth and nail, even expelling from the party his close friend the Raja of Mahmudabad. The impetuous Raja later repented and was allowed back in.

As Pakistan became certain, he showed his hand. His vision of Pakistan, which he repeated on numerous occasions, was one where sovereignty rested unconditionally with the people regardless of religion, caste or creed. On 11th August 1947, speaking to the constituent assembly he made plain that a person`s religion was a personal matter and would have nothing to do with the business of the state. Citing the example of Catholic and Protestant conflict in England, Jinnah spoke of a modern nation state which would rise up above these differences and work towards the betterment of the people of Pakistan without distinction.

As if to cement his words, he appointed a Hindu Law minister to undertake the task of law-making in the new state. Sadly today every dictum laid down by him has been ignored as Pakistan is an avowed Islamic Republic.

What did he imagine Pakistan`s relations to be with India? He certainly did not foresee a nuclear arms race. He once told a young lady, who happens to be author Tariq Ali`s mother, that he wanted open borders between Pakistan and India. Kuldip Nayyar, the Indian writer and parliamentarian, recalls often how Jinnah had told him that Pakistan would stand side by side India in the common defense of the subcontinent against all foreign invasions. On the eve of his departure from India he had appealed to let bygones be bygones and start afresh, an appeal no one has paid any heed to.

Many tributes have been paid to the life and times of Mr. Jinnah in the past. None greater than Saadat Hassan Manto`s famous "Mera Sahab" or M N Roy`s obituary for him, which are two of a kind because Manto was not the kind of person who wore his political opinion on his sleeves and M N Roy was a secular humanist of international stature.

He has been described as Pakistan`s George Washington, its King Emperor, its arch bishop of Canterbury, its Prime Minister all rolled in one, but I have a feeling he would have settled for much less. Nay he would have preferred to be called South Asia`s Clarence Darrow, for like Darrow, Jinnah too had been a champion of unpopular causes, like the Suffrage movement with which he was deeply associated in England in the 1890s.

Jinnah too had championed reason and logic over superstition and he too had taken on a figure like William Bryan Jennings, said to be the greatest figure in American history since Thomas Jefferson. In the end Jinnah wanted to be acknowledged as a lawyer above all and he was, for his portrait today graces the most hallowed hall of British legal tradition i.e. the Great Hall of Lincoln`s Inn, where he stands with some of the finest legal minds produced in 500 years.

[indianguy4u]

Do reflect on this article too
link

Partition
The Messiah and The Promised Land

Margaret Bourke-White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine during the WW II years. In September 1947, White went to Pakistan. She met Jinnah and wrote about what she found and heard in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India,Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. The following are the excerpts:



Pakistan was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the influx of minor government officials. There was only one major government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on what his critics called his "triple crown": he had made himself Governor-General; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League -- now Pakistan's only political party; and he was president of the country's lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly.



"We never expected to get it so soon," Miss Fatima said when I called. "We never expected to get it in our lifetimes."



If Fatima's reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother's was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah's deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his achievement in creating the world's largest Islamic nation.



"Oh, it's not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!"



The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?



"Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion."



I ventured to suggest that the term "democracy" was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?



"Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning," said Jinnah. "It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the poor."



This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.



"Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century."



This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides "social justice" -- the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. "The land belongs to the God," says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the "true Islamic principles" one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation's laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because "the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy."



What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?



"America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," was Jinnah's reply. "Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed" -- he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles -- "the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves." He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. "Russia," confided Mr. Jinnah, "is not so very far away."



This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah's mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America's military interest in other parts of the world. "America is now awakened," he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. "If Russia walks in here," he concluded, "the whole world is menaced."



In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam's thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. "Surely America will build up our army," they would say to me. "Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in." But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. "No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan."



This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan's own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.



Jinnah's most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....



No one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of him as a "savior of Islam." In those days any talk of religion brought a cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began sweeping the country he was hailed as "the embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity." The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of Jinnah's closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great unifier in the fight for independence. "Perchance it is written in the book of the future," ran one of her tributes, "that he, in some terrible crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality" as the hero of "the Indian liberation."



In the "terrible crisis," Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality, not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi's civil disobedience program. Nehru says that Jinnah "disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who filled the Congress" and was not at home with the new spirit rising among the common people under Gandhi's magnetic leadership. Others say it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi's program. One thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.



In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years' existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.



The trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible, a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive for power. ......



Less than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah's Olympian assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made public. "The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold" was the answer given to inquiries.



Only those closest to him knew that the "cold" was accompanied by paralyzing inability to make even the smallest decisions, by sullen silences striped with outbursts of irritation, by a spiritual numbness concealing something close to panic underneath. I knew it only because I spent most of this trying period at Government House, attempting to take a new portrait of Jinnah for a Life cover.



The Quaid-i-Azam was still revered as a messiah and deliverer by most of his people. But the "Great Leader" himself could not fail to know that all was not well in his new creation, the nation; the nation that his critics referred to as the "House that Jinnah built." The separation from the main body of India had been in many ways an unrealistic one. Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world's jute supply; the processing mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed.



With his burning devotion to his separate Islamic nation, Jinnah had taken all these formidable obstacles in his stride. But the blow that finally broke his spirit struck at the very name of Pakistan. While the literal meaning of the name is "Land of the Pure," the word is a compound of initial letters of the Muslim majority provinces which Jinnah had expected to incorporate: P for the Punjab, A for the Afghans' area on the Northwest Frontier, S for Sind, -tan for Baluchistan. But the K was missing.



Kashmir, India's largest princely state, despite its 77 per cent Muslim population, had not fallen into the arms of Pakistan by the sheer weight of religious majority. Kashmir had acceded to India, and although it was now the scene of an undeclared war between the two nations, the fitting of the K into Pakistan was left in doubt. With the beginning of this torturing anxiety over Kashmir, the Quaid-i-Azam's siege of bad colds began, and then his dismaying withdrawal into himself. ....



Later, reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan's territorial and economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr. Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no bigot, he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and now that his new nation had been achieved the bigots were in the position of authority. The leaders of orthodoxy and a few "old families" had the final word and, to perpetuate their power, were seeing to it that the people were held in the deadening grip of religious superstition.

U would like to join in the thread started earlier link

[ylh]

Originally Posted by indianguy4u

Do reflect on this article too
link

U would like to join in the thread started earlier link

Have read this article several times.
Margaret Bourkwhite was extremely pro-Gandhi but her grudging admiration for Jinnah can also be seen...

The point is that this article raises questions... questions which- since the transfer of power papers have been declassified have been answered... one of the things that has emerged is that Jinnah did not want partition as the ideal solution.

A great study by the great Indian constitutional jurist H M Seervai called "Partition of India-legend or reality" has proved conclusively that Jinnah- the former best ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity was driven to separatism as a last option.


I'll be posting a few other articles too...

[ylh]

From Frontline, an Indian magazine:

http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2217...6003003400.htm

ASSESSING JINNAH

A.G. NOORANI


Mohammed Ali Jinnah was an Indian nationalist who did not believe that nationalism meant turning one's back on the rights of one's community. The Congress stipulated that, virtually.

That this was Jinnah's favourite photograph tells us a lot about his self-image.

IGNORANT biographers have made much of the fact that at a reception in his honour on January 12, 1915, Gandhi asked Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who was presiding, to speak in Gujarati; implying that he was embarrassed because he knew only English. But Gujarati and Cutchi were the only two languages Jinnah spoke perfectly; "beautifully", M.C. Chagla recalled. His devoted follower M.A.H. Ispahani put it delicately: "Even in this language [English] the meticulous don would have found some flaws" (The Jinnah I Knew ; page 107).

But, with the indifference to matters of substance that marks most writings on Jinnah, they overlook a more significant aspect to the relationship. Dr. Ajeet Jawed draws pointed attention to its implications. When Gandhi returned to India from South Africa, Jinnah was a national leader towering above Motilal Nehru, Tej Bahadur Sapru and M.R. Jayakar. He was a colleague of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Bal Gangadhar Tilak. He performed a central role in the Congress, the Muslim League and the Home Rule League (HRL). Gandhi's demand was certainly presumptuous, if not insulting. But it revealed his pronounced tendency to establish his ascendancy. It worked with all others - save Jinnah. In his correspondence, he even advised Jinnah gratuitously about his wife. In October 1916, addressing a conference over which Jinnah presided, Gandhi referred to him as "a learned Muslim gentleman ... . an eminent lawyer and not only a member of the Legislature but also president of the biggest Islamic association in India" (Secular and Nationalist Jinnah; page 193).

Gandhi was "cutting Jinnah to size", as a sectarian leader. Jinnah was neither put out nor deflected from the course he followed. Chimanlal Setalvad and he remained two persons who never subordinated their will and judgment to him. On his part, till the end Jinnah treated Gandhi as a peer. He was not forgiven for this. Jinnah could not be "domesticated" like the Nehrus and Sardar Patel, nor co-opted.

Equally wrong is the impression that Jinnah was embittered because Gandhi, in effect, ousted him from two bodies - from the Home Rule League of which Jinnah was president, and from the Congress. About what happened in the former, we have Jayakar's detailed account in his memoirs, The Story of My Life (Vol. I, pages 316-318 and 404-5). In December 1919, Jinnah invited Gandhi to join the HRL as its president. So much for his ambition and ego. He overruled Jayakar's opposition, which was based on Gokhale's advice: "Be careful that India does not trust him on occasions where delicate negotiations have to be carried on with care and caution... . He has done wonderful work in South Africa... . but I fear that when the history of the negotiations... is written with impartial accuracy, it will be found that his actual achievements were not as meritorious as is popularly imagined."

The concluding part of two-part article.


Gandhi promised Jayakar that he would not change the HRL's character. He became its president in March 1920. Gandhi and Jinnah had cooperated at the Amritsar session of the Congress in November 1919. At the Calcutta Congress in September 1920, Gandhi unfolded his programme of non-cooperation. Jinnah said that while he was "fully convinced of non-cooperation" he found Gandhi's programme unsound. Gandhi was able to win over the doubters. He failed with Jinnah. Maulana Shaukat Ali tried to assault Jinnah, but was stopped by his friends. Gandhi took the battle to the HRL and presiding over its session on October 3, 1920, had its objectives changed in breach of his promises. It was a coup. Nineteen veterans resigned from the HRL, including Jinnah, Jayakar and K.M. Munshi (vide Jayakar, page 405 for the text of the letter). Gandhi flouted his promises to Jayakar, as he recorded.

On October 30, 1920, Jinnah wrote a letter to Gandhi which is of historic importance: "I thank you for your kind suggestion offering me `to take my share in the new life that has opened up before the country'. If by `new life' you mean your methods and your programme, I am afraid I cannot accept them; for I am fully convinced that it must lead to disaster. But the actual new life that has opened up before the country is that we are faced with a Government that pays no heed to the grievances, feelings and sentiments of the people; that our own countrymen are divided; the Moderate Party is still going wrong; that your methods have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto, and in the public life of the country not only amongst Hindus and Muslims but between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even between fathers and sons; people generally are desperate all over the country and your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganisation and chaos. What the consequence of this may be, I shudder to contemplate; but I, for one, am convinced that the present policy of the Government is the primary cause of it all and unless that cause is removed, the effects must continue. I have no voice or power to remove the cause; but at the same time I do not wish my countrymen to be dragged to the brink of a precipice in order to be shattered. The only way for the Nationalists is to unite and work for a programme which is universally acceptable for the early attainment of complete responsible government. Such a programme cannot be dictated by any single individual, but must have the approval and support of all the prominent Nationalist leaders in the country; and to achieve this end I am sure my colleagues and myself shall continue to work."

This was not an intimation of parting of ways but a plea for unity against the British, differences on the methods notwithstanding.





With Jawaharlal Nehru at the residence of Dr. Rajendra Prasad.

At the Nagpur session in December 1920, Gandhi's capture of the Congress was complete. Only, it was a victory procured by a Faustian deal with the Ali brothers on Khilafat. Jinnah was in a minority of one. Decades later, Munshi lauded him for his courage. Ian Bryant Wells' comment is fair: "By taking up the Khilafat issue, he gained substantial support for his own political programme." Without the Ali brothers' support, he could not have pushed through his programme.

Before long, the All India Congress Committee (AICC) ordained that Congressmen should give 2,000 yards of hand-spun yarn every month. Jinnah was still not embittered. This is what he said on February 19, 1921: "Undoubtedly Mr. Gandhi was a great man and he had more regard for him than anyone else. But he did not believe in his programme and he could not support it" (The Collected Works of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah; edited by Syed Shatifuddin Pirzada; Vol. I; page 411. Emphasis added throughout). Jinnah attended the Congress' annual session in Ahmedabad in 1921. The yarn requirement was another matter.

Jinnah knew what was at stake. He accurately predicted that the movement would divide the communities and breed disrespect for law and order. He supported the Khilafat cause, opposed the Ali brothers' methods, and gave up once Turkey made its own decision. He told the League: "We are not going to rest content until we have attained the fullest political freedom in our own country. Mr. Gandhi has placed his programme of non-cooperation, supported by the authority of the Khilafat Conference, before the country... . The operations of this scheme will strike at the individual in each of you, and therefore it rests with you alone to measure your strength and to weigh the pros and cons of the question before you arrive at a decision. But once you have decided to march, let there be no retreat under any circumstances... . One degrading measure upon another, disappointment upon disappointment, and injury upon injury, can lead a people only to one end. It led Russia to Bolshevism. It has led Ireland to Sinn Feinism. May it lead India to freedom... I would still ask the Government not to drive the people of India to desperation, or else there is no other course left open to the people except to inaugurate the policy of non-cooperation, though not necessarily the programme of Mr. Gandhi."

He convened a meeting of representative Muslims in Delhi in March 1927, which put forth four major demands. One of these was for a one-third representation in the Central Legislature. A committee of the Congress, set up to examine their import, accepted the demands. Its members were Motilal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Maulana Mohammed Ali and Srinivasa Iyengar. The AICC accepted the committee's views with minor changes.

The Hindu Mahasabha led by Madan Mohan Malaviya opposed these demands, as did Muslims in some provinces. Opposition to the Simon Commission divided the League, but Jinnah supported the Congress in the campaign to boycott this all-White body. The alternative constitutional proposals adopted in the famous Nehru Report dashed Jinnah's hopes. The Report did not even refer to Jinnah's proposals, or to their acceptance by the Congress. Jinnah now put forth his 14-points. Their rejection and his personal humiliation at the All-Parties Convention are chapters in a story told several times over. (For a crisp, documented account vide Uma Kaura's classic Muslims, and Indian Nationalism; Manohar; 1977.)

Three myths must be laid to rest. First, it did not mark "a parting of ways". Jinnah said in his speech at the Convention: "We are all sons of the soil. We have to live together... If we cannot agree, let us at any rate agree to differ, but let us part as friends." The second myth is that soon after this Convention, "Jinnah found himself in the company of the Aga Khan" and other reactionaries. The Aga Khan convened an All-India Muslim Conference in Delhi on December 31, 1928, around the same time as the All-Parties Convention on the Nehru Report in Calcutta. Wolpert `records' how Jinnah came late, looked around and what he wore. It is a fabrication. While the Ali brothers and even radicals like the Leftist poet Maulana Hasrat Mohani participated, in sheer disgust at the outcome of the Calcutta Convention, Jinnah did not. He had rejected the invitation brusquely.

The third is about Motilal Nehru's attitude. His letter to Gandhi on August 14, 1929, reported his talks with the Hindu Mahasabha leaders: "We agreed that the Hindu opposition to the Muslim demands was to continue and even be stiffened up by the time the Convention was held." He concluded: "You will see that the stumbling block in our way is this question of one-third Muslim representatives and on this point even the most advanced Musalmans like Dr. M.A. Ansari, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Mr. T.A.K. Sherwani and others are all very strongly in favour of the concession. I would therefore ask you to direct your attention now to the Mahasabha leaving Ali Brothers and Mr. Jinnah to stew in their own juice." (The Indian Nationalist Movement 1885 - 1947; Select Documents; edited by B.N. Pandey; Macmillan; pages. 63-64). This document establishes that: the convention failed because of the Hindu Mahasabha's obduracy; Motilal Nehru cooperated with the Mahasabha leaders though he saw no harm in the demand; and the "advanced Musalmans" failed to stand up to the Congress leaders for the community's rights, which Jinnah did without falling in the Aga Khan's camp of pro-British reactionaries. This is what made Jinnah truly unique - clarity of thought, moral courage, and sturdy, uncompromising independence. These were the qualities that made him so formidable an adversary later and so tragic in his fall from the ideals he once espoused.

Jinnah continued to cooperate with Gandhi even after Nagpur. In December 1929, he went all the way to Sabarmati Ashram to discuss the Viceroy's announcement of a Round Table Conference. Documents published recently show Jinnah pleading with the Viceroy on his behalf and that of the Congress in 1929-30. "I am left with the impression that Mr. Gandhi himself is responsible," he wrote.

His wife Ruttie's death in her 30th year, on February 20, 1929, shook Jinnah to the core. He withdrew from society and became distant. To think that it changed his political outlook is to underestimate the man's commitment and to fly in the face of the record. Even in 1937, eight years later, he saw "no difference between the ideals of the Muslim League and of the Congress, the ideal being complete freedom for India".

On July 21, 1937, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote to Rajendra Prasad: "During the general election in U.P. [United Provinces] there was not any conflict between the Congress and the Muslim League." With characteristic Nehruvian consistency, he proposed "the winding up of the Muslim League group in the U.P. and its absorption in the Congress".





With daughter Dina, Liaquat Ali Khan and his wife.

In later years, Azad professing, as ever, superior wisdom pinned the blame on Nehru. It was Azad, not Nehru, who gave the surrender terms to Khaliquzzaman: the League's group "shall cease to function as a separate group" (for the text vide Indian Politics 1936-1942; by R. Coupland; Oxford University Press; page 111). Sapru's letter to B. Shiva Rao of The Hindu, dated November 16, 1940, referred to his experience of "party dictatorship or Congress Ministries wherever they have existed... . So long as these people were in power they treated everybody else with undisguised contempt". That experience led him to believe that the "Western type of majority rule in India will not do. And we shall have to come to some arrangement by which we may take along with us the minorities in matters of general interest" (Crusader for Self-Rule; Rima Hooja; Rawat Publishers; page 280). This is precisely what Jinnah came to hold and for the same reason - the Congress' refusal to share power.

He had received short shrift from Gandhi and the British at the Round table Conference in London and decided in desperation to settle down there. Returning to India, he arrived at a pact with Rajendra Prasad in 1934, in which he abandoned separate electorates. In the light of 1928, he insisted that the Congress secure the Mahasabha's assent as well (for the text vide Marguerite Dove's Forfeited Future; page 462). Nehru, however, went so far as to assert: "There are only two parties in the county, the Congress and the government." Jinnah retorted: "There is a third party in the country and that is the Muslims." If in 1928 Jayakar questioned Jinnah's credentials as a representative, in 1937 Nehru did likewise: "May I suggest to Mr. Jinnah that I come into greater touch with the Muslim masses than most of the members of the League." The Congress, at one remove Nehru himself, represented everybody and would lay down the terms for the future.

Jinnah accepted the challenge and built up through mass politics a representative capacity that stunned all. Nothing in his past should have surprised any. Men like Mohammed Iqbal and Maulana Mohammed Ali had come to regard him as the "only" Muslim leader. At the League's session in October 1937, Jinnah pleaded: "Let the Congress first bring all principal communities in the country and all principal classes of interest under its leadership." He had in mind, not merger, but "a pact", a concept he had "always believed in". But Nehru had no use for "pacts" between "handfuls of upper-class people". Jinnah, in his view, represented them alone. There really was no "minority problem". The people were concerned with bread and butter. Economic issues alone mattered.

Jinnah laid bare his heart in a much neglected speech at Aligarh in February 1938 in which he recalled the past: "At that time there was no pride in me and I used to beg from the Congress." The first "shock" came at the RTC; the next, in 1937. "The Musalmans were like the No Man's land. They were led by either the flunkeys of the British government or the camp-followers of the Congress... . The only hope for minorities is to organise themselves and secure a definite share in power to safeguard their rights and interests."

He had said in October 1937 that "all safeguards and settlements would be a scrap of paper unless they were backed up by power". In Britain the parties alternate in holding power. "But such is not the case in India. Here we have a permanent Hindu majority... ."

This is where Jinnah's recipe went disastrously wrong. The solution lay, not in aggravating the communal divide by his two-nation theory; but in the tactics of the Jinnah of old - mobilise both communities, espouse secular values and seek protection for the rights of all minorities as Dr. B.R. Ambedkar had urged him to do.

Jinnah refashioned the League and made it a progressive body. He told the students at the AMU: "What the League has done is to set you free from the reactionary elements of Muslims and to create the opinion that those who play their selfish game are traitors. It has certainly freed you from that undesirable element of Maulvis and Maulanas. I am not speaking of Maulvis as a whole class. There are some of them who are as patriotic and sincere as any other but there is a section of them which is undesirable. Having freed ourselves from the clutches of the British government, the Congress, the reactionaries and so-called Maulvis, may I appeal to the youth to emancipate our women." Later he delivered "a warning to the landlords and capitalists who have flourished at our expense" (J. Ahmad; Vol. I; pages 39, 43 and 507).

What was his alternative, the Viceroy asked Jinnah. He replied on October 5, 1939, that "an escape from the impasse ... lay in the adoption of Partition". His article in Time and Tide of London on January 19, 1940, spoke of "two nations who must both share in the governance of their common motherland... so that the present enmities may cease and India may take its part amongst the great nations of the world" - as one nation. An identical contradiction was made in his speech of August 11, 1947: "a nation of 400 million". The Pakistan Resolution of March 23, 1940, did not refer to the two-nation theory that Jinnah now began to advocate with greater stridency. It envisaged in the last paragraph an interim centre prior to partition, which Ambedkar alone noted. Even 24 hours before its adoption, the draft provided for a limited centre (vide the writer's article, "The Partition of India"; Frontline; January 4, 2002).

In a real sense our leaders were a profoundly ignorant and arrogant lot. They failed the crucial test which Edmund Burke propounded in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents written in 1770. He held that "the temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought to be the first duty of a Statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn".

It is not any "interest" alone which prevents self-education. So does Hubris. Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru were men of colossal pride and vanity beyond the ordinary. Jinnah should have known that besides the inherent falsity of the poisonous concept, a nationalism based on religion degenerates into violent sectarianism. Gandhi acting as "the supreme leader" never seriously strove for conciliation in a plural society. Nehru denied the validity of the concept itself. Both spurned Jinnah. He painted himself into a corner from which he did not know how to escape.

We know in retrospect how and why things went wrong. Jinnah did not devise a formula for power-sharing in a united India. The Congress was adamant against sharing power with him. Nehru forgot the lessons of 1914 when socialists expected the workers to rise against their governments when they went to war. The workers turned out to be more chauvinistic than the "upper classes". So it was with communal feeling in a deeply religious society which Nehru least understood. Neither did Jinnah. He espoused the two-nation theory. While its consequences affect India, it holds his own state hostage.

We now find the problem of a "permanent majority" in all plural societies in Europe, Asia and Africa. On December 20, 1986, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's spokesman in Madras (now Chennai) said "two nations... coexist in one country". The LTTE does not propound sincerely a "viable alternative to Eelam", though.

Arend Lijphart's seminal work, Democracy in Plural Societies, published in 1982, propounded the concept of "consociational democracy". This would have been unthinkable to the Congress. It implied a national pact on power sharing. Safeguards are not enough. Empowerment is crucial.

From 1906 to 1936, the basis for discourse on the minority problem in India was a pact on safeguards for the minorities. What Jinnah said at the RTC in London on September 5, 1931, was conventional wisdom then: "The new Constitution should provide for reasonable guarantees to Muslims and if they are not provided, the new Constitution is sure to break down." Jawaharlal Nehru had no patience with anything that preceded his arrival on the scene of Indian politics. In a letter to Gandhi on September 11, 1931, he branded Jinnah's proposition as "narrow communalism".

Nehru's was a nationalism that denied the very fundamentals of Indian society, so far removed was he from the realities. Even Jinnah's moderation in 1931 was of no avail against Nehru's obdurate refusal to recognise that minorities were entitled to some rights. Nehru's was an absolutist secularism garnished with a socialism that he could only dimly perceive. A colossal intellectual failure all round produced a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. Tragedy, it has been said, lies not so much in the conflict between good and evil as between one good force and another.

Like Nehru, Jinnah also shattered the established basis of discourse. Nehru did so on the minorities' rights, Jinnah on India's unity; Nehru in arrogant ignorance, Jinnah in arrogant reliance on his tactical skills. Jinnah's greatness lay in the pre-1940 record when he was a tireless conciliator, a real statesman. Both men were secularists. Therein lies the tragedy. Nehru harmed secularism by denying the legitimacy of minority rights. Jinnah ruined it by the two-nation theory.

The leaders drifted apart not only politically but also in personal estrangement. After 1937, Jinnah's rhetoric became abusive. Gandhi did not spare comments of a personal nature, either.

In the aftermath of Partition, rhetoric on both sides, Indian and Pakistani, verged on abuse. Pakistanis questioned Nehru's sincerity as a secularist. On the Indian side, a portrait of Jinnah came to be painted of a man rude, arrogant and bereft of humanity. Sarojini Naidu's was a portrait of a man of deep sensitivity and refinement: "a naive and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as a woman's, a humour gay and winning as a child's".

Unlike Chagla, Jinnah's other junior, Yusuf Meheralli, went to prison and courageously argued back with him. But he never denigrated Jinnah. He told an American reporter: "After half an hour's conversation with Jinnah one returns a devotee." Men as diverse as V.P. Menon, Frank Moraes, P.B. Gajendragadkar, A.S.R. Chari, Mohammed Yunus and M.O. Mathai have testified to Jinnah's warmth and impeccable good manners. He would argue patiently with the young.

The great short-story writer Sadat Hasan Manto interviewed Jinnah's chauffeur and wrote an essay, "Mera Saheb" (My Boss), which was published in a collection called Ganje Farishte (Bald Angels). An English translation was published in the Illustrated Weekly of India of February 10, 1985, by Mr. Ghazeli (a pen name, of course). It reveals a man intensely human and in pain. Whenever memories of his dead wife and estranged daughter possessed him, their clothes would be spread out on the carpet for a while. He would then walk to his bedroom, wiping tears. Memoirs of his ADC Ata Rabhani, I was the Quaid's ADC (Oxford University Press; 1996) reveal a clubbable gentleman.

But the caricature of "whiskey, pork and Savile Row suit" came to stay. No one mentioned two respected Congress presidents who were devotees of Bachus. One, a man of religion, was a notorious alcoholic; the other, a lawyer, was a notorious addict. In a state of inebriation he once kicked a bucket containing food; the guests fled. Jinnah's neighbour in New Delhi, Sir Sobha Singh, recalled that he always drank in strict moderation.

Remember, Jinnah was eagerly sought after to sit on committees. A good committee man must be a good listener with a talent for compromise. No one cares to ask why it was that while Jinnah got along famously with Tilak, Malaviya and Lajpat Rai, he had problems with Gandhi. "Lalaji had generally not much difficulty in working with M.A. Jinnah." They would walk into each other's room with ease "sometimes several times in the course of the same day... and go together to Malaviyaji to continue the discussion" (Lajpat Rai by Feroz Chand; Publications Division; page 499).

That people were surprised when Jinnah's stout defence of Bhagat Singh in the Assembly was brought to light recently shows how little he was understood. "The man who goes on a hunger strike has a soul. He is moved by that soul" and was prepared to die for the cause, Jinnah thundered. Few had as good a record on civil liberties. "I thoroughly endorse the principle, that while this measure should aim at those undesirable persons who indulge in wanton vilification or attack upon the religion of any particular class or upon the founders and prophets of a religion, we must also secure this very important and fundamental principle that those who are engaged in historical works, those who are engaged in bonafide and honest criticisms of a religion shall be protected" (CW, Vol. III, page 208). (Vide the writer's essay "Jinnah's commitment to liberalism"; Economic and Political Weekly; January 13, 1990.)

Yet, it is doubtful if, in the entire history of India's struggle for freedom, anyone else has been subjected to such a sustained, determined denigration and demonisation as Jinnah has been from 1940 to this day, by almost everyone - from the leaders at the very top to academics and journalists. In his Autobiography Nehru maliciously caricatured him as one who distrusted, if not disliked, the masses and attributed to him a suggestion, he "once privately" made, that "only matriculates should be taken into the Congress". No authority for this palpable falsehood is cited. Jinnah was not one to make such a remark privately which went against his entire outlook. Nehru wrote thus in 1936. Nearly two decades earlier Jinnah's strong assertion to the contrary was made publicly and in London on August 13, 1919, in his evidence before the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on the Government of India Bill.

The Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu was downright rude: "Question 3633: How long have you been in public life Mr. Jinnah? - (Answer) Since I was twenty-one (i.e. 1897). 3634: Have you ever known any proposal come from any government which met with your approval? - Oh, Yes... 3636: You must have felt very uncomfortable?... "

Major Ormsby "Q 3810: You speak really as an Indian Nationalist? - I do." Lord Islington asked: "Q 3884: You would say that there are people in India who though they may be not literate, have a sufficient interest in the welfare of the country to entitle them to a vote? - I think so, and I think they have a great deal of common sense... . I was astonished when I attended a meeting of mill hands in Bombay when I heard some of the speeches, and most of them were illiterates." Could such a man have made the suggestion Nehru attributed to him in 1936? Not surprisingly, in 1937 Jinnah converted the League into a mass organisation, pledged to complete independence.

Interestingly, the next day Jinnah took his wife Ruttie to the theatre. He had as a student performed in plays and even toyed with the idea of becoming an actor. When they returned home, a little after midnight Ruttie gave birth to their daughter Dina. It was on August 14-15, 1919, a devoted friend of both recorded (Ruttie Jinnah: The Story of a Great Friendship; Kanji Dwarkadas; page 18).

Addressing the League in 1924, Jinnah proudly noted that "the ordinary man in the street has found his political consciousness". He mentioned "Mahatma Gandhi" and threatened that if the British did not respond Indians should "as a last resort make the government by legislature impossible" and resort to "parliamentary obstruction and constitutional deadlocks". This was the language of a Congressman, not liberals like Sapru.

Most of Jinnah's friends were non-Muslim and they remembered him affectionately. Kanji Dwarkadas' two volumes of memoirs, India's Fight for Freedom and Ten Years to Freedom, are well documented. K.M. Munshi said "Jinnah warned Gandhiji not to encourage the fanaticism of Muslim religious leaders" in the Khilafat movement. He wrote in his Pilgrimage to Freedom (1968): "When Gandhiji forced Jinnah and his followers out of the Home Rule League and later the Congress, we all felt, with Jinnah that a movement of an unconstitutional nature, sponsored by Gandhiji with the tremendous influence he had acquired over the masses, would inevitably result in widespread violence, barring the progressive development of self-governing institutions based on a partnership between educated Hindus and Muslims. To generate coercive power in the masses would only provoke mass conflict between the two communities, as in fact it did. With his keen sense of realities Jinnah firmly set his face against any dialogue with Gandhiji on this point."

Even so Jinnah did not part company with him. Three other episodes followed - the Nehru Report, the RTC in London, and the Congress' arrogance of power (1937-39). He appealed to Gandhi in 1937, through B.G. Kher, to tackle the situation. Jinnah drew a blank.

Belatedly, on December 6, 1945, Gandhi confided to the Governor of Bengal, R.G. Casey: "Jinnah had told him that he (Gandhi) had ruined politics in India by dragging up a lot of unwholesome elements in Indian life and giving them political prominence, that it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done."

In 1936, even as he set out mobilising Muslim support, Jinnah refused to exploit the Shahidganj Mosque issue in Lahore and doused the fires. Jinnah was no Advani (vide the author's article "Ayodhya in reverse"; Frontline, February 16, 2000). The Governor of Punjab wrote: "I am greatly indebted to the efforts of Mr. Jinnah for this improvement and I wish to pay an unqualified tribute to the work he has done and is doing."

Pothan Joseph was handpicked by Jinnah to be Editor of the League's organ Dawn. He recalled that "there was no trace of pressure or censure and he was anxious to test his views by inviting criticism in the seclusion of his drawing room... the notion of his having been a common bully in argument is fantastic, for the man was a great listener... he was really a man with a heart, but determined never to be duped or see friends let down. He didn't care a hang about being misrepresented as Mir Jaffer or Judas Iscariot. No one could buy him nor would he allow himself to be betrayed by a kiss."

Amazingly, Jinnah's superb record as an MP remains yet to be studied - as a member of the Central Legislative Assembly he spoke on a variety of subjects; the Motor Vehicles and the Post Office Acts included. On March 10, 1930, he denounced the restrictive orders imposed on Vallabhbhai Patel and on January 22, 1935, the detention of Sarat Bose. He emulated the combative style of British MPs. The British, arrogant as ever, resented it. Indians, thin-skinned, took it personally.

Dewan Chaman Lall, a close friend for 30 years and a noted Congress MP, recalled Jinnah's efforts for settlement before and after 1940 and said in 1950: "He was a lovable, unsophisticated man, whatever may be said to the contrary. And he was unpurchasable."

Sarojini Naidu did not change her opinion of the man even after he began to advocate partition. She described him at a press conference in Madras on January 18, 1945, as the one incorruptible man in the whole of India. "I may not agree with him, but if there is one who cannot be bought by title, honour or position, it is Mr. Mohammed Ali Jinnah." Predictably Nehru was "upset" by her "excessively foolish speech" (SWJN: First Series; Vol. 13, page 546).

Surely, any decent biography, any honest appraisal must reckon with the entire record. No serious effort has been made to explain the change. Why did a man who wrote on March 17, 1938, that "it is the duty of every true nationalist, to whichever party or community he may belong, to help achieve a united front" against the British advocate the partition of India on March 23, 1940? Why, indeed?

The reason is not hard to seek. Jinnah was an Indian nationalist who did not believe that nationalism meant turning one's back on the rights of one's community. The Congress stipulated that, virtually. Its shabby record on Muslims in the Congress bears recalling; some day Jinnah lost his balance, abandoned Indian nationalism and inflicted on both his nation and his community harm of lasting consequences. Nehru, in contrast, stood by the secular ideal till his dying day.





In a moment of relaxation.

Pakistanis, on the other hand, wilfully shut their eyes to Jinnah's grave mistakes and canonise him. They overlook the damage inflicted on Pakistan itself, let alone the Muslims of India.

Jinnah's record from 1906 to 1940 does not obliterate the record of 1940-48 any more than Nehru's brave fight, against all odds, for secularism in India or Gandhi's conscious choice of martyrdom alters the record prior to 1947. Gandhi knew his life was in peril, but did not compromise and did not flinch one bit.

The record prior to 1940 only deepens the tragedy that befell Jinnah, and because of him, the India he loved and the community whose interests he sought to advance. Responsibility for the partition was not his exclusively; but his share was enormous.

The League's Resolution of March 23, 1940, brought partition into the realm of the possible. The collapse of the Cabinet Mission's Plan of May 16, 1946, for a united India dragged it into the abyss of inevitability. For this, Jinnah was not a bit responsible. That phase deserves a closer study than it has received.

Indians and Pakistanis must come to terms with Jinnah's record in its entirety. He was of a heroic mould but fell prey to bitterness and the poison that bitterness breeds. In the present age, some will be talking of his virtues; others of his failings alone. Posterity alone will do him justice.

Some day, the verdict of history on Jinnah will be written definitively. When it is written, that verdict will be in the terms Gibbon used for Belisarius: "His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times; his virtues were his own, the free gift of nature or reflection. He raised himself without a master or a rival and so inadequate were the arms committed to his hand, that his sole advantage was derived from the pride and presumption of his adversaries" (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Modern Library; Vol. II, page 240).

[Monk]

It has always been my view that it was Gandhi's overt support to Nehru and his attempt to "Cut" Jinnah down to size that led to M.A. Jinnah leaving the congress. In my honest opinion I do think Jinnah saw himself as the first Prime Minister Of free India , and god knows i believe that he was a better man for the Job than Nehru ever was or would have been. In short, Gandhi was directly responsible for M.A. Jinnah leaving the Congress and the partition of India, If not for his fanatical support to Nehru and his attempt to supplicate everyone to his will, this tragedy would never have occurred. The fact that the two nation theory is a failure and united India could have achieved a lot more is no longer of debate. The final testament of Nathuram Godse in the Gandhi assassination trial is worth reading in this regard.
Gandhi was a great man without doubt, but his assumption that he was also a great statesman was critically flawed.

[indianguy4u]

Monk,
i think we are better off without pak & bangla combine. What happened was to a great benefit our country. Though i would like an peaceful region as a whole & not constantly bickering we go through.

[Ray]

Ylh,

Could you give a link or reference wherein Jinnah wanted a loose confederation of two states; one Hindu and one Moslem. That aspect appears to be new to me.

Noorani's article I have read, and I met Noorani when he had come to give a lecture at our Defence Services Staff College. I was not too impressed since he tends to indulge in rather tenuous and loose connection of facts with interpretations that are flawed. Of course, that was our impression.

It would be nice if you feed more details of Jinnah along with links so that I can save them for reference. I know it does appear lazy of me, but then you know more of Jinnah than I and hence you would be able to home on while I meander aimlessly.

[ylh]

Originally Posted by Ray

Ylh,

Could you give a link or reference wherein Jinnah wanted a loose confederation of two states; one Hindu and one Moslem. That aspect appears to be new to me.

Noorani's article I have read, and I met Noorani when he had come to give a lecture at our Defence Services Staff College. I was not too impressed since he tends to indulge in rather tenuous and loose connection of facts with interpretations that are flawed. Of course, that was our impression.

It would be nice if you feed more details of Jinnah along with links so that I can save them for reference. I know it does appear lazy of me, but then you know more of Jinnah than I and hence you would be able to home on while I meander aimlessly.

Dear Ray,

There are several books on the issue, which prove it conclusively, the three most famous being (The first two are based on primary sources):


1) Partition of India: Legend or Reality by H M Seervai, an Indian jurist par excellence

2) the sole spokesman by Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani historian based at Cambridge

3) Secular and Nationalist Jinnah by Dr Ajeet Jawed of Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi.

As for links... there are several but I'd say go for the evidence

[Ray]

Thank you.

[Asim Aquil]

A great study by the great Indian constitutional jurist H M Seervai called "Partition of India-legend or reality" has proved conclusively that Jinnah- the former best ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity was driven to separatism as a last option.

On this conversion: http://www.pakistanlink.com/Opinion/2000/Dec/29/02.html

The understanding of why Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted Pakistan, the nation he created, is crucial to an understanding of the nature of South Asian politics even today. Like other fathers of the nation - Washington for the USA, Lenin for the former Soviet Union, Mao for Communist China and Khomeini for Islamic Iran -- Jinnah is central to Pakistan. Indeed his impress was probably greater as he actually created a country that did not exist.

Yet almost half a century after his death Jinnah remains ‘enigmatic’ and ‘inscrutable’ (Ian Talbot, ‘Jinnah and the making of Pakistan’, History Today, February, 1984). The power of popular Indian and British journalism and the audio-visual media ensure that Jinnah continues to be cast as the villain of the drama of the last days of the Raj, the man who shattered the unity of India. This has become the agreed version of history. Attenborough’s fim, Gandhi, shot through a romantic Raj haze, ensured that millions and millions of people came away with the impression that Jinnah created Pakistan because he was jealous of Gandhi and a villain at heart.

Jinnah’s negative and inaccurate portrayal in the film was not surprising. The film was dedicated to Nehru and Mountbatten, Jinnah’s adversaries, and approved of by Nehru’s daughter, the then prime minister of India. Demonising Jinnah or reducing him to caricature is a spectacular failure in explaining not only one of the major players in the drama of India in the first half of this century but also the aspirations of the Muslims of South Asia.

Jinnah defies easy analysis even in Pakistan. Given his enormous prestige, each political party attempts to appropriate him. Islamists (notably from the time of General Zia’s regime in the 1980s) paint out Jinnah’s genuine humanism, universal tolerance and affection for English culture concentrating entirely on his more ‘Islamic’ statements. Secularists point to his Savile Row suits and English lifestyle and conveniently overlook Jinnah’s unambiguous championing of the Muslim cause and identification with Muslim identify from the mid-1930s.

What continues to baffle people is the conversion of Jinnah from a liberal, Anglicised, seemingly secular politician, whose proudest title was Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity and whose early political life was s