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Analysis
Jinnah and
Partition and Nehru
by
Pramod Khilery
The word
partition evokes an emotion the range and depth of which far exceeds the
clamor and tears of the ground it vivisects into two or more than two.
It is not only the relationship between the two parts coming to terms
with a newness that bears the brunt but also the present and future run
the risk of falling into the habit of hiding behind the big wall of
partition. When we sit under the shadow of that wall the ground seems
trampled by either malodor of obduracy or effeteness of submission. And
we never forget the wall, the partition.
Jaswant
Singh’s book seeks to revive once again the ever mootable question of
who divided India. Jaswant, now expelled from BJP sought to turn the
existing notion of ‘Jinnah being the conceiver of two nation theory’ on
its head by suggesting that Jinnah did not win partition but Nehru and
Patel conceded partition to Jinnah with British always present as ever
helpful midwife. Historians bear out Jaswant’s political iconoclasm and
state that his book divulges nothing lurid and radical. The argument
goes it was not Jinnah who demanded Pakistan but haste of Nehru and
Patel to jump to supreme power that led them to agree with Mountbatten’s
crude ‘surgical solution’. But if the answers were as simple as Jaswant
would have us believe and as clear and pellucid as historians especially
on other side of the border pretend to know the furor that Jaswant’s
book has met with would largely have been absent.
Unfortunately once again the crystal clean answers will elude us but
still we can have a picture as to what occasioned the division that
engendered a bloodfest of centuries and exodus never seen before. Three
primary protagonists Nehru, Jinnah and Mountbatten have their roles well
defined in the history text books of India and Pakistan. In India, it is
Jinnah and in Pakistan it is Hindu extremists Congress headed by Nehru
that caused partition. Every nation needs heroes. At the time of
independence India had plenty of them in Gandhi, Nehru, Abul Kalam Azad,
Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, Rajaji and many more. Newly created state of Pakistan
had only one and perhaps the best till date. The one who had helped
Pakistan come into being, whose shrewd arguments and astute reading of
Muslim paranoia, however slight it was, had altered the map. For
millions of Muslims it was nothing short of an epiphany: an independent
sovereign state of their own to be ruled by their own people. No longer
did they run the risk of marginalized by a Hindu majority as Muslim
League told them. M A Jinnah was now Quid-E-Azam (great leader).
Here is contradiction. If Jinnah had won Pakistan for Muslims how come
he was not directly responsible for partition? Why Nehru and Patel are
being defamed? The general defense is that Jinnah never demanded a
territorial Pakistan. All that he was trying to ensure was a greater
autonomy for individual provinces as to endow provinces with Muslims
majority with enough power in their hands independent of clutches of
majoritism. Nehru and Patel did not relent and hence a new state was
carved out of India.
But if that is a case then how come he still was a nationalist? Jinnah
himself had relegated himself from being a nationalist to a leader of
only Muslims. He held that Nehru was representing Hindus and he Muslims,
a quasi truth preposition, right in his case and wrong in Nehru’s.
Pakistani-American historian Ayesha Jalal, Mary Richardson professor of
history at Tufts University USA and the writer of “The Sole Spokesman:
Jinnah, the Muslim League and the demand of Pakistan” argues that once
the all India negotiations failed to make headway and the Hindu
Mahasabha had called for the division of two main Muslim majority
provinces of Punjab and Bengal in early 1947 Nehru and Patel insisted on
partition; the sole spokesman of India’s Muslims tried to avoid such a
catastrophe till the very end.” If Jinnah was the sole spokesman of
Muslims (one religious community though with substantial population)
then ipso facto Jinnah ceases to be a nationalist. Regardless of the
credentials of the historian one needs to be utterly credulous to not
take the statement “Nehru and Patel insisted on partition” with a pinch
of salt. What could have been and was in all probabilities a tragic nod
can’t be made to wear the colors of an importuned insistence as Ayesha
Jalal seems to be doing. Even if we assume this outlandish preposition
that Nehru and Patel insisted on partition rather than trying to
accommodate Jinnah’s concerns for Muslim minority then what Jinnah is
suggesting at when in a speech at the Muslim League convention in 1940
he says, “very often, the hero of Hindu is a foe of the Muslims. To
yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical
minority and the other as a majority, must lead to rowing discontent and
the final destruction of any fabric that may be built up for the
government of such a state.” Doesn’t this statement corroborate what
we all associate Jinnah with?
If we go by some statements of the person who once wished to be a Muslim
Gokhle and wore an anglicized liberal secular persona till his death
before and after that famous august 11, 1947 speech delivered before the
constituent assembly of Pakistan in which he said, “you are free to
go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques, your caste creed
and religion has nothing to do with business of the state” then it
becomes clear that either secular and liberal Jinnah had killed himself
and given birth to a new Jinnah in pursuit of his political aims and had
reconciled with the bitterness of being in cohorts with communal Muslim
League propounding communal and sectarian beliefs or more than any idea
of India that Jinnah may have had it was his jealousy for Nehru that got
better of him. Jinnah was not immune from the bug of inconsistencies.
If in 1947 he wanted Pakistan to be a secular state but just two years
after while addressing the Karachi bar association on January 25, 1948
he opined that people who were rejecting the idea of an Islamic state
were indulging in mischief and stressed that constitution of Pakistan
would be based on Sharia. Three years ago in November 1945, he had
written to the Pir sahib of Manki Sharif in NWFP that the constitute
assembly of Pakistan would be able to enact laws for Muslims which won’t
be inconsistent with the Sharia laws and Muslims will no longer be
obliged to abide by un-Islamic laws. These statements illustrating the
communal politics played by a ‘secular’ Jinnah don’t end here. There are
more statements recorded in the form of his speeches and letters that
allude to Jinnah’s not having any qualms in playing out communal
politics and donning an inflexible approach to his views cleverly weaved
around the spindle of Muslim’s interests.
Quite oddly though it may seem but Jinnah did not represent all Muslims
of India contrary to what he claimed. According to a population survey
conducted as recently after partition as 1951 India was house to more
Muslims than was newly Islamic state of Pakistan. This evinces a
majority of Muslims had discarded the theory of Muslim interests in
jeopardy at the hands of Hindu majority propagated by Jinnah. These
Muslims decided to stay back in the India of their birth even at the
risk of being minority when they had the choice to be part of majority
in a separate Muslim nation. Despite odds these Muslims today are
helping their India as much as any member from majority Hindu community
can.
So what conclusions do we draw? Which Jinnah do we deem real? One who
envisages a modern secular state of Pakistan or the one for whom
Pakistan can only be an Islamic state? Don’t Jinnah’s flip flops compel
us to ask some insouciant questions? How did a person who was never open
to the lure of any office fall prey to his political ambitions? Did a
demeanoral human peccadillo of egotism and vanity compel him to be
adamantine even at the expanse of his own true self, doused in secular
waters, a self that he lived with for most part of his life? No one can
repudiate the fact that Jinnah who seriously contemplated the thought of
settling down in London till 1930 and did spend few years there even
when independence movement in India was at its peak, had ceased to be a
secular person in at least the last 10 years of his life however much
historians on both sides of the border claim otherwise. Every aspect of
his politics in these years was imbued with communalism.
Jinnah was a liberal, dapper, westernized personality, seldom praying,
often ridiculing Muslims for not being parsimonious enough, embodying
all the virtues of a sedulous and honest man. He was an extremely
competent lawyer and took pride in seeing himself as the bridge between
the two main communities of Hindus and Muslims, even after joining
Muslim League. Gopal Krishan Gokhle once called him ambassador of Hindu
Muslim unity. On flip side Jinnah was fastidious and attention demanding
personality. He wanted to be hub. The only man Jinnah could draw
parallels in Congress was Nehru, a man he could never get along. It was
the presence of Nehru in congress that drove Jinnah out. The joining of
Muslim League, a communal outfit Jinnah could never have found anything
in common with was just a support Jinnah needed to lean on. This was a
marriage that suited both. Muslim League had in Jinnah a man of high
intellect and great spunk in their fold. However absurd as this may seem
it was not as much the clash of communities that led to partition as the
clash of personalities. The imperious voice of Jinnah mouthing communal
concerns never found consonance with not only steadfastness of Nehru and
Congress but also with interests of a united India.
Today in India everyone seems to have grown bored with the deifying of
Nehru and Gandhi so it is quite a fashion to revile these two
personalities whom India owes a lot. Nehru can be lambasted for
partition as most historians on both sides of the border are doing with
a new found enthusiasm sourced from a right wing politician’s book for
not being pliable enough to the British cabinet mission plan in 1946
which Jinnah agreed to. According to this plan the federal government
would have had control of some key areas in governance like foreign,
defense, home and rest would have gone to states. The ‘nationalist’
Jinnah would have at least six Muslim governed provinces over which
federal government would have had near zero control. That would have
been going way beyond article 370 including the right to form sub
national collectives, constitutional statuaries or even secede. We don’t
need a prize to guess what India would have been like with in 10 years
of independence if Nehru had acquiesced to such a demand. To add insult
to the injury who would have stopped under such a system of governance
some 600 odd princedoms from not demanding even greater autonomy in
their internal jurisdictions. If Nehru would have done what today’s
historians often accuse him of not doing to avoid partition then perhaps
we would have been confronting not one Pakistan today but several, all
around us. Independent India has survived many insurgencies in the
various part of India thanks to Nehru’s cleaving to an India with
centralized control of power. The balkanization which Nehru feared would
have been the only reality, otherwise.
Everyone who finds fault with Nehru’s stubborn attitude in the events
building up to partition has to have problems in reckoning India as one
sovereign nation. There have been many people for whom India has always
been a multination entity rather than one country. In a way these people
are not far from reality in so far as what India was before British
began to consolidate their grip on India. Nehru himself was a bit
skeptical of the degree and depth of national consciousness ‘that brings
the sense of belonging together’ in colonized India but was assured that
a nation without this national consciousness can’t survive longer. His
emphasis on centralized control was a step forward in that direction to
endow as diverse a nation as India with that utter important sense of
belonging together.
Prophecies were always galore that it is but natural for this country to
get dismembered. 62 years after independence India has falsified almost
every such doom theory and Pakistan a symbol of Jinnah’s ‘Muslim
governed province’ though in the form of a complete separate nation but
enjoying the parity of religion is still struggling to find its feet on
the ground of stability. Today we see what Nehru envisaged flourishing
and what Jinnah stood for in tatters. Yes, partition could have been
avoided if Jinnah had acted more like a nationalist than a community
leader. Yes, one partition could have been averted were it not for Nehru
holding his own against Jinnah’s demands for a loose federation but in
that case for how long and how many.
August 30, 2009
See Also:
Jaswant
Singh’s Incomplete Truth
by Rajinder Puri
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