by NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
“You can’t plant a watermelon seed if you want to get oranges.”
— Al Sharpton’s staple punchline in the Presidential Debates.
This week marks the 127th birth anniversary of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan.
Jinnah loathed extra-parliamentary politics and lived among the elite. During India’s freedom struggle, he denigrated Gandhi’s attempt to bring the common people into the political calculus. Unlike the Congress Party leadership, not one day did Jinnah spend in a British Jail. He was a member of the British Viceroy’s Executive Council, and believed, so he said, in a constitutional progression to freedom. He deplored Gandhi’s mass movements, saying they would unleash the most violent instincts among the people.
Jinnah’s creation, Pakistan, has certainly had its share of the spotlight after September 11, 2001. The latest news is that Pakistan may have supplied nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya — US officials are currently interrogating the highest ranks of Pakistan’s nuclear establishment. During the Afghan war, the New York Times reported that several Pakistani transport planes landed at Kunduz, which was besieged by the Northern Alliance, and took off with regulars of the Pakistani Army who had been trapped along with the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in the city. It was Pakistan, of course, which armed, supported and succoured the Taliban. Mir Amal Kamsi and Ramzi Yusef — one convicted of opening fire at the CIA building in Langley, and the other termed the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 — were both from Pakistan.
A paradox, surely, that a country founded by a self-proclaimed constitutionalist would end up, half-a-century later, with a military dictator at its head and the Taliban as its most famous export. A closer inspection would reveal, however, that despotism, fanaticism and intolerance were built into the very fabric of Pakistan.
Jinnah himself was never specific (maybe out of political necessity) about what his new country would be, keen only that there be a new country – whatever the human cost. Unlike Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru, who had laid out their visions for a free India in a prolific set of writings, one is not aware that Jinnah had any outline of the kind of state and country Pakistan would be, other than a few political speeches here and there. Nehru’s ‘Discovery of India’ was written during his final stint in jail (1942-44). Jinnah, never having spent any time in jail, perhaps did not have the leisure to write a similar screed outlining his vision for Pakistan…
Lest this should sound like a caricature of Jinnah, let me hasten to say that he was known as an incorruptible, brilliant man and a gifted lawyer. In his time he was reputed to be the most expensive attorney in India. “To watch him argue a case…”, wrote M C Chagla, his assistant, who later rose to be Foreign Minister of India, “was to see a work of Art.” The Early Jinnah was a broad minded, non-sectarian, liberal, who wanted nothing more, as he himself put it, “than to be the Muslim Gokhale”. He was a member of the Indian National Congress, and a close associate of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Sarojini Naidu. It was Jinnah who successfully defended Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his famous sedition trial of 1916.
Looking at Jinnah’s biography, it seems natural that Jinnah, with his background and outlook, should have been most comfortable amongst his intellectual and liberal peers in the Congress. Instead, he was destined to throw in his lot with some of the most retrograde elements in India politics — the Muslim League. Many writers have blamed both Gandhi and Nehru for Jinnah’s departure from the Congress. He was, of course, always a member of the Muslim League (in those days many people belonged to both). In the Solomonic tale, the woman who agreed so readily to saw the baby in half was being legalistic, not compassionate. Such a characterization fits Jinnah the lawyer remarkably well.
Gandhi’s advent into India was a watershed in the Freedom Movement. He changed the Indian National Congress from a once-a-year debating club into a vibrant mass movement. He electrified the nation, and also gave it a moral self-respect. Many prominent personalities took the transition well, others did not. Jinnah was not a mass leader by temperament. He also had serious, sincere, reservations about Gandhi’s introduction of religious motifs into the political idiom. And he had a horror of agitational politics. Gandhi had a different view, “The life of the millions is my politics”, he wrote, “which I cannot deny without denying my life work and God.” We can see that these were two different men with completely different views of the world. The differences are genuine.
From the time he left the Congress in 1920, to the mid 1930’s, Jinnah spent some of his time dabbling in Muslim League politics, but mostly on a lucrative law practice and shrewd real estate investments. Ironically, he was generally suspect within the Muslim League, where the orthodox regarded him as a false Muslim, both for his western lifestyle and his liberal past. The aim of the Muslim League was mainly to act as a lobby to safeguard Muslim rights and interests in an independent India. The notion of a separate homeland for Indian muslims was, if ever proposed, laughed away. And rightly so, for Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other religious groups had lived together in India for millennia. It would be like saying that all Americans with brown hair should have their own state – so interspersed were the populations!
The rationale of sectarian politics is always dubious. Whenever one encounters a party agitating for the rights of a particular community, one is tempted to ask what rights that community requires which others don’t. Why not then fight for the rights of all? Gandhi successfully blocked a move by the British to split the Freedom Struggle by introducing separate electorates for a section of the Hindus. To Gandhi, sectarianism was anathema. But not to the former liberal, Jinnah, who, by this time, had become a vociferous proponent of separate everything, going so far as to say that Hindus and Muslims were ‘two separate Nations’. This was the pernicious ‘Two Nation Theory’. He pushed the case that Muslims could never get a fair deal in a Hindu-dominated India. He wanted a separate homeland for the Muslims.
The Second World War was a godsend to Jinnah. While Gandhi and the Congress leadership were thrown in jail, and the rank-and-file hunted down for the Quit India agitation, the Muslim League, never one to oppose the British (supplication being more its style), had the blessings of the British to propagate the Two Nation Theory, and a clear two-year window for an unchallenged promotion of their views. Despite this opportunity, they failed to win majorities in either of the two main provinces where they had staked a claim based on the muslim majority – Punjab and Bengal. However, Britain was not displeased with the rise of the Muslim League, which gave them a counterweight to the Congress.
In August 1946, after the War had ended, the great constitutionalist, Jinnah, called for a “Direct Action Day”, when violence on an unprecedented scale was unleashed by the Muslim League in Bengal. This was to demonstrate the Muslim League’s power – to awaken the British into recognizing Jinnah’s strength. The other Muslim League leaders were men of no great liberal bent — when you are demanding a separate state on the basis of religion, how liberal could you be anyway — but this particular action goes to show how far Jinnah himself had traveled from his early days.
Along the path he had also jettisoned his earlier notions, saying that, “[Muslims] would not live under any system of govenrment that was based on the nonsensical notion of Western democracy”. All Jinnah’s lifelong paeans to progressive, parliamentary, orderly, transfer of power, etc. were thrown to the winds. His language became more militant, as did the League’s actions on the ground. Of course, there were enough Hindu hooligans to respond – the carnage in the neighboring state of Bihar in answer to the Calcutta massacre was no less gruesome. Politically Jinnah was singleminded and brilliant – when Congress leaders tried to answer his purported concerns of ‘Hindu Domination’ by a policy of appeasement – power sharing, etc., he thwarted every move toward reconciliation. He knew he had a terminal illness, and he had only a one-point agenda – to obtain Pakistan before dying. It did not really matter to him what a state founded on religious exclusion would lead to. A man of his intelligence clearly would have forseen the results, but he was approaching the matter much as he would approach a brief. “To me”, he once declared to an astounded acolyte, “Pakistan is a case – no more, no less.”
Many blame Britain for its duplicity in breaking up India. To me that seems like an silly charge, even if true. Why should one expect the British, who had after all stripped and robbed India for over two centuries, suddenly to worry about its integrity? Besides, it was certainly not in Britain’s interest that the new nation burst upon the world intact, the sooner to reach its inevitable status as a major power. If the Indians were happy to be disunited, it was hardly Britain’s responsibility to unite them. In the final anlysis, India was let down by its own leaders, Congress and Muslim League, Jinnah prominent among them. And indeed, both India and Pakistan have bled themselves white over the years in an unending arms race.
Freedom came, and with it the unholy compromises on the part of the Congress leaders, including Nehru, who accepted Partition without referring the matter to the Indian people. Jinnah, who had conducted the entire campaign for Pakistan on the basis of his Two Nation theory, namely that Hindus and Muslims could never coexist (Nehru correctly asked – why just Two-Nations, for there were plenty of other religions in India), now made that famous speech of August 11 1947, which his apologists frequently quote:
“You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state … We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and citizens of one state… 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…”
No kidding! And here we were, believing Jinnah all along when he assured us that Hindus and Muslims could never coexist! Evidently, that was only in India – in Pakistan — voila — no problemo! If ever there was a greater essay in hypocrisy, it is not on record. Not only that. Jinnah evidently lost little sleep over the fact that even after the Partition, there would still be tens of millions of Muslims remaining in India. How did this situation fit with his thesis that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist? If he claimed to represent all muslims, how then could this anamoly be explained? But Jinnah never answered these questions. And Pakistan, his handiwork, remains one of the world’s most confused states — a country in search of a rationale.
The reason is not far to seek. At the time of its creation, Pakistan was the only major nation, after the United States in 1776, to be formally founded upon an idea. The latter was created invoking the highest principles known to Man — “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”.
Pakistan was launched with the supremely inspiring, “A country where the Muslims will be in a majority”. What next to do?
Mission accomplished, Jinnah was now ready to revert to the liberal theme of his Congress days – democracy, secularism, equality of all citizens regardless of religion, etc. etc. His cohorts in the Muslim League had many faults – frequently they held bigoted, ignorant, and obscurantist views. But at least they were honest in their beliefs. Not one of them could have approached the monumental hypocrisy of their Quaid (Leader). Having employed this great lawyer to obtain their pound of flesh, they now ignored all his high talk and proceeded to live up to the true ethos of the nation they had helped found – religious persecution, extremism and bigotry. (On the other side of the border, too, similar things were happening, ending in what Robert Payne called the ‘permissive assassination’ of Gandhi himself. But Gandhi was willing to assert his moral authority to try and stop killings on the Indian side, and paid for his efforts with his life. Having launched the entire country on the basis of religious passion, one feels that Jinnah, even if he had wanted, could not have had much moral authority in the matter. In any event, there is no record of Jinnah having made the kinds of heroic efforts as Gandhi did at Calcutta and Noakhali).
For Pakistan’s non-muslims, life as second-class citizens commenced on the day the country came into existence. But what about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devout muslim, one of India’s greatest sons, and a relentless foe of the British? Badshah Khan got an early taste of life in Jinnah’s new nation — some months into Jinnah’s reign, he was thrown in prison for a 3-year sentence. His crime — speaking up for democratic freedoms. A state founded on religous exclusivity, Pakistan’s own version of apartheid has not looked back. Its laws of oppression have since grown to cover even Muslims of the ‘wrong’ persuasion – Shias, Ismailis, Ahmediyas… Just saying, Assalam Alaikum, the traditional greeting of muslim lands, is forbidden to anyone defined as a non-muslim (including the sects above). Praying in the traditional muslim fashion is considered blasphemous for anyone so defined, and several members of the Ahmediya community are in prison for this very offense. As to any perceived criticism of Islam, perish the thought. Or perish yourself. It is punishable by death. There are reports of schoolchildren on death row for alleged insults to Islam.
Jinnah died about a year after Pakistan was founded. Some feel that, had he lived on some ten or fifteen years after Freedom, as Nehru did, he might have placed Pakistan on a firm foundation of tolerance and democracy. I am not so certain. For unlike the Congress, the Muslim League had few popular leaders with either domocratic instincts or experience of governance. Not having struggled for freedom, Pakistan had not developed any second or third rungs of political leadership (aside from Jinnah, Liaqat Ali Khan, and Suhrawardhy, it scarcely had a first!). Military juntas have ruled Pakistan for nearly half its life. Jinnah was therefore prescient when he reportedly observed, “Each successive governement in Pakistan will be worse than its predecessor”.
When admirers of Jinnah in the Pakistani press, such as the veteran journalist Ardeshir Cowasjee, keep quoting Jinnah’s above speech of August 11, 1947 (‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed…’), they fail to present the full picture – for the larger record is different. Jinnah campaigned for a totally Islamic state, and his one speech above favoring a secular state displays either naivette or mendacity: neither conclusion does him much credit. In his stern determination to revenge himself on Gandhi and the Congress, Jinnah (whose title of Quaid-E-Azam was conferred by the Mahatma, incidentally), was willing to countenance the uprooting of millions, the death of thousands, and the sowing of a communal fury which continues unabated till today.
A promising Shakespearean actor in his youth, one wonders if these lines ever crossed the Quaid’s mind, “The evil that men do lives after them – the good is oft interred with their bones.” Whether or not they did, one cannot help wondering what this brilliant mind could have contributed to the world if it had been applied to a non-sectarian ideal.
Niranjan Ramakrishnan’ website is Indogram