by A. G. NOORANI
Mohammad Ali Jinnah with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru PHOTO/The Hindu
IN the wake of a crisis, nations search their souls as painfully as individuals do. The United States was torn apart by racial riots in the late 1960s. Britain was in agony over multiculturalism after the terrorist attacks in July 2005. India agonised over Hindu revivalism after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, 20 years ago, on December 6, 1992. Terrorism and religious intolerance prompt Pakistanis to ask, “Is this the Pakistan which Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah aspired to establish?”
The question is legitimate. It has, however, two facets – the concept and the vision. There is little doubt about the vision. He envisioned Pakistan as a modern democratic state governed by the rule of law, one in which the minorities were not discriminated against, provincialism was curbed and corruption was well under control. There is less clarity on his concept of Pakistan. Contrary to popular impression, Jinnah did not have a cut-and-dried blueprint. It was work in progress. Expositions followed with time and circumstance. They were none too consistent.
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Jinnah was realistic. Constitutional safeguards mattered little to a minority community unless it had a “ definite share in power”. In his presidential address to the Lucknow session of the League in October 1937, he said, “All safeguards and settlements would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed up by power” (Ahmad, Volume 1, pages 30 and 43). That required an accord on power sharing; the Lucknow Pact of 1916 adjusted to the situation in 1937. Inebriated with electoral success, the Congress spurned the proffered hand and opted for a monopoly on power.
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Seven years later, in a letter to Jinnah dated June 21, 1937, Iqbal proposed “a separate federation of Muslim provinces” including Bengal, as “nations entitled to self-determination”. Muslims in those provinces “ ought at present to ignore Muslim minority provinces” ( Letters of Iqbal to Jinnah, Sheikh Muhammad Ashraf, 1942, page 34). Jinnah would have committed political suicide had he written off the Muslims in non-Muslim majority provinces from whom he drew his strength and also if he had written off the non-Muslim majority areas of Punjab and Bengal. His supporters from these areas would have fled the Muslim League. Eventually, both happened. Muslims in India were all but written off (see this writer’s article “Jinnah and Muslims of India”, Criterion, Volume III, No. 4, October-December 2008). The partition of Punjab and Bengal followed inexorably, inescapably from the partition of India. Figures of the 1941 Census stared in the face of any who cared to have a look at them. The non-Muslim majority areas comprised whole districts that were contiguous to one another and formed large and compact areas.
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