by MAHIR ALI
There is more than one way of looking at India’s political trajectory in the past decade or so, in the light of the Two-Nation Theory that propelled the Subcontinent’s trifurcation.
The current drift towards Hindutva can be seen as confirmation that the notion of separate, and ultimately incompatible, Hindu and Muslim identities was reasonably accurate. On the other hand, until fairly recently, India had more or less conformed to the flawed, but nonetheless dominant, secularism projected by its founding fathers.
Were these founding fathers misguided, or delusional? Is what we are witnessing a logical culmination of that theory, or one of its consequences? Was Mohammad Ali Jinnah right all along, through the communitarian and ultimately communalist phases of his political evolution?
It is well known that, before his political evolution, Jinnah was a prominent Indian nationalist, hailed as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in the early 20th century. Much has been written in the intervening decades about Jinnah’s ultimate choice of a very different path, grounded in alienation and focused on separatism.
That path was strewn with complications and contradictions, and a clear picture of the thought processes behind it remains elusive. The details of that journey remain open to conjecture and perhaps always will, not least because Jinnah — unlike contemporaries such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — left behind no written record of his political evolution.
Ishtiaq Ahmed’s latest book sets out to challenge the assumption that Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a staunch secularist, but offers only an interpretation rather than incontrovertible proof
There are no memoirs or diaries one could turn to. All we are left with is Jinnah’s public statements and speeches, plus some correspondence. In his new book, Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History, political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed delves deeply into this evidence in his endeavour to demonstrate that, once the All India Muslim League opted for separatism, there was no going back, and that there is no compelling evidence that Jinnah envisaged Pakistan not as a Muslim-majority, but as a secular state.
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