Jaswant Singh Book on Jinnah

[acharya]

Flawed thesis on partition

A Surya Prakash

Although Mohammed Ali Jinnah propounded the pernicious two-nation theory and forced the partition of India on the ground that Muslims constitute a separate nation, he is not wholly to blame. Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and other Congress leaders who failed to stop Jinnah ought to take the rap. In fact, Nehru is the draftsman of India’s partition! Further, even after partition and the emergence of a secular, democratic India, those Muslims who chose to remain in India find themselves abandoned and bereft of “psychological security” and so, by implication, the secular majority must take the rap!

These are some nuggets from Mr Jaswant Singh’s book, Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, which has resulted in his ouster from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr Singh’s sympathetic treatment of Jinnah, the author of that sinister theory that pitted man against man and resulted in the bloodiest exchange of human populations, not only challenges some of the fundamental beliefs of the BJP but of all Indians. Jinnah claimed that Muslims constituted a separate nation and that they cannot co-exist with Hindus. Jinnah said this a thousand times between 1940-47.

Throughout this period, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Rajagopalachari and many others tried to talk him out of it. All the initiatives taken by these individuals to avert this tragedy are also fully documented (for key excerpts of all the letters and documents exchanged during those days, see Secular Politics, Communal Agenda by Prof Makkhan Lal, one of our leading historians). Eventually, when all else failed and when members of Jinnah’s Muslim League resorted to barbaric massacre of Hindus in Muslim majority areas, Nehru, Sardar Patel and others gave in to Jinnah’s demand in the hope of stopping the slaughter of the innocents.

The partition meant untold suffering for millions. Over 15 million people were uprooted on both sides of Jinnah’s inhuman divide and over half-a-million were butchered in the senseless communal frenzy. This was the largest killing of human beings instigated by a politician in this part of the world. While the killing of Hindus went on unabated,

Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Congress, all of whom were sufficiently indoctrinated in the most noble traditions of secularism and peaceful co-existence by the Mahatma, took firm measures to stem the violence against Muslims on the Indian side.

These are historical facts which are well chronicled. Yet, the burden of Mr Singh’s argument is that the leaders of the Congress must take the blame for partition. Secondly, Mr Singh seems to hold the Hindu majority responsible for the secessionist tendencies among Muslims prior to partition. Finally, lo and behold, even after partition, the Hindu majority must take the blame for the maladjustment of Muslims in democratic India!

We are all now sufficiently familiar with what has become of the Islamic state that Jinnah created and the road traversed by secular, democratic and liberal India. Pakistan is an Islamic Republic which constitutionally prohibits non-Muslims from holding certain public offices. The population of the Hindus in Pakistan has crashed from 25 per cent in 1947 to 1.6 per cent in recent times. For much of the last 62 years that have gone by since partition, Pakistan has been under military dictatorship.

Contrast this with India. The Muslim population in India has risen from around 35 million in 1947 to over 150 million. We have a secular, democratic Constitution that ensures equity and equality. Indeed, we are so secular that since 2004, those who call the shots in India (and this includes the Prime Minister) are non-Hindus. Yet, if you go by Mr Singh’s logic, we get no marks at all for our humanistic approach to life and nation-building.

Shockingly, Mr Singh says, “Those Muslims who remained or were left behind in India now find themselves as almost abandoned, bereft of a sense of real kinship of not being ‘one’, in their entirety with the rest. This robs them of the essence of psychological security”. This is not all. Mr Singh fuels the demand for reservations for Muslims when he says “having once accepted this principle of reservations, circa 1909, then of partition, how can we now deny it to others, even such Muslims as have had to or chosen to live in India? Which is why some voices of Muslim protest now go to the extent of speaking of a ‘Third Partition’.”

In short, Mr Singh’s thesis is terribly flawed. He is so enamoured of Jinnah that he even describes Nehru as “one of the principal architects, in reality the draftsman of India’s partition”. He is also contemptuous of leaders like Nehru and Patel when he says he was struck by “the petty preoccupations of most ‘leaders’ of those times”. His misplaced sympathy for Jinnah and antipathy for Nehru, Patel and other Congress leaders does violence to our secular, democratic ideals even as it treats the perpetrators of religion-based hatred with much compassion and understanding. This is a dangerous argument. Every citizen who values secularism and democracy and hopes for the extension of these ideals, specially into non-secular frontiers like Pakistan, must summarily reject Mr Singh’s formulation.

Equally extraordinary is his claim (despite the thousand cuts inflicted on us by Pakistan, including 26/11) that Pakistan is now “somewhat mellowed” and “accommodative”.

Therefore, our secular, democratic enterprise amounts to nothing but the Islamic state that has crushed religious minorities and is now the epicentre of terrorism is “accommodative”.

Finally, a word about the political fallout of this book. While it must be emphasised that no leader of a party has the right to shock and awe his party colleagues and workers, there is nothing in the book to warrant Mr Singh’s summary expulsion from the BJP. Further, there is hardly any ground for banning the book because there are no references to Sardar Patel or Nehru which warrant a ban. Sadly, the expulsion and the ban in Gujarat have given life to a book that would have otherwise gathered dust in the back shelves of book stores.

If the BJP had treated this book with the contempt it deserves, Mr Singh’s Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, would have been another ‘weighty’ tome that would have been sold by weight by the publishers from their godowns in Daryaganj after a futile wait for customers. The party has, unfortunately for itself and for our country, given currency to a flawed and muddled thesis that glorifies Muslim communalism and separatism and condemns secular, democratic India and its great leaders.

http://dailypioneer.com/198000/Flawed-thes...-partition.html



August 30, 2009

Editorial

No Jinnah for India

In the collective conscience of India, Mohammad Ali Jinnah is a hate figure like Mohammad Ghori, Mohammad Ghaznavi, Babar and Aurangzeb. Jinnah is disliked more because his actions are fresh in memory, and millions of victims of his hate campaign are still alive.

There have been many attempts to whitewash the crimes-rape, rapine, forced conversion, loot and pillage of temples and mass slaughter of Hindus by the invading Muslim marauders-by Marxist historians like Romila Thapar, RS Sharma and Irfan Habib but no historian worth the name in India dared paint Jinnah a paragon. Because it is an impossible, thankless task.

Every nation has its unique ideas of history, sense of fair play and common memories of friends and enemies. So in Britain one cannot think of making a legend of Napoleon or in the US lionising the actions of Jefferson Davis. These things often may not stand academic scrutiny. It is so because trying to overturn these aspects is to insult the mass conscience. What historians and academics can attempt perhaps becomes taboo for politicians. So wise men avoid treading the area where only fools rush in. It is a matter of inference whether at the formative stage of his politics Jinnah was secular or that in one of his speeches after the formation of Pakistan he became generous and extended an olive branch to the beleaguered minorities in that hot bed of fanatic intolerance. After all, a tree is known by the fruit it bears.

Jinnah to a student of history comes out as the person who effectively and forcefully articulated the insidious thesis of two nation and injected the poison of communal canker and riots in India. He destroyed with lavish conspiratorial assistance from the British the long history of Hindu-Muslim unity displayed repeatedly during the country’s First War of Independence in 1857 and during the fight against the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Jinnah became the architect of Partition. Not once but repeatedly he used direct action-a vicious, vituperative call for mass murder-as a weapon of blackmail to get his way. He did this brutally instigating the massacre of millions of innocent Hindus. His devious ploy was to prove that the Hindus and the Muslims cannot live together. In this, he ensured his leadership by becoming a willing stooge of the British. When India fought the British, he sabotaged the movement by trying to keep the Muslims away from the national mainstream. Jinnah’s 1916 Lucknow Pact with the Congress was a communal charter, which formalised the appeasement Congress strategy, which finally made the Indian Muslim a bargaining chip. He conceived the divisive Muslim attitude of special status instead of equal rights for all. Appeasement led to separatism.

Jinnah cruelly and constantly insulted and heaped abuses on Gandhiji, Nehru and other Congress leaders for their correct and nationalist stand of not accepting Muslim League as the sole representative body of the Muslims. The Congress proved in polls after polls before Partition that it enjoyed the support of more Muslims than Jinnah. A frustrated, piqued and egoist Jinnah characterised Congress a Hindu party, Gandhiji, Nehru and other Congress leaders Hindu leaders and the Congress Muslim leaders like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as slaves of the Hindus. Even if the Congress wanted, the nation would not have accepted Jinnah as the first prime minister of India. Jinnah playing in the hands of the British not only betrayed the freedom movement but hastened and forced the Partition wading over the rivers of blood of innocent women and children and heaps of dead bodies of countless number of Hindus and Muslims. Such a political cynic should be counted among the barbarians history has witnessed. Their names are not celebrated as emancipators of human race.

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