08-26-2009, 09:33 PM
Jinx of a djinn(ah)
Chandan Mitra
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There can be no two opinions that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was among the most malevolent figures in contemporary history. It boggles the mind how a normal, well-educated epitome of the Westernised Oriental Gentleman, who never wore religion on his sleeves, could have convinced an entire generation of Indian Muslims that their destiny lay in vivisecting the homeland of their ancestors. In the process, the pork-eating, whisky-sipping, cigar-smoking barrister from Bombay who even married outside his faith; also caused the greatest mass migration in history to take place, a catharsis that left hundreds of thousands dead, brutally injured, raped and homeless. He further left behind a bitter legacy of discord between the country of his birth and that of its creation. The fragility of his two-nation theory was established with gory certitude when East Pakistan successfully seceded and through a bloody war of liberation Bangladesh was born.
But like all malevolent figures in history, from Atilla the Hun to Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, Jinnah holds the sub-continent in thrall. Probably it is the sheer mystique of his reclusive personality, discomfort with languages other than English, condescension towards his own party colleagues leave alone the âgreat unwashed massesâ whom he roused to a state of mindless frenzy, all of this makes him an object of repeated biographical inquiry and deconstruction. Many scholarly works, such as those by Stanley Wolpert and Ayesha Jalal, have been penned in recent years. But none has succeeded in penetrating his mask. Nor have they been able to conclusively establish how a man so far removed from the heat and dust of Indian politics managed to build a mass movement of gigantic proportions purely by playing upon the insecurities of his co-religionists.
Adding to his mystique is the fact that he knew he was dying of a debilitating disease but disclosed this to nobody till he achieved his goal of carving out a separate âhomelandâ for Indian Muslims â a homeland that left at least half of them back in India. His rapid physical degeneration and death within a year of Pakistanâs creation has led many to conjecture that if only Congress leaders knew of his ailment, they might have prolonged negotiations with the British and the Muslim League to a point where a post-Jinnah League would have fractured and Pakistan never happened. These are the proverbial ifs and buts of history, which can neither be proved nor disproved, but make for interesting speculation.
There can be another view of Jinnah that confers on him the mantle of a deliverer who only precipitated the inevitable; that Partition would have happened with or without him because after Direct Action Day, August 16, 1946 in Calcutta, there was no way Hindus and Muslims could have continued to cohabit. It is further contended by votaries of this argument that many more fearsome communal riots would have been engineered in the aftermath of that massacre, leading to thousands of deaths and complete anarchy.
So, the Congress leaders displayed maturity by bending on their knees before Jinnah to concede his one-point agenda. While Jinnah remains a villain according to this school of thought for inciting Muslims to take law into their own hands, proponents of this view say that once he had demonstrated his muscle it was better to surrender before him rather than risk prolonged bloodbath bordering on civil war.
Unfortunately, this argument ignores the massive loss of life and property, dislocation of millions and the anarchy that prevailed across undivided Punjab during the fateful months following the Partition, which most of its victims never believed would actually happen.
Notwithstanding the âsecularâ sermon that Jinnah delivered to the Constituent Assembly of still-to-be-born Pakistan at Karachi on August 11, 1947, the new State showed no willingness to implement that purported dictum, which seems an aberration in his personality anyway. The âdelivererâ argument also founders on the fate of East Pakistan, whose Hindu population at the time of Partition was a very substantial 40 per cent. The merciless manner in which they were turfed out over 20 years carries a tale even more tragic than the one-time transfer of population that happened in Punjab. The hypocritical Nehru-Liaqat Pact by which East Pakistanâs minorities were assured a place under the sun started to be violated even before the ink could dry on the agreement.
Nehru had supreme unconcern for the Eastern part of the country (Assam has not forgotten how he readily made a farewell speech at Tezpur while the Chinese invasion was raging in 1962). He left Bengali refugees at the mercy of marauding East Pakistani hordes and an insensitive regime in New Delhi. Come to think of it, Jinnah was a reviled man in his own community in Bengal, with leaders like Fazlul Haq steadfastly refusing to join the Muslim League.
In other words, Jaswant Singhâs belief that MA Jinnah has been demonised in India is an unacceptable contention: Jinnah hasnât been demonised; he was a demon. It can even be argued that Pakistan was probably no more than an ego trip for the haughty barrister who considered himself intellectually superior to the entire clutch of Congress leaders and was contemptuous of what he regarded as Gandhiâs fads â khadi, austerity, prevention of cow slaughter and so on. It is true as Singh argues Jinnah was a self-made man of enormous confidence and conviction. But surely he was not the only major historical personality to fit into that category.
Once he was convinced that Congress leaders would never concede the status, which he believed he deserved, he went about systematically carving out his own small world where he could be the undisputed monarch.
Democracy was anathema to him for he insisted it was a euphemism for Hindu domination, probably not foreseeing the subsequent reality of Hindus voting along caste and other lines while Muslims vote as a block. Had he anticipated that he might not have embarked on his diabolical mission to dismember the country for in a democratic but undivided India, Muslims would have held all electoral trump cards if they stayed united.
A final myth remains to be demolished â that of Jinnah being an architect of Hindu-Muslim unity till 1935 and deviating from it only on account of the self-serving machinations of âHinduâ Congress leaders. A man who could derisively refer to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as Congressâs showboy and refuse to parley with the highly respected theologian must not only be criticised for his maniacal ego but also unseemly denigration of anotherâs intellect. Further, that so-called ambassador of unity meticulously plotted Direct Action Day and despite its grotesque consequences threatened to serially repeat the carnage all over the country if Pakistan was not conceded.
Revisionism is part of history writing and every generation has the right to revisit the âfactsâ of history handed down by their predecessors. But there are certain realities that do not merit a sympathetic re-look. The persona of Mohammed Ali Jinnah is one of them.
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Chandan Mitra
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There can be no two opinions that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was among the most malevolent figures in contemporary history. It boggles the mind how a normal, well-educated epitome of the Westernised Oriental Gentleman, who never wore religion on his sleeves, could have convinced an entire generation of Indian Muslims that their destiny lay in vivisecting the homeland of their ancestors. In the process, the pork-eating, whisky-sipping, cigar-smoking barrister from Bombay who even married outside his faith; also caused the greatest mass migration in history to take place, a catharsis that left hundreds of thousands dead, brutally injured, raped and homeless. He further left behind a bitter legacy of discord between the country of his birth and that of its creation. The fragility of his two-nation theory was established with gory certitude when East Pakistan successfully seceded and through a bloody war of liberation Bangladesh was born.
But like all malevolent figures in history, from Atilla the Hun to Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, Jinnah holds the sub-continent in thrall. Probably it is the sheer mystique of his reclusive personality, discomfort with languages other than English, condescension towards his own party colleagues leave alone the âgreat unwashed massesâ whom he roused to a state of mindless frenzy, all of this makes him an object of repeated biographical inquiry and deconstruction. Many scholarly works, such as those by Stanley Wolpert and Ayesha Jalal, have been penned in recent years. But none has succeeded in penetrating his mask. Nor have they been able to conclusively establish how a man so far removed from the heat and dust of Indian politics managed to build a mass movement of gigantic proportions purely by playing upon the insecurities of his co-religionists.
Adding to his mystique is the fact that he knew he was dying of a debilitating disease but disclosed this to nobody till he achieved his goal of carving out a separate âhomelandâ for Indian Muslims â a homeland that left at least half of them back in India. His rapid physical degeneration and death within a year of Pakistanâs creation has led many to conjecture that if only Congress leaders knew of his ailment, they might have prolonged negotiations with the British and the Muslim League to a point where a post-Jinnah League would have fractured and Pakistan never happened. These are the proverbial ifs and buts of history, which can neither be proved nor disproved, but make for interesting speculation.
There can be another view of Jinnah that confers on him the mantle of a deliverer who only precipitated the inevitable; that Partition would have happened with or without him because after Direct Action Day, August 16, 1946 in Calcutta, there was no way Hindus and Muslims could have continued to cohabit. It is further contended by votaries of this argument that many more fearsome communal riots would have been engineered in the aftermath of that massacre, leading to thousands of deaths and complete anarchy.
So, the Congress leaders displayed maturity by bending on their knees before Jinnah to concede his one-point agenda. While Jinnah remains a villain according to this school of thought for inciting Muslims to take law into their own hands, proponents of this view say that once he had demonstrated his muscle it was better to surrender before him rather than risk prolonged bloodbath bordering on civil war.
Unfortunately, this argument ignores the massive loss of life and property, dislocation of millions and the anarchy that prevailed across undivided Punjab during the fateful months following the Partition, which most of its victims never believed would actually happen.
Notwithstanding the âsecularâ sermon that Jinnah delivered to the Constituent Assembly of still-to-be-born Pakistan at Karachi on August 11, 1947, the new State showed no willingness to implement that purported dictum, which seems an aberration in his personality anyway. The âdelivererâ argument also founders on the fate of East Pakistan, whose Hindu population at the time of Partition was a very substantial 40 per cent. The merciless manner in which they were turfed out over 20 years carries a tale even more tragic than the one-time transfer of population that happened in Punjab. The hypocritical Nehru-Liaqat Pact by which East Pakistanâs minorities were assured a place under the sun started to be violated even before the ink could dry on the agreement.
Nehru had supreme unconcern for the Eastern part of the country (Assam has not forgotten how he readily made a farewell speech at Tezpur while the Chinese invasion was raging in 1962). He left Bengali refugees at the mercy of marauding East Pakistani hordes and an insensitive regime in New Delhi. Come to think of it, Jinnah was a reviled man in his own community in Bengal, with leaders like Fazlul Haq steadfastly refusing to join the Muslim League.
In other words, Jaswant Singhâs belief that MA Jinnah has been demonised in India is an unacceptable contention: Jinnah hasnât been demonised; he was a demon. It can even be argued that Pakistan was probably no more than an ego trip for the haughty barrister who considered himself intellectually superior to the entire clutch of Congress leaders and was contemptuous of what he regarded as Gandhiâs fads â khadi, austerity, prevention of cow slaughter and so on. It is true as Singh argues Jinnah was a self-made man of enormous confidence and conviction. But surely he was not the only major historical personality to fit into that category.
Once he was convinced that Congress leaders would never concede the status, which he believed he deserved, he went about systematically carving out his own small world where he could be the undisputed monarch.
Democracy was anathema to him for he insisted it was a euphemism for Hindu domination, probably not foreseeing the subsequent reality of Hindus voting along caste and other lines while Muslims vote as a block. Had he anticipated that he might not have embarked on his diabolical mission to dismember the country for in a democratic but undivided India, Muslims would have held all electoral trump cards if they stayed united.
A final myth remains to be demolished â that of Jinnah being an architect of Hindu-Muslim unity till 1935 and deviating from it only on account of the self-serving machinations of âHinduâ Congress leaders. A man who could derisively refer to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as Congressâs showboy and refuse to parley with the highly respected theologian must not only be criticised for his maniacal ego but also unseemly denigration of anotherâs intellect. Further, that so-called ambassador of unity meticulously plotted Direct Action Day and despite its grotesque consequences threatened to serially repeat the carnage all over the country if Pakistan was not conceded.
Revisionism is part of history writing and every generation has the right to revisit the âfactsâ of history handed down by their predecessors. But there are certain realities that do not merit a sympathetic re-look. The persona of Mohammed Ali Jinnah is one of them.
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