08-31-2009, 05:12 AM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Most Muslim leaders at the time were motivated by the communal concern for furthering Muslim interests, but this could take very different forms depending on their analysis of the power equation. Jinnah as a modern man estimated that democracy was here to stay, and that consequently numbers were decisive. In this view, Muslims in a Hindu-majority country would be out of power and should secede from it to create a state for themselves or at least one in which they would be the majority. But the religiously orthodox Deoband school reasoned differently: in the Middle Ages, Muslims were a far smaller minority and yet they ruled over the Hindus. Damn democracy and restore the Islamic empire, was the position of Deobandis like Maulana Maudoodi. And of the most famous Deobandi, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, often falsely presented as a "nationalist Muslim", but in fact a clever Islamist strategist who exploited Gandhi's and Nehru's eagerness to somehow find a nationalist Muslim somewhere. With his direct experience of the Congress leaders' gullibility regarding Islam, he knew that there was no "Hindu majority" that would oppress the Muslims. On the contrary, Muslims were getting all kinds of priviliges (Gandhi, with Azad's support, even offered Jinnah the option of forming an all-Muslim government as reward for abandoning the Partition scheme), and if they played their cards well, they could become the dominant community with their 25%, percentage which would only grow and become a majority in the end.
Jinnah wanted Pakistan as a secure basis from which a later generation could perhaps conquer the rest of India, Azad wanted to give the Muslim community a strond and eventually dominant position in a united India. Both were cynical and determined Muslim communalists, but their strategies were different. With hindsight, we may judge that Azad was a more far-sighted strategist, for the conduct of Hindu politicians in remainder-India proves that they are no match for any Muslim pressures, not from the one in seven in remainder-India, let alone from a Muslim community that would comprise one in three inhabitants of a united India. Those are the angles from which the Jinnah phenomenon can be understood: the inter-Muslim debate over which scenario would best serve Muslim interests. But no one is bringing them up in the present quarrels over personalized matters such as the relative merits and demerits of Nehru and Patel. Just as the Congress leaders back then failed to weigh the situation in those terms, with the result that their attempts to prevent partition were based on sentiment rather than on a proper facts-based analysis, and were doomed to be ineffectual.
http://voi.org/20090829221/koenraadelst/co...ion/page-3.html<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Jinnah wanted Pakistan as a secure basis from which a later generation could perhaps conquer the rest of India, Azad wanted to give the Muslim community a strond and eventually dominant position in a united India. Both were cynical and determined Muslim communalists, but their strategies were different. With hindsight, we may judge that Azad was a more far-sighted strategist, for the conduct of Hindu politicians in remainder-India proves that they are no match for any Muslim pressures, not from the one in seven in remainder-India, let alone from a Muslim community that would comprise one in three inhabitants of a united India. Those are the angles from which the Jinnah phenomenon can be understood: the inter-Muslim debate over which scenario would best serve Muslim interests. But no one is bringing them up in the present quarrels over personalized matters such as the relative merits and demerits of Nehru and Patel. Just as the Congress leaders back then failed to weigh the situation in those terms, with the result that their attempts to prevent partition were based on sentiment rather than on a proper facts-based analysis, and were doomed to be ineffectual.
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