<b>Jinnah is not relevant</b>
Balbir K Punj
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Who was responsible for the creation of Pakistan? Could partition have been avoided? Was it merely the result of Britainâs attempt to divide India before leaving so that it could have elbow room in the sub-continent by playing India and Pakistan against each other?
Mr Jaswant Singhâs book on the subject reached the top of the charts even before its official release because he added much zing to the controversy over who was responsible for partition. According to the book Jinnah â India, Partition and Independence â Mohammed Ali Jinnah was not actually seeking Pakistan but a certain âspaceâ for Muslims which the Congress, more specifically Jawaharlal Nehru, was adamant on denying. Thus, Jinnah was âforcedâ to seek partition.
This hypothesis is a red-herring, for, it seeks to deflect the focus from the real sinners of partition. In fact, neither the Congress nor Jinnah was responsible for partition. Nehru and others did fail to understand the challenge of Muslim separatism. The British, of course, played a mischievous role and <b>the Communists provided the Muslim League with all the intellectual arguments it needed to press for partition.</b>
The seeds of vivisection of India were sown long before the arrival of either Jinnah or Nehru on the Indian political scene. The real culprit was the Muslim psyche, which lived in the âgloriousâ past when the Islamic sword ruled India. The prospect of living as equals with kafirs in independent India was unacceptable to Muslims. Jinnah, a leader without any mass following till the 1930s, was an instant hit with Muslims after he started articulating their separatist demands.
Speaking in Meerut on March 16, 1888, over a year before Jawaharlal Nehru was born, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University, had espoused the two-nation theory. He had asked, âIs it possible that two nations â the Mohammedans and the Hindus â could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of the two should conquer the other.â
Sir Syedâs line of thinking came to strongly influence the Muslim community in the following years. On October 1, 1906, the Aga Khan led a Muslim delegation in Shimla that met Viceroy Lord Minto with two main demands: Muslims should be represented only by Muslims in all âdemocraticâ institutions and such representation should be in excess of their numerical strength.
BR Ambedkar in Pakistan or the Partition of India termed this development as âthe beginning of the British Governmentâs policy of giving favourable treatment to the Muslimsâ and âto wean them away from the Congress and to create a breach and disunity between the Hindus and the Mussalmansâ.
Two months later, in December 1906, the Muslim League was formed in Dhaka. And in 1908, after his return from England, Muhammad Iqbal wrote a poem Tarane-i-Milli, the first line of which reads: Chino-Arab hamara, Hindustan ho hamara, Muslim hain hum, Watan hai Saara Jahan hamara (China and Arabia are ours, Hindustan is ours; we are Muslims and the whole world is ours).
In his presidential address at the All India Muslim League session at Allahabad on December 29, 1930, Iqbal demanded a âMuslim Indiaâ within India. Rahmat Ali, a student at Cambridge University where Iqbal had also studied, coined the name âPakistanâ to encapsulate Iqbalâs idea, and pamphlets explaining the idea of Pakistan were distributed among the delegates of the Round Table Conference in London in 1931-32. <b>So the two-nation paradigm took just 40 odd years to develop into a solid proposal and another 17 to become a reality in 1947.</b>
During this period, the bulk of the Hindus opted for the Congress. Muslims, in turn, opted for Jinnah, and not even five per cent of the people remained with Mahatma Gandhi. The fact that the Muslim masses did not follow Maulana Azad, a deeply religious Muslim, and supported Jinnah, who was not a practising Muslim, is itself instructive of the influence of Sir Syedâs two-nation theory.
In all historic evaluation of the events that led to partition, one must take into account the differing perceptions of the majority of Hindus and that of the majority of Muslims to the concept of independent India. Surely, Mr Jaswant Singhâs treatise on Jinnah is bound to raise many a storm in India, but these are likely to be academic in nature.
But the situation on the other side of the border is different. Over the last 62 years, India has fought separatist militancy and survived as a secular democracy. Governments, both at the Centre and in the States, have come and gone in response to freely expressed popular will, without any bloodshed. This is not the case in Pakistan. It is battling for survival against a backlash of Muslim orthodoxy, in spite of the fact that Pakistan is a declared Islamic republic. The orthodoxy in Pakistan believes that the country is still not Islamic enough.
Ever since its birth on August 14, 1947, Pakistan has made âhate Indiaâ the only theme of its existence. After realising over four wars that India cannot be defeated, it has resorted to using terrorism to divide India and destroy its economy. Neither terrorism nor promoting divisive forces, however, has shaken the Indian edifice.
Those who believe that Jinnah was secular have a lot to explain regarding Pakistanâs India-specific focus. Ashley Tellis, a Yale University expert on Pakistan, had pointed out last January that Indiaâs achievement in becoming a peaceful, prosperous, multi-ethnic and secular democracy remains an affront to the Lashkar-e-Tayyebaâs vision of a universal Islamist caliphate begotten through tableegh or preaching and jihad.
The debate about Jinnahâs legacy is irrelevant for India. Instead of debating Jinnahâs âsecular credentialsâ, we must seek to properly evaluate the threat to our secular democracy from the resurgent Islamic orthodoxy in Jinnahâs Pakistan, of which Al Qaeda, the LeT, etc, are only symptoms. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The communists usurped the history of the Independence movement and dissociated it from its Hindu Renaissance origins. Why does SR Goel attribute a Russian provenance for the Communists? The Russians were nonexistent as a political force in India. How can this be reconciled with the oft cited Communist collaboration with the British? What is the evidence for communist collaboration with the British? Nehru was a British styled Socialist and definitely not a communist. His entire ideological repertoire from AIT to Islamic tourists in India is British-originated.
Balbir K Punj
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Who was responsible for the creation of Pakistan? Could partition have been avoided? Was it merely the result of Britainâs attempt to divide India before leaving so that it could have elbow room in the sub-continent by playing India and Pakistan against each other?
Mr Jaswant Singhâs book on the subject reached the top of the charts even before its official release because he added much zing to the controversy over who was responsible for partition. According to the book Jinnah â India, Partition and Independence â Mohammed Ali Jinnah was not actually seeking Pakistan but a certain âspaceâ for Muslims which the Congress, more specifically Jawaharlal Nehru, was adamant on denying. Thus, Jinnah was âforcedâ to seek partition.
This hypothesis is a red-herring, for, it seeks to deflect the focus from the real sinners of partition. In fact, neither the Congress nor Jinnah was responsible for partition. Nehru and others did fail to understand the challenge of Muslim separatism. The British, of course, played a mischievous role and <b>the Communists provided the Muslim League with all the intellectual arguments it needed to press for partition.</b>
The seeds of vivisection of India were sown long before the arrival of either Jinnah or Nehru on the Indian political scene. The real culprit was the Muslim psyche, which lived in the âgloriousâ past when the Islamic sword ruled India. The prospect of living as equals with kafirs in independent India was unacceptable to Muslims. Jinnah, a leader without any mass following till the 1930s, was an instant hit with Muslims after he started articulating their separatist demands.
Speaking in Meerut on March 16, 1888, over a year before Jawaharlal Nehru was born, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University, had espoused the two-nation theory. He had asked, âIs it possible that two nations â the Mohammedans and the Hindus â could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of the two should conquer the other.â
Sir Syedâs line of thinking came to strongly influence the Muslim community in the following years. On October 1, 1906, the Aga Khan led a Muslim delegation in Shimla that met Viceroy Lord Minto with two main demands: Muslims should be represented only by Muslims in all âdemocraticâ institutions and such representation should be in excess of their numerical strength.
BR Ambedkar in Pakistan or the Partition of India termed this development as âthe beginning of the British Governmentâs policy of giving favourable treatment to the Muslimsâ and âto wean them away from the Congress and to create a breach and disunity between the Hindus and the Mussalmansâ.
Two months later, in December 1906, the Muslim League was formed in Dhaka. And in 1908, after his return from England, Muhammad Iqbal wrote a poem Tarane-i-Milli, the first line of which reads: Chino-Arab hamara, Hindustan ho hamara, Muslim hain hum, Watan hai Saara Jahan hamara (China and Arabia are ours, Hindustan is ours; we are Muslims and the whole world is ours).
In his presidential address at the All India Muslim League session at Allahabad on December 29, 1930, Iqbal demanded a âMuslim Indiaâ within India. Rahmat Ali, a student at Cambridge University where Iqbal had also studied, coined the name âPakistanâ to encapsulate Iqbalâs idea, and pamphlets explaining the idea of Pakistan were distributed among the delegates of the Round Table Conference in London in 1931-32. <b>So the two-nation paradigm took just 40 odd years to develop into a solid proposal and another 17 to become a reality in 1947.</b>
During this period, the bulk of the Hindus opted for the Congress. Muslims, in turn, opted for Jinnah, and not even five per cent of the people remained with Mahatma Gandhi. The fact that the Muslim masses did not follow Maulana Azad, a deeply religious Muslim, and supported Jinnah, who was not a practising Muslim, is itself instructive of the influence of Sir Syedâs two-nation theory.
In all historic evaluation of the events that led to partition, one must take into account the differing perceptions of the majority of Hindus and that of the majority of Muslims to the concept of independent India. Surely, Mr Jaswant Singhâs treatise on Jinnah is bound to raise many a storm in India, but these are likely to be academic in nature.
But the situation on the other side of the border is different. Over the last 62 years, India has fought separatist militancy and survived as a secular democracy. Governments, both at the Centre and in the States, have come and gone in response to freely expressed popular will, without any bloodshed. This is not the case in Pakistan. It is battling for survival against a backlash of Muslim orthodoxy, in spite of the fact that Pakistan is a declared Islamic republic. The orthodoxy in Pakistan believes that the country is still not Islamic enough.
Ever since its birth on August 14, 1947, Pakistan has made âhate Indiaâ the only theme of its existence. After realising over four wars that India cannot be defeated, it has resorted to using terrorism to divide India and destroy its economy. Neither terrorism nor promoting divisive forces, however, has shaken the Indian edifice.
Those who believe that Jinnah was secular have a lot to explain regarding Pakistanâs India-specific focus. Ashley Tellis, a Yale University expert on Pakistan, had pointed out last January that Indiaâs achievement in becoming a peaceful, prosperous, multi-ethnic and secular democracy remains an affront to the Lashkar-e-Tayyebaâs vision of a universal Islamist caliphate begotten through tableegh or preaching and jihad.
The debate about Jinnahâs legacy is irrelevant for India. Instead of debating Jinnahâs âsecular credentialsâ, we must seek to properly evaluate the threat to our secular democracy from the resurgent Islamic orthodoxy in Jinnahâs Pakistan, of which Al Qaeda, the LeT, etc, are only symptoms. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The communists usurped the history of the Independence movement and dissociated it from its Hindu Renaissance origins. Why does SR Goel attribute a Russian provenance for the Communists? The Russians were nonexistent as a political force in India. How can this be reconciled with the oft cited Communist collaboration with the British? What is the evidence for communist collaboration with the British? Nehru was a British styled Socialist and definitely not a communist. His entire ideological repertoire from AIT to Islamic tourists in India is British-originated.