Jaswant Singh Book on Jinnah

[Bharatvarsh]

<!--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-->

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-Bodhi+Aug 27 2009, 03:16 PM-->QUOTE(Bodhi @ Aug 27 2009, 03:16 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->..
Contrary to what Congress secularists and Hindu nationalists claim, the British did not engineer nor even favour partition. India's numerous white-supremacists, of both the secular and the Hindutva variety, refuse to concede agency to mere natives and insist that anything of consequence must have a white hand behind it, i.c. British machinations behind the Partition. But in reality, Jinnah was very much his own man, pursuing the non-white agenda of Islam, not at all a British stooge. Viceroys Linlithgow and Wavell told Jinnah they would never countenance the division of their neat and well-integrated empire, and Mountbatten only gave in under Jinnah's forceful pressure, which made Partition seem inevitable. Additionnally, the changing world situation after WW2 with the incipient Cold War made the British government see emerging opportunities in a partitioned India (viz. to enlist Pak in the Western alliance), so they reconciled themselves to it. But all through, the initiative for Partition was with Jinnah.
..
KE
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Apart form using 'Hindutva' as a term of abuse, Elst is wrong here in his appraisal of the British role. The British purposefully nurtured the Muslim element and indeed resuscitated Islam in India as a ruling lever, just as Sikh, Maratha, and the Bhakti Saints were poised to eliminate it from the national consciousness. They also promoted the most radical communist Nehru as their successor in the subcontinent. It is no coincidence that Mao was promoted in China (by the Americans) at the same time. Western origin Secularism (an Enlightenment product) blunts hindu perception of big bad wolf Islam. This was never the case in the medieval period, when hindu antipathy to Islam was a general rule.

[Bodhi]

There can be little doubt that British fanned the Islamic separatism since at least the after-days of 1857. This was in the general template of their regimentalizing the Hindu and playing up all the anti-Hindu forces against it. These can be seen very clearly right since the days of the British support to the likes of Syed Ahmed.

However, the questions that must be asked here are: Did the significant portion of energy or initiative for Islamic Separatism come from British Support, or were they a mere catalyst for it? Was the partition of India a perfect british design, or was it coming anyways?

In my opinion one should not underestimate Islam which I think needed no special energy from British to affect the separation. As the data shows, reaction of Islam to the rise of Hindu nation was already happening, even without the British tickling it. Moslems I think were already trying to re-organize themselves as can be seen not only in the political events of early British period, but also in the intellectual sphere, like the founding and popularity of the madarsa of deoband the fountainhead of the spiritual energy for separatism, identity of Urdu as the 'national language' of moslems, and ongoing riots in UP, Punjab and Bengal.

British were quick to realize it, and built further upon it, while at the same time they slowly paralyzed the Hindu faculties.

Coming to Partition, if one says it was some neat design drawn up on a black board through a strategy session inside a war room in the India office of London and then executed to perfection by their fieldmen in India, this I find hard to believe. I think it was a simple, natural and near-chemical outcome of the process that had already set in. Islamic separatism which was by now fairly self-sustaining and could live on its own enegry and design, found under Jinnah a leader who could effectively demand a separate state for Moslems, whereas Hindus by now thoroughly paralyzed were so disarrayed and confused that it was hard to imagine a Hindu fight-back (not that its consciousness was missing -- their leadership and organization was simply hijacked by the secularized lot having no clue about Islam).

In this I think the british hand can be seen at the abstract level, but not in the ground-level design for partition. I can be wrong of course.

Moslems too, as we know, were not unitedly behind the demand for partition. The other school with equally zealous moslems thought that the long ranging interest of Islam was better served through a united India rather than through a separately carved Moslem and Hindu states. In the final analysis, sadly for Hindus, it seems both the Moslem fractions won a victory -- they first got a separate Moslem state, and at the same time also got to stay behind in the Hindu portion to continue the age old process of steady dawat, and as a bonus, both of them together got to Islamize the Londonistan too!

[Bharatvarsh]

Blaming the British in my mind is a way of deflecting from dealing with unpleasent truths facing India today, among them is the fact that most Indian Muslims supported Partition.

The British fanned the flames but they never started it, separation from kaffirs is built into Muslim theology, partition was seen as another hijra in the tradition of Muhammad who migrated to Medina from Mecca where he found more support and used it as a base to then conquer Mecca.

Indians don't like to deal with this because it would then mean confronting the problem of Islam, its far safer to keep blaming the long dead Brit empire, look at how an otherwise scholarly Dharampal tried to shift the blame for the origins of cow slaughter as a way to insult Hindus to the British when tons of evidence showing it's Islamic origins was staring him right in the face. It's the same symptom at work when much bravado is exhibited in changing Brit colonial names of cities but which disappers when it comes to changing a single Islamic imperialist name, one of the holiest Hindu places such as prayAga still carries the name "Allahabad" officially, yet no one has the guts to do anything about that.

I think Elst is wrong when he says that Brits didn't favour partition but what they certainly didn't do is come up with the whole idea in the first place & partition certainly wasn't possible without the willingness of the common Muslim to riot, murder Hindus & rape Hindu women.

[Husky]

IMO. It's the same as today: virulent islamania trying to take over and carve little TSPs in Bharatam. But just like it couldn't be so successful in such a short period of time as when a christian govt is now in power helping it, same with the Brits who carefully helped it along back then.

The same background situation becomes apparent when reading IIRC Aurobindo's writings on when Brits were splitting Bharatam's Bangladesha into Hindu Bengal and islamaniac Bengal.

The islamaniac willingness is and has certainly always been there, but it is facilitated by calculating christianism which directs the blundering, hacking weapon of islamania into one that cuts right at the vital organs. Christoislamism.

Else why does it seem like islamism otherwise takes centuries to achieve the same sort of successes (and then too incomplete successes) that it achieves within a much shorter span of time and in a more complete form when christianism is in charge?
<b>ADDED:</b> Christianism in power does 2 things:
- it enables, encourages and empowers islamism,
- while it simultaneously disables Hindu Dharma's fight against islamism, and HD's natural immunity against terrorism and subversion. Christianism achieves this last through psecularism, through lying in the media and more general history-rewriting, etcetera.

Christianism just has the better brains, islamism will provide them with the necessary mercenaries. And reading christian missionary writings (before and even today) shows that they support islamania in the country. E.g. christian orgs' support from the very start of 1990 for an islamic Kashmir seceding from India (in fact, they presented it as separate). Christian lying international and local media spinning fictions on the Gujarat riots to protect islamic initiation and to simultaneously invent anti-islamic atrocities, while concealing what actually happened to the train and the actual numbers of the dead (just one example being Cedric "it's a genocide" Prakash and his fictions of many thousands of dead - and only of islamics - in the Godhra riots. And more recently REUTERS multiplied the numbers again as well, *even* after the truth had come out already). Christomedia essentially achieved the feat of turning the aggressors into the victims and forcing the Hindus into future inaction, turning secularising Hindus against Hindu victims and other Hindus directly affected. Islamism cannot do that, it never could. That's christianism.

You can see this also in the western institutions where every anti-Hindu islamaniac group has christian western collaboration and even representatives/panelists/vocalists to help them along. The brains are christianism which can only get a foot in India by neutralising Hindu resurgence by strengthening islamism and by increasing the latter's chances. Also islamism is necessary to deflect from the other conflict in India: christianism against Hindu Dharma (christobrits' christorule and christianisation process in India is also swept under the carpet, since it seems more invisible/secular in comparison to islamania). E.g. framing Hindus under Hindu terror and setting it up as something comparable to islamaniac terrorism is a christian tactic. RAND was already doing this outside India: branding normal Hindu orgs and secular Hindy political groups as terrorist groups "like Al Qaeda". Christogovt in India merely took this one step further by inventing Hindu terrorists for the Indian audience. Again, christianism gets invisibility.

[acharya]

Jaswant, Jinnah and Ghost of India’s Partition
Ram Puniyani

Jaswant Singh’s latest book on Jinnah (August 2009) has rekindled the debate ‘who did it’ of partition. The storm created by this work can be gauzed from the fact that BJP, the party of which Jaswant Singh has been the founder member and for which he has been working from last three decades, was expelled him from the party. The basic point Singh is making is that Jinnah was a secular person, he has been wrongfully demonized in India, that Nehru and Patel rather than Jinnah were responsible for partition of India because of which there was gory violence and that Muslims are being treated as aliens in India.
To take the last point first. One concedes that Muslims have and are being treated as aliens in India. One of the major political parties which has targeted Muslims and, whose aggressive anti Muslim campaigns have resulted in their present plight, their exclusion from social and economic space is BJP, itself. The question is what has Mr. Jaswant Singh been doing when BJP has been asserting the concept of Hindu nation, has been part of processes which have relegated Muslims to the status of second class citizens? One is not arguing that the maltreatment of Muslims is only due to BJP. The major factor has been the subtle penetration of RSS ideology in the social and political arena of Indian life. While Jaswant Singh does not come from the RSS shakhas, he has been part of the party, which is the political vehicle of RSS. In this case his cry of ‘alienation of Muslims’ looks like shedding crocodile tears!



As far as Jinnah being secular is concerned, it is ironical that a party, which Jinnah headed with ‘brilliance’, had the name Muslim League! If that does not clarify the communal evaluation of a person what else will. Jinnah despite his exposure to the Western culture, despite his being part of the Indian National Congress for initial part of his life, did become the ‘sole spokesman’ of interests of Muslims, i.e. Muslim elite, in due course of time. One agrees that the individual attributes of the Qaed-e-Azam of Pakistan were remarkable, but that does not make him secular. Secularism essentially stands for relegating religious identity to private realm to one’s life, while Jinnah chose to lead Muslim League, where the religious identity was the base of the national identity.



There were people like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and others who chose to be part of National movement for composite Indian nation. Majority of poor Muslims continued to support and follow Mahatma Gandhi and national movement. There were even Muslim religious leaders, and seminaries like those of Barelvi and Deoband, which stood for composite Indian Nationalism. On the other hand Muslim League, initially a product of the politics of Muslim Landlords and Nawabs and later joined in by section of educated and affluent Muslims, kept talking of interests of ‘Muslims’ and kept labeling Congress as Hindu party, despite its secular policy of Indian Nationalism.



The language of Interests of Muslims, leading to the notion of ‘Muslims are a separate nation’ was quiet akin and parallel to the concept of Hindu nation propagated by Savarkar-RSS, of India being a Hindu Rashtra, Hindu Nation. Do all Muslims have similar interests as asserted by Jinnah? What was the similarity between the interests of Ashraf and Arjal Muslims? What was the similarity of interests between the interests of rich landlord, businessmen Muslims and the poor artisan Muslims? Savarkar and RSS talked of the interests of Hindus, which layers of Hindus were these? Essentially the same layers which as Muslims were the beneficiaries of Muslim Leagues’ articulation, i.e. landlords, clergy and a section of middle classes.



Jinnah’s enticing 12th August 1947 ‘secular speech’ notwithstanding, the whole Muslim League predominantly consisted of those communal elements, who did want to convert Pakistan into a Muslims Nation, which they did in due course. And it was the same Muslim League under Jinnah’s leadership, which called for a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan, in 1940 Lahore resolution. Just because Jinnah was a non-practicing Muslim and a Westernized person does not make him secular. One’s association in politics should determine one’s characterization.



As far as role in the partition of the country is concerned, most of the debate is generally focused at superficial level, Muslim League, Congress, Nehru-Patel. Most of the debate is in the language of Heroes and villains, the deeper processes which gave rise to the political streams, which believed in religion based nation state, the role of British in creating such a situation is missing in the debate. While in Pakistan a large section will blame the intransigence of ‘Hindu Congress’ for partition, in India, Muslim League, Jinnah are blamed for the same. The source of ‘Hate politics’ in India, the RSS ideology, holds Gandhi also as a major culprit. According to the RSS-Hindu Mahasabha thinking expressed in so many ways, most clearly in the speech and action of Nathuram Godse, Gandhi is to blame for partition as he followed the policy of Muslim appeasement leading to their becoming assertive and going on to demand Pakistan. In most of the communal discourse, a large part of which has become part of social common sense in both the countries, the role of British in leading to the divisive path, and class character of communal organizations, which believed in the Religion based nation state, is missing altogether.



After the coming into being of Indian National Congress in 1885, from amongst the rising classes of Industrialist-Businessmen, educated sections and workers, the old declining classes of Landlords and Kings came together (1888) to form United India Patriotic Association. It is in this organization in which the future founders of Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha were working shoulder to shoulder, e.g. Raja of Kashi and Nawab of Dhaka. British played their cards very well and in pursuance with the imperial policy of divide et empera (divide and rule) recognized Muslim League as the representative of Muslims in 1906. That time it was predominantly formed by Muslim elite, who themselves were contemptuous of low caste Muslims; Arzals and Azlafs. Similarly Hindu Mahasabha, which was founded in 1915 had Hindu elite who were for Hindu Nation and average Hindus and low castes had no place in their scheme of things.



There is a lot of deeper parallelism in the agenda and language of both these communal streams. These were not only predominantly male dominated organizations, they also talked exclusively of identity issues. At that time the process of social transformation of caste and gender was going on but these streams totally kept aloof from those social processes. These communal streams emphasized on Muslim (elite) Hindu (elite) interests. That’s why they kept aloof from the national movement which aimed to bring in people of all religions, regions, castes and gender into a single stream of Indian ness. Jinnah’s focus on Constitutional methods and deep opposition to participation of masses in national movement was quite similar to Hindu Mahasbah and RSS policy of keeping aloof from freedom movement. It is from the Hindu stream, Savarakar, that the concept of Hindu nation and its politics, Hindutva, emerged. This Hindutva was later picked up by RSS. There was not much difference in many a formulation, which came from these two stables. As a matter of fact Savarkar goes on to quote approvingly, Jinnah’s statement that there are two Nations in India, Hindus and Muslims. And then says that since this is predominantly a Hindu nation, Muslim nation has to remain subordinate to the same. The deeper agenda of communal streams was same, the only difference was Muslim League called for parity and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS wanted subordination of Muslim nation.



While Hindu Communalism got fragmented between Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and some part of it entered Congress, Muslim communalism came up as a major force and later on a section of the Muslim educated classes came to support the same.



It is in this background that the logistics of partition has to be seen. For Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha-RSS it was a control over nation. National movement and Congress targeted for getting freedom, to come out of the shackles of feudal system and to lay the foundation of Industrial society on democratic basis. It is because of this that Nehru refused to accommodate Muslim League demand of take them in UP ministry in 1937, despite the defeat of Muslim League. Nehru’s argument was that since Congress wants to go for land reforms etc., how they can have a landlord representative sitting in the cabinet. Also Nehru refused to believe that Muslim League is a representative of all Muslims, the same way he opposed the formulation that Hindu Mahasabha-RSS are representatives of Hindus. Cabinet Mission plan, to which Congress and Muslim League both had assented, suggested a federal structure with all powers to provinces and have only defense, communication, currency and external affairs with the Central Government. During the course Nehru and Patel both realized that such a weak center will not be able to undertake the programs for country, programs for centralized planning for industrialization and related progress.



Superficially Nehru and Patel can be held responsible for what happened, but that’s like looking at the tip of iceberg. The deeper seed of divisiveness, the protection to interests of landlord elements was the British policy. It is in pursuance with that the Muslim League and Hindu Mahsabha was never the subject of British wrath, while the leaders of national movement had to make the British jails as their second home.



For Advani and Jaswant Singh the deeper fascination for Jinnah has some logic. Jinnah pursued two nation theory and succeeded in forming a Muslim nation. They have the wish to have a Hindu nation, so a subtle admiration as to how Jinnah could achieve his goal and so is a great hero for those pursuing religion based politics. At ideological level they are on the same wave-length, religion based nation state, as was Jinnah. They also visualize that by exonerating Jinnah from the blame of partition they are cornering Nehru and Congress, which at one level serves the BJP agenda. And here lies the problem. Since Nehru and Patel are inalienable as for as the trajectory of practical politics is concerned, Patel also comes in to the gambit of blame game which cannot be tolerated by large section of BJP followers. Another reason is that in RSS shakhas’ indoctrination module, the blame of partition is put on Jinnah’s head and the on the follies of Gandhi and Nehru. So how can Jinnah be resurrected without annoying the RSS module of indoctrination? Here lies the dilemma of RSS controlled Rajnath Singhs, and so the expulsion of Jaswant Singh for writing all this. Advani could save his skin earlier despite his ‘secular Jinnah speech’ because of electoral exigencies, as with sickness of Vajpayee, it was difficult to fill the gap by anybody else.



History has strange lessons to teach. Today lot of powerful opinions are being voiced, but most of them are based on one or the other superficial observation e.g. Jinnah’s earlier period when he was part of Congress or his 12th August 1947 speech in the Parliament. Similar type of historiography is also used for the communal historiography where kings are glorified or demonized according their religion. The deeper issues related to the workers, peasants and other average people are missing in this discourse. Same is the problem with the presentation of recent history, where the roots of communal streams (Muslim League, Hindu Mahsabha, and RSS) from the feudal lords and feudal values (Birth based hierarchy of caste and gender) is undermined and deliberately overlooked. This attitude also revels in creating heroes and villains; one streams’ hero being another streams villain. No wonder Bollywood is so successful in using this formula. And as major section of Bollywood is not bothered about the deeper issues of broad layers of society so are many of the worthy commentators for whom this wavelength is something easily understood and deliberated upon!



31st Aug 2009, 02:06 am.

[acharya]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIbrCPSpnR0


For more than 30 years, Jaswant Singh has been a loyal member of India's opposition Bharatiya Janata party. But after he wrote a book presenting a sympathetic portrayal of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, t...
For more than 30 years, Jaswant Singh has been a loyal member of India's opposition Bharatiya Janata party.

But after he wrote a book presenting a sympathetic portrayal of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, Singh was expelled by his party.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, he outlines his view on the way Pakistan should be governed today and unleashes a fierce tirade at the pary he has served for more than three decades.

[acharya]

<b>Jaswant, Jinnah and Ghost of India’s Partition
</b>
By Ram Puniyani

Jaswant Singh’s latest book on Jinnah (August 2009) has rekindled the debate ‘who did it’ of partition. The storm created by this work can be gauzed from the fact that BJP, the party of which Jaswant Singh has been the founder member and for which he has been working from last three decades, was expelled him from the party. The basic point Singh is making is that Jinnah was a secular person, he has been wrongfully demonized in India, that Nehru and Patel rather than Jinnah were responsible for partition of India because of which there was gory violence and that Muslims are being treated as aliens in India.

To take the last point first. One concedes that Muslims have and are being treated as aliens in India. One of the major political parties which has targeted Muslims and, whose aggressive anti Muslim campaigns have resulted in their present plight, their exclusion from social and economic space is BJP, itself. The question is what has Mr. Jaswant Singh been doing when BJP has been asserting the concept of Hindu nation, has been part of processes which have relegated Muslims to the status of second class citizens? One is not arguing that the maltreatment of Muslims is only due to BJP. The major factor has been the subtle penetration of RSS ideology in the social and political arena of Indian life. While Jaswant Singh does not come from the RSS shakhas, he has been part of the party, which is the political vehicle of RSS. In this case his cry of ‘alienation of Muslims’ looks like shedding crocodile tears!

As far as Jinnah being secular is concerned, it is ironical that a party, which Jinnah headed with ‘brilliance’, had the name Muslim League! If that does not clarify the communal evaluation of a person what else will. Jinnah despite his exposure to the Western culture, despite his being part of the Indian National Congress for initial part of his life, did become the ‘sole spokesman’ of interests of Muslims, i.e. Muslim elite, in due course of time. One agrees that the individual attributes of the Qaed-e-Azam of Pakistan were remarkable, but that does not make him secular. Secularism essentially stands for relegating religious identity to private realm to one’s life, while Jinnah chose to lead Muslim League, where the religious identity was the base of the national identity.

There were people like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, Rafi Ahmad Kidwai and others who chose to be part of National movement for composite Indian nation. Majority of poor Muslims continued to support and follow Mahatma Gandhi and national movement. There were even Muslim religious leaders, and seminaries like those of Barelvi and Deoband, which stood for composite Indian Nationalism. On the other hand Muslim League, initially a product of the politics of Muslim Landlords and Nawabs and later joined in by section of educated and affluent Muslims, kept talking of interests of ‘Muslims’ and kept labeling Congress as Hindu party, despite its secular policy of Indian Nationalism.

The language of Interests of Muslims, leading to the notion of ‘Muslims are a separate nation’ was quiet akin and parallel to the concept of Hindu nation propagated by Savarkar-RSS, of India being a Hindu Rashtra, Hindu Nation. Do all Muslims have similar interests as asserted by Jinnah? What was the similarity between the interests of Ashraf and Arjal Muslims? What was the similarity of interests between the interests of rich landlord, businessmen Muslims and the poor artisan Muslims? Savarkar and RSS talked of the interests of Hindus, which layers of Hindus were these? Essentially the same layers which as Muslims were the beneficiaries of Muslim Leagues’ articulation, i.e. landlords, clergy and a section of middle classes.

Jinnah’s enticing 12th August 1947 ‘secular speech’ notwithstanding, the whole Muslim League predominantly consisted of those communal elements, who did want to convert Pakistan into a Muslims Nation, which they did in due course. And it was the same Muslim League under Jinnah’s leadership, which called for a separate state for Muslims, Pakistan, in 1940 Lahore resolution. Just because Jinnah was a non-practicing Muslim and a Westernized person does not make him secular. One’s association in politics should determine one’s characterization.

[acharya]

Jaswant, Jinnah and the South Asian Monroe Doctrine
96 Comments | Post Comment
C. Raja Mohan Tags : Jaswant Singh, Mohammed Ali Jinnah- Posted: Sunday , Aug 16, 2009 at 2142 hrs

Bhartiya Janata Party leader Jaswant Singh's bold reinterpretation of Mohammed Ali Jinnah--his book on the founder of Pakistan is being launched on Monday--is bound to create controversy in both India and Pakistan.

On the face of it, it would seem futile to reapportion the political blame for the Great Partition of 1947. Yet, the renewed controversy over Jinnah could help us rethink the future of Indo-Pak relations.

No amount of blood-letting and political quibbling will alter our past. But we owe it to ourselves to overcome the many bitter consequences of the Partition. It is in this context that Jinnah's frequent invocation of the 'Monroe Doctrine' is of some interest.

The 'Monroe Doctrine', of course, is about the US foreign policy aspirations in the 19th century, when it sought to minimize the influence of European powers in the Western hemisphere. Jinnah visualized that after Partition, India and Pakistan could declare some kind of a Monroe Doctrine that would prevent the great powers from intervening in post-colonial Subcontinent.

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In an interview to a European newspaper in early 1948, Jinnah discussed broadly his idea of how he wanted India and Pakistan to relate to each other and the world. "Our own paramount interests demand that the Dominion

of Pakistan and the Dominion of India should co-ordinate for the purpose of playing their part in international affairs. It is of vital importance to Pakistan and India as independent sovereign states to collaborate in a friendly way to jointly defend their frontiers both on land and sea against any aggression. But this depends entirely on whether Pakistan and India can resolve their own differences," Jinnah said.

... contd.

[acharya]

<b>
Jinnah: neither angel nor demon
</b>
Pakistan's founder was a complex figure. A controversial new book rightly challenges zealous fictions about him

In his analysis of a new book about Jinnah, Kapil Komireddi accuses the author, Jaswant Singh, of "bowdlerising zealously" to rid Pakistan's founder of the "blame of partition". Yet Kapil's account omits certain important facts relevant to any discussion of how the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity" came to found one of the modern world's only two states carved in the name of a religion (the other being Israel).

To suggest that the story of a man as complex as Jinnah can be told without omissions in the confines of an opinion piece would be unfair to the man and to the storyteller. Kapil errs not in that he makes omissions in the story but that he attempts to tell the story at all in such a confined space. As Kapil rightly points out, Jinnah was, by all accounts, a secular constitutionalist and staunch Indian nationalist for most of his career. The story of how he became the voice of the movement that sought British India's division across religious lines is a complex early 20th century drama involving conflicting personalities and fractured identities set against the backdrop of a dying empire.

The leading characters in this drama – Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah, Patel, Iqbal – are variously worshipped and demonised in modern India and Pakistan. Yet, they are all merely human, children of India's first tryst with modernity, individuals trying to make sense of their own very different histories to conjure visions of their future, who, in doing so, happen to alter the history of the subcontinent forever.

Their stories are rich and worthy of being told and retold, and for anyone interested in how modern India and Pakistan came to be, their relationships with one another are worth examining in detail. These are stories of evolving identities in which we find the Harrow and Cambridge educated Mr Nehru becoming Pandit Nehru; barrister Gandhi becoming Mahatma Gandhi; Sir Iqbal becoming Allama Iqbal; and, the most fascinating of them all, the provincial Mahomedali Jinnahbhai transforming into the Savile Row-fitted Mr MA Jinnah, before finally settling on the Persianic Quaid-e-Azam. These are splendid, complex, brilliant men, each guided by his own sense of self and nationhood, who come together to dismantle the British Raj, yet part ways when the end is in sight.

It is thus unfortunate that these fascinating individuals must always be seen through the prism of their greatest collective failure: the sequence of wholly avoidable events leading to the bloodbath of partition. And as events of great human tragedy often do, the story of partition has become a deeply divisive and political issue in modern India and Pakistan.

The two countries have evolved competing histories of the event and the persons responsible for it: India sees the creation of Pakistan as a result of machinations by Jinnah, his band of Muslim League cronies and the conniving, departing British; Pakistan imagines its birth as a result of a hard-fought historic struggle against the twin evils of British imperialism and Hindu majoritarianism.

It is in this wide chasm between two competing falsehoods that Singh finds his space. In Singh's book a new Jinnah is born, a much more human Jinnah, neither the demon hated in India nor the hero worshipped in Pakistan: a self-made man in an era of princes and privilege, driven by ambition to the pinnacle of success, yet held back by circumstance; a person whose intransigence was fed by that of those he was up against; and one whose resolve eventually broke him and the India he had set out to free.

His argument, drawn from primary sources of the time, centres on the sense of insecurity bred in the psyche of Muslim leadership as a result of what they perceived to be gains of Hindus, as represented by the Congress, at their expense. The level to which these fears were real is, of course, open to debate among historians, but as Singh explains, this "minority syndrome" amongst Muslim leadership caused religion to become the field where battles over federalism, socialism, modernism, and Indian identity are fought between these highly complex personalities.

He is, of course, not the first to challenge the historiography of partition. As early as 1960, Ram Manohar Lohia, an active member of the nationalist movement, had published a book called Guilty Men of India's Partition, which criticized Nehru and Patel's acquiescence to partition. In her 1985 book The Sole Spokesman, Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal examined the last decade of British power in India and reached similar conclusions as Singh as to the causes of India's partition.

Kapil is wrong to dismiss Singh's work – he does an important job in straddling the important boundary between academic, polemical and popular histories and reaching a conclusion that challenges both prevailing national narratives. Needless to say, it helps that Singh is one of modern India's most prominent individuals, and has the ability to generate a greater popular effect than the most erudite of academics: the fact that his book has been banned in Gujarat, while sad and reprehensible, speaks volume for the level of discomfort his narrative is causing to that of the Indian establishment's. He may ultimately be wrong – the strength of his evidence leads me to suspect he is more right than most existing accounts – but the very existence of his work should serve to kindle a long overdue soul-searching in both countries as to how we see ourselves, our leaders and each other. When it comes to the question of Jinnah, independence, India and partition, zealotry must give way to intelligent discourse if we are to ever exorcise the ghosts of partition.

[acharya]

<b>Jinnah and tonic </b>



Sikandar Hayat’s study of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his role in bringing about the partition of the Indian subcontinent — or the birth of a homeland for Indian Muslims, if you will — is an elegant exposition of both the Quaid-i-Azam’s personality and the historical circumstances in which it found space to flourish. Jinnah

Much of the ground that Hayat covers — from the early years of the last century to the decisive months in 1947 when Partition became an inescapable reality — is ground covered in great detail by scholars on both sides of the divide and from beyond the subcontinent. The research is meticulous but does not provide by way of a historical narrative anything substantially new. What is new is the ‘theoretical’ spin he seeks to put on the narrative.

Hayat’s case is that Jinnah was, like many other leaders located in situations of rapidly unwinding colonial rule, a ‘charismatic’ leader. The charisma derived, in Hayat’s telling, both from Jinnah’s personality — in that circumstance his unique ability to combine a rationalistic pursuit of power — and from the historical situation, in which Indian Muslims faced the distressful situation of having to contemplate a substitution of British colonial rule with Hindu majoritarian rule from which there seemed no way out.

Jinnah’s emergence as a leader of men, Hayat further argues, was made possible (if not essential) by the vacuum of leadership the community faced especially from the beginning of the 1930s, by which time the communal faultlines and the difficulties of devising a constitutional modus vivendi had been exposed by the Motilal Nehru report.

It does not become clear after the reading of the last page whether the characterisation of Jinnah as a ‘charismatic’ leader in the manner of others such as Kwame Nkruma or Kemal Attaturk helps us to understand either Jinnah or the Partition of India in a substantially more insightful way, however elegant the exegesis.

But there is certainly a cavil, as there is with most historical narratives that see the elitist domain of politics (and history) as being the driving force of all change and progress or lack of it.

Hayat argues that the final proof or the final act in the development of Jinnah’s charisma came in 1940 when he pulled out the Pakistan demand as the final, non-negotiable solution to the decolonisation endgame. In Hayat’s telling this was Jinnah’s gift to the Indian Muslim nation, something only his genius was capable of bringing about and finally making real.

From another perspective, of course, one could as well see Jinnah as a prisoner of circumstance on his journey from ardent nationalist, to ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity and to ultimately champion of the two-nation theory. The final transformation was wrought by two things: the pressure of mass politics in the shape of the growing Hindu-Muslim chasm over which he had little control and the pressure of the Muslim elite, which wanted a patch of territory it could rule and conduct business in. In this Jinnah was not that different from the Congress leadership — and deserves no greater measure of demonisation or adulation. Nevertheless, Hayat makes his case well, though he does gloss over Jinnah’s partiality to cynical calculation, which, to be fair, could be condoned in any politician playing for serious stakes.

Providing considerable contrast to Hayat’s work is Jaswant Singh’s attempt to re-evaluate Jinnah. To begin with, it is sloppily argued, randomly researched and recounted as a barely coherent historical narrative. It does not help, too, that Singh has not been served with any particular distinction by his editor. In numerous stretches, his prose is barely intelligible. All that he manages to do is revisit a slice of history that is well known and which has been retold with far greater skill and ability by many others before him.

To be fair to Singh, he gets many of his conclusions right, though his short ‘philosophical’ digression into the meaning of ‘secularism’ can, at the most charitable, be described as kindergarten and his incessant attacks on Jawaharlal Nehru neither sustained by the evidence nor the argument.

Finally, Singh does deserve commiseration for the treatment he has got from his party. His re-evaluation has nowhere uncritically deified Jinnah, it has merely attempted to balance blind demonisation. And nothing he says about Vallabhbhai Patel merits the saffron hysteria in evidence. To say that Patel at the end of the long negotiations finally came to accept the inevitability of Partition is hardly saying anything other than the staggeringly obvious. Now expelled, Singh might well reflect that he is well out of the mess that is the Sangh parivar.

Suhit Sen is a Kolkata-based writer

[acharya]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--> Reply | Forward  BJP has reached this deplorable state because of it's own doings. They are a bunch of Party members who just can't control their views.fine, but why should they talk to the press? Why can't these matters be discussed within Party Circles? Expelling J.SINGH is 'RIGHT', as he confronted with 'Party Ideology', but why discuss Party Ideology with Public, it's a Party Matter, should have been discussed within and sorted out within. He could have been given a worthy send off. His Book would not have sold and this matter of 'whodunit-Partition', won't have arisen.And look what has happened, un believable! For the last six days there is no other NEWS but the BJP CRISIS and the President of BJP tells OUR PM to worry of Drought, Why has the BJP forgotten the Drought, have they given any statement of 'How the Drought can be controlled etc', and why did they start a crisis when there is a drought?Our PM has just sympathised with the situation.They must introspect these matters.
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[ramana]

Some one said that modern BJP is vanar sena out to destroy Ayodhya.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Aug 31 2009, 03:30 PM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Aug 31 2009, 03:30 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Some one said that modern BJP is vanar sena out to destroy Ayodhya.
[right][snapback]100830[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Sometimes one doesnt realise the value of ones own belongings. Perhaps some time away from each other will make hindus and the hindu leadership realise each others worth. Hopefully it wont be too late before the worth is realized on both sides.

Meantime, JS continues....

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/News/P...how/4957118.cms

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Mr Singh, who was nominated by his erstwhile party to head Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, a coveted post that is earmarked for the country’s principal Opposition, before relations between them turned hostile, has signalled his determination to hold on to the post. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-ramana+Aug 31 2009, 06:30 PM-->QUOTE(ramana @ Aug 31 2009, 06:30 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Some one said that modern BJP is vanar sena out to destroy Ayodhya.
[right][snapback]100830[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Any person at helm with an iota of shame or guilt would have resigned long ago. Gone are the days of people like Lal Bhadur Shastri.

[Bodhi]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Jaswant, not-so original
C M NAIM, Indian Express
Posted: Sep 01, 2009 at 0910 hrs IST


The author of Jinnah: India – Partition – Independence, Jaswant Singh, and its publisher, R K Mehra, have taken pains to convince the book’s readers that it is a piece of meticulous research.

“It has taken me five years,” Singh states in his introduction, “to write, rewrite, check, cross-check, seemingly an endless process.” He also mentions a research team that assisted him in the task, highlighting the persons whose particular whose help was invaluable to him.

As for the publisher, R K Mehra of Rupa & Co., he said in an interview: “It’s a well-researched and professionally handled academic work...” Then he added, “Our editors had diligently scanned the manuscript in its entirety...”

The book may have been ‘researched’ by an assiduous team, but the book carries Singh’s name as its author. He is responsible for everything included in it. Further, by putting his name on the cover, Singh lays claim to the authorship of all the book’s contents, unless otherwise indicated — i.e. properly ascribed to someone and duly acknowledged as a quotation. Similarly, the job of any book editor or publisher worth the name is to ensure accuracy and consistency in the text, and a full acknowledgment of other people’s wherever needed.

Sad to say, that is not the case here. I have found several cases in the footnotes and endnotes where huge chunks have been copied word-for-word from some source available on the web, with absolutely no acknowledgment of the source.

(When The Indian Express contacted Mehra, he declined to comment on the lifting of text while Jaswant Singh was unavailable for comment. When contacted, IAS officer and former aide to the author, Raghvendra Singh, thanked by Singh in the acknowledgments as “relentlessly searching out new books, new sources and references,” said: “What can I say?”).

• On pages 481-2, there is a long (19 lines), erudite note on the Canadian scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith. Besides being totally irrelevant, it is a verbatim copy of a note that is available on the web at the following link: http://www.as.ua.edu/rel/aboutrelbiowcsmith.html. The site belongs to the College of Arts and Sciences, University of Alabama ; the biographical statement on Smith was authored by its Department of Religious Studies.

• On page 588, the long (34 lines), equally erudite note on Benedict Anderson and his book, Imagined Communities, is a meticulous copy of what is available on the web at the site set up by “The Nationalism Project.” Its html is: www.nationalismproject.org/what/anderson.htm.

• Page 623 contains a note (20 lines) on the Muddiman Committee. Singh or his research team has stolen it word for word from the “Banglapedia” on the web. The copyright for it belongs to the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. Amazingly, the same note is duplicated on page 630, unnoticed by the vigilant editors at Rupa & Co.

• On page 633, the author has included a note on Ramsay Macdonald; it runs to 25 lines, and faithfully copies what the Indian National Congress has placed on the web under the heading “British Friends of India.” It can be looked up at www.congress.org.in/british-friends-of-india.php.

• On pages 634-5, the author has presented a long note on A K Fazlul Haq. Its 38 lines were originally written by someone for the “Story of Pakistan” project. One can find it on the web at: www.story of pakistan.com

Let me reiterate that none of the above carries any indication that it was not authored by Jaswant Singh. I’m confident that more searches of the kind I did, using key words or sentences, will turn up many more such examples in the endnotes and also elsewhere.

I am sure that both Singh and Mehra will describe the above as “inadvertent lapses,” and call my exercise “nitpicking.” In most countries of the world, however, the same “lapses” will be called plagiarism.

— The author is Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago, and a National Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. <!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[dhu]

<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 Britain’s 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 Singh’s 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 — India, Partition and Independence — Mohammed Ali Jinnah was not actually seeking Pakistan but a certain ‘space’ for Muslims which the Congress, more specifically Jawaharlal Nehru, was adamant on denying. Thus, Jinnah was ‘forced’ 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 ‘glorious’ 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, “Is it possible that two nations — the Mohammedans and the Hindus — 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.”

Sir Syed’s 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 ‘democratic’ 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 “the beginning of the British Government’s policy of giving favourable treatment to the Muslims” and “to wean them away from the Congress and to create a breach and disunity between the Hindus and the Mussalmans”.

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 ‘Muslim India’ within India. Rahmat Ali, a student at Cambridge University where Iqbal had also studied, coined the name ‘Pakistan’ to encapsulate Iqbal’s 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 Syed’s 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 Singh’s 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 ‘hate India’ 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 Pakistan’s India-specific focus. Ashley Tellis, a Yale University expert on Pakistan, had pointed out last January that India’s achievement in becoming a peaceful, prosperous, multi-ethnic and secular democracy remains an affront to the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba’s vision of a universal Islamist caliphate begotten through tableegh or preaching and jihad.

The debate about Jinnah’s legacy is irrelevant for India. Instead of debating Jinnah’s ‘secular credentials’, we must seek to properly evaluate the threat to our secular democracy from the resurgent Islamic orthodoxy in Jinnah’s 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.

[Guest]

Yes, Jinnah is truly irrelevant. The party lost focus that it gave rise to such characters as Jaswant Singh and his writing has become instant focus to blow out the dissensions within the party.

Hope the RSS chief in spite of all his pretensions not to interfere in the BJP's affairs takes it upon himself to speed up the cleaning up the rot within BJP. We can give him some time I suppose.

[Guest]

<b>Gujarat HC lifts ban on Jaswant's book</b> <!--emo&:cool--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/specool.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='specool.gif' /><!--endemo-->

[Guest]

Mudyji, why do you think its cool that the ban has been lifted ? freedom of expression ?