e book is the product of the author’s “journey” of “rediscovery and clearer understanding of why India was partitioned in 1947.” The theme: Jinnah’s transformation from being an “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” to being the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan. The author chooses not to be a “cold, linear narrator of events”. Consequently, the work is “saturated with emotions.”
The author’s assessment of Jinnah is that he was “fundamentally in error” in propounding the two-nation theory; in his “continued rigidity, his fixed stand on an ever-increasing charter of demands for the Muslims, an even bigger share of power for them in independent India”; and that Jinnah did not “win” Pakistan, Nehru and Patel “conceded” Pakistan to Jinnah with the British “playing a helpful midwife”. Does this constitute a revisionist refurbishing of Jinnah’s image? Is this the demolition of his “demonisation” that readers had expected to find in the book from comments repeatedly made in public? Similarly, there is little about Sardar Patel which has not been said before. Yet, there have been angry reactions, politics having taken precedence.
India — and Pakistan — commemorated six decades of independence earlier this month. Our present is derived from our past. An understanding of the past enables us to judge how much of it retains relevance in contemporary times. Does it help, or hinder, the resolution of our present-day problems?
The idea that contained the seed of separatism in the national movement was that of parity — of a minority being equal to a majority. It undermined the fundamental principle of democracy. It located the citizen exclusively in a religious persona and ignored the civic persona. The fear of an unassailable Hindu majority riding roughshod over Muslim interests had haunted the Muslim leadership from the inception of efforts for greater Indian representation in decision-making in the late nineteenth century. It led to the formation — with the explicit encouragement and assistance of the colonial power — of the Muslim League in 1906 and, eventually, to the demand for Pakistan.
Jinnah, the author recounts, argued that the freedom movement was in contention among three, not two, parties: the British, the Congress and the Muslim League. The role of the British is, therefore, a legitimate part of the enquiry. But the book does not delve into it. There was nothing to stop the British from counseling the League to set itself up as a parallel political organisation appealing for support from all sections. Except, that is, their desire to rule India indefinitely for which they needed to divide the two major communities.
A constitutional state must necessarily guarantee the rule of law, various civil and political rights and freedoms, and be governed by representative assemblies elected by universal suffrage and numerical majorities of all citizens in elections at regular intervals between competing candidates and/or political organisations. If this was to be nature of the post-colonial state that India would emerge into, did not the Congress, given its self-perception and position as the dominant nationalist force in the country, have the political, even moral, duty to assert its right to speak in the name of all citizens, not just one community, and fight sectarianism and separatism? This became even more imperative when the Muslim League sought to speak in the name of the entire Muslim community despite its narrow base and when, in fact, the representative institutions, such as they were, which might confer legitimacy, were based on an extremely restricted franchise. Would a compromise on principle have led to accommodation or escalating demands?
The book documents Jinnah’s view of the communal situation in a future Pakistan. His response to a question during the Press meet on November 14, 1946 in New Delhi was that “minorities can only live as minorities and not as a dominant body.” Once Pakistan was formed, Jinnah felt it would be a question of how best to “protect and safeguard” the minorities in each country. Evidence regarding Jinnah’s belief in a “secular” conception of the state — his formidable credentials as a constitutional lawyer notwithstanding — is contradictory. If his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 points in one direction, his speech of January 25, 1948 in Karachi declaring that the Constitution would be based on Islamic (sharia) laws “to make Pakistan a great Islamic state”, points in the other. Religion would guide not only the relationship with God but also activities in other spheres of life. As Farzana Shaikh has pointed out in her recent book, Making Sense of Pakistan, the relationship between Islam and nationalism, is, today, the “single greatest source of ideological uncertainty in Pakistan.” The answer, she believes, may lie in recasting the “religious consensus” in terms of its “cultural heritage”. Pakistan may then salvage a “pluralist alternative consistent with democratic citizenship”. United India offered that possibility in 1947 and must continue to do so.
The reviewer, a former member of the Indian Foreign Service, is presently a Visiting Professor at the Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
Jinnah India-Partition-Independence
Jaswant Singh
Rupa & Co
669 pages; Rs 695