The cards Jinnah played

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man who created Pakistan, made his first speech at a Friday congregation in a mosque in February 1936. In his long political career, that began in the early twentieth century as an advocate of a joint electorate for both Hindus and Muslims in British India, that was the first time Jinnah played the Islamic card.

B R Nanda’s biography of Jinnah describes that about-turn as a sign of desperation on the part of a leader who, at that stage of his life and political career, was battling for sheer survival. The irony is that in the end, not only did he survive, he also emerged triumphant with the creation of what a little later became the world’s first Islamic state, leaving, of course, in its wake a legacy that continues to haunt both India and Pakistan even to this day.

Nanda’s biography has succeeded where most such attempts usually fail. Without paying much attention to minor details and sundry developments around his subject, Nanda manages to stick to his primary theme of portraying a personality that was a bundle of contradictions and inconsistencies. The narrative is simple and linear in structure. Nor does it unduly burden the reader with bibliographical references in the middle of interesting anecdotes and analyses of issues.

With the skill of an adroit storyteller, he has reserved the most surprising twist in Jinnah’s life in the last few chapters. This is where Jinnah begins using the Islamic card in a bid to get even with the Congress trio of Gandhi, Nehru and Patel.

His address at the Friday congregation in a Lahore mosque in February 1936 took place just around the time when he realised that he would lose the support of the Muslim electorate if he failed to deliver to it something substantial in return. That was Jinnah’s political predicament. From then on, his single-point agenda was to align with the British and reinforce the demand for a separate state for Muslims.

Nanda also provides many interesting insights into Jinnah’s evolution as a political leader. One of them is truly perceptive. Nanda argues that while Gandhi could upstage his Muslim League rival on many occasions by isolating him even when he was within the Congress fold, the real differentiator between the two lay in the following: While Gandhi could build an array of second-rung leaders for the Congress, Jinnah looked around and found that there was none he could turn to. The few leaders he had around him did not help because of Jinnah’s inability to have complete trust in them.

To prove that Jinnah essentially was a bundle of contradictions, Nanda leaves no stone unturned. He draws attention to Jinnah’s famous secular address at the first session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in August 1947 after being elected its president and then to his speech in Dacca where he reminded all to be remembered as Muslims, and not as Bengalis, Sindhis, Pathans or Punjabis.

Remember that his speech at Dacca in March 1948 came less than a year after his “secular Pakistan” address where he told those who opted for Pakistan that “you may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to with the business of the State.”

Nanda, however, does not offer any credible explanation of such sharp turns and twists in Jinnah’s public postures and policies. If there is any shortcoming of this biography, it is this. The only hint of an explanation lies in his suggestion that Jinnah was a hostage to the Islamic card that he realised he must use if he had to remain politically relevant, particularly at a time when he had to contend with the likes of Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. That may well be true. But if there is no fresh perspective on such an important issue, a biography of this nature, coming as it does after several such attempts by other historians and politicians alike, may leave readers unsatisfied.

The biography also touches upon an interesting aspect of Congress politics in that era. He makes it clear that the Congress’ reluctance to form coalitions to run provincial governments after the elections in 1937 could have been responsible for the emergence of Jinnah as a powerful leader of the Muslim League with a powerful and relevant issue with which he could go to his people.

Nanda does not adequately dwell on the crucial question on what the fate of Jinnah would have been, if the Congress had offered to form an alliance with the Muslim League. Nitish Sengupta in his book on the conundrum of Bengal’s partition had conclusively shown that the Gandhi-backed obduracy of the Congress not to have any alliance with the Muslim League in forming provincial governments had benefitted Jinnah. More research on this subject is called for, as this would be able to tell the nation how costly that mistake was.

Road To Pakistan
The Life and Times of Mohammad Ali Jinnah
B R Nanda
Routledge Taylor & Francis Group
374+VIII pages; Rs 745