How a Jinnah portrait at AMU is getting Muslims to reassert their identity

A portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, on display inside Aligarh Muslim University since 1938, is prompting Muslims on campus to defend their identity today

On May 31, when Bharatiya Janata Party lost the Kairana Lok Sabha seat in Uttar Pradesh, there was one comment that became almost a chant for news channels — that ganna (sugarcane) had trumped Jinnah. This comment, though made by Rashtriya Lok Dal leader Jayant Chaudhary, referred to a controversy at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) almost a month ago. BJP MP Satish Gautam had raised questions over why a portrait of Muhammad Ali Jinnah was displayed inside AMU’s Union Hall. Right-wing groups were quick to join the clamour for the removal of the painting.

What Gautam and the right-wingers failed to, or chose not to, mention was that the portrait had been installed in 1938, much before Jinnah became the founding father of Pakistan and three decades before Gautam was born. Jinnah had been awarded the life membership of AMU’s Students’ Union (AMUSU) and that’s how his portrait came to be placed inside the majestic Union Hall, a place where the AMU student cabinet meets and debates. Alongside his are portraits of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B R Ambedkar. Not one of these portraits is labelled and if one is not consciously looking for him, one might even miss seeing Jinnah on the wall. This portrait occupies no pride of place, and has no special carving. If at all, Gandhi’s technicolour portrait is the most striking on the walls lined with faces of historically significant men. The fact that there is not a single woman on these walls is the subject of another debate.

“The issue is that Jinnah’s life had two phases. One, as a liberal, Muslim elite who was a follower of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and who won the title of the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity from Sarojini Naidu. The second, as the architect of Pakistan,” says Mahesh Rangarajan, historian and dean of academic affairs, Ashoka University. “Jinnah was never a mass politician, but continues to remain controversial because he evokes memories of the two-nation theory, even though this theory came crashing down in 1971.”

“You see, it’s the ‘M’ in AMU that makes people believe we are not pro-India,” says an AMU official who requests not to be named. “The problem is, no matter how much we achieve in academics or how many successful students graduate from here, AMU’s perception is still that of a closed, non-secular space,” he rues.

This perception battle overpowers every conversation at AMU. From students to professors, officials to alumni, the academic and religious freedom that the university upholds is constantly being defended by those on campus and questioned by those outside.

Mohammed Fahad, Honorary general secretary, AMUSU. Photo: Dalip Kumar

A few years ago, an India-Pakistan T20 match allegedly led to “clashes” at AMU and initial media reports claimed that some students chanted pro-Pakistan slogans and booed India’s victory. It turned out later that a Muslim student had been shot at, but only as an innocent bystander during celebratory shooting.

“Time and again, if people don’t find anything against AMU, they start using cricket matches to prove their allegations and sometimes the local media also helps them,” says Tarushikha Sarvesh, assistant professor, AMU. “Last year, AMU was targeted on the basis of an India-Pakistan cricket match during the Champions Trophy final. In local newspapers, the headlines read, ‘Area adjacent to AMU celebrated Pakistan win with fireworks.’ How can a cricket match be the test of anyone’s nationalism or patriotism?”

Irresponsible news items have also led to graver acts of violence. “There were the 1990-91 riots of Aligarh, where AMU’s reputation was completely tarnished because of fake news articles and rumours that two policemen were shot dead inside the campus and students were being asked to vacate the hostel,” recalls the official.

A People for Civil Liberties report details the events of the riots and says that a Hindi daily from Uttar Pradesh even carried a prominent report suggesting that 74 people, including 28 patients at AMU’s Jawaharlal Medical College, were killed during these riots. These claims were later refuted, but AMU was scarred in the process.

AMU, founded in 1877 as the Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College by Syed Ahmed Khan, played a crucial role during the freedom struggle. “In 1920, it was AMU’s students’ union that opened its doors to Gandhi to channelise the youth potential for India’s freedom struggle,” explains Omar Peerzada, the public relations officer for AMU. Speaking with the pain and passion of an “old boy” guarding his alma mater, he explains how AMU, through various historic moments during Independence, was a key centre of open debate and conflicting ideologies. The Khilafat movement, an agitation by Muslims to preserve the Ottoman Caliphate, saw its roots in AMU. But then came Jinnah and with him the two-nation theory, which subsequently made Muslims the symbolic “anti-national” villain, pitted against India’s virtuous secularism.

“To call a citizen of a country a sympathiser of another country is an abysmal situation that really needs to be understood in depth. We flippantly call people from the Northeast Chinese or Nepali. We cannot fathom how members of the Dalit community can choose to ride a horse for their baaraat, let alone become officers,” says Sarvesh. “We are constantly told that the two-nation theory found its feet in AMU, that Maulana Azad was welcomed with ‘a garland of shoes’. These statements are made believable through the metanarrative, as I explained,” she says. “But it is those same people who chose to stay in Aligarh, in India and, by extension, rejected the two-nation theory.”

Sarvesh is not alone in this argument, and the controversy over the Jinnah portrait has brought it to the fore once again. “But we rejected Jinnah” is a phrase that reeks of a defensive stance where Muslims at AMU have to constantly explain how their conservative religious practices have little to do with their belief in the Indian Constitution.

“If you keep calling someone a thief, they will eventually speak up and offer a defence. That is exactly the case with Muslims in AMU and in India today,” says Latafat Raza, a real estate developer and an AMU “old boy”. When old boys like Peerzada and Raza speak of their time at the university, there is an overwhelming need they express to show their alma mater as a liberal space. “Where we have Ramadan, we also have Diwali and Holi. All of us know the Saraswati vandana, we know what Navratras are and the Hanuman Chalisa is as much a part of our culture as the Quran is,” says another “old boy” in Peerzada’s office.

The main entrance to Aligarh Muslim University. Photo: Dalip Kumar

Discussions about the Ramayana and Mahabharata follow and Ashwatthama’s role in the battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas is talked about in detail — detail that would put most urban Hindus to shame.

“The defensiveness you see on campus is a sim\ple consequence of an international perception of Muslims as ‘terrorists’. You have people like Subramanian Swamy openly calling AMU a ‘terrorist adda’ (Swamy called it a hub for terrorist ideology). This constant need to explain our nationalism is only a natural outcome of this constant suspicion,” says Mohammed Fahad, honorary general secretary of AMUSU. “We have 7,000-8,000 Hindu students on campus. We don’t eat food during Ramadan, but we make sure they have access to food. And yet you hear murmurs about Hindu students suffering without food when we have our rozas,” he says.

“Some people also become reactionary at times when they realise no matter what they think or do, they will still be accused of being anti-national,” says Sarvesh.

“We have eminent alumni like Dhyan Chand, Lala Amarnath and Raja Mahendra Pratap. The university has international students and a truly cosmopolitan culture,” adds a former student. Other eminent alumni such as Ismat Chughtai, former Vice-President Hamid Ansari and former President Zakir Hussain are left out of this list. “AMU has over 30 per cent non-Muslim students. In contrast, the Banaras Hindu University has less than 18 per cent Muslims. Our first graduate and the first professor were both non-Muslim. And yet, we are called pro-Pakistan,” says Peerzada. “This is nothing but an attempt to undercut the fact that AMU stands tall against divisive forces and is a strong proponent of pure morality, large-hearted tolerance and free enquiry,” he adds.

The only way forward, Sarvesh says, is to do exactly what people at AMU are doing: using historical fact to counter allegations of being Pakistan supporters.