Was Jinnah Secular and Solely Responsible for Partition?

Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the BJP for writing a book on Jinnah raises a number of issues. First is the manner it was done. He was conveyed the decision by party President Rajnath Singh on telephone when he arrived at Shimla to attend the chitnan baithak of the party which he was asked not to attend. Could not this have been done before he left Delhi? Or could he not have been dropped from attending the meeting like Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie?

Why were normal courtesies like issuing a show cause notice not extended to him, even if it might not have made any difference to the eventual decision? The manner the decision was taken and conveyed shows signs of nervousness that has overtaken the BJP leadership. The ban on Jaswant Singh’s book by the Modi Government is also unjustified. For, the right to dissent is the essence of democracy.

Leaving aside how the BJP treated Jaswant Singh, his book raises two main questions, namely, was Jinnah secular and was he solely responsible for the partition of the country? The book does not disclose any new facts but interprets them in Jaswant’s own way which has provoked unusual reaction which no other book on Jinnah—of which the number is too large—ever did.

In the first phase of his political life when he was a member of the Congress and the Muslim League—which was possible at that time—he was in his professions and practices fully secular. He could legitimately be called an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. He aspired to be the Muslim Gokhale. Gopal Krishna Gokhale was senior to him in profession and politics and one of the few persons whom he respected. No need to cite any evidence to prove his secular credentials during this phase.

But it is his unique personality and its unique characteristics that provide real clues to his political role till 1930 when he left for London and after he returned in 1934.

Apparently, it seemed to be a miracle how a person almost singlehandedly succeeded in creating the largest Muslim country in the world. According to historian Percival Speer, “alone he did it”. In fact he did it in spite of a number of handicaps. He belonged to the Agha Shahi sect of Shia Muslims who have never played a signifi-cant role in the Indian subcontinent. He was one of the loneliest persons in private and public life. His marriage with a Parsi damsel, Rittubai, turned out to be unhappy and was soon terminated.

He had contempt for the personality and practices of Gandhi, for the latter’s austere life, half-naked public appearance and extra-constitutional methods like satyagraha and agitation. He could not fit into the Congress culture. In the first session of the party that he attended, he refused to sit on the ground as was the practice and insisted on getting a chair. He opposed the ‘Quit India’ Movement launched by Gandhi and the latter’s campaign against the war effort which must have endeared Jinnah to the British Government. He was fond of the good things of life and liked the choicest whisky and cigars and was indeed the best-dressed man in the public life of the country. He did not know much about the precepts and practices of Islam. He did not offer namaz or observe fast during holy month of Ramadan. According to his biographer Stanley Wolpert, he did not observe Islamic dietary restrictions. M.C. Chagla, who was his junior, in his memoirs Roses in December, endorse this view. He was for all practical purposes a non-practising Muslim. He could not speak Urdu and delivered his speeches in English. Nor did he have any interest in books, literature, music or art. D. Peel Yates told his official biographer Hector Bolitho that one of his ambitions was to become the President of the Congress. He did not consider anybody in the party to be his senior or even equal and could not function in a team. He, therefore, remained on the margins of Indian politics and left India in disgust to practice law in England in 1930. He returned in 1934 when Liaquat Ali and his newly wedded charming wife, on a honeymoon to London, met him and invited him back and offered him life Presidentship of the Muslim League; he soon acquired the status of Quaid-e-Azam, which he could not dream of getting if he had remained in the Congress.

In the first election to the Provincial Assemblies in 1937, the Muslim League led by him did not cut any ice. The Congress swept all the seats, including most of the Muslim seats. His opportunity came in 1939 when the elected Congress Government in seven States resigned in protest against the declaration of war by the British Government against the axis powers on behalf of India without consulting its leaders. The Muslim League led by him organised a deliverance day in protest against the injustices done by the Congress governments to Muslims and the majoritarian trends among some sections of the Congress. Within one year he sought deliverance of Muslims from the majority Hindu rule when India became independent by carving out a separate Muslim country called Pakistan. And within seven years he achieved it.

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Having opposed extre-constitutional methods so far, he gave a call for direct action on August 16, 1946 when the pent-up sentiments of Muslims got an outlet and at places violently clashed with Hindus. A chain of action and reaction of communal riots spread in many parts of north India. It, for the first time, brought the demand of Pakistan to the limelight. Muslim sentiments, Jinnah himself had remarked, were like soda water which rose and subsided in no time. He struck when it had risen. In the elections to the Provincial Assemblies in 1946, he got a majority except in the Muslim majority provinces. In the Frontier Province, the Muslim League was no match to Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, in Punjab the Unionist Party got a majority. In Sindh the League could not beat G.M. Syed, and in Kashmir Sheikh Abdullah was an unmatched hero. On the whole the majority that the League got was based on the extremely limited franchise of the upper middle class, that is, 10 per cent of the Muslim population of which only half voted. In other words, the League got a majority out of five per cent of Muslims, as Mushtaq Naqvi points out in his book on partition.

How far genuine grievances and appre-hensions of Muslims, the role of Hindu nationa-lists and the part played by the British Government are responsible for the creation of Pakistan may be debatable. But it hardly solved any Muslim problem. The Pakistan movement was weakest in the parts that now comprise Pakistan. In this context Dr Iqbal’s letter to Jinnah is very relevant. In this letter he wrote: “Confine the movement for Pakistan to northwestern parts of India on the basis of common culture apart from being Muslim majority and leave Muslims where they are in minority to settle their terms with Hindus.” He invited Jinnah to shift to Lahore and concentrate his activities in the region and offered to help him.

In between, several alternatives to the partition were given a trial. The Cabinet Mission Plan of dividing the country into Hindu and Muslim majority groups under a loose sovereignty of the Centre with a right to secede to each group after ten years was tried. An interim government was formed in which Jinnah insisted and got parity for the Muslim League with the Congress.

The experiment did not work as there was clash on every issue in the Cabinet. According to Sardar Patel, he could not appoint a peon in his Ministry without the approval of the Finance Minister, Liaquat Ali. The breaking point came when Nehru declared that the Constituent Assembly would have a right to amend its Constitution.

Gandhi tried another alternative. He offered the post of the Prime Minister of the first Cabinet of independent India to Jinnah. The proposal was not acceptable to Nehru and Patel who were by now used to what they considered the authoritarian mind of Jinnah. Moreover the threat of the Muslim majority asserting their right to secede was not entirely absent. Additionally, the communal tensions and chain of riots made partition inevitable.

The second conclusion of Jaswant Singh, referred to in the beginning, namely, that Jinnah was secular seemed to be based on the fact that he never used verses from the Holy Quran or Islamic idiom in his campaign for Pakistan. He, as mentioned earlier, never followed the precepts and practices of Islam in his personal or public life. By this logic the most secular Hindu of his time was Veer Savarkar, who too was not a religious person and professed to be an atheist. He had said in 1937, “there are two nations in the main, the Hindu and Muslim in India”, an exact echo of the two-nation theory that Jinnah advocated. Their followers were responsible for unprecedented massacres and large scale migra-tion from two newly created dominions to the other side and not the followers of the devout Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, and equally devout Muslims like Maulana Azad, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Sheikh Abdullah and the entire class of Islamic ulema, who had opposed Pakistan.

The moral of of the partition story is that identities exclusively based on religion lead to clashes between them. Religious personalities mentioned above, apart from belonging to their respective religions, equally claimed their Indian or regional loyalties. In fact no single identity can satisfy all human urges but suppresses them and makes its followers fanatic and intolerant. It becomes a threat not only to others but hurts their own interest also. Multiplicity of identities ensures full growth of their personality and links them with other communities too.

The third phase of Jinnah’s political career, equally significant but unfortunately short-lived, was as the Governor General of Pakistan. His inaugural address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947 was an eloquent testimony of his determination to make Pakistan a truly secular country. It made L.K. Advani an admirer of Jinnah when he visited Pakistan some years ago. Even before this address, presenting the logic for the creation of Pakistan, he had said: “While there is no way out of a division in the present circumstances if either of the two countries faces an external aggression, we shall fight it like brothers as we are indeed brothers and the blood bond overrides any other bond.” (Shamim in Aina weekly, December 26, 1976).

This is the most relevant part of Jinnah for contemporary India and Pakistan.

The author is the Director, Institute of Jammu and Kashmir Affairs, Jammu.