Jinnah — a visionary for all ages

[fatman17]

Jinnah — a visionary for all ages

Even a brief look back onto the pages of history yields a handful of faces who, in their quest for higher ideals or goals never yielded and never shed a single drop of blood or fired a single shot. Of these visionaries, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, stands out among all others, having securing freedom and a separate homeland for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, all without a bloody revolution.

At a time when India was passing through the most atrocious of times, it was Jinnah’s statesmanship that helped Muslims secure the democratic state of Pakistan.

“Our objective should be peace within, and peace without. We want to live peacefully and maintain cordial friendly relations with our immediate neighbours and with the world at large,” Jinnah once said.

On way to materialise the dream of Allama Iqbal, the Quaid surpassed all obstacles, not only winning acknowledgement from friends, but also from foes.

Vijay Lakshmi Pundit, the sister of Jawaharlalz Nehru, the first prime minister of India, wrote in her book, “If Pakistan Muslim League had 100 Gandhis and 200 Abulkalam Azads, there would have been no Pakistan. However, if the Congress had only one Jinnah, India would not have been divided.”

Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of the subcontinent, admitted in his memoirs, “Had I any clue that Jinnah would die in 1948, I would have extended the date of division and Pakistan would never have been there on the world map.”

But, no conspiracy, no ill will could come in the Quaid’s way to an Ideology and creation of an independent state for the suppressed Muslims of the subcontinent.

Pakistan Movement leader Azad Bin Haider says, “Quaid-e-Azam strictly believed in upholding the democratic norms and the party constitution.”

app

 

[Murshad]

A very good thread started about “less known” stalwart of world’s history. A man who was well away from all political tactics to become a popular leader. With his “western looks” he challenged mighty religious leaders, did not show any special skill to “sell” his ideology, was not able not speak the language of masses fluently but even then he rode the surf of political popularity comprehensively.

He was a frail man. A physically weak man. A dying man. He also had little emotional comfort, apart from his sister's undying affection. He lived a lonely and painful life, yet strong enough to give enough strength to an entire nation to stand and be counted with all dignity.

Stanley Wolpert summarizes him as,

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”

 

[fatman17]

Editorial: Let’s agree on Jinnah’s role

In his new book, Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, India’s former foreign minister who later also served as finance minister in the last BJP government, Mr Jaswant Singh, has given India a positive portrait of Pakistan’s founder, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Given the fact of Mr Singh’s BJP affiliation, the book is being treated as an extraordinary event in India.

Because of his rightwing credentials, no one in India can doubt Mr Singh’s patriotism. That is why the book is going to be an important Indian revision of a highly demonised Muslim leader. Some other Indians too have done the job of balancing the distorted Indian view of Mr Jinnah, but this time history may be reinterpreted more permanently in favour of an Indo-Pak détente through a “reinterpretation” of Mr MA Jinnah.

Mr Singh has been blunt in his promotional interviews: “[Jinnah was a great man] because he created something out of nothing, and single-handedly he stood against the might of the Congress Party and against the British who didn’t really like him...Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don’t we recognise that? Why don’t we see (and try to understand) why he called him that?”

Perhaps more significantly than anything else he has said in praise of his subject, Mr Singh’s explanation of the last-minute rupture between Nehru and Jinnah will become important in the coming days: “Nehru believed in a highly centralised polity. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’t. Consistently, he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India”.

Although pointed out earlier by Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose in their book Modern South Asia, Pakistani writers have ignored this real foundation of disagreement which made Pakistan possible. Both Allama Iqbal and Mr Jinnah wanted a confederal or federal arrangement in which the Muslims could attain a measure of autonomy and freedom from Hindu majoritarianism. The Cabinet Mission Plan which promised this arrangement as late as 1946 was scuttled, not by Mr Jinnah, but by Mr Nehru.

Mr Singh puts forward a point of view rejected in the past as a “communal” stance: “Muslims saw that unless they had a voice in their own economic, political and social destiny they will be obliterated. That was the beginning (of their political demands). For example, see the 1946 election. Jinnah’s Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet they don’t have sufficient numbers to be in office because the Congress Party has, without even a single Muslim, enough to form a government and they are outside of the government”.

Pakistan’s myth of Indian opposition to the existence of Pakistan is based on the frequently expressed Indian view that Partition was wrong and that it was brought about entirely by Mr Jinnah and British machinations. Where the great Parsi Indian judge Mr HM Seervai had failed to remove the bilateral myths of partition with his book Partition of India (1994), Mr Singh might succeed. If that happens, both Pakistan and India will have to “rationalise” their view of Mr Jinnah.

In Pakistan, the conservative right and the liberal intellectuals are hopelessly divided on the person of Mr Jinnah. But both tend to stand together when it comes to what they think is Indian prejudice against the great man. Now that Mr Jaswant Singh has set the record straight in India, it may be easier for Pakistan to frame Mr Jinnah in a more realistic national reference. The identity of the state of Pakistan has been consciously moulded over the years in relation to India as the “enemy” state.

The Quaid can save Pakistan from its internal crisis if Pakistanis are prepared to see that the terrorists hiding behind “Islam” are opposed to what he wanted Pakistan to be. Pakistan’s statute books that contain laws against the minorities should be revisited in light of what he really stood for. He was never an enemy of India; India can reclaim him now. And in the process, India and Pakistan can change their bilateral equation, abandoning the path of an arms race, and accepting the mutual cooperation and economic interdependence dictated by history and current circumstances.

http://www.thedailytimes.com.pk

 

[Halaku Khan]

Jinnah pursued Pakistan for power
Jaswant disappoints; ignores British designs
The Tribune, Chandigarh, India - Opinions

by Narendra Singh Sarila

I am disappointed with Jaswant Singh’s 660-page book on Jinnah and Partition, released earlier this week. At the end he says: “I still fail to understand why India was partitioned in 1947? Or the manner in which it was done.” If even after his massive research and hard work, he did not get to the bottom of his subject, there is a reason for it. It is because he has ignored the most important element that was responsible for Partition, namely British strategic interests that required the creation of Pakistan. The British top secret documents on Partition have now been unsealed and there was no excuse for ignoring them. I myself showed these to him some years back. The whole story is there in those documents.

The Labour government that came to power in Britain in mid-1945 was willing to grant independence to India but was worried about losing its 60-year-old military base here from which the British controlled the whole Indian Ocean area, including the eastern Middle-East that contained oil wells — The Wells of Power — of increasing importance in war and peace and which Stalin, with his rising ambition after his victory over Germany, the British feared, might seize. In the last two great wars it was from their Indian base that the British deployed Indian and British forces in Iran and Iraq and the British Chiefs of Staff were adamant on keeping a foothold in India. But Atlee, the British Prime Minister, knew that the government of a free India under the Congress party’s rule would neither give them a military base nor join their team against the Soviet Union in the fresh Great Game. What were they to do?

Towards the end of 1945, Field Marshal Wavell, the Viceroy of India, came up with a possible wayout of their quandary. After the Congress party had refused to cooperate in the war effort in 1939, unless Britain announced that it would give freedom to India after the war, Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, had encouraged Jinnah to formulate the Pakistan scheme, informing London that Jinnah was in his pocket. “He represents a minority and a minority can only hold its own with our assistance,” the Viceroy told London.

Wavell now suggested that they use Jinnah’s demand to create a separate state in the north-west — not give him all he wanted in the west but territories along Iran, Afghanistan and Sinkiang with the port of Karachi — and Pakistan would cooperate with them on defence matters. On being asked by London to give them a clear picture of the areas that could go to Pakistan, Wavell in a historic dispatch on February 6, 1946, sent a map delineating the boundaries of Pakistan he had in mind, which were exactly the boundaries that Radcliff drew 18 months later.

So, what Pakistan was going to be was already decided in early 1946 and the time between then and August 15 was used by Atlee, Cripps and Wavell and later Mountbatten to make Jinnah accept the smaller Pakistan and the Congress party to accept Partition, while Atlee kept proclaiming from housetops that they were working to preserve India’s unity. All the British manoeuvring can be discerned by studying the British top secret files. It is a myth that Jinnah founded Pakistan. President Roosevelt had posted his representative in Delhi after1942 and his dispatches in the US archives also tell us much.

Some of the assessments in the book are also mistaken. To believe that the Cabinet Mission Plan would have resulted in a united India is moonshine. After 10 years Punjab, Sindh and the NWFP had the option to break away on one side and Bengal and Assam on the other side. That would give the League a much larger Pakistan after 10 years and certainly, in the meanwhile, it would fan the flames of communalism to prepare the ground for the above. And what about the princely states? They had the option to break away too . So, possibly Hyderabad would join Pakistan and would help reach Tripura and Manipur, which would be swallowed up. The Plan would have balkanised India and Nehru, despite the many mistakes he made, was correct in striking it down.

The Congress made many mistakes in the struggle, but Gandhiji united a heterogeneous and largely uneducated people, without which Independence was not possible.

I agree with Jaswant Singh that Jinnah at heart was a nationalist and a secularist. And he remained so for the first 60 years of his life — a long time. Jinnah opposed satyagrah, calling it an extreme programme that would lead to disaster. He was shunned by Gandhiji. And Motilal Nehru feared that this brilliant man would eclipse his son, Jawaharlal. In 1928 Jinnah proposed to convince the Muslims to give up separate electorates — that were preventing Hindu-Muslim political interdependence and unity — suggesting in return that Muslim representation in the Central Assembly be raised from 27 per cent to 33 per cent — a very minor concession compared to the possibility of ending the pernicious separate electorates. But he was pooh-poohed, and virtually driven out from the Congress party.

After the Congress refused to cooperate in the war effort in 1939, the Viceroy sought out Jinnah. The doctors had earlier the same year told him that he had terminal TB. Jinnah had always wanted to be the first in every thing. There are many instances in history of people abandoning their principles to achieve power and glory. So, for him it was now or never. His Pakistan scheme, launching Direct Action — the precursor of today’s terrorism — and mobilising Muslims against the Hindus, were all in the persuit of power and glory. He did not believe in what he was doing. After Pakistan had been achieved, he spoke in Karachi advocating secularism. But he quickly retreated when opposed by his followers.

Chagla, who worked with him in his law firm in Bombay, once told me that he was a man of great integrity. But it was tragic that at the end he lost it. And no man can be great without integrity. I also feel sympathy for Jinnah, for his humiliation and suffering. But at the end of his life he did many bad things, and inflicted incalculable harm. To believe that he was great just because he fought the mighty Congress party is nonsence. Do we call Hitler great because he fought the mighty Allies?n

The writer is a former Ambassador of India to France and Switzerland. Earlier, he was ADC to Lord Mountbatten. He has authored “The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition.”

 

[Halaku Khan]

The Three Blind Men...
www.outlookindia.com | The Three Blind Men...

Jaswant Singh’s book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah, which has become a talking point across India, has revived the old debate about Partition. Time for a reality check before we decide on heroes and villains

Rajinder Puri

Jaswant Singh, former cabinet minister, has written a book on Mohammed Ali Jinnah which has become a talking point across India . I have not read the book. I have heard Jaswant Singh on TV expounding his views on Jinnah. The main thrust of his work seems to be:

1) Jinnah has been unnecessarily demonised. He was a great man and not wholly responsible for the Partition of the subcontinent.

2) Pandit Nehru was primarily responsible for the Partition because he believed in a centralized India which left no space for the Muslims to protect themselves against Hindu domination.

3) Mahatma Gandhi, and other Congress leaders were opposed to the Partition and would not have allowed it if it were not for Nehru.

The view about Nehru’s role in the Partition is not new. This scribe wrote about it in a book of just 107 text pages, not over 600 pages, which were published 20 ago. Others, such as former ADC to Lord Mountbatten and later India ’s ambassador abroad, Narendra Singh Sarila, wrote on the subject of the Partition at greater length.

Let us consider the three main postulates of Jaswant Singh’s views outlined above.

1) Jinnah was not a “great” man. He was articulate, highly intelligent and focused. He missed greatness by a wide margin because he willingly colluded with the British to create a Pakistan about which he had not even determined boundaries or shape. He mainly fulfilled British goals while satisfying his own vanity.

Independence came first; the boundaries of the divided nations came later. The British had decided on Partition to serve their own strategic ends. On 29 March 1945, after Viceroy Lord Wavell met Prime Minister Churchill in London he recorded: “He (Churchill) seems to favour partition of India into Pakistan, Hindustan and Princestan.”

Sir Martin Gilbert, the British biographer of Winston Churchill revealed that Churchill had asked Jinnah to dispatch secret letters to him by addressing them to a lady, Elizabeth Giliat, who had been Churchill’s secretary. This secret interaction continued for years. Jinnah’s key decisions between 1940 and 1946, including the demand for Pakistan in 1940, were taken after getting the nod from Churchill or Lord Linlithgow and Wavell, both Churchill's admirers.

Jinnah admitted during the Simla Conference in 1945 that he was receiving advice from London . In other words, Jinnah was as much a British puppet on a string as were the top Indian leaders.

2) Yes, Pandit Nehru was primarily responsible for the Partition. This was not because he was emotionally committed to a centralised India but because he too was thoroughly programmed by the British since his school days. His proximity to Lord Mountbatten has been recorded by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and historian Shashi Joshi among others. Even before Mountbatten’s arrival in India Lord Wavell had complained that Nehru was often informed by Whitehall before he was!

3) Mahatma Gandhi and other Congress leaders may have been unhappy about the Partition. They did not oppose it. When the resolution to accept Partition was taken by the Congress on June 3, 1947 Gandhi observed his day of silence. He assured Mountbatten on June 2 that he would not oppose Partition.

It can be nobody’s case that Nehru was so powerful that he could override Gandhi and the rest. The truth was that Gandhi lacked the gumption to oppose Partition when it came to the crunch because he knew that his adversary was not Nehru but Britain . At Mountbatten’s bidding he could undertake a fast unto death to compel the Indian government to pay adequate compensation to Pakistan . He made no such protest when his life’s work of creating a united independent India was being destroyed.

Gandhi’s belated attempt to undo his mistake by wanting to settle in Pakistan and by demanding the dissolution of the Congress in his last will and testament was aborted by his death.

These judgments may appear cruel. Truth is seldom kind. Any assessment about the causes that led to the Partition of India would be flawed unless the central role of the British in creating it, and the compliant role of the Indian and Pakistani leaders in accepting it, are recognized.

The most clinching evidence of this is provided by the recorded views of Christopher Beaumont who was private secretary to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission. His private papers were recently released by his son, Robert Beaumont. The elder Beaumont wrote in 1947:

“The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished…The handover of power was done too quickly."

Christopher Beaumont was most scathing about how partition affected the Punjab . He wrote:

“"The Punjab partition was a disaster… Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment… The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation… Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war… By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab - now part of Pakistan - and no Muslims in the Indian east… The British government and Mountbatten must bear a large part of the blame for this tragedy."

A few Britons are beginning to confront the truth. Will Indians ever start doing the same?

 

[fatman17]

^very interesting points are being raised but i feel credit must be given to Jaswant Singh for having the courage to write on this subject at a time of heightened tensions (mumbai), zero tolerance and a huge trust-gap between the two nations! - it is very difficult for people in our countries to think "out-of-the-box" so to speak as we are so stuck in our "anamosities of the past" and thus Jaswant Singh has been villified and ousted from the BJP for writing a book !!!

 

[Halaku Khan]

^^^ I agree that open and free discussions are desirable. Jaswant's writing a book is a good thing but on the other hand political parties have their own discipline and their own constraints.

 

[fatman17]

^^^ I agree that open and free discussions are desirable. Jaswant's writing a book is a good thing but on the other hand political parties have their own discipline and their own constraints.

i know political parties in pakistan are not "democratic" as they dont hold internal elections to select leaders, but it seems it is the same in India also!
Democracy - to each his own i guess!

 

[Khajur]

Partition of india was totally unavoidable...

we either tend to praise or blame Jinha,Nehru or patel for the partition depending on our persoanl affiliations... its idea of "Two nation theory" that ultimately divided india.

And like as they say u cant stop an idea whose time has arrived.

so though no doubt Jinha was a great leader ...its actually the power of "two nation theory" which would have found any other leader incase had jinha choosed to stay in congress and just the name of founder of pakistan would have been someting else today.

Earlier i used to think that if 18 crores muslims can live with 90 cr hinduss then 40cr muslims of Pakistna and bangladesh combined would certainly have lived with 90 cr hindus of india.

Now i know how wrong i was.Its only because that muslims are 15/16% that they could live in a india whose national anthem is in Sanskrit.

Its not that hindu and muslim hate each other so much that they cant live together ever ...but its questions self preservation ,religious identity, insecuries take center stage before godly attributes like unity,equality and co existences with unlimited tolerance.

Its not just india or pakistan...no country in the world that have two separate but equally popular religions in a single nation.


And even if we leave aside our religious divisions,there are many other divisive agents like language,culture,cast,race differences etc can easily segregate one region from another.

For example pakistan have to be divided on the basis on language and cultural differences even if it was mostly muslims. Simiarly each states in india are created on basis language differences and more likely to come up in future like a Telengaan Andra or GorkhaLand in Bengal .

So infact Partition started happening since the arrival of Mohammad bin Kasim and conversion of north west india to Islam.It only emphasised its presence in 1947 and Indian map too looks its the way in its current state as it has the presence of hindu majority in most states acting as singular biggest cohesive agent.The few states where hindus are smaller in nos ,they all suffer from some form of separatist movements.

So the point is that never underestmate the power of "Two nation theory" while discussing partition and partition ought to be analysised majorly on account of it rather than the socalled personal believes,rivalry and power politics between the leaders of pre partition era.

 

[Khajur]

i know political parties in pakistan are not "democratic" as they dont hold internal elections to select leaders, but it seems it is the same in India also!
Democracy - to each his own i guess!

Ironicaly BJP is most diversified and that has far better internal democracy whose leadrship changes in every few yrs in internal elections than any other political parties in india .

And jaswant Singh just found to be in an wrong place at wrong time and became of scape goat of sort for bigger leaders of the party who are looking for one to divert attention from taking responsibility of last electoral debacle.

 

[gubbi]

^very interesting points are being raised but i feel credit must be given to Jaswant Singh for having the courage to write on this subject at a time of heightened tensions (mumbai), zero tolerance and a huge trust-gap between the two nations! - it is very difficult for people in our countries to think "out-of-the-box" so to speak as we are so stuck in our "anamosities of the past" and thus Jaswant Singh has been villified and ousted from the BJP for writing a book !!!

Quite the contrary. Jinnah, IIRC, was never ever vilified in the curriculum that I studied in school. He was praised as a great visionary and freedom fighter in all the text books that we used in schools.
I have read the speech that Jinnah gave in the Pakistani parliament after your independence. One of the most beautiful, soul stirring proses ever. The irony of what things would have been in Pakistan!
Unfortunately, pseudo-leaders and others usurped Jinnah's vision to further their own personal agendas, in their attempt to satisfy their insatiable hunger for power at all costs!
The tragedy was that Jinnah was relegated to history pages and framed photographs in govt buildings while his original vision was replaced by greed and religious fundamentalism!
People are right in praising Jinnah, now if only the Pakistani powers to be would embrace his vision instead of carrying on a facade of showing respect to the man.

And oh, about some people in BJP - you've got morons everywhere!

 

[All-Green]

So Jinnah knew he was dying and therefore he went off and created Pakistan for glory...which by the way he would have known would only be available to him after his death?
Come one, this kind of nonsense is why we can never reconcile with eachother, the hero of Pakistan is seen as a powerthirsty British agent by the Indians who would have done anything to gain power.
The same Jinnah who did not accept Knighthood when suggested by Lord Reading, should be considered a blindly ambitious man who threw his integrity down the gutter to be governor general of a nation for hardly 1-2 years, beset with all sorts of teething problems and whose survival was not guaranteed?
I think it does not make sense.

It is not like Jinnah was a traitor or an antagonist, he was a prominent leader in the congress and was all for unity but certain events and observations made him realize that after the British leave, there will be no equal opportuniy amongst the Muslims and the Hindus.
He set out to create a more suitable political solution and was not the one who rejected the cabinet mission plan in its initial form.
He came up with the fourteen points in 1927 to ensure political compromise between Muslim League and Congress.
He engaged congress in a dialogue for power sharing after 1937 elections but congress thought it could do away without such an arragement and did not agree...it is not like Jinnah did not sincerely try to keep the nation united but this was not possible and the only option left was Pakistan.
The point to note is that Jinnah and Muslim League would have accepted the original cabinet mission plan had Nehru not declared his intent to do away with the autonomy offered by the cabinet mission plan. In doing this he practically attested the claim of Muslim League that the political future of Muslims was not secure and will be at the mercy of congress alone.
The only reason the demand for Pakistan became a reality was this stalemate and for this no matter how much you defend Nehru, he was responsible...
As to what prompted Nehru, many like me feel that he just could not accept giving autonomy to a dominating figure like Jinnah since it meant great difficulty for him politically, so he instead chose to go down the road which he also knew would have only one end in case Jinnah did not bend the knee.
In the case of this worse case scenario of partition, Nehru would still rule the majority of land and be known as a great leader of the world whereas Jinnah would inherit the more difficult (autonomous Tribal areas) and less developed areas (most infrastructure was in central parts of India)...with a good deal of complications both geographical, economic and political resulting henceforth.

Jinnah and Nehru were towering figures and those who think Jinnah was a mere agent and had no greatness are really imbeciles if they cannot see what the man was capable of and what he achieved in his life.
I think it is their clash of equally strong personalities that made Nehru more determined not to pass an arrangement where Jinnah would have a major sway in the future of a United India.

In my personal opinion, a lose federation as per the cabinet mission plan may still have been intact but that is my personal opinion.

On the other hand i am thankful for this country which was born out of the entire situation.

Jinnah was a great man and all his life everyone agreed that he was a man of principles come what may, facing certain death usually makes us more resolute and not the other way around.
Saying that he became greedy and powerhungry at the end in sight of his death is ridiculous to say the least.

Coming back to Jaswant Singh, he atleast has made really sure the book has a good sales pitch...

 

[Halaku Khan]

As I see it, there are two influences amongst the Muslims of the subcontinent: One is the urge towards nationalism based on Islam, and the other is the connectedness to the ancestral pre-Islamic civilizational heritage.

The dominance of the former influence is to be found in organizations like the Jamaat-ud-Dawa and the ISI. An excellent example of the latter influence is the former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam.

It would probably be correct to say that both influences are simultaneously present in varying degrees in most Muslims, even though they are contradictory to a significant extent.

It is interesting that one sees analogous forces at play even in other notable pre-Islamic civilizations such as Persia and Egypt. The difference is that Egypt and Persia were essentially annihilated by Islamic invasions, whereas the Indian civilization was not.

What happened in 1947 is that the interests of the forces of Islamic nationalism and the strategic interests of the colonial powers were aligned, and could therefore succeed in effecting the partition.

The partition did allow the forces of Islamic nationalism some space of their own, and that was perhaps a necessary thing. It is a part of the process of evolution. Over a period of time, the intrinsic value of an ideology becomes obvious to all concerned.

 

[araz]

From what little i have read and gathered I strongly feel that it was not Mr jinnah,s intention till the last 2-3 yrs to make pakistan as an independant country .He wanted It to stay within indian frame work with rights assured for muslims. Whether it would have continued to do so is another debate. I think the level of maturity of the muslim populace and their leadership and the fact that Mr jinnah by his sheer brilliance did not tolerate people with a view point at variance from him .Unfortunately it kept more intelligent people away from the top brass of the party and in many ways Mr jinnah understood this. I also feel that his own illness made it imperative for him to ensure that the muslim population of undivided india was in a situation to make their own future independant of the Hindu population.
No one will do justice to his intellect by denying jinnahs Brilliance in this regards.He played and beat the very players who invented the game at their own game. what was even more remarkable was the way in which it was done , so that no one could ever lift a finger at him and I think he was about the only leader who did not go to jail during the whole evolving drama of the partition.
I personally think that jinnah s interpretation was that of a secular pakistan guided on the principles of islam yet not run by it. It may have been the thing that eventually went wrong as without an ideology we floundered and the top leadership dissipated away quickly to reveal what can only be described as second class clueless leadership which resulted in the Army taking charge .
Jinnahs only drawback was that he did not have the time to nurture this nation forward in the right direction and past its infancy into a stable democratic country. In many ways it may have been appropriate for him to find a person taking on the mantle of the leader of the nation from him . I disagree with most pakistanis in that mr Liaquat Ali Khan really did not have the calibre to lead pakistan at that crucial a juncture, howsoever good a finance minister he might have been.
These are my thoughts, and impressions on the subject.
WaSalam
Araz

 

[fatman17]

ANALYSIS: Singh’s book and its repercussions —Najmuddin A Shaikh

We must not allow ourselves to be held hostage by false or mistaken notions about the part our religion played in the creation of our country and the consequent assertion that we have to see ourselves as a centralised state under theocratic rule

The publication of Jaswant Singh’s new book has caused a furore in India. Ostensibly, the decision of the BJP to expel Singh, a veteran BJP leader of 30 years standing and a former foreign minister who won high praise from his American interlocutor, Strobe Talbott, was attributed to his departure in his book from the BJP’s public stance of holding the Quaid responsible for the partition (or more vividly the vivisection) of India.

A BJP spokesman, speaking to a Pakistani channel, explained that that in holding Nehru and more particularly Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel responsible for partition, Singh had contradicted a basic tenet of the BJP’s interpretation of the tumultuous political developments that led to the emergence of Pakistan on the world map.

What Singh found after his five years of research is nothing new. Political scientists the world over have long acknowledged that the Quaid, a long time advocate of Hindu-Muslim unity in the struggle for independence from British rule, had been forced to seek a separate homeland for the Muslims of South Asia only after Nehru and his even more hard-line colleague Sardar Patel refused to agree to any equitable power sharing arrangement between Hindus and Muslims in an independent India.

If there were any doubts, they were settled by the publication of The Sole Spokesman. This meticulously researched book by Ayesha Jalal, which was published some 25 years ago and which established Ms Jalal as one of South Asia’s best scholars, made it clear that it was the obsession of the Indian Congress leaders, Nehru and Patel, to maintain the same centralised control that the British had used in India that forced the Quaid to depart from his much praised role as ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity and become the leader of the movement for an independent Pakistan.

It is clear, however, that there is much more to the BJP decision than this acknowledgement by Jaswant Singh of what has been long accepted by impartial political scientists. Singh had for long been a thorn in the side of BJP hardliners, especially the extremist organisations that have provided the bulk of the BJP’s electoral strength but have been forced to operate from behind the scenes because of the perceived need of the BJP to find support among the more moderate sections of the Indian electorate. For these hardliners the partition of “Mother India” and the “villainous role” that the Quaid played in bringing this about is an article of faith.

Any departure was not to be tolerated, as LK Advani, the parliamentary leader of the BJP, discovered when during his visit to the city of his birth, Karachi, he uttered a few words of tepid praise for the Quaid and then had to offer his resignation to quiet the storm that this had occasioned. Advani of course was forgiven his trespasses after he had offered a half-hearted apology.

Earlier, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a former prime minister and an iconic figure in the BJP, suffered, I was told by Indian friends, a considerable loss of political support when as part of the now much praised Yatra to Lahore in 1999, he visited the Minar-e-Pakistan and acknowledged in his remarks in the visitors book that Pakistan was a reality, and with whom India would seek good neighbourly relations. Again while Vajpayee paid a political price, this was seen as no more than a hiccup from which he soon recovered.

Admittedly Jaswant Singh’s book, which one assumes will become available in Pakistan soon, is of much greater consequence in the eyes of the hardliners than the misdoings of Vajpayee or Advani, but the strength of the reaction owes much to the disdain with which this Rajasthani aristocrat, with increasingly strong intellectual credentials, has treated many of the BJP’s other leaders. Words of high praise for Jaswant’s negotiating skills and Jaswant’s vision in Strobe Talbott’ book Engaging India, written after his long and tedious negotiations with Pakistani interlocutor Shamshad Ahmad and Indian interlocutor Jaswant Singh, only served to increase the irritation of the lesser BJP stalwarts who had secured no such recognition for their intellectual prowess and who, more often than not in private conversations, termed Singh as a charlatan who often sacrificed India’s interest to further his own image.

In India, the ruling Congress party has also condemned the book but that was to be expected given the Nehruvian heritage of the party and the fact that his heirs still provide the leadership for the party. That it will affect the party’s attitude towards Pakistan appears unlikely at least for the moment. The BJP will suffer a further decline in popularity not because the popular sentiment will be to endorse Jaswant Singh’s findings but because of the intolerance of dissent.

It is in Pakistan, however, that one hopes this book should have greater impact. If Jaswant Singh, long perceived as an adversary, has the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the Quaid and his colleagues were seeking an equitable power sharing arrangement and a measure of autonomy for the provinces from strangling centralised control, then perhaps our less tolerant politicians should also recognise that Pakistan ka “matlab” was not “La ilah’a illalah” but rather “a separate homeland in which the Muslims could realise their full economic potential”. They should also recognise that the devolution of power or autonomy of the provinces was the centrepiece of the Quaid’s manifesto.

Our political leaders are virtually all in agreement that it was the single-minded efforts of the Quaid that secured this homeland for us. They should now also agree that this came about because the Congress leadership was not prepared to share the Quaid’s vision of an undivided India in which the provinces were largely autonomous and in which the minority community had its rightful share of power in the centre. If we are to be true to the vision of the Quaid and his colleagues, we must think in terms of autonomous provinces and an equitable share of power for each federating partner in all the central power structures. We must find our security not in a militarised state but in creating the perception of a commonality based on shared interests rather than shared enmities.

As we contend with our current internal problems we must recognise that false sloganeering and the mindset thus created have brought us to this sorry pass and that our salvation lies in returning to the original vision of our founding fathers. We must not allow ourselves to be held hostage by false or mistaken notions about the part our religion played in the creation of our country and the consequent assertion that we have to see ourselves as a centralised state under theocratic rule.

The writer is a former foreign secretary