@hellfire twe
@SarthakGanguly
A meaningless, vapid thread.
I noted with some amusement
@hellfire 's enthusiasm on discovering this aspect of Jinnah. Ataturk was a very strong influence on him, and my amusement is due both to his lack of awareness of this very basic characteristic, and equally to the ignorance of all on this thread of the direct and fundamental contradiction encapsulated in this personal history.
When Gandhi supported the Ali Brothers in the Khilafat Movement, it was Jinnah who warned him, in vehement terms, not to introduce religion into the body politic. Look up that dire warning, and read for yourself the force and passion with which this essentially secular person cautioned Gandhi. We can safely say that this terrible step by Gandhi laid the foundation for the forthcoming alliance between the conservative Muslim and the ulama and the Congress, an alliance that led to their calling Pakistan Paleetistan, and jeering at Jinnah as the Kaffir-e-Azam. One of the main culprits was Maulana Maudoodi, about whom my limited vocabulary will fail to do justice; only the acid pen of a Yassir Latif Hamdani can adequately deal with it.
Meanwhile what has been described in a brilliant word as the Muslim 'salariat', led by the graduates of the Aligarh Muslim University, lined up with the Muslim League, as they saw a direct competition developing between them and educated Hindus for the loaves and fishes of office. They were leaderless and ineffective, except for British efforts to maintain their presence with tactful attention to the rules, and a positive disposition towards Muslims, until Jinnah returned from his self-imposed exile in Britain, upon which the movement caught fire and moved from strength to strength. It was at this point that the British Viceroys, from Linlithgow onwards, heaved a monumental sigh of relief and hauled up the Muslim League to a position of parity with the Congress, led, as always, by a completely unpredictable and idiosyncratic Gandhi.
It is interesting to note what a huge impact on the sub-continent these two Kutchis had.
To return to the point, Jinnah's vision was close to Ataturk's vision; both lie in ruins now. Ataturk has been betrayed by Erdogan and the return of Islamism to Turkey, and the current defeat of the Army, not necessarily a secularist Army, but possibly one affiliated to a different strand of Islamism, one opposed to Erdogan. Jinnah was betrayed in very short order; the nascent state left him to die in a broken-down ambulance, and soon moved to the Basic Objects resolution, which betrayed all his hopes and aspirations for his nation, including his faith in a confederation once the bitterness was over, and to the renegade Maududi's persecution of the Ahmedis, which led to a sentence of death for several crimes, a sentence never executed.
As a staunch admirer of Jinnah, not a blind admirer, but one who sees his greatness and his vision with admiration, while saddened at the loss of his great mind to the greater cause of south Asian progress and development for a narrow purpose which today makes no sense whatsoever, I am also wholly contemptuous of these hedge scholars who seek to co-opt him and his charismatic memory for their own narrow purposes.
A few days ago, a senior, sober, thoughtful member put up a book review on Churchill and the Muslim world; I forget the name. It was a brilliant review, by an obviously scholastically accomplished faculty member at LUMS, which might easily be described as IIM Lahore. I have already pointed out to a select few the harsh and dismissive terms in which that author deals with the illusions that our little shallow students have been hurling at us with the accompaniment of football fan vocabularies and barnyard imitations. Why
@hellfire and
@SarthakGanguly (whom I respect intellectually and socially as much as I detest his political alignment) bother to get into the drain to fight these battles I have yet to understand. I hope I never do.
