Secular and Nationalist Jinnah Review

[SecularNationalist]

By Secular Nationalist
So guys long story short I once saw a book written by an Indian writer Dr Ajeed Jawed Online about our founding father MA Jinnah. The title of book was “Secular and Nationalist Jinnah”. I inquired from the readers of this book and overall got a very positive response. So I decided to buy this book, from oxford university press and it costed me almost 1000 PKR but it’s actually a million dollar book. It, s impartial and everything claimed or written has a historical backing to books which were written between 1900-1947.So there is a little chance of history being distorted or a false claim is made by the writer. I advise everyone to read this book before reaching conclusions based on the distorted and amended history or false claims presented in both India and Pakistan by people who changed facts for their own convenience or to fulfill their personal agendas. I again repeat read this book if you are really looking for truth and realistic answers.

Review

Mohammed Ali Jinnah is the most misrepresented figure in the political history of the subcontinent. In Pakistan he is considered the savior of Muslims, protector of Islam and Islamic culture. In India he is dubbed as an evil genius, a die-hard communalist. Opponent of the freedom struggle, all of the British imperialists and the one man responsible for the partition of the country. The real facts about Jinnah are suppressed by both Indian and Pakistani historians.

The truth is that Jinnah was an uncompromising enemy of foreign rule throughout his political career. He was a patriot, a secular nationalist, and an advocate of Hindu Muslim unity. He fought vigorously for Indian interests in the imperial legislative assembly, refused any title from the British, and struggled for united India for forty years of his life. He resisted for long the proposal of partition and sought fair play and safeguards for the Muslim minority in united India and when Pakistan was won he advocated the same for the Hindu minority.

Secular and nationalist Jinnah challenges many of the myths that grown around Jinnah’s role in the freedom movement and reveals his true character to readers around the world.

The writer strongly criticized Gandhi and Nehru’s as politicians driven by hypocrisy, power and personal agendas who turned Jinnah into a separatist. She specially called Gandhi a pro-British and supported her claim with several real life examples. According to her MA Jinnah was the only leader of India whose politics were solely driven by the freedom of India from the British yoke and the betterment of Indian people. No one was ever able to challenge his honesty and integrity.

Every time he wanted to settle down differences between Hindus and Muslims someone from the congress or separatists working on the British payroll defeated him. Thus he was never able to achieve his nationalistic dream of Hindu Muslim unity against the British.

Even after Pakistan came into being he advocated the same rights for Hindu minority of Pakistan as he was advocating for Indian Muslims pre partition. But Jinnah was of little use of communal elements of Pakistan who used him to get Pakistan but they wanted to impose Islam on everyone and tried to suppress his every speech and action which shows his nationalism and secularism. Jinnah even tried to convert Muslim league into a national league which was open to all Pakistani citizens irrespective of religion but he failed. Jinnah was a practical, modern and progressive man emotions and religion has no special place in his life who even opposed the sharia and khilafat movement. He left the young nation of Pakistan just after 1 year and later this country was at the mercy of military dictators, feudal lords and likeminded communalists.

We see huge no of Indians today hating Jinnah and opposing the creation of Pakistan. Very few of them know Pakistan is the product of their own beloved leaders like Gandhi and Nehru. The subcontinent produced a fine politician and leader who was an honest secular and nationalist but was forced to choose partition as second best alternative as without partition the rights and existence of Muslims of India were at stake. It was only after 1939 when he started to talk about partition and gradually got away from his nationalistic ideas. The Hindu Muslim unity were existent in real life but it was ruined by the dirty politics of that time. According to Jinnah it was made a political problem in fact it was just a community problem. The ones benefited from it most were the British.

Now 70 years have gone and the current scenario is different. Indians are loyal with Indian and Pakistanis with Pakistan but if we go back and dig the history partition indeed was a tragedy.Pakistanis and Indians should think about celebrating on 14th and 15th august the former lost the vision of their founding father and latter on that fateful day lost one third of their territory. If Jinnah’s few demands for Muslim rights were not opposed, he was not felt humiliated by Nehru and congress there would be no Pakistan today. If it was not the religious mindset of people there would be no British raj and no partition. Do division on religious lines and no rule of the British invaders. As the democracy dictates people should be given freedom to practice their religion in their private lives but religion should be not be allowed in politics as it give rise to communal mindset, hamper progress,destroy nationalism and disintegrate unity which as history tells us ends up in disaster.

 

[Joe Shearer]

By Secular Nationalist
So guys long story short I once saw a book written by an Indian writer Dr Ajeed Jawed Online about our founding father MA Jinnah. The title of book was “Secular and Nationalist Jinnah”. I inquired from the readers of this book and overall got a very positive response. So I decided to buy this book, from oxford university press and it costed me almost 1000 PKR but it’s actually a million dollar book. It, s impartial and everything claimed or written has a historical backing to books which were written between 1900-1947.So there is a little chance of history being distorted or a false claim is made by the writer. I advise everyone to read this book before reaching conclusions based on the distorted and amended history or false claims presented in both India and Pakistan by people who changed facts for their own convenience or to fulfill their personal agendas. I again repeat read this book if you are really looking for truth and realistic answers.

Review

Mohammed Ali Jinnah is the most misrepresented figure in the political history of the subcontinent. In Pakistan he is considered the savior of Muslims, protector of Islam and Islamic culture. In India he is dubbed as an evil genius, a die-hard communalist. Opponent of the freedom struggle, all of the British imperialists and the one man responsible for the partition of the country. The real facts about Jinnah are suppressed by both Indian and Pakistani historians.

The truth is that Jinnah was an uncompromising enemy of foreign rule throughout his political career. He was a patriot, a secular nationalist, and an advocate of Hindu Muslim unity. He fought vigorously for Indian interests in the imperial legislative assembly, refused any title from the British, and struggled for united India for forty years of his life. He resisted for long the proposal of partition and sought fair play and safeguards for the Muslim minority in united India and when Pakistan was won he advocated the same for the Hindu minority.

Secular and nationalist Jinnah challenges many of the myths that grown around Jinnah’s role in the freedom movement and reveals his true character to readers around the world.

The writer strongly criticized Gandhi and Nehru’s as politicians driven by hypocrisy, power and personal agendas who turned Jinnah into a separatist. She specially called Gandhi a pro-British and supported her claim with several real life examples. According to her MA Jinnah was the only leader of India whose politics were solely driven by the freedom of India from the British yoke and the betterment of Indian people. No one was ever able to challenge his honesty and integrity.

Every time he wanted to settle down differences between Hindus and Muslims someone from the congress or separatists working on the British payroll defeated him. Thus he was never able to achieve his nationalistic dream of Hindu Muslim unity against the British.

Even after Pakistan came into being he advocated the same rights for Hindu minority of Pakistan as he was advocating for Indian Muslims pre partition. But Jinnah was of little use of communal elements of Pakistan who used him to get Pakistan but they wanted to impose Islam on everyone and tried to suppress his every speech and action which shows his nationalism and secularism. Jinnah even tried to convert Muslim league into a national league which was open to all Pakistani citizens irrespective of religion but he failed. Jinnah was a practical, modern and progressive man emotions and religion has no special place in his life who even opposed the sharia and khilafat movement. He left the young nation of Pakistan just after 1 year and later this country was at the mercy of military dictators, feudal lords and likeminded communalists.

We see huge no of Indians today hating Jinnah and opposing the creation of Pakistan. Very few of them know Pakistan is the product of their own beloved leaders like Gandhi and Jinnah. The subcontinent produced a fine politician and leader who was an honest secular and nationalist but was forced to choose partition as second best alternative as without partition the rights and existence of Muslims of India were at stake. It was only after 1939 when he started to talk about partition and gradually got away from his nationalistic ideas. The Hindu Muslim unity were existent in real life but it was ruined by the dirty politics of that time. According to Jinnah it was made a political problem in fact it was just a community problem. The ones benefited from it most were the British.

Now 70 years have gone and the current scenario is different. Indians are loyal with Indian and Pakistanis with Pakistan but if we go back and dig the history partition indeed was a tragedy.Pakistanis and Indians should think about celebrating on 14th and 15th august the former lost the vision of their founding father and latter on that fateful day lost one third of their territory. If Jinnah’s few demands for Muslim rights were not opposed, he was not felt humiliated by Nehru and congress there would be no Pakistan today. If it was not the religious mindset of people there would be no British raj and no partition. Do division on religious lines and no rule of the British invaders. As the democracy dictates people should be given freedom to practice their religion in their private lives but religion should be not be allowed in politics as it give rise to communal mindset, hamper progress,destroy nationalism and disintegrate unity which as history tells us ends up in disaster.

It is heart-warming and deeply encouraging to read this insightful review, and to realise that a true understanding of Jinnah's vision and inclusive humanist temper exists; also that the virtues of this great man are still appreciated by a few, who have the ability to disentangle his personality and his work from the hyper-patriotic nonsense with which he has been surrounded in Pakistan, and the vicious smear campaigns to which he is regularly subjected in India. The absolute silence that has greeted this review speaks for itself; this is not the forum where such views will be understood; while there might be half-hearted agreement among the little-read about the wrongs that he is said to have suffered at the hands of Gandhi and Nehru (a view that I personally do not entirely agree with, btw), there will be none, indeed, there may be outright opposition to other aspects, most of all to the supposition that he was not a communal leader, but an all-India leader of all Indians. Why, then, is he seen today in the very slanted light of the father of Pakistan, and why is his broader vision not understood? For that, we must thank the gradual accretion of supposition, and of deliberately distorted thinking about the nazariya-e-Pakistan that has crept in, not steadily over the years, but in gushes of prejudice and bigotry with both Bhutto and his iniquitous and ultimately doom-dealing successor, Zia.

The review states that the book, which I have not read, shows Gandhi as pro-British and, ultimately, anti-independence. Unfortunately, that conclusion must be based on what Ramachandra Guha has very recently characterised in a skilful analysis as the distinction in thinking between a truly Westphalian nation, that is Pakistan, and an attempt to break that mould, that is India. India, from the outset, set out not to be mono-cultural - the very thought is ludicrous, no matter what the supporter of the RSS and its political wing, the BJP, thinks - not to be mono-lingual, an obvious absurdity, and not to be mono-religious, again contrary to the bilious formulation of Indian religious right-wingers. In addition, in another departure from the classic Westphalian formula, India set out from the outset to venture into nationhood without the baggage of artificially created enmity with other nation-states; not so Pakistan. Not by intent, but by first principles and definition of the nation as it was defined - mono-lingual and mono-religious, although not as mono-cultural as Pakistanis would have us believe - it was inevitable that sooner or later, they would find an enemy to hate. They succumbed to the formula and India became the hated other, to an extent that was not true to India, and did not come on the horizon until 18 years later, at the earliest, 42 years later, at its peak.

Gandhi was pro-British in this sense. He believed, curiously enough, that as long as we were a colony, we should obey the laws. That to cease to be a colony, we should have to disobey the laws from time to time, and at such times, we should have to submit ourselves to the law and take the punishment meted out without demur. That to be effective in our resistance to colonial rule, we should not flinch from the demanding path of non-violent opposition to British rule. Gandhi's difficulty, to himself and to all the rest of us, was that in parallel with his political programmes, he had a personal programme, of religious dimensions, and the constant intrusion of this personal programme leads to occasional exasperated complaints that his personal agenda took precedence over that of the country that he was leading to freedom.

Nehru, too, was, not pro-British, but an Anglophile. In defence, a Nehruvian analyst would point to Jinnah's Anglophilia, in an obvious whataboutery defence. It is unfair to both men to bring in these elements. Jinnah was essentially a constitutionalist; he never contemplated the kind of mass movement that Gandhi did, until right at the end, and his hallmark, during his seminal days with the Congress as a blue-eyed boy of Gokhale, was his adherence to the constitutional path for bringing in change. In his hands, this constitutionalism was not a weak option to mass movements; his formidable intellect and his forensic skills - forensic as in application of science and rational analysis to a matter relating to civil or criminal law - ensured that his view was given weight. Nehru, on the other hand, surrendered at an early date to the charisma of Gandhi, and in spite of his obvious credentials as an Old Harrovian, moved himself into the national orbits around Gandhi.

But this is not about either Gandhi or Nehru, this is about Jinnah. There is enough on record to explain why the trio failed to see eye to eye towards the end. The friction over Jinnah's advocacy of the Muslim League, and the holding up to administrative attention of the rights of the minority - primarily of the Muslim minority, but without ignoring Jinnah's consciousness of the rights of other minorities, and his conversations with Ambedkar or with Tara Singh - may have contributed in part, creating an impression that he was not allowing that broad front to be created that Gandhi and other nationalists in the Indian National Congress felt to be desirable. The difficulties, even trauma of the joint rule by Muslim League and Congress, where all decisions were obdurately vetoed by the League ministers, led by Noon, was another, perhaps greater factor. That dreadful experience of trying to get along together led to the rooted aversion to cooperation with the Muslim League that imbued all Congress members who thought about the aftermath, about the ways things would be organised after the British left.

There is, however, one incident that is difficult to sidestep, and that is the wreck of the Cabinet Mission proposals on the 10th of July 1946. Both the League, represented by Jinnah, and the Congress, represented, among others, by Nehru, had agreed to the general formula; India would be three sub-sections - not independent Dominions - two in the north-west and in the east respectively, forming Muslim-majority areas, and the vast central mass, remaining as it always had been, a Hindu-majority area. There would be a central government presiding over these three, but responsible only for defence, communications and external affairs. All went well, until Nehru, addressing a press conference, emphasised that delegates to the constituent assembly to be set up to decide a new Constitution, would not be bound by the instructions of their originating sub-section but would be free to decide as their conscience took them. To Jinnah, this was a fatal flaw; this would make nonsense of the effort to put in place safeguards for the cultural and religious protection of the Muslims, and would degenerate, he thought, into a watered-down mush, that would lose all coherence. All this while, the possibility of an outright partition and the formation of Pakistan had been held out as a threat; this unfortunate statement by Nehru, most probably at the urging of his colleagues who could not bear to contemplate working with Muslim League colleagues as they had done briefly already, blew the Cabinet Mission Plan into a thousand tiny smithereens.

For the rest, for what happened after independence, I have little to say. Not because I have little to place before a reader, but because in the overheated atmosphere prevalent in PDF today, nothing can be said about Pakistan and its origins by an Indian member; even a Pakistani member who refutes every contrary argument through fact and through logical analysis has to face an uncouth attack by thoroughly obnoxious bigoted and extremist elements. There is no point in even venturing there.

It is an extraordinary review by @SecularNationalist , and it is only to be expected that it would be thoroughly ignored, which is a pity. I would like to draw the attention of two scholastically inclined individuals to this thread, @M. Sarmad and @SoulSpokesman, as I am sure that they will both instantly identify with elements of either the original review or of the comments I have adduced.

On a very personal note, I am tagging @jbgt90, along with a request that he should keep his sarcastic comments about my maximalist use of language to the minimalist limit.

I am also taking a great liberty in tagging two of the personalities on PDF whom I respect very highly, in the hope that the original review may appeal to them, and that they may find it worthy of attention. My own effusions are of no consequence.

@Oscar
@niaz

 

[shah_123]

Yeah a good read for the seculars/liberals who lives in a world of their own.
to the normal Pakistanis! don't waste your Rs.1000 on this cheap book, you just don't have to do this.

 

[SecularNationalist]

Yeah a good read for the seculars/liberals who lives in a world of their own.
to the normal Pakistanis! don't waste your Rs.1000 on this cheap book, you just don't have to do this.

Yea you must live in your narrow minded world full of illiteracy.No need to face the truth,no need to correct what is wrong.Be a sheep who just follow the herd.
Instead give that Rs 1000 to a madrasa as a donation which trains a suicide bombers who will later blow up your fellow normal Pakistanis.
Even it if takes a bloody revolution pakistan must need to get rid from people like you.

 

[Reichsmarschall]

Instead give that Rs 1000 to a madrasa as a donation which trains a suicide bombers who will later blow up your fellow normal Pakistanis.

Even if takes a bloody revolution pakistan must need to get rid from people like you.

ladies and gentlemen this is the real face of Pakistani khooni liberals they are even worse than TTP and ISIS I bet even the worst terror organizations we know are more tolerant and coexisting than these things who call themselves liberals

 

[SecularNationalist]

ladies and gentlemen this is the real face of Pakistani khooni liberals they are even worse than TTP and ISIS I bet even the worst terror organizations we know are more tolerant and coexisting than these things who call themselves liberals

It,s is duty of a every decent human being to fight against religious extremists who don,t live and let others live.
If we don,t put up a fight our upcoming generations will suffer.

 

[El Sidd]

I am here.

To those who worship Jinnah. Kbow that Jinnah is dead.

 

[Reichsmarschall]

It,s is duty of a every decent human being to fight against religious extremists who don,t live and let others live.
If we don,t put up a fight our upcoming generations will suffer.

only extremist I see here is you who is threatening to kill millions of innocent people to get rid of someone who just has a slight difference of opinion with you
now imagine if you people had some real power you guys would have killed us all just like your ideological ancestors i.e stalin churchil hitler and Mao did

 

[Enigma_]

He wasn't a nationalist he was a patriot. Big difference.

 

[-blitzkrieg-]

The more threads they make, the more desperate they are.. Dont feed him and he will go away.

 

[Taygibay]

I am here.

To those who worship Jinnah. Kbow that Jinnah is dead.

So some men are worth more dead than many of us are while alive,
what of it?

Tay.

 

[Maarkhoor]

Mr. Jinnah was staunch supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity against British but every time he made effort towards this he deceived by Hindu leaders including Mr. Gandhi which made Mr. Jinnah realizes that British rule is going to end any day but after that Hindu leaders want to rule this country and Muslim would be subject to second class citizens (and now he proved correct see in India Muslim are subject to inhuman treatment) so he decided create separate country for Muslim and this idea encouraged by Dr. Illama Iqbal.

Thank you Quad e Azam we can see now if you did't create this country called Pakistan today Hindu would lynch us for eating beef.

 

[El Sidd]

So some men are worth more dead than many of us are while alive,
what of it?

Tay.

Man decides its own worth no matter what the price is.

Cain and Abel long dead still a worthy lesson for the humankind

 

[shah_123]

Yea you must live in your narrow minded world full of illiteracy.No need to face the truth,no need to correct what is wrong.Be a sheep who just follow the herd.
Instead give that Rs 1000 to a madrasa as a donation which trains a suicide bombers who will later blow up your fellow normal Pakistanis.
Even if takes a bloody revolution pakistan must need to get rid from people like you.

 

[SecularNationalist]

only extremist I see here is you who is threatening to kill millions of innocent people to get rid of someone who just has a slight difference of opinion with you
now imagine if you people had some real power you guys would have killed us all just like your ideological ancestors i.e stalin churchil hitler and Mao did

No not millions only extremists like yourself who want to impose their view on others.History has proven seculars do not impose their view on other they just demand freedom for everyone including zealots like you.
How can you even compare the ideal democrats who are seculars and nationalists with stalin and hitler?
So that,s means obama ,clinton and every president today of a secular country who is patriot or nationalist is like stalin and hitler.
Well thanks for proving once again how ignorant you are or may be you are programmed in your doctrine language and can,t think out of the box.

Mr. Jinnah was staunch supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity against British but every time he made effort towards this he deceived by Hindu leaders including Mr. Gandhi which made Mr. Jinnah realizes that British rule is going to end any day but after that Hindu leaders want to rule this country and Muslim would be subject to second class citizens (and now he proved correct see in India Muslim are subject to inhuman treatment) so he decided create separate country for Muslim and this idea encouraged by Dr. Illama Iqbal.

Thank you Quad e Azam we can see now if you did't create this country called Pakistan today Hindu would lynch us for eating beef.

Dude i salute you for wasting your precious time in front of blind and deaf right wingers of this forum.