Mohammed Ali Jinnah Haazir Ho

India lost out on Jinnah and Pakistan has chosen to lose him. That he is still a hot topic on the other side that he left and his name is raked up for controversial comparisons speaks volumes about how much the man is hated and, therefore, cannot be dismissed.

It is indeed amusing that the country that Jinnah formed with the hope of serving a secular ideal is today an Islamic Republic. And the so-called ‘akhand Bharat’ that Veer Savarkar stood for allowed for the Republic of India to become a pawn in the hands of the Hindutvawadis and their divisive ideology.

At least Jinnah took the divided part; Savarkar’s legacy is a worm that eats away at the entrails of the very society that feeds it. So much so that scholars of Islam, like Rafiq Zakaria, are looking for approval from these very segments. And what better way than to drag Jinnah in? Dr. Zakaria has called him the villain who destroyed Hindu-Muslim unity. “From 1937 onwards, Jinnah changed his tactics and began setting the Hindus against the Muslims. Never in India’s history has even the worst Muslim ruler alienated Hindus from Muslims as Jinnah has done.”

Such hyperbole looks good on paper, but to imply that Jinnah’s actions caused the eventual division of the Muslim community in the sub-continent into three segments -- Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian Muslims -- is absolute rubbish.

There has got to be something inherently wrong if we as Indians continue to blame every Hindu-Muslim discord on the Partition. Communal riots predate it and, as recent events have proved, Jinnah’s fears of Hindu domination have not been unfounded. Although the light did not strike him until 1938. Prior to that he had commented “Nobody will welcome an honourable settlement between the Hindus and Muslims than I and nobody will be more ready to help it.” It could be attributed to empty rhetoric but it could also be that he was let down by our leaders, or perhaps he had sharper foresight on the matter.

On September 11, his death anniversary, a military-run regime in the ‘pure land’ will pay glowing tributes to his genius, trapped behind a title – Quaid-e-Azam. But genius is supposed to stand the test of time. What happened then? Was Jinnah in reality a failure? Do we know him at all? Did he ever weep? Could he laugh at himself? Was he a wily politician or a dependable statesman? How was he as a friend, a colleague? Could we brand him the black sheep or the lost lamb?

It’s a long list of questions and in a decade-old search, I have found very few willing respondents. A freedom fighter, now dead, who had in his time urinated on the Union Jack wouldn’t comment on Jinnah. “He was a senior person, I would not like to speak on the subject.” This had been the general tone. The wife of Jinnah’s nephew, the late Akbar Peerbhoy, would not speak either. However, with the views given by others (some now dead), Jinnah - real or otherwise - does come alive.

Who was he?

The string of events that pass for history make a man so large that he spills outside our realm, or so small that we can’t see him. Jinnah is both. We keep hearing about the dichotomy in this Bond Street-suited gentleman with a monocle held against his eyes, looking disdainfully at the world going by, who became the messiah to ten crore Muslims on the strength of religion.

How Muslim was Jinnah? Minoo Masani, the veteran civil liberties man, had met Jinnah during his student days, often visiting his Mount Pleasant Road house with Yusuf Meherally. He distinctly remembered, “Jinnah had no use for the Muslim League and he denounced its leaders as ‘those dadhiwallas’.”

However, that did not stop him from going along with the tide. He began attending Friday prayer dressed in a sherwani. Pyarelal, Gandhi’s PA, in his biography of the Mahatma mentions how during Ramzan leaflets with a picture of Jinnah, sword in hand, were distributed. It gave the Muslims a threatening voice, warning the rest, “Be ready... O Kafer! ...your doom is not far...” Where was Jinnah then? Probably drinking his favourite Scotch.

It is reported that he once said, “My sausages are more important than god.” According to advocate Iqbal Chagla, “He was a bad Muslim, he did everything that the Quran proscribes.” And he should know, being the son of Justice M.C.Chagla, who on returning from Oxford in the early 20s joined Jinnah’s chambers, and was an associate, both in law and politics.

An incident bears repetition. When Jinnah was contesting a municipal election, he and Chagla were out campaigning. On the way they stopped for some tea and Jinnah ordered ham sandwiches. A venerable bearded Muslim entered the restaurant with his grandson and was promptly invited to join in. The little boy was eyeing the sandwiches. “My father debated whether he should save Jinnah’s soul or his elections, and he opted for the latter, handing over a sandwich to the child,” recalled Iqbal Chagla.

For a man with no compunctions about religion, when did the moment of truth occur? According to what H M Seervai, a constitutional expert and former advocate general, puts down in his book ‘Legend and Reality’, it was not until the elections of 1937. That was the time when Nehru declared that there was no such thing as a Hindu-Muslim or a minority question. It was after Gandhi had said, “I wish I could do something but I am utterly helpless. My faith in unity is bright as ever; only I see no daylight but impenetrable darkness and in such distress I cry out to god for light.”

It was perhaps at this point that Jinnah, who had a very hazy idea of god, decided to give him a try. But only tangentially, to meet a demand. “How is it that no one questions why an Islamic scholar like Maulana Azad did not accept Partition?” asked Asgharali Engineer, head of the Institute of Islamic Studies and a reformist-activist. “Jinnah did not know the A-B-C of Islam but we must remember the demand was not regarding whether people would be permitted to practice their religion, it was to see that on a secular basis the rights of the minorities were protected. You cannot simply arouse the masses on the basis of religion. People have their own interests in mind. He was quite secular.”

This is borne out by Chagla’s recollection of how Jinnah felt that intermarriage was the best way to promote communal harmony. He said so to Dinshaw Petit, topping it with the question, “Now may I marry your daughter?” He did, but Petit did not have anything to do with him thereafter. Rati, Jinnah’s Parsi wife was the only one who wielded any influence over him. Iqbal Chagla was told by his father about this scene at a conference. “There, in the midst of all the people, she entered the room dressed in leopard print slacks and sat swinging her legs. Then she interrupted the meeting saying, ‘Jeh, we are getting late!’ She brought out the human streak in him. When she died there were tears in his eyes. Otherwise, my father used to say, he was not a very humane person. As his junior when my father was on the brink of starvation for eight years, he never got any help from Jinnah. Yet he always said he was a bad lawyer but a very good advocate.”

Besides, he had an arresting personality. “When he entered the assembly all eyes would turn to look at him,” remembered Masani. “He gave a lot of time to youth activities. His only foible was that he spoke English with a haw-haw accent but, alas, his grammar was very poor.”

That did not prevent him from being noticed. Even a Gandhian like Usha Mehta, who did not meet him personally, could not resist remarking, “He was quite good-looking!” Ismat Chugtai had regretted not meeting him. “When I was fighting my case in the Lahore court, I tried to get in touch, but he was in the sanatorium. He was very, very ill.”

What did he do?

No man is an island. In the throes of ideas and actions and interactions he comes to such a pass that he soon becomes a product of all these. In the mental pictures one forms of Jinnah, he comes across as one so self-contained that any other input would inflate him grotesquely. Till just the other day he seemed like a man who had done a Columbus with Pakistan. Therefore, Sir Stafford Cripps’ words jar: “When I find a person getting louder and more violent in his denunciation of his opponents, I get the feeling that he is beginning to recognise that the extreme case for which he stands is becoming desperate.”

This goes contrary to Jinnah’s ‘lack of emotions’. But most agreed about his tenacity, forthrightness and principles. “He stood alone,” said Iqbal Chagla, who recalled another episode: “Jinnah had taken to going to the small cause’s court to appear for himself when he was sued by a tailor. When asked why he was doing it, he said, ‘That man thinks he can blackmail me and get away with it’.” Jinnah was not purchasable with goodies or compromise solutions. When Mountbatten suggested that he could become the officiating governor-general of Pakistan, the offer was rejected. “Do you realise what this will cost you?” he asked Jinnah, who replied, “It may cost me several crores of rupees in assets.” Mountbatten continued the onslaught. “It may well cost you the whole of your assets and the future of Pakistan.” Jinnah reportedly stayed unmoved. Is it any wonder then that the good Lord M was happy to be rid of the “evil genius of the whole thing” who he thought was a “psychopathic case” suffering from “megalomania in its worst form”?

“The real megalomaniac was Nehru, a Stalinist,” fumed Masani. “Jinnah would have made a far better PM.” This view was contested by Engineer. “True, Nehru had a weakness for the prime ministership but Jinnah cannot compare. Nehru stood by secularism not as a convenience but out of conviction. Anyway, the issue was not of who became PM but of the devolution of power.”

Lord Mountbatten was the real schemer behind the Partition and its resultant carnage, for ‘out of the blue’ on his own admission he forwarded the date to August 15 from the originally decided June 1948, thus causing mindless bloodshed. Whether or not he was influenced in his attitude by Lady Edwina, it was quite clear that the last viceroy was distinctly biased against Jinnah, often publicly ridiculing him. Even his biographer, Philip Ziegler, noted, “The truth in his hands was swiftly converted from what it was to what it should have been. He sought to rewrite history with cavalier indifference to the facts to magnify his own achievements.”

In fact, the tenth volume of ‘The Transfer of Power’, the detailed journals portraying the British view of the period, states, “If Mr. Jinnah thought himself betrayed he might derive great satisfaction by going down in history as a martyr for his cause, butchered by
the British on the Congress altar.” Pakistan was created with little money and even less goodwill, and as Jinnah wryly pointed out, “Brother Gandhi has 3 votes, I (Brother Jinnah) have only one.” Even after the blood was oozing out of Calcutta, Gandhi said, “When two parties cannot agree, and both are sincere in their respective conditions, it is clear that one of them must be wrong. Both cannot be right. The world must be the arbiter in that case.” That was three votes against one. The Mahatma pipped the mandarin to the post.

His grandson Rajmohan Gandhi, in ‘Eight Lives: A study of the Hindu-Muslim Encounter’, records one of the Mahatma’s statements – “My own experience but confirms the opinion that the Mussalman as a rule is a bully and the Hindu a coward.” Rajmohan writes about how the elders spoke of this ‘Great Obstacle’ Jinnah who would brook no blockage in his path. “I didn’t much like my picture of him, but he intrigued me.”

Did he do it right?

And so Jinnah got Pakistan. What do we say? The impetuous child got his favourite toy? Or the Idealist got his Utopia? Whatever it be, did it help him? Dreams don’t seek validity, but how would he feel watching his dream crumble to pieces?

In actual terms he had the price of 6 lakh lives and 14 million uprooted people on his head. Leadership does not preempt sanity, yet do the people in charge ever turn back and look? It is a pointless exercise to ask who was responsible. On Gandhi’s suggestion that Jinnah be made the first PM, there were sabotage attempts, according to Seervai. And we will have to accept that it was only on July 29, 1946 that Jinnah said, “Throughout the painful negotiations, the two parties with whom we bargained held a pistol at us; one with power and machine-guns behind it, and the other with non-cooperation and the threat to launch mass civil disobedience. The situation must be met. We also have a pistol.”

Even if the firing range was limited, it did come as a surprise. Nehru must have had to rush for the eraser to rub out his words: “The Muslim League leadership is far too reactionary (they are mostly landlords) and opposed to social change to dare to indulge in any form of direct action. They are incapable of it, having spent their lives in soft jobs. If it’s once made clear that violence on their part will not help them at all, they will subside.”
They did not. For a person who had “never been a believer in mass movements”, according to Azad, it was perhaps a seething response to Nehru’s declaration, “There are only two forces in India today, British imperialism and Indian nationalism as represented by the Congress”; Jinnah corrected him, “No, there is a third party, the Mussalmans.” The results of the 1945 central legislative assembly proved Jinnah’s hold on the masses. In Muslim constituencies the League got 86.6 per cent of the votes to the Congress’ 91.3 per cent in non-Muslim areas.

In this context one would like to know how to define a nationalist. In Seervai’s words, “It is a little unfortunate that those who assail Jinnah for destroying the unity of India do not ask how it was that a man who wanted a nationalist solution till as late as 1938, when he was 61 years of age, suddenly became a ‘communalist’.”

It is still pertinent to ask whether Jinnah was morally right in playing with fire. There are two ways of looking at it. Either he thought of fire as light, or he failed to anticipate the charred remains. “There is no doubt he wanted Pakistan,” maintained Iqbal Chagla. “That was the reason my father parted with him.”

Another question can be raised: was Jinnah a short-sighted man? One of the issues brought up by the League in its call for Partition was regarding the use of the Devnagari or the Persian script when less than 10 per cent Indians knew how to read. The uncharitable view is that getting concessions was easier by representing one section whose needs were more or less uniform than all the minorities, as Jinnah was doing until then. Then why would he have gone off in 1931 to practise in England before the Privy Council only to return four years later? Did he ultimately give the people what they wanted?

No. “As far as Pakistan is concerned we are putting up a tent. We can do no more,” said Mountbatten. Sardar Patel too saw it for what it was: “As for the Muslims they have their roots, their sacred places and their centres here. I do not know what they can possibly do in Pakistan. It will not be long before they return to us.”

Was Jinnah blind or was he playing blind man’s bluff? If there is so much anger against him in India, is it because of the man he was? I think it is more due to the idea he represented. The impression is that he put the germ of the lost land in the romantic’s head and a niggling suspicion in the fundamentalist’s, who feel cheated about an unrealised dream. That they have outlived the man is, in a strange twist, not to his credit.

Would Jinnah have been relevant to today’s Pakistan and Indo-Pak relations? As Minoo Masani said once “He would have been a fish out of water in today’s Pakistan.” Engineer felt the situation was bad all those years ago itself. “Why now? He rued the decision to create Pakistan. He was left to die, even a plane was not arranged for him.” A major part of the problems we face with our neighbour is its instability, and one should think that under Jinnah’s steerage for a few years Pakistan would have found its roots. As architect of the country he would have felt responsible for it unlike the feudal lords and ladies that have been ruling it.

With Jinnah around things might have been different. Perhaps there would have been no Bangladesh and no Pak-occupied Kashmir. For Jinnah, who Lord Mountbatten called a bastard, would have understood the pain of being referred to as an illegitimate child.