Pakistan's Father

One of the great faults of the British attitude to India was simply that it was pigheaded. It preferred the illusion of imperial might to the admission of imperial failure; it put prestige before common sense. And the most pig-headed of all British politicians when it came to India was Winston Churchill who, following the defeat of his party, had returned to the back-benches as an opposition MP. "I hate Indians," he declared. "They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

Churchill was fond of quoting his father, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Randolph Churchill. "Our rule in India is as it were a sheet of oil spread out over and keeping free from storms a vast and profound ocean of humanity," the elder Churchill had said. As a metaphor, it was apt, though for different reasons than he intended. An oil slick does not protect the sea from storms, but stifles all life beneath it. Winston Churchill made it his business to incapacitate any attempt to move the Indian nation towards self-government.

But within Indian division, Churchill saw an opportunity. An argument continually repeated saw the large Muslim and Untouchable minorities as being under serious threat in Hindu-majority India. The British, in their role as paternalistic rulers, had a moral duty to protect them. If the British left, it would be a dereliction of that duty. The existence of the Muslim League served to strengthen this argument. Meanwhile, it suited the Muslim League to have friends in the British establishment.

Despite the cultural and religious differences in India in 1931, there was not yet a mainstream demand for partition. Muslims, Sikhs and Untouchables may have requested separate electorates, to safeguard their representation among the caste-Hindu majority; but they did not demand separate nations. The call for Pakistan would only come to prominence as a result of the alienation of India's ablest Muslim politician, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who, in late-1931, had walked out of the second Round Table Conference in disgust and, at that point, appeared to be politically finished. The opposite was true. Jinnah would soon emerge as one of the most successful politicians of the 20th century: creating his own country, leading it and almost single-handedly reviving Islam as a modern political force.

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Jinnah was a successful barrister born in Karachi. Tall and slender, he hardly ate, and smoked 50 Craven A cigarettes a day. He was often described as looking cadaverous, but this description does no justice to his dynamism. With his smooth coiffure and glittering stare, he looked more like a cobra than a corpse.

American journalist Margaret Bourke-White described at length "the Oxford-educated Jinnah" with his "razor-sharp mind and hypnotic, smoldering eyes." Jinnah had not, in fact, been educated at Oxford: He had attended a madrasa in Karachi and a local mission school. But it was easy to believe that this urbane gentleman, described by The New York Times as "undoubtedly one of the best dressed men in the British Empire," his public speaking rich with quotations from Shakespeare, was part of the British elite.

Jinnah had begun his political career in Congress. He made himself a figurehead for Hindu-Muslim unity, and was acclaimed as such by Hindu Congress luminaries. He had joined the Muslim League in 1913, confident that he could act as a bridge between the political parties. But it was the emergence of Mohandas Gandhi as the spiritual leader of Congress in 1920 that began to elbow Jinnah out.

"I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics," Jinnah had said. "I part company with the Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria. Politics is a gentleman's game."

But politics is rarely gentlemanly, and as if to prove it there was a profound and deadly clash of personality between Jinnah and the other English gentleman of Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru. Like his compatriot and friend, the poet Muhammad Iqbal, Jinnah disdained "the atheistic socialism of Jawaharlal."

"We do not want any flag excepting the League flag of the Crescent and Star," he would declare. "Islam is our guide and the complete code of our life."

Despite his position as one of the key figures in the rise of 20th-century Islam, Jinnah was no fundamentalist. His Islam was liberal, moderate and tolerant. It was said that he could recite none of the Koran, rarely went to a mosque and spoke little Urdu. Much has been made of his reluctance to don Muslim outfits, his fondness for whisky and his rumoured willingness to eat ham sandwiches. In fact, he never pretended to be anything other than a progressive Muslim, influenced by the intellectual and economic aspects of European culture as well as by the teachings of Mohammed.

The game he played was carefully considered: Here was a Muslim who understood the British sufficiently to parley on equal terms, but asserted his Islamic identity strongly enough that he could never be seen to grovel. His refusal of a knighthood was significant; so, too, was his demurral in the face of Muslim attempts to call him "Maulana" Jinnah, denoting a religious teacher. Some historians go so far as to describe him as a "bad" Muslim, revealing more about their own ideas of what a Muslim should be than about Jinnah's faith. In any case, the Muslim League suffered from no shortage of good Muslims. What it had lacked was a good politician. And Jinnah was without question one of the most brilliant politicians of his day.

Jinnah had married Rattanbai "Ruttie" Petit, the daughter of a prominent Parsi banker, when he was 42 and she just 18. Rebellious and beautiful, Ruttie had been a close friend of Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Nan Pandit; she was closer still, indeed almost passionately so, to Padmaja Naidu, who would later become Nehru's lover. The deeply personal and incestuous nature of Indian politics is plain from these relationships.

Jinnah's marriage was not an easy one. After the birth of their daughter, Dina, he and Ruttie separated. Ruttie died on her 30th birthday in 1929, following a long affliction with a digestive disorder. Jinnah was devastated at her death, and moved to London with Dina. He took a large house in Hampstead, was chauffeured around in a Bentley, played billiards, lunched at Simpson's and went to the theatre. He considered standing for Parliament in the Labour interest, but was rejected by a Yorkshire constituency, allegedly with the verdict that it would not be represented by "a toff like that." His sister Fatima gave up a career as a dentist to become, in effect, his hostess, though that title belies her full significance. Fatima Jinnah was a woman of intelligence and drive, and was influential in her brother's move towards Islamic nationalism.

Jinnah had returned to politics to fight the Muslim League's corner at the Round Table Conference, which pitted him directly against Gandhi. "I had the distinct feeling that unity was hopeless, that Gandhi did not want it," he told a journalist in the 1940s. After the conference, he returned to private life -- until a friend reported to him a comment made by his arch-rival, Jawaharlal Nehru. In conversation at a private dinner party, Nehru had remarked that Jinnah was "finished." Jinnah was so furious that he packed up and headed back to India immediately, with the stated intent to "show Nehru." He returned ready to fire up the Muslim League, which he would transform from a scattered band of eccentrics into the second most powerful political party in India.

But probably the most surprising obstacle to Indian independence was the man who was widely supposed to be leading the campaign for it -- Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi's need for spotless moral perfection hamstrung his party's progress. His principal object was to make the Indian people worthy of freedom in the eyes of God. The object of actually achieving freedom from the British was secondary. Gandhi's most influential work, Hind Swaraj, published in 1908, set out very clearly his point of view: that European civilization was corrupt, atheist and destructive, but that merely driving the British out of India would not serve to make India free. To be free, Indians needed to relinquish violence, material possessions, machinery, railways, lawyers, doctors, formal education, the English language, discord between Hindu and Muslim, alcohol and sex. It is for this reason that his campaigns so often faltered. Gandhi stood for virtue in a form purer than politics usually allows. Whenever he had to make a choice between virtue and politics, he always chose virtue. He strove for universal piety, continence and humility, regardless of the consequences. Even if a person were faced with death, or a group with obliteration, he would sanction no compromise of moral integrity.

It is impossible to assess how the Indian nationalist struggle might have proceeded without Gandhi, but there are ample grounds for thinking that a more earthly campaign led by a united Congress, perhaps under the joint leadership of Motilal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, could have brought dominion status to India in the 1920s. Gandhi's spiritual style of leadership was a source of inspiration to millions but, politically speaking, it was erratic. Within Congress, too, it created divisions. Congress was not a church, and Gandhi's mystical judgements were often difficult even for his closest followers to accept. - From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann. Now available in bookstores. Published by McClelland&Stewart Ltd. Reprinted by permission.