Jaswant Speaks Out

Pardesi, U raised an important point.

As I see it, Muslim League's Pakistan is JUST ONE point of the whole agenda. Jinnah's just one convenient leader.

Lemme quote something from history:

Ghazanfar Ali Khan and Liaqat were part of the Central govt just b4 partition. They've had responsibility to keep the country peaceful and safe but they gave two hoots to such responsibility and propriety.

Lets see what they said in Feb 47:

The Free Press Journal quoting GA Khan

"Mohd bin Qasim and Md of Ghazni invaded India with armies composed of a few thousand yet were able to overpower lakhs of Hindoos; Inshallah, a few lakhs of Muslims will yet overwhelm the crores of Hindoos (not just Punjab but whole of India).

LA Khan

"....expected Punjab ministry (Khizr Tiwana) would fall as a result of League's campaign*.....that Punjab demostrations were an indication of what League could do on an all-India scale if it became necessary ALTHOUGH I COULD NOT GUARANTEE THAT IT'D REMAIN ALWAYS NON-VIOLENT".


*
Muslim League added Quran as the symbol of Muslim League.
Masjids were used to hold ML meetings.
Speeches abt 'Islam Khatrey mein hain' given.
Anti Fifth Columnist groups were formed (Hindus and Sikhs by default are fifth columnists - so Jinnah is secular!!).
The goal is to collapse the Unionist ministry of Tiwana, Chotu Ram.

--

Seeing from the bombings and terrorist campaigns in India we can see the pattern of what these ML leaders believed, said and done.

The lesson to learn from all this is, how to
prevent future Jinnahs in India.
Clearly, appeasement is not one of them.

Sidhu/DM:

Jinnah was a convenient tool for Muslim League to deal with British to achieve their vision. That's why he was hired when he had comfortably retired in UK and looked forward to being either a judge or MP in London and live peacefully with his sister. If he would not have come back, they would have found some one else. The partition would have happened sooner and later. When one party is willing to use 'direct action' (read violence) and had sympatheic ears amongst the masters, there was no stopping.

Sidhu, your post on Iyer on another board is right. JASWANT IS A FOOL. He is only talking about jinnah V.1.0 (birth to year 1920) and Jinnah 2.0 (up to year 1934) and NOT Jinnah V3.0 that represented ML to do the deed. Nehru had many weaknesses but he or Patel did not push Jinnah 3.0 to partition.

May God help us all to move forward and just forgive each other.

DM...
Creation of Pakistan was boon for India, and Muhammed Ali Jinnah is true Bharat Ratna....We don't see much diffence between civilised india and beduinistic Pakistan in materialistic term due to the wrong leaders, we got at the time, Brits left. If we would have got rid of Nehru and his family oriented dictatorship, in early 50s, India would have been realy powerful...All these Jinnah/Sinnah etc. would have been irrelevant.....
Beduinistic separatism or beduinistic violence, as propagated by the arab gangster through his book should have been expected by Indians...B C Chatterjee, the first University Graduate of Asia informed people through his book "Ananda Math"...If you blame Jinnah alone for partition,how will you explain musla/jihadi separatism in Thailand, Mynmar, Philipines, Nigeria, Serbia, Russia etc? It is realy ugly to blame Jinnah or potray him as good or bad person...He is like any other creature leading herd of beduinoids....

Pew/Pardesi/Riaz:

I am convinced that despite his earlier views, by the end of 1946, Jinnah was hell bent on getting his Pakistan, even a moth-eaten Pakistan. Those who argue otherwise wish what Jinnah wanted than what he himself wanted, therefore, they give the most benign, convoluted interpretations of what he said while also claiming that he was a straight shooter and sincere.

I posted these passages from sadna on UP on the Rakesh Mani thread, which I am reproducing here:


You seem to be mesmerised by Ayesha Jalal (it is unfair to say by JS as nobody seems to have read the whole book yet). Does Ayesha deal with the following and similar correspondence. This is what sadna posted on UP (thanks sadna!). I have highlighted some parts.

While I have read these and other similar passages, I have not seen a single, REPEAT SINGLE, passage from Jinnah which suggests that he was using Pakistan as a bargaining chip. Those who say that must have known Jinnah better than he knew himself. [I am here not referring to Jinnah before 1937]


Notes by Major Woodrow Wyatt
Notes on conversation with Mr. Jinnah - December 3, 1946

1. Some of the insistence which Mr. Jinnah placed on his attitude may possibly be discounted slightly by the fact that he was most anxious to impress his view-point on the people I had invited to meet him at luncheon.

2. He is still harping on the unfairness of the Cabinet Mission's interpretation of paragraph eight of the statement of June 16. He feels very bitterly that he should have been allowed to form a Government when the Congress turned down the short-term plan.

3. He vehemently sticks to the view that Congress have never accepted the long-term plan, never meant to accept it and never will accept it. Nor do they ever intend to reach a settlement in India. He says repeatedly that all they are after is to seize power. He makes it clear that for his part, he will do all he can to prevent that.

4. He now refers to the Cabinet Mission plan as a fraud and a humbug. Nothing can be done until it is put out of the way. He has no intention whatsoever of going back to India by December 9.

5. He has now returned to the proposition that only the creation of Pakistan can deal with the situation. Any lingering thoughts that he had at Simla of a central government with three subjects appear to have gone for ever.

6. I asked him the direct question: "If the Congress were now to say without equivocation that they accepted the Cabinet Mission plan, together with the grouping system in its entirety, would you feel that there were still some possibilities in the Constituent Assembly and the Cabinet Mission plan?" His answer was most decisively No, that it was not even worth discussing the proposition. "You don't realize", he said, "how far the situation has gone in India since you were there". His theme song on this issue is what he calls the deliberate butchery of Muslims by Hindus in Bihar.

7. When asked for a constructive proposition, he said that the only thing that could be done immediately was to restore law and order. Congress were not in the interim government to co-operate, only to seize power. They must all co-operate, particularly the British, in restoring law and order. There must be a period of tranquility in which the poor could feel secure in their homes, before anything further could be done. Then, for Pakistan.

8. My general impression is that Jinnah will certainly come to no agreement now on the basis of the Cabinet Mission plan, even if the Congress agreed completely to the grouping system and all it implies. He is going to make the most of the situation in Bihar, and say that it demands over-riding action from the British. He is then going to get back to his old argument that the British have no need to be getting out of India now, that their responsibility is to stay and hold the ring. I think that he will covertly advance this, so that he may gain time to build up the Muslim League to a state in which it has every chance of beating Congress physically. I do not ever remember seeing him before in a worse mood, from the point of view of reaching agreement with anyone over anything. His last words to me as he got into his car were:"There is no time any more for argument".

The only hope now, I am sure, is to frighten him badly, and to say that if he won't accept the Constituent Assembly, then his people must leave the government, and he will get no support from the British. END.


Sir E. Mieville to Rear-Admiral Viscount Mountbatten of Burma
11 April 1947
Your Excellency,
I saw Mr. Jinnah for half an hour this afternoon. He was at his very best. He started by recalling the luncheon party at which we were both present at Buckingham Palace last December and told me how much he had enjoyed it. He said that his enjoyment was enhanced by the fact that on talking to the King he found that His Majesty was pro Pakistan. On talking to the Queen after luncheon he found that Her Majesty was even more pro Pakistan, and finally when he had a conversation with Queen Mary he found that Her Majesty was 100% Pakistan! I replied that I was sorry that Their Majesties had acted in such an unconstitutional way as to express their opinions on political matters connected with their Indian Empire, at which he laughed quite a lot.



In April 1974, Mountbatten to Lapierre and Collins:

Mountbatten's views on Hindus, Muslims, others
Anyway, that I wasn't told, was almost criminal. The only chance, and I am saying this now on the spur of the moment, it was the only chance we had of keeping some form of unified India, because he was the only, I repeat the only, stumbling block. The others were not so obdurate. I am sure the Congress would have found some compromise with them.

Q. With the Muslim League as well?

A.You see, I liked the Muslim League people-they were mostly the people from the officer class of the Indian Army-much more than the Hindus. We came around to the Hindus more after I got out to India than before. I wasn't pro-anybody, but I really did like the Muslims. I had so many friends. Don't forget the history of India is basically one of conquest. When the Moghuls came along they in fact, conquered India and ran India and people like the Nizam were the viceroys of the Moghuls in the south. The Hindus were completely militarily beaten and treated as an occupied people by the occupying power.

But they were good brains, much better brains than the Muslims. I'm generalizing; Hindus were good shopkeepers, good business people, good clerks, good civil servants, and were employed by the British and they fitted in very well. They enjoyed serving the British-they preferred to serve the British, don't forget, than to serve the Muslims who were prepared to be gracious as hosts and go hunting and that sort of thing, but did not like the idea of toeing the line to the British at all. They were prepared to enter the army and so forth, but in fact the Hindus got into the whole machinery; they got into it because the Muslims weren't prepared to work in that sort of way with us.

I think you'll find this one of the things that's not completely understood. The British out there were naturally more easily friends with Muslims because they played polo, they went out shooting, they mixed freely, they didn't have any sort of inhibitions. The Hindus didn't get on so well with the British. Frankly, no Muslim ever took part in any plotting against the British. They wanted the British to remain, it secured their position.

The last thing Jinnah wanted was that we should go. He said first he didn't want a separate Pakistan, just wanted us to stay and hold the reins for them. But the Hindus wanted us to go because they had gone to British universities, they were all terribly imbued with sort of Fabian ideas and they just thought it was wrong that the British should be ruling India. I mentioned that we ruled with the consent, with the affection, of the vast masses. No doubt of that. But the intelligent, educated people didn't like it. So that this is one of the things one was up against.

So how could we meet the Congress Party's desire without transferring power? We couldn't. We were obliged to the transfer of power. Nobody, particularly me, wished to have any partition in India. It was a ghastly thought. And it wasn't going to work. It wasn't really going to work because, you see, if you look at the distribution of the Muslim population in India, it's all over India. I don't suppose that we were able to separate more than half the Muslims and make them into East and West Pakistan. The rest of them were all over India. Most were perfectly happy to stay.

Now, I suppose my wife and I were about the first people to show genuine affection for Indians, irrespective of their creed. Don't forget you had Parsees and Jains also. The last Jain king lost his throne because as he was marching out to meet his enemy, the rains came and he cancelled the march, for fear of the tremendous loss of insect life his troops would cause marching across the marshes when the insects were coming out.

And there were the Christians also. The south of India became Christian about the first century A D under St. Thomas. So you will never understand the problem of India unless you realize it is not a country. Its called a subcontinent because it's attached to the continent of Asia, but it is, in fact, a continent. It's comparable to Europe in almost every way. The dimensions are not very far apart. The number of races, of languages, of dialects, of religions, is pretty near as great. And what the English did is produce a common market, run by them as sort of overlords 200 years ago. It's a very remarkable piece of social work which mustn't be minimized. So it is tragic that we should have had to divide it on leaving.

Q. Would you say you were pre-disposed in any way, before you reached India?

A. It is very difficult to say for certain what the state of my mind was on arrival. I was a great believer in a unified India. I thought the greatest single legacy we could leave the Indians was a unified country. It's a hell of an achievement to have a unified India. I realized I still had to unify the states with the rest of India.That, I thought was going to be the greatest difficulty and indeed it was an absolute miracle that we managed to get that straightened out.

I thought we should try everything we could to keep India united and I really was very keen that we should find a solution.

Q. What did the Hindu leaders think of partition?

A. Nehru was horrified by the idea of partition. He was an extraordinarily intelligent man. He saw the point on everything. He almost got himself in serious trouble when he saw the point on the Indian National Army court martials which no one else could see. He saw everything I was trying to do. I was completely in step with him. He would have given me any help he could to try and keep India unified if Jinnah had shown any sort of advance at all. Nehru was a first class chap.

Gandhi had no key at all. The key to the whole thing obviously was Jinnah. Not only that, but I believe there was confusion all the way through. Most people thought it was Gandhi. If they didn't think it was Gandhi they thought it was Nehru. But it wasn't Gandhi, it wasn't Nehru, it was Jinnah and Patel. They were the two people.

If Mr. Jinnah had died of this illness about two years earlier, I think we would have kept the country unified. He was the one man who really made it impossible. I didn't realize how impossible it was going to be until I actually met Jinnah.

I have the most enormous conceit in my ability to persuade people to do the right and intelligent thing, not because I am persuasive, so much, as because I have the knack of being able to present the facts in their most favourable light. I didn't realize there was nothing at all you could do about Jinnah. He had completely made up his mind. Nothing would move him.

Q. There was an impasse?
A. All I could do was just to negotiate. For instance, he wanted to have the whole of the Punjab, the whole of Bengal, and I told him this was not on. And then of course there followed that amusing and rather tragic game of around and around the mulberry bush which I shall describe.

When I told Jinnah I don't want you to have a partitioned India, I gave him all my reasons, and he said, "Well, I am afraid we must. We can't trust them. Look what they did to us in 1938-39. When you go, we'll permanently be at the mercy of the elected Hindu majority and we shall have no place, we shall be oppressed and it will be quite terrible."

I told him I was quite certain that people like Nehru, and there were many of his colleagues like him, had no intention whatever of oppressing them.

He said, "Well, that's what you say, but Nehru was still the most important figure when they did, in fact, oppress us in 1938-1939. And he failed to stop it. But," he said, "you must give me a viable Pakistan. You must give me the whole of Punjab as well as Sindh and NWFP and Bengal and Assam, and I shall want a corridor to unite them."

I said, "Look, Mr. Jinnah, you have said that you won't agree to having a minority population ruled by a majority population."
"Absolutely."

"Alright, I happen to know that in the Punjab and Bengal there are wide areas where the opposite community is in the majority. It happens also that they just about divide east and west. So I'm afraid that if you want Pakistan, I shall have to arrange for the partitioning of both the Punjab and Bengal. You cannot take into Pakistan the Hindus of Punjab and Bengal."

"Your Excellency doesn't understand that the Punjab is a nation. Bengal is a nation. A man is a Punjabi or a Bengali first before he is a Hindu or a Muslim. If you give us those provinces you must, under no condition, partition them. You will destroy their viability and cause endless bloodshed and trouble. "

"Mr. Jinnah, I entirely agree."
"Oh, you do."
"Yes, of course. A man is not only a Punjabi or a Bengali before he is a Muslim or Hindu, but he is an Indian before all else. What you're saying is the perfect, absolute answer I've been looking for. You've presented me the arguments to keep India united."

"Oh, you don't understand. If you do that..." and so we'd start all over again.
"Look, Mr.Jinnah, it is a fact you want partition?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, if you want partition then you must have partition of Punjab and Bengal."

You know, not only did this go on for hours, it went over several discussions. He simply was caught in his own trap. He finally gave up and said, "So you insist on giving me a moth-eaten Pakistan."
I said,"You call it a moth-eaten Pakistan. I don't even want you to take it at all if it's as moth-eaten as that. I'd really like you to leave India unified."

But he was absolutely set on his great cry of no-he was the de Gaulle of his day-and when after about three or four of these sessions I realized the man was quite unshakeably immovable and quite impervious to any quarrel or logical argument and not even prepared to look at any safeguards which I might be able to devise, I told him, "Mr. Jinnah, if only you would believe me, if only you would accept some organization like the Cabinet Mission Plan you would find that you could have great autonomy, the Punjab and Bengal could rule themselves, it would be even more autonomous than the USA. It would be quite independent. What is more, you could have the great pleasure of oppressing the minorities in any way you wanted to, because you'd be able to prevent the centre from interfering. Doesn't that appeal to you?"
"No, I don't want to be part of India. I'd sooner lose everything than be under a Hindu raj."

He went on and on. Very early I realized what I was up against. I never would have believed, I had never visualized that an intelligent man, well-educated, trained in England, was capable of closing his mind-it wasn't that he didn't see it-he closed his mind. A kind of shutter came down. Then I realized that while he was alive, nothing could be done. The others could be persuaded, but not Jinnah. He was a one-man band, and the one man did it like that.

Mind you, Jinnah is now forgotten. He was the man who did it. Bangladesh and all that misery which I forecast. Twenty-five years ago Rajagopalachari and I said it would last 25 years. It had to. . . It couldn't go on. All this misery and trouble was caused by Jinnah and no one else. And he hasn't had one word said against him. He was the evil genius in this whole thing. He presented a peaceful solution. He wouldn't play along at all. He was perfectly friendly and courteous and polite, at the end, emotionally pleased when I took him around and prevented him from being blown up[in Karachi, post-independence-blogger]. But with him there, you couldn't move him. You could move all the others. When Jinnah came to see me, he always sat there(relaxes, sits back easily), Ali Khan, when he came in with Jinnah sat right on the edge of his chair. He'd keep saying, "Yes, Qaidi." He would not even sit back.

The only difference between the scheme I was prepared to give Jinnah and that which he would have go under the Cabinet Mission Plan was that under the Cabinet Mission Plan he was obliged to accept a small, weak centre at Delhi controlling the defence, communications and external affairs. The three might really be lumped together under the general heading of defence.

That speech was absolutely the last plea for a united India. Please remember, every one of these interviews lasted one hour. They were reduced in my note to three or four pages. They represented, each page, 15 minutes of talking. Therefore, one-eighth of what was said was compressed into this.

I then realized that he had this faculty of closing his mind to the thing-he could see points, he was an able debater, he had a well-trained mind, he was a lawyer, but he gave me the impression of having closed his mind, closed his ears; he didn't want to be persuaded, he didn't want to hear. I mean whatever one said, it passed him absolutely by. In the case of partitioning Punjab and Bengal, he didn't even seem to have been listening to the previous thing at all.

His great strength. . . he got all this by closing his mind and saying, "No".And how anybody could fail to see Jinnah held the whole key to the situation, to the continent, in his hand, I fail to understand. I saw that dear old Gandhi held nothing at all in his hands.

Major, exactly, and that is why J3 Jinnah overwhelming
negates anything good that J2 and J1 Jinnah had.
Overall balance of J1 + J2 + J3 is overwhelmingly
negative as far as Indians are concerned.
That is why Indians really really do not need a
demagogue and vitiator like him, however brilliant
lawyer he was, not withstanding whatever crumbs he was
willing to throw Hindus and secularism in his Pakistan.

Re: # 101 Major

Then why did C Rajagoplachari, Gandhi and Azad believe that an accommodation should have been reached with Jinnah?

Those who accept the outcome as being optimal are also unwilling to consider the alternatives.

Re: # 98 pew

the "united india" option would have been even worse - contunous civil war and political stalemate... Patel/Nehru made the least bad choice of all bad choices available...

See - at time of partition, themses like "Hindus and Muslims are separate nations", "I ahve Loaded Gun", "Destroy India" was already playing in the public domain ad nauseam for a while ... and damage was already done - a lot of people have bought into those slogans and entire atmosphere was beyond control... trying to stop and contain would have made things even worse... congress was just a political party , not the govt itself...

People who blame Jinnah blame him for this reason - that, on purpose - he injected copious amount of toxicity into an already bad atomosphere as part of his high-stake game of political chicken... he being secular or what not does not really matter after that...

#96 Pew

4000-5000 hindu/muslims were killed in direct action in bengal (1946). About 3000 sikhs were killed in early March 1947 that prompted my relatives from various areas between Rawalpindi, Gujrat, Mandi Bhaudeen and Lahore to start leaving while full scale massacres were being threatened. I guess this many killings did not register any warning signs to our leadership.

As I said our leadership was schooled in angrezi schools and were very familiar with all the french-english wars with dates but did not know the history and fault lines of their own land. Yes, we can blame british for leaving us in a disorderly manner, but then again we were the ones who told those guys that we are more civilized eastern folks and we can peacefully coexist after they leave.

I gtg. It was a pleasure chatting with you :).

I think with the hatred and bile that Jinnah spew
while building his client's case, was bound to have an
effect, at that time or later.
There was systematic demonization of Sikhs and Hindus
during late 30s and 40s it has still continued ,in
Pakistan as Urstruly admitted.

And there were embers flying way before Independence,
it had started smoldering.

Re: # 97 Major

"...he was pressing down the slope hoping good people of congress will hold him from falling over altogether... well, guess what, congress just stood by and watched him fall..."

That's essentially what Nehru/Patel did. But, don't overlook the millions killed/displaced and the continuing harm done to Pakistan, India and Bangladesh ever since. Jaswant does not think that Nehru/Patel acted responsibly.

Re: # 90
[... he expected the Congress to accept Partition...Had the Congress known the holocaust ...they, too, would have had second thoughts...]

So essentially, jinnah was playing the game of chicken - he was pressing down the slope hoping good people of congress will hold him from falling over altogether... well, guess what, congress just stood by and watched him fall... LOL...

I am sure Congress knew what's going to happen... I mean, it wasn't too hard figure out given the communal tension... but they had to let it go, let jinnah have his pakiland and watch the freak show...

And they were right...

Re: # 95 Pardesi

"...If congress did not know that there will be displacement and massacres, then they were criminals of the first order..."

I don't think that anyone knew where the boundaries will lie. Would Amritsar be in Pakistan or in India? Lahore? How many would be displaced? That said, the failure to provide adequate protection to quell the riots lies with the British and Mountbatten. Nehru/Patel's eagerness to accept Partition is the subject of criticism by Jaswant.

"...If congress had not accepted partition, the situation would have continued to get worst from bad..."

That is hypothetical, and not necessarily a foregone conclusion. A loose federation might have eased the pressure and things could also have settled down. Remember, Gandhi never accepted the Partition plan. Under British rule, both Punjab and Bengal were relatively peaceful provinces for long durations. The madness did not really start until 1947, and most of it after August 16, when the boundary award was announced.

#90 Pew:

If congress did not know that there will be displacement and massacres, then they were criminals of the first order. These idiots should have seen the results of direct action and taken their collective head out of Ashrams and gone to see villages and towns of Punjab when my relatives were leaving in March. These bastards could have started planning for orderly transfer.

If congress had not accepted partition, the situation would have continued to get worst from bad. Once this fire was lit, there was no escaping and we were doomed.

Re: # 92 Riaz

I agree with you. I hope that Jaswant sets in motion a healing process. You could not have expected someone from the Nehru clan to have initiated it.

Re: # 91 Pardesi, you are right. My point was that Gandhi never agreed to Partition, but he had no official position in the Congress.