Just as the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) idea of India is that of a Hindu nation and not a multicultural one, Jaswant Singh’s interpretation of Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s pre-1947 role is at odds with the widely held perceptions in India.
By arguing that the founder of Pakistan has been unfairly demonised for partitioning the country, Singh not only went against the BJP’s views, which has now expelled him, but also against an overwhelming majority of public opinion in India.
In addition, he courted further controversy by arguing that it was actually Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel who were more responsible for dividing the country than Jinnah.
Before considering Singh’s historical fallacies, it may be instructive to examine his possible motives. In doing so, it is necessary to recall that before him, another BJP leader, L.K. Advani, had praised Jinnah to the surprise and embarrassment of many in the BJP and earned the displeasure of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
However, Advani’s adulation of the Quaid-e-Azam was more historically valid than Singh’s, for he quoted Jinnah’s celebrated speech of Aug 11, 1947, to emphasise his secularism.
In that speech, which Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal compared with the Magna Carta and another historian, Akbar S. Ahmed, with Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, Jinnah had outlined his vision of the new country where “Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State”.
There is little doubt that there has rarely been such a remarkable exposition of secularism before or after that speech, which is ignored in today’s Pakistan and which was described as “a serious lapse on his (Jinnah’s) part” by Sharif-ul-Mujahid, director of the Quaid-e-Azam Academy in the 1980s.
However, Advani’s discovery of it nearly six decades after it was delivered suggests a personal motive rather than a belated attempt to set the record straight. The explanation perhaps lies in the BJP leader’s attempt to pose as a moderate after the realisation that his hawkish image as the ‘rath yatri’ (his famous chariot-led march) of 1990 was no longer paying political dividends.
Arguably, a similar motivation guided Jaswant Singh. He, too, seemed to have realised after the party’s second successive defeat in a general election that it had reached a dead end so far as the espousal of its Hinduttva philosophy is concerned. Not surprisingly, Singh had wanted the BJP to take a fresh look at its pro-Hindu world view.
By praising Jinnah, the MP from Darjeeling apparently wanted to distance himself from his party’s anti-minority outlook and chart a new political course for himself as a moderate. But, predictably, his first step in this direction evoked the ire of both his party and the RSS.
While Advani was relieved of his position as the party chief under pressure from the RSS following his pro-Jinnah observations, Singh, who is a much lesser figure, has had to pay a heavier price for defying the party line.
But, irrespective of the political fallout, what has to be considered are the distorted analyses of the events prior to independence in his book: “Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence”. His failure to understand why Jinnah is excoriated in India is a strange affectation considering that it was the Muslim League leader’s two-nation theory which paved the way for partition to the accompaniment of communal violence sparked by his dangerously provocative Direct Action to secure Pakistan.
Once the religious passions had been whipped up by Jinnah, based on his “Islam is in danger” assertion because of the dominance of Hindus under Congress rule, there was little that Nehru and even Mahatma Gandhi could do to stem the tide.
True, the Congress also made mistakes. For instance, a more accommodative attitude towards the Muslim League in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh) after the Congress’s 1937 election victory could have diffused the situation. As M.R.A. Baig, one of Jinnah’s advisors, said: “Pakistan never came to Jinnah’s mind till about 1939… When the Congress formed the provincial government (in UP), he expected them to form a Congress-League coalition, which was his concept of Hindu-Muslim unity…”
“It was only when the Congress, wedded to political theories perfectly applicable to Britain, such as majority party government, and not recognising that in Indian conditions, a numerical majority could be synonymous with a communal majority … that he turned to Pakistan.”
There were other miss-steps, too, as noted by Abul Kalam Azad in his “India Wins Freedom” as when Nehru said that the Congress would enter the constituent assembly “completely unfettered by agreements”. Since Jinnah interpreted this as a rejection of the Cabinet Mission plan, which the Muslim League had accepted, he also repudiated it and said that Pakistan remained the only course left for his party.
Even if the Congress’ authoritarian instincts (which again manifested themselves during the 1975-77 Emergency) made it dismissive of other parties, they are not sufficient to explain Jinnah’s transformation from a constitutionalist to a votary of street violence and from an “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” to a patron of communal carnage.
As is clear, there were two Jinnahs – one a hero and the other a villain. The hero was driven by his thwarted ambitions because of the ascendancy of Gandhi and Nehru to turn into its opposite with a vengeance. Jaswant Singh’s mistake is that he ignores this final phase of Jinnah’s career.
