To us, children of the dawn and daylight following that fateful midnight of Aug 14-15, ‘47. the partition of AkhandBharat into India and Pak is a given. Indeed, in the coy communal climes of today talking in terms of Hindu and Muslim, which was what partition was all about, may even seem out of sync. Old wounds are best left unopened but when history is sought to be falsified and hard-learnt wisdom risks forfeiture, the museum in the mind has to be reopened. And those skeletons cannot be a pleasant sight even from this far in time.
Jaswant Singh’s sudden enlightenment on the bloodiest chapter in Bharat’s history and his misplaced exoneration as well as eulogising of Jinnah may seem as just historical nitpicking at best and a typical publishers’ ploy to push and peddle his book at worst. But it reflects a deeper malaise: If even the Advanis and Jaswants with their known ideological baggage are eager to de-demonise and instead ‘angelise’ the likes of Jinnah, is there not something wrong with the nation’s genetics? For they are only following a pattern as starkly visible in them and their contemporaries like MSingh as it was evident in Gandhi, Nehru and Co: Capitulation to Muslim pressure. The mortal fear of the Mullah in the Indian psyche, particularly the leaders, is a historical reality. If Gandhi & Nehru indulged a living Jinnah all through, Advani and Jaswant, render posthumous obeisance. MSingh’s unsolicited prostration to Pak diktats recently is another instance.
Indeed, Jinnah’s legacy may be in tatters, but it has been most inauspicious for India. And now that he is in our midst again, his politics needs to be exhumed too. A word of caution: Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Jinnah etc were great individuals who gave their all for public causes at immense personal risk. For that very reason they cannot also escape the scrutiny of the retrospect vis-a-vis their methods, motives and mistakes. History is no respecter of reputation; Journalism, even less so. Armed with this alibi, it needs to be reiterated with all force that, whatever his stature in Pakistan, to India, Jinnah remains the Demon Incarnate, Jaswant’s certificate notwithstanding. He was the prime-mover of partition and the huge human tragedy that befell the sub-continent in 1947-48 can be squarely placed at Jinnah’s tomb. In fact, a year before, in 1946, he conducted a dress rehearsal of the deadly drama in the offing. His call for Direct Action is dubbed a watershed for the impending bloodshed: the violence unleashed on unsuspecting Hindus on and from Aug 16, the Direct Action Day, particularly in Calcutta, which became a ‘city of the dead’, the resultant Hindu backlash in Bihar and the spread of communal flames to other provinces burned up all hopes of a united India, in keeping with Jinnah’s script.
With a rank communal call of ‘Islam in danger’, Jinnah inaugurated the jihad against India that haunts us till date. His Muslim League described the Direct Action as a ‘holy war against the enemies of the Muslim nation’. ‘We are no believers in ahimsa’, the league leaders proclaimed and Jinnah himself said, ‘I will not discuss ethics’, when quizzed about the violence. To quote Sardar Baldev Singh ‘every imaginable artifice was being employed by Jinnah, his accredited colleagues and innumerable religious sectarian heads to rouse Muslim religious fanaticism against non-Muslims who were dubbed enemies of islam, knowing full well the grave consequences. It was these wild and reckless preachments provoking blood-lust and lauding tyrants such as Chengis khan that have led to the abominable atrocities in Punjab and elsewhere’. With such origins, is it surprising Pak is the epicentre of global jihadi terror today?
Many biographers claim that Jinnah started as a champion of Hindu-Muslim unity. Whatever his earlier pretensions, from the time he quit the Congress and joined the Muslim League in 1928, for two decades till death, he was possessed by a single obsession: The two nation notion. When Gandhiji wrote to him asking ‘how a body of converts and their descendents claim to be a nation apart from the parent stock’, pat came J’s reply: “We maintain that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation … by culture, civilisation, language, literature, art, architecture, names, nomenclature, values, proportion, legal laws, moral codes, customs, calendar, history, traditions, aptitudes, ambitions …by all canons of international law, we are a nation.’! And later, ‘Yes, two different nations confronting each other in every province, every town, every village of India. That is why we must be separated. That is the only solution’. In fact, he even suggested a Muslim corridor of many mini Paks connecting East and West Pakistan, a formula that makes your stomachs churn for its chilling connection to the present. But to his credit, he always referred to India as Hindustan, a concession that the ‘secular’ India of Nehru-Gandhi vintage gleefully rejected. But he was always bogged down by the bogey of a dominant ‘hindustan’ exercising hegemony over Muslims. On that count, his soul can rest in peace, thanks to H’stan’s vote-bank politics that has ensured a reverse veto instead.
No doubt, the British were as keen to divide and quit as they were about ‘divide and rule’, but Jinnah gave them an inferiority complex with his brutal intransigence over getting Pakistan, even if it were to be ‘truncated or moth eaten’. Again, Jaswant’s criticism of Nehru and Co’s role in partition does not make Jinnah any pious! But all the acquiescence to Jinnah’s whims and fatwas pales before their ignorance of Jinnah’s illness that claimed his life in 1948. Had the British and Indian leaders taken cognisance of the fact that they were yielding to a dying man in a terminal hurry, history would have been different. At least, the human havoc caused by his haste would have been mitigated with the most potent protagonist of Pakistan tucked away in paradise. Says M’batten: ‘ …it was the only chance we had of keeping some form of unified India, because Jinnah was the only, I repeat, the only stumbling block’. I think these should be enough for Jaswant to eat his written words, Advani, the earlier Jinnah victim, having already withdrawn his spoken ones on the Pak founder’s super secular sensibilities.
But Jinnah will continue to haunt, not just on account of the jihadis he had unleashed for perpetuity. Every terror attack, every communal riot, every appeasement gimmick, every day in Kashmir, indeed, every Khan, Haque and Ali under a cloud, would bring to fore the birth pangs of partition. Many here still mourn the mutilation of their motherland. There are those who think it was a blessing in disguise for otherwise the demography would have destroyed both democracy and the economy. Some argue that was the inevitable way out to avoid a protracted civil war; the human loss though immense was at least compressed into a few months. But most importantly, the home grown minority politics that looks at Iran, nuclear deals and even Afzal Gurus through the Muslim prism and many Muslims’ self alienation evidenced by their rejection of Vande Mataram or the national tri-colour raises a legitimate anxiety: Was Jinnah after all right about two nations? If so, what should have been done? Over to the address of Acharya Kripalani, the then Cong president, at the 1946 AICC session in Meerut: ‘Had Jinnah’s scheme envisaged a total and wholesale transfer of populations and the concentration of all the Muslims in (undivided) India in one compact territory (Pakistan) so that no Hindu, Sikh, Christian or Parsi is left in the Muslim State and no Muslim left anywhere else in India, the scheme might at least have the merit of being a logical solution to the problem, however costly, tragic and inhuman it might be to carry out. If the Muslim league claims Pakistan on religious and communal grounds, let it face all implications and not try to eat the cake and yet have it’. Ambedkar even argued that Jinnah’s Pakistan was futile because the Muslims who were most desperate for separation actually stayed back in Bharat!
Well, our forebears were at least candid, even if no match for Jinnah’s bullying. The current crop while lacking that virtue are instead on reverse gear. Indeed, J.Singh, in attempting to cover Jinnah with glory has himself sunk in the mud of the latter’s grave!
(Quotes courtesy: Madhav Godbole’s ‘The Holocaust of Indian Partition’ and H.V.Seshadri’s ‘The Tragic story of Partition)
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