What bothered me, apart from Kasuri posing with Gandhi's charkha, was his parrot-like reiteration that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was opposed to India's partition, much like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was
The brouhaha over the event to release Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri’s book in Mumbai is not worthy of either serious or detailed comment. Manufactured controversies to push book sales (or drum up audience for a film’s first day first show) are dime a dozen. Only the perpetually outraged, and those in media whose daily bread depends on converting ersatz outrage into a ‘burning question’, obsess with passing shows.
Which does not mean Kasuri’s Neither a Hawk Nor a Dove is not worthy of comment. It takes a lot of time and effort to plod through 850 pages of dense, boring, poorly crafted prose. I will revert to the book in due course. What bothered me, apart from Kasuri posing with Gandhi’s charkha, was his parrot-like reiteration that Mohammed Ali Jinnah was opposed to India’s partition, much like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was.
Yes, Gandhi was unrelenting in accepting India’s partition along communal lines. But JinnahIJ Surely Kasuri jokesIJ But for Jinnah, who anointed himself as the ‘sole spokesman’ of undivided India’s Muslims, and whose Muslim league held the pistol while Radcliffe wielded his pencil, India would have been one. With what, possibly terrible, consequences is entirely a different issue and another story.
So, let’s stick to Jinnah for what he was, not his reconstructed image to further the cause of chicanery. Here are some notes after reading another book, Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah, India, Partition, Independence. For the record, this book too ran into needless controversy when it was released. I had opposed then, and still do, the BJP’s hounding of Jaswant Singh and the ban on the book in Gujarat (which was struck down by the courts). No book should be proscribed or burned for what it says between its covers. It’s an individual’s choice to read or shun it. But I digress; let’s get back to Jinnah and partition.
One has seen Jinnah, we are told, cried in public only thrice in his life. The first occasion was at the grave of his wife, Ruttie, the day she died. The next time he was spotted weeping was on the train from Calcutta after Congress refused to countenance the Muslim league’s objections to Motilal Nehru’s 1928 report (known as the ‘Nehru Report’) proposing dominion status for India with a Constitution that provided for a unitary system of governance and equal rights for all citizens. The last time Jinnah was seen shedding tears, or so his friends recall in their memoirs, was during a visit to a Hindu refugee camp in Karachi in January 1948. Moved by the plight of the refugees, he is believed to have hoarsely whispered, “They used to call me Quaid-e-Azam; now they call me Qatil-e-Azam.”
It is possible that Jinnah, who is not known to have ever smiled, grieved over Ruttie’s grave. It is also believable that he wept bitter tears of rage after being given the short shrift by the Congress over the Nehru Report (he was to later come up with what is known as ‘Jinnah’s 14 Points’ which, under the guise of proposing that the “future Constitution should be federal with residuary powers vested in the provinces,” demanded that “in the Central legislative Assembly, Muslim representation shall not be less than one-third”). But it’s rather hard to believe that the man who was unmoved by the blood-letting that followed his call for ‘Direct Action’ in August 1946 and continued till he had attained his “moth-eaten Pakistan” a year later would be moved by the sight of wailing women and orphaned children at a Hindu refugee camp in January 1948. If at all Jinnah was distressed it was because his vanity had been hurt — the ‘Quaid’ was being spat upon as a ‘Qatil’.
I am neither a scholar nor a historian. I am the child of parents who suffered the horrors of partition; my father arrived in India from east Pakistan with his widowed mother and four younger siblings, penniless and virtually with nothing more than the clothes on his back. He didn’t have the privilege or the luxury of pondering over the minutiae of the politics of partition in the amiable surroundings of Nehru Memorial library or groves of academe. Yet, I do not recall him ever expressing either rancour or regret. Even if he wanted to, my mother wouldn’t have let him. The struggle for survival rode rough-shod over any emotional struggle that might have peeked hesitantly in their minds.
And unlike many others who believe that partition was a blunder, that India would have been one large happy family had the Radcliffe line not been drawn, that the Congress should not have persisted with its idea of India as one nation with a unitary system in which power would be concentrated at the Centre, that the Muslim league had a case when it argued for proportionate representation if not more for Muslims to compensate them for the loss of the power they wielded before the British took charge of India’s affairs, I belong to the minority which believes that partition was the third best thing to have happened to us.
The first was Bengal’s deliverance from the depredations of a rapacious Nawab Siraj-ud-Daullah, the second was the failure of the Ghazis to prop up a dissolute badshah in 1857. Jaswant Singh obviously disagreed with this contention: “It was here in the middle of the 19th century that the symbol of our sovereignty was finally seized and trampled underfoot by British India.” Not everybody mourned that event, just as Hindus in Bengal were not terribly upset when Nawab Siraj-ud-Daullah was given the boot in 1757.
But that defeat of presumed Muslim supremacy in 1857 was not without significance. Rudely stripped of their status as a minuscule minority ruling over India’s vast majority, Muslims discovered salvation in separatism in the subsequent decades — first in terms of faith and culture, and later with the formation of the Muslim league in 1906, in Muslim identity politics. Jinnah did not gravitate towards the league then, but it was his natural home and he couldn’t possibly stay away for long. The “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” thought he could bargain for a slice of power through exclusivist constitutionalist politics, which he thought was his forte, but when Gandhi steered the Congress to mass politics, Jinnah, clad in Savile Row suits, sipping whisky and munching on ham sandwiches, couldn’t quite see himself mingling with the unwashed masses.
Ironically, this is the man, who had little knowledge of Islam and even lesser respect for its core beliefs, who would emerge as the ‘sole spokesman’ of undivided India’s Muslims, or so he would insist on being known as; that was a platform he found convenient so as not to get pushed out from national politics by the Congress and its leaders, namely Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Yet, for all his rancid denunciation of Hindu majoritarianism, of Congress’s emphasis on centralisation of power, of everything that together shaped India and the Indian identity, he could never command cross-country Muslim support. Or else, the Muslim league would not have to look for proportionate representation.
Jinnah’s rhetoric became the recurrent theme of Muslim league politics after the lahore Resolution of 1940. Would Jinnah have ever recanted had Nehru toed the line of least resistance and gone with himIJ Nehru talked of conditional participation in the Constituent Assembly, of reserving the right to modify the Cabinet Mission Plan. Jinnah spoke a sharply different and sinister language: He recalled the lahore Resolution and reiterated the demand for Pakistan; he threatened “Direct Action”.
Thus was conceived, in the dark labyrinths of his mind, and given shape to in consultation with his Faustian colleagues, ‘direct action day’ to be observed on August 16, 1946. “We shall have India divided or we shall have India destroyed,” Jinnah thundered. Did the Quaid-e-Azam feel any sense of remorse when he saw vultures feasting on the dead after the Great Calcutta KillingIJ He didn’t. That is the Jinnah which his apologists in both India and Pakistan whitewash with guileless ease.
It is argued by them that if only Nehru had been farsighted, had he and Patel not colluded to pass the March 8, 1947 Congress resolution asking for the partition of Punjab (and keeping the option of partitioning Bengal open), had they been more accommodative towards Jinnah, there would have been no Pakistan, no Bangladesh today, but a “magnificent edifice of a united India”. Jinnah’s opposition, as Jaswant Singh wrote, “was not against the Hindus or Hinduism, it was the Congress that he considered as the true political rival of the Muslim league, and the league he considered as being just an extension of himself”. Jaswant Singh oversimplified the case for the Quaid-e-Azam, “The Muslim community for Jinnah became an electoral body; his call for a Muslim nation his political platform; the battles he fought were entirely political — between the Muslim league and the Congress; Pakistan was his political demand over which he and the Muslim league could rule.”
Jinnah, who died 13 months after ensconcing himself as the Governor-General of Pakistan, sowed the seeds of his country’s break-up before he discovered that even ‘sole spokesmen’ are but mere mortals. On his first and only visit to Dhaka, he pompously declared that Urdu, a language he neither spoke nor read, leave alone write, would be the state language; the Bengalis could either like it or lump it. Bangladesh chose to lump it.
So, thank you very much Mr Kasuri. But you can keep your Qaid-e-Azam. We would rather remember the other Jinnah, the ‘Qatil-e-Azam’.