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| Jaswant’s book and Partition |
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Thursday, September 24, 2009
Yasser Latif Hamdani
Jaswant Singh’s book “Jinnah India — Partition Independence” has elicited interesting reviews in Pakistan. They are interesting entirely because of how off the mark they are which shows how little our country’s so-called intelligentsia understands the finer points of political science, constitutional law and history, especially those deep wells from which Jinnah himself professed to have drunk. Much has been written about the book – including the justified criticism that has been levelled at it for terrible punctuation and grammar. If Jinnah was calling, from beyond the grave, for his definitive biographer, the definitive biography now calls for an able editor. However, not many critics have addressed the political theme which has made it so famous.
The crux of the book is actually contained not in the main text — not that I want to drive down Jaswant Singh’s narrative — but in the author’s correspondence with Professors Susan and Lloyd Randolph. It is a matter of great regret that Benedict Anderson and his theory of nation as an imagined identity come up only once in the appendix. This should really have been the starting point. Jaswant Singh only acknowledges it in passing when he mentions that Jinnah held the question of nationhood as a purely subjective one i.e. if Americans say they are a nation, they are a nation. The issue as the Randolphs point out is the inability to distinguish between state and nation. Once it was conceded – and I’ll venture to say it was conceded long before Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru or anyone else showed up on the scene — that Muslims were a separate community, the hop from community to nation was a very small one.
Jaswant Singh’s narrative shows abundantly when the said acceptance came. All subsequent arrangements had to proceed on that basis. Jinnah came to accept it only later, having started his career as a Congressman who did not believe in religious distinctions and who was a strident opponent of the separate electorates. Here again the important journey for Jinnah is not as much from the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to the Quaid-e-Azam, but rather from an Indian to an Indian-Muslim and from a Congressman to the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. Tactical acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Gandhi’s characterisation of Jinnah as a ‘minority Muslim’ as Gurjar Sabha and finally the Lucknow Pact are important milestones in this journey, not just for Jinnah but India itself. The roots of what has now come to be defined as ‘consociationalism’ by political scientists were firmly laid and Jinnah’s role had been only to guide this to the nationalist advantage. While religious identities had been non-negotiable even before, it was Gandhi’s use of the Khilafat Movement that introduced into India’s politics a fundamentalist element. Meanwhile, Jinnah’s role ever since he was hailed as the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity remained one that sought to reconcile the Muslim consociationalist position, most notably from Punjab and Bengal, with that of his nationalist colleagues in the Congress Party. A federal democratic solution could have been found had Jinnah’s original four amendments to the Nehru Report been conceded. They were not.
Then came the conglomerate Muslim demands in the form of Jinnah’s 14 points. These were also rejected by the Congress by two polarising factors: One, the majoritarian attitude of the Hindu Mahasabha, and two Jawaharlal Nehru’s superficial understanding of Marxist thought. Contrary to popular belief, the Congress under Gandhi ended up delaying independence by at least two decades, as their civil disobedience campaigns were used by the British to stall responsible government and advance towards a dominion status. Given that independence only came to a partitioned India and that too in the form of a dominion status makes one wonder why the Congress acted with such intransigence in the 1920s and the 1930s. The break between Jinnah and the Congress came after a series of such blunders. Till 1935, Jinnah still described Muslims as a minority with a number of secular concerns, not religious ones. The 1937 elections were contested as an alliance between the Congress and the League. And yet the Congress refused to make coalition ministry in UP despite having failed to win a single Muslim seat as opposed to Muslim League’s 29. This was the beginning of the break.
The offer of reconciliation on the basis of one Indian nation that existed for twenty odd years was now recanted and the whole issue was restated in national terms — classic consociationalism — on March 23, 1940. From then on Jinnah clamed to speak for the Muslims on the basis of having secured the allegiance by then of most Muslim legislators all over India. Meanwhile, by not joining the Quit India Movement Jinnah neither cooperated nor obstructed the British war effort thus consolidating his party and tightening his grip on the leadership. The British realised that Jinnah had become the most powerful man in India and if he were to decide to patch things up with Gandhi, they would have to surrender India. Jinnah, by now, did not trust the Congress and its leadership and for good reason. He continued to organise the Muslim League and was rewarded with excellent results in 1946. The Muslim League won as many as 100 per cent of all central Muslim seats and 87 per cent of all provincial Muslim seats thus proving adequately Jinnah’s claim to be the sole spokesman for the Muslims of India.
While a re-interpretation of Jinnah’s struggle may have an impact on Hindu-Muslim relations in India, it is in Pakistan that its implications are fully relevant. For one thing, Jinnah’s political positions pooh-pooh the much sanctified ’Nazaria-e-Pakistan’ which was allegedly invented by one Sher Ali Pataudi in 1969. Pakistan was not founded as an ideological state but was founded like any other nation-state on the basis of national conflict which in this case was expressed in entirely constitutional terms. Nor is Jinnah’s vision – as expressed in his August 11, 1947 speech — in any way incompatible with his championing of the Muslim cause. Unlike his critics and his followers, he distinguished between the nation and the state. Jinnah had proceeded on the basis that a unitary centre in the great Indian subcontinent was a British creation. Flowing from this was his conviction that the Hindu-Muslim problem would best be solved if two federations, one Hindu-majority and the other Muslim-majority – both with significant minorities — would be formed which would then work out treaty arrangements with each on the basis of sovereign equality and form a confederation of India above them. Partition – especially of Punjab and Bengal — did not figure into his calculations and he opposed it to the very end. When taken to their logical conclusion, these facts make an inclusive — I daresay secular — Pakistan at peace within and without working in tandem and cooperation with India – based on what Jinnah himself described as ‘South Asia’s Monroe Doctrine’ — the irreducible minimums of Jinnah’s Pakistan. We Pakistanis must make a clear choice now: do we want a Pakistan that is hailed as a ghetto and hotbed of terrorism or a country working towards peace and prosperity not just of itself or the subcontinent but the entire world, as envisaged by Jinnah? The latter presents a grand opportunity for Pakistan to revisit the legacy of its founding father and if it does, it will stand as a proud and respectable member of the comity of nations. This will be a welcome outcome of Jaswant Singh’s book, not just here but in all concerned capitals in the world. Perhaps this is why one hopes that Singh’s book is on the reading list of the current occupant of the White House, who is known for his vociferous reading habits.
The writer is an Islamabad-based lawyer. Email: yasser.hamdani@gmail.com
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