SOURCE: TNN
For quite some time now, a view has been taking root in India that puts the blame for Partition at the door of Congress, with Jinnah coming off favourably even as Jawaharlal Nehru is painted as the man who wanted to be prime minister by any means even if that meant dividing India on religious grounds.
Now, a new book by Ishtiaq Ahmed, Swedish political scientist of Pakistani descent, has rubbished this theory, arguing that Jinnah, who is venerated as Quaid-e-Azam in Pakistan, was adamant about partitioning India even though the Congress led by Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru tried till the very last moment to change his mind and keep India united.
“Jinnah spared no opportunity to communally attack Congress as a ‘Hindu party’ and Gandhi as a ‘caste Hindu’ and a ‘totalitarian dictator’,” Ahmed, the author of ‘Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History’, told TOI. “I have shown that from March 22, 1940, when Jinnah delivered his presidential address in Lahore, followed by the March 23, 1940 resolution passed on March 24, not even once did Jinnah or the Muslim League ever suggest their willingness to accept a united India, even with a loose federal system with most powers vested in the provinces.”
This new perspective challenges Pakistani-American historian Prof Ayesha Jalal’s theory that has held since the mid-1980s that Jinnah did his bit to come to a power-sharing agreement with the Congress. “From the late 1930s his main concern was the arrangements by which power at the centre was to be shared once the British quit India,” Jalal wrote in her 1985 book, ‘The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan’.
But Ahmed claims Jinnah did no such thing, and there isn’t a shred of evidence to support this theory. “There are ad infinitum speeches, statements and messages of Jinnah explicitly demanding the partition of India to create Pakistan. Also, Jinnah on scores of occasions said that it is nefarious Congress propaganda that he and the Muslim League were using the demand for Pakistan as a bargaining chip. He rejected such an insinuation saying he wanted the partition of India to create a separate and independent Pakistan,” Ahmed says.
Ahmed also accepts the theory that says that the British agreed to partition India as they feared a Congress-led India wouldn’t further the British imperialist cause, which a Muslim League-led Pakistan would. He has relied on primary sources, including Transfer of Power documents, to show that the British really feared that with so many socialist leaders, including Nehru, Congress-led India might ally with the Soviet Union.
Eventually when Partition happened, Jinnah complained about having received a “moth-eaten Pakistan”. But it appears that he wanted further division of India with a separate state for the Sikhs comprising the princely states in East Punjab and a separate Dravidistan in South India.
“His main offer was to agree to substantial autonomy for Sikhs if they agreed to support his demand for partition. Similarly, he encouraged the Dravidian leaders to demand a separate state – this idea was originally of Rahmat Ali. However, in early March 1940 when Dr Ambedkar and Periyar met Jinnah at his Bombay house, no agreement was reached to form an alternative party to the Congress. Both Ambedkar and Periyar were disappointed with Jinnah. Ambedkar wrote against Islam using very strong words which up until then he used for Hinduism’s notorious caste system,” Ahmed says.
The Stockholm University professor emeritus also rejects the claim that Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be a secular state: a view that arose from his August 11, 1947, speech to the Pakistan constituent assembly. “My theory is that the speech was to convince the Indian government not to expel the 35 million Muslims who were in India because Pakistan would prevent Hindus and Sikhs from leaving too by protecting them,” Ahmed says.
This was in keeping with the League’s ‘hostage theory’. “The assumption was that there would be substantial minorities in both India and Pakistan. That would mean that if Indian Muslims were coerced by Hindus in India, then Hindus in Pakistan would be given a tough time,” Ahmed explains. “Interestingly, on March 30, 1941 he was asked to explain what the fate of Muslims left in India would be… Jinnah in a fit of anger told them that he would make 2 crore Muslims taste martyrdom and be smashed in order to liberate 7 crores. The actual numbers left in India were 35 million,” Ahmed says.
He also says that Jinnah was no longer a secular Indian nationalist after 1920. From 1937, Jinnah was “a Muslim nationalist who described Hindus and Muslims as not only two separate and distinct political nations but also hostile and irreconcilable nations”. Ahmed also says that Nehru’s 1936 speech in Lucknow where he said that free India would abolish zamindari, secure peasants’ rights and introduce a Soviet model of development to establish a socialist state, seriously alarmed the Muslim landowners. This, coupled with Congress’s refusal to include Muslim Leaguers in the UP government unless they joined Congress, helped Jinnah expand Muslim League’s appeal.
In fact, Jinnah hated all those Muslim leaders like Maulana Azad who subscribed to the Congress’s inclusive, territorial nationalism and rejected the Pakistan demand. Azad and Hussein Ahmad Madani had warned that sectarian divisions would come to haunt Pakistan. “Jinnah had no clear vision for Pakistan. Once Pakistan came into being and the question of constitution and law began to be discussed, the old sectarian conflicts flared. Jinnah had assured all the atypical sects that Pakistan will be a non-sectarian Muslim state, but if you establish a state for Muslims, the question who is a true Muslim emerging because of historical sectarian animosities should not be surprising,” Ahmed says.
“In the 1950s it was the Ahmadis who faced the charges of holding beliefs subversive of true Islam. They were finally declared non-Muslims by Pakistan’s National Assembly in 1974. The Shia-Sunni conflict emerged in the wake of Gen Zia ul-Haq (Sunni) capturing power in Pakistan, the Ayatollahs in Iran and Saudi Arabia (extreme Sunni) challenging the Iranian bid to capture the leadership of the Muslim world. What followed was sectarian radicalisation of Shias and Sunnis. The so-called Afghan jihad was also an arena for anti-Shia violence.”
