Nehru-Jinnah

Nobody, including Jinnah, Nehru, Patel, or Lord Mountbatten, had any idea of what Partition would entail. Would they, with the benefit of hindsight, have chosen a different course?

Success has many fathers, as the familiar proverb puts it, while failure is an orphan. In the event, conjecture about Pakistan’s possible progenitors comes across as a decidedly odd phenomenon.

The one striking feature about former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh’s political biography of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, relentlessly cited in reports about the controversy spawned by the book, is the author’s supposed contention that Pakistan would not have been born but for the supportive stance adopted by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Given the broadly positive reception accorded to the book in Pakistan, does it follow that Pakistanis are happy to acknowledge the Pandit and the Sardar’s pro-creative role in the birth of their nation? Or is their enthusiasm based chiefly on the childish ire generated by Jaswant Singh’s version of history on the Indian side of the border?

As far as I am concerned, it’s entirely a question of blame rather than credit. He is by no means the first person, or even the first Indian, to point out that Jinnah’s demand for Pakistan was primarily a bargaining ploy and that the leaders of the Indian Congress could have thwarted Partition had they agreed, for instance, to a federation based on a weak centre.

Their intransigence effectively blocked feasible alternatives and propelled the two-nation theory towards its illogical conclusion.

This hardly qualifies as a novel thesis, and there can be little question that Jaswant Singh’s petulant expulsion from the Bharatiya Janata Party reflects poorly on the latter’s viability as a political force in a secular country. The Congress, too, has reacted importunately to the book, possibly because of its reluctance to countenance criticism of India’s first Prime Minister by a prominent opposition figure (notwithstanding the party’s own drift away from what is regularly derided as “Nehruvian socialism”).

The fact is that more than six decades after independence, the blame game is still being played in the subcontinent. Barring honourable exceptions, the general impression in India seems to be that Partition was a fulfilment of Jinnah’s dream; a perhaps inevitable corollary of this view is that he was a closet Islamic fundamentalist.

The Pakistani equivalent of this phenomenon is the inability to make a distinction between the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s endeavours to forge communal harmony seldom find mention in Pakistani history books. Nor is there any mention of the fact that in the charged atmosphere of 1947, Nehru routinely risked his life to protect Muslim refugees—as did the great love of his life, Edwina Mountbatten, whose empathy with the victims of violence, regardless of their caste or creed, contrasted with her vain husband’s obsession with his own place in history.

Jaswant Singh dwells time and again on the mutual antipathy between Nehru and Jinnah, implying that the former was ill served by his rancour. Both leaders were secular Indian nationalists before Jinnah dedicated himself to communal leadership. Nehru was able to prevent India from lapsing into an identity focused on religion. “As long as I am at the helm of affairs,” he declared, “India will not become a Hindu state. The very idea of a theocratic state is not only medieval but also stupid.”

In his oft-quoted speech to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly in the run-up to Partition, Jinnah offered the impression that a citizen’s faith would bear no relation to his or her status. But did he wonder whether it could indeed be so, given that Pakistan had been founded on an unequivocally communal basis? And would it not have made infinitely more sense to strive for such an undertaking in an undivided India?

To his credit, Jaswant Singh concedes that, after the event, Nehru regretted Partition and held out the hope that it may be reversed. Based on a perusal, rather than a complete reading, of his book, he does not cite indications, insufficiently corroborated though they may be, that Jinnah was similarly inclined.

“According to his doctor,” writes Alex von Tunzelmann in Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, “Jinnah [in his last days] saw Liaquat [Ali Khan] and told him that Pakistan was ‘the biggest blunder of my life’. Further yet, he declared: ‘If now I get an opportunity, I will go to Delhi and tell Jawaharlal to forget about the follies of the past and become friends again.’ ”

The evidence, admittedly, is circumstantial, but it complements the impression Jinnah created when, during a Pakistan Times-sponsored flight to survey the extent of the refugee crisis in the Punjab, he held his head in his hands and reputedly remarked, “Oh my God, what have I done?”

Nobody, including Jinnah, had any idea of what Partition would entail. Would he, with the benefit of hindsight, have chosen a different course? Almost certainly. So would have Nehru and Lord Mountbatten. And Patel, notwithstanding his pro-Hindu slant. Radcliffe’s boundaries tend to be derided, and not without cause. But no possible division of India could have been entirely satisfactory to anyone.

That view does not, however, solve the problem of Pakistan’s antecedents. There is even an unexpected intruder. “There can be no doubt,” writes von Tunzelmann, “that his public championing of the Muslim League’s cause in the House of Commons throughout 1946 and 1947, and of Pakistan’s thereafter, was crucial both to the creation of Pakistan and to the British government’s support for its interests over the years to come. If Jinnah is regarded as the father of Pakistan, [Winston] Churchill must qualify as its uncle; and, therefore, as a pivotal figure in the resurgence of political Islam.”

That last bit is, arguably, a bit of a stretch. In 1947, hardly anyone could have suspected that a nation carved out on a confessional basis would lead to a country obsessed with jihad. However, there can be little doubt that it is Jinnah—rather than Nehru or Patel—who ought to have known that the country he left behind 61 years ago was not destined for secularity.

(Email: mahir.dawn@gmail.com)

11 September 2009

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article18323.ece

RYD: Folly lay in rejecting the Cripps's Proposals in 1942. It was almost Independence without Partition. The Proposals were considered as a post-dated cheque drawn on a bank under liquidation. The entire Indian leadership's lack of understanding of the political forces and the world forces had led to this disastrous situation. The problem has now become multiply difficult.

Mahir Ali: Many thanks for your post. I tend to agree with you—chances are the Cripps formula would have worked. And even if it hadn't been a complete success, it would still have produced less painful results than the alternative.

RYD: My conviction is that Cripps’s was a thing which had come on the wings of inspiration and should have been immediately accepted. The issues at the time of the War were issues of civilization itself, of the mankind. The offer had in it the full seeds of complete Independence. Even if it was defective in the eyes of the subcontinental leadership, those eyes should have looked beyond that frame of time. And, assuming for a moment that it was a British ploy, the Struggle was after all not so flimsy and feeble that it could not have been handled, that the imagined adverse effects could not have been thwarted.

But that is all history now. The question is: how does one look at the future? We are presently in a state that we have won political freedom but the freedom of the mind and of the life has yet to be won. That is a much deeper problem. One of the steps could be, for the elite, to move in the direction of liberal thought which looks forward rather than towards the formulations which are actually a drag on us. Media is one place where this can, and should, happen. We have to focus on social issues in the context of the future which must come to us. Moulding that future itself is a part of that liberal thought. ...

Mahir Ali: The way I see it, partition was a monumental—and unnecessary—tragedy. More than 60 years later, our purpose must be to move on. But misconceptions about the events of 1947 keep getting in the way. In Pakistan, for instance, the tendency is to blame everything negative on Hindus/Sikhs and specifically the Congress. I suspect such biases will have to be largely overcome in the interests of peace in the subcontinent. It makes perfect sense for India and Pakistan to promote amity and goodwill and trade and cultural exchanges, and so on. But the wretched past keeps getting in the way. Hopefully, one day we shall overcome...

(Private e-mails)

Here are the comments which appear on the Hindu web-page:

The question put up is so equivocal, but the last sentences make it clear.

An immaculate article.

from:  Santoshkalyan Chakravarthy

Posted on: Sep 11, 2009 at 13:23 IST

Sir,
'Nobody, including Jinnah, had any idea of what Partition would entail'. More so that even after 60 years both Nations would still fight to nullify each other. That both countries would end up being extensions of the Cold War and what not.
One can agree with the views presented by you on Jinnah, Nehru and Patel. However, what bemuses me till date is the gross underscoring of the role of Gandhi. How could he let that happen for he had and as you have acknowledged in your article was religion-free.?

from:  Ravi

Posted on: Sep 11, 2009 at 17:00 IST

A perfectly disinterested point of view on the partion of india. Mahir's perspicuity on the subject matter is commendable.

from:  Mohammed Ayaz Qureshi

Posted on: Sep 11, 2009 at 21:14 IST

People ranging from brutal despots to all sorts of fundamentalists with ulterior motives and unfounded claims to authority, do find it quite tempting to invoke selective historical events and antecedents out of context to prove their subjective viewpoints and thereby enlist support, that perhaps was not forthcoming. The Jinnah-Nehru-Patel controversy raised by Jaswant Singh is another such instance to keep alive the communal conundrum in the context of India and Pakistan.

from:  Jai Prakash Sharma

Posted on: Sep 11, 2009 at 23:12 IST

A few men's folly, the partition, has changed the destinies of millions unfortunately. When will the extremists of today get to learn this?

from:  Bujal

Posted on: Sep 12, 2009 at 09:06 IST

If Modi is responsible for Godhra and after, then Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi together with the British government are equally responsible even though they had no idea about the aftermath of the Partition and Independence.

from:  Rahul

Posted on: Sep 13, 2009 at 20:33 IST

I am sorry to say that even though you talk correctly about the prevailing view of Jinnah in India, you yourself have fallen victim to the visual media's inaccurate depiction of Pakistanis being obsessed with 'jihad'. Pakistan has its fair share of problems, but the masses turning to 'jihad' is not one of them. It is common knowledge that the extremists in Pakistan are a weapon of war created and funded by the United States to battle the Soviet Union.

from:  Khan

Posted on: Sep 26, 2009 at 19:52 IST

Jaswant Singh has concentrated on the roles of individuals. The partition which Indian leaders do not tire to call 'vivisection' was historical inevitability. Whatever is the current map of sub-continent, it is the result of interplay of historical forces.
Wajih Hamdani

Kamoke

from:  Wajih Hamdani

Posted on: Oct 14, 2009 at 12:53 IST

Folly lay in rejecting the Cripps's Proposals in 1942. It was almost Independence without Partition. The Proposals were considered as a post-dated cheque drawn on a bank under liquidation. The entire Indian leadership's lack of understanding of the political forces and the world forces had led to this disastrous situation. The problem has now become multiply difficult.

from:  RY Deshpande

Posted on: Nov 3, 2009 at 09:30 IST