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'Almost every Muslim was with Gandhi, not Jinnah': Rediff.com news
- In 1915, Gokhale advised Gandhi to keep 'his ears open and his mouth shut' for a year, and see India. Gandhi stopped in Calcutta on his way to Rangoon and spoke to students. Politics, he said, should never be divorced from religion. The signal was picked by Muslims planning to marry politics with religion in their first great campaign against the British empire, the Khilafat movement.
- Over the next three years Gandhi prepared the ground for his version of the freedom struggle: a shift from the legislatures to the street; a deliberate use of religious imagery to reach the illiterate masses through symbols most familiar to them (Ram Rajya for the Hindus, Khilafat for the Muslims); and an unwavering commitment to the poor peasantry, for whom Champaran became a miracle.
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History might be better understood if we did not treat it as a heroes-and-villains movie. Life is more complex than that. The heroes of our national struggle changed sometimes with circumstances. The reasons for the three instances I cite are very different; their implications radically at variance. I am not making any comparisons, but only noting that leaders change their tactics.
Non-violent Gandhi, who broke the empire three decades later, received the Kaiser-I-Hind medal on June 3, 1915 (Tagore was knighted the same day) for recruiting soldiers for the war effort.
Subhas Chandra Bose, ardently Gandhian in 1920, put on a uniform and led the Indian National Army with support from the Fascists.
Jinnah, the ambassador of unity, became a partitionist.
The question that should intrigue us is why.
Ambition and frustration are two reasons commonly suggested in India, but they are not enough to create a new nation.
Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan only in 1940, after repeated attempts to obtain constitutional safeguards for Muslims and attempts at power-sharing had failed.
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Friday, August 21, 2009
'Almost every Muslim was with Gandhi, not Jinnah': Rediff.com news
