Jinnah is not relevant

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  • Balbir K Punj
  • Who was responsible for the creation of Pakistan? Could partition have been avoided? Was it merely the result of Britain’s attempt to divide India before leaving so that it could have elbow room in the sub-continent by playing India and Pakistan against each other?
  • In fact, neither the Congress nor Jinnah was responsible for partition. Nehru and others did fail to understand the challenge of Muslim separatism. The British, of course, played a mischievous role and the Communists provided the Muslim League with all the intellectual arguments it needed to press for partition.
  • The seeds of vivisection of India were sown long before the arrival of either Jinnah or Nehru on the Indian political scene. The real culprit was the Muslim psyche, which lived in the ‘glorious’ past when the Islamic sword ruled India. The prospect of living as equals with kafirs in independent India was unacceptable to Muslims. Jinnah, a leader without any mass following till the 1930s, was an instant hit with Muslims after he started articulating their separatist demands.
  • Speaking in Meerut on March 16, 1888, over a year before Jawaharlal Nehru was born, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, founder of Aligarh Muslim University, had espoused the two-nation theory. He had asked, “Is it possible that two nations — the Mohammedans and the Hindus — could sit on the same throne and remain equal in power? Most certainly not. It is necessary that one of the two should conquer the other.”
  • Two months later, in December 1906, the Muslim League was formed in Dhaka. And in 1908, after his return from England, Muhammad Iqbal wrote a poem Tarane-i-Milli, the first line of which reads: Chino-Arab hamara, Hindustan ho hamara, Muslim hain hum, Watan hai Saara Jahan hamara (China and Arabia are ours, Hindustan is ours; we are Muslims and the whole world is ours).
  • During this period, the bulk of the Hindus opted for the Congress. Muslims, in turn, opted for Jinnah, and not even five per cent of the people remained with Mahatma Gandhi. The fact that the Muslim masses did not follow Maulana Azad, a deeply religious Muslim, and supported Jinnah, who was not a practising Muslim, is itself instructive of the influence of Sir Syed’s two-nation theory.
  • The debate about Jinnah’s legacy is irrelevant for India. Instead of debating Jinnah’s ‘secular credentials’, we must seek to properly evaluate the threat to our secular democracy from the resurgent Islamic orthodoxy in Jinnah’s Pakistan, of which Al Qaeda, the LeT, etc, are only symptoms.