By Nasim Zehra, Arab News
In response to L.K. Advani's comments on Quaid-e-Azam many India have pulled out their traditional "charge sheet" against Jinnah. Undoubtedly this flows from a collective Indian attachment to historical misrepresentation. Independent India needed a "villain" to explain the partition of India. Jinnah was the natural choice.
Yet historical facts, as told by even non-Pakistani historians, point out that the responsibility for the break-up lay elsewhere.
The circumstance that led to the creation of Pakistan was politics not religion. The first major political blunder was committed by the Nehru Report prepared in 1928. The committee rejected the Muslim demand that they be given one-third representation in the Central Legislature though their population was only 25 percent, to ensure that no measure was passed by the legislature against the interest of Muslims.
Jinnah was even prepared to accept joint electorates if the demand for one-third representation was accepted. The Congress only held out verbal assurances to Jinnah. He has sought concrete constitutional guarantees.
The Congress and Muslim League alliance cracked after the British Parliament adopted the Government of India Act in 1935. The act established a federal system that granted substantial autonomy to eleven provinces, of which Muslims comprised the majority in four: Bengal, Punjab, Sind and the North-West Frontier Province. When the Muslims did badly in majority Muslim provinces the Muslim League's offer for coalition was rejected by the Congress. Instead Congress offered absorption. Leaguers could only join Congress.
This offer was in stark contrast to the Congress-League Lucknow Pact of 1916. The pact conceded that the Muslims of India should be given one-third representation in the central government and that there should be separate electorates for all the communities until a community demanded joint electorates. This pact became the basis for the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. This was the first acknowledgement of the Muslims as a separate community with distinct political rights within a united India.
But now the Congress leadership erroneously believed the Muslim League would be weakened as would the Muslim resolve for political rights. And that it could be ignored as a representative political force. This changed Congress policy caused the end of Congress-League unity and ultimately the creation of Pakistan.
Nehru's secularism, built on denial of minority rights, in fact sowed the seeds for communal politics. The Congress was not keen on a partnership with the Muslims. It sought their absorption. Penderel Moon, the Indian civil servant wrote in "Divide and Quit": "In other words Congress was prepared to share the throne only with Muslims who consented to merge themselves in a predominantly Hindu organization. They offered the League not partnership but absorption. This proved to be a fatal error - the prime cause of the creation of Pakistan - but in the circumstances it was a very natural one."
However as Moon argues the decision of a victorious Congressional politics, to not share power with another party, the Muslim League, could be defended as "perfectly natural" in the tradition of parliamentary politics. This natural behavior instilled in the Muslims of India, indeed in their leader, the fear of how far this "perfectly natural" behavior would go in denying to the large chunk of Indian Muslims their religious, cultural and economic rights.
Congress leadership overlooked the question of political rights for the Muslims. In 1939 Gandhi wrote to a Muslim correspondent, "Why is India not one nation? Was it not one during, say, the Moghul period? Is India composed of two nations?" The answer simply was no.
Until the British arrived India was not a single nation state, it was never administered as a united country under the control of a centralized state. This changed after the British. It was in this context of the beginnings of a Western State and Constitutional rule in India, especially after the British exit, that Jinnah had sought Muslim political representation. Social coexistence that Gandhi wanted would have been possible by the Hindu majority granting rights to the Muslim minority.
The rise of a Muslim political consciousness was directly linked to the denial by the Congress of political rights to the Muslims. The results of the 1945 central legislative assembly elections proved Jinnah's hold on the masses. In Muslim constituencies the League got 86.6 percent of the votes to the Congress' 91.3 percent in non-Muslim areas.
Jinnah, the leader swarmed by Muslims who were a hundred years behind in mind and material of the astute and robust Hindu nationalism that Ram Mohan Roy had led, then rose, as the accomplished historian Ayesha Jalal aptly writes, to become the sole spokesman for the Muslims of India. Combining his inflexible political conviction with the sheer power of constitutionalism Jinnah was going to pilot his people to a safe and secure landing, either within united India or in an independent homeland.
For the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity his rift with the Congress began after Gandhi introduced "Hindu doctrine to energize mass support adopting his universally recognized trademarks, the dhoti and spinning wheel." (Meyers).
Yet first within an undivided India Jinnah had sought public space through political rights for Muslims. Sunil Khilnani, an Indian- born historian recalls in his book "The Idea of India: "Jinnah saw the Muslims as forming a single community, or 'nation,' but he envisaged an existence for them alongside a 'Hindu nation' within a united, confederal India. The core of his disagreement with Congress concerned the structure of the future state. Jinnah was determined to prevent the creation of a unitary central state with procedures of political representation that threatened to put it in the hands of a numerically dominant religious community." He adds that "As such, this was a perfectly secular ambition." Congress' refusal to accommodate this legitimate demand pushed the creation of Pakistan.
Indian justification for attacking Quaid includes their allegation that Quaid conspired with the British to divide India. Facts tell another story. While Nehru colluded with Viceroy Mountbatten to tamper with the Boundary Commission's work Indians accuse Quaid for conspiring with the British. According to Karl E. Meyer, in the Invention of Pakistan (World Policy Journal Spring 2003), in 1992 Christopher Beaumont, Radcliffe's former aide wrote a memorandum "that frontiers had been secretly redrawn to Pakistan's disadvantage. The most important reversal involved Ferozepore, an area of some four hundred square miles, important because its canal headwaters controlled the irrigation system in the princely state of Bikaner. Forewarned by a leak of Ferozepore's award to Pakistan, Nehru joined with the Maharajah of Bikaner in appealing to the viceroy. After a private lunch with Mountbatten - Radcliffe's second and last meeting with the viceroy - the chairman bowed to pressure and altered the Punjab line.
"This episode reflects great discredit on Mountbatten and Nehru," Beaumont's memorandum concluded, "and less on Radcliffe."
As for Jinnah, the Indian Nirad Chaudhuri in the second volume of his autobiography "Thy Hand, Great Anarch", writes: "I must set down at this point that Jinnah is the only man who came out with success and honor from the ignoble end of the British Empire in India. He never made a secret of what he wanted, never prevaricated, never compromised, and yet succeeded in inflicting unmitigated defeat on the British Government and the Indian National Congress. He achieved something which not even he could have believed to be within reach in 1946."
Former Advocate-General of Maharashtra, Mr. Seervai wrote in "Partition of India: Legend and Reality" that "It is a little unfortunate that those who assail Jinnah for destroying the unity of India do not ask how it was that a man who wanted a nationalist solution till as late as 1938, when he was 61 years of age, suddenly became a 'communalist'."
Pakistan's violent birth did not embitter the unbending Quaid. Even after the bloodletting divide he stood by his principles. As his August 11, 1947 address to Pakistan's constituent assembly demonstrated.
Quaid was as tall a man as history has ever carried. His penetrating vision had room for both a united India but he simultaneously foresaw the dangers of unrelenting Congress-led Hindu domination. Congress confirmed his fears. Jinnah knew parting was inevitable.
Someday Indian intellectuals will need to produce a revisionist history. Knock out their "learnt truths." The way Pakistan did.
