By and large, almost every phase of Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah's multi-faced life was dominated by four qualities: an unswerving faith, an indomitable will, an inflexible determination and a tenacity of purpose that defied definition.
Add to them four other attributes: his prescience, idealism, clarity of vision and intellectual vigour that had imbued him with the faith that informed his long, crowded public life. And the taxonomy of the basic leadership-specific resource base, that enabled him to formulate and define for himself the goals he should pursue, gets explicated and delineated.
And once the goals had been set, his faith in his ability to achieve them sharpened his uncanny singleness of purpose, and his iron will and inflexible determination saw to it that from them he swerved not.
Thus, once Jinnah had set his heart on something, he refused to accept defeat, whatever the odds. And achieve he did ultimately, no matter how hopeless his pursuit might seem in the beginning. This was true of Jinnah's early career no less than that of its finale.
To quote Sarojini Naidu, one of the top Indian nationalist leaders, the first Indian Governor of U.P., and his first biographer, "The true criterion of his greatness lies not in the range and variety of his knowledge and experience but in the faultless perception and flawless refinement of his subtle mind and spirit; not in a diversity of aims and the challenge of a towering personality but rather in a lofty singleness and sincerity of purpose and the lasting charm of a character animated by a brave conception of duty and an austere and lovely code of private honour and public integrity".
In his early life Jinnah's most magnificent passion was to succeed in law. For three dreary years he went up and down the streets of Bombay without claiming any significant brief. Yet, when sometime later, he was offered a job that would ultimately fetch him Rs 1,500 a month, he declined it, saying, "I hope to make that much every day". And within two years he did make good his claim: he was making Rs 2,000 month.
And, ere long, he not only became the leading lawyer at the Bombay High Court; he also displayed immense courage in taking up the defence of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and B. G. Horniman against charges of sedition. That, if anything, provides an irrefutable index to his whole souled dedication to the ethics of his profession.
While still a law student in England during 1892-96, Jinnah had asked of himself, "Why should there be less freedom in India than there is in England?" No wonder, wresting more freedom for India became Jinnah's foremost passion once he had established himself at the bar, and became financially solvent to pursue methodically and passionately his extra-professional goals.
The demand for self-government, he realised quite early in his political career, would go by sheer default unless preceded by a Hindu-Muslim concordat. He therefore, tried to bring the Hindus and Muslims, the Congress and the League, on one platform from 1912 onwards. And he played the prime role in getting the two representative bodies to go in for such a concordat, and the Lucknow Pact (1916) was the result.
Thus, he came to be widely hailed by the nationalist circles and in the nationalist press "not merely as an ambassador but as an embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity". Ram Krishna Gokhale, the foremost Congress leader till his death in 1915, had said of him, "He has true staff in him and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which would make him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity", and Sarojini Naidu had subtitled the compilation of his speeches and statements which she edited and published in 1918 as "An Ambassador of Unity".
For the best part of the next two decades, Jinnah, despite increasing communal bickering and religious tensions, continued to live up to that faith in him. He repeatedly tried to bring about a rapprochement between the two communities, but circumstances failed him.
He formulated a series of constitutional proposals and even tried to humour the Hindu-dominated Congress' reservations to the extent of even waiving the Muslim right to separate electorates, which had been their most basic demand since the 1880s and which the British had conceded in the 1909 Act and the Congress had acquiesced into accepting in the Lucknow Pact - but all this to no avail.
He told the all Parties National Convention at Calcutta in late 1928, "... it is essential that you must get not only the Muslim League but the Musalmans of India and here I am not speaking as a Musalman but as an Indian. And it is my desire to see that the seven crores of Musalmans march along with us in the struggle for freedom.
Would you be content with a few? Would you be content if I were to say, I am with you? Do you want or do you not want the Muslim India to go along with you?"
Alas, the Convention failed to heed his plea and rejected out of hand even the more basic Muslim demands. Despite this rebuff, as against the traditional Indo-Muslim historiography and popular mythology, "the parting of the ways" had not come in 1928/1929. Documents of the period indicate Jinnah strenuously working for a Hindu-Muslim settlement, and having met Gandhi, Motilal Nehru, Patel, Bhulabhai Desai, K.M. Munshi and Sitaramayya, among others, in pursuit of his goal, and even having gone out of the way to wave the olive branch during 1936.
But the final parting did come and had to come when the Congress haughtily rejected out of hand the Congress-League coalition idea and went ahead installing one party-governments in six out of eleven provinces in July 1937. No wonder, Jinnah became despaired of Hindu-Muslim unity, and, driven to the wall, took the path of confrontation with the Congress.
Once Jinnah became convinced that Muslims could expect neither justice nor fair play at the hands of the more numerous, more advanced and more resourceful Hindus and the dominant Congress, he decided to create a nation our of an inchoate and backward minority.
During the next three years (1937-40), he awakened the listless Muslims to a new consciousness; built up the moribund Muslim League into a mass organisation, with branches at the divisional, district and ward/mohalla levels, made it democratic in its structure, and changed its creed to independence; and, above all, gave coherence and direction to the Muslims' innermost, yet vague, urges and aspirations. He also filled them with his own indomitable will, his own undying faith in their destiny. From a more rabble he welded them into a nation - united, strong, self-conscious.
What, however, sets him apart from other nation-builders like Cavour, Lenin, and Atatturk, was while others assumed leadership of traditionally well-defined nations and led them to freedom, he created a nation out of almost nothing and established a cultural and national home for it. And all that within a decade. Thus, his was a Bismarkian role in the Indian context more than that of any other nation-builder.
Presently, the man who had always shunned the crowds and lived in a stratified atmosphere of his own creation, came to establish an exceeding and incremental measure of rapport with the Muslim masses.
Such was his popularity that Beverley Nichols remarked in 1943, "He can sway the battle this way or that as he chooses. His hundred million Muslims will march to the left, to the right, to the front, to the rear, at his bidding and at nobody else's..."
When Jinnah gave Muslims a viable permanent platform in Pakistan in March 1940, almost everyone was dead set against partition, almost everyone scoffed at the unthinkable idea of a sovereign Muslim homeland in the subcontinent. The British were hostile, incredibly so.
The Hindus considered it a challenge to their long cherished dream of an undivided India. Even some of the Muslim stalwarts and faltered. But not Jinnah: he stood like a rock - impregnable, inflexible, stubborn.
Cowered by neither authority nor by brute majority, fooled neither by trickery nor by cajolery, swayed or swerved neither by dire threats nor by malicious propaganda, Jinnah stood his ground unfalteringly. Humbug he called off almost intuitively, but always unerringly and resolutely. And out of his encounters, numerous and deadly with the Congress and the British alike, he came out unscathed and unruffled: his prestige as a politician, strategist, negotiator and as a statesman touching a new high.
To quote Sir Mohammad Zafarullah Khan former, judge of the Federal Court of India, one time President of the U.N. General Assembly and an ex-Judge of the International Court of Justice at the Hague, "For a man past middle age to have conceived of an ideal of that kind, first to have persuaded his own people to see what he saw, and then to have persuaded the larger community in the country, along with the power then dominating the country, is something that one has not heard of anyone anywhere else in History.
"It was a thing that a man at the age of 64, accustomed to every comfort of life, should take on an ideal which would make the severest call on all his physical and intellectual qualities.
"He never flinched from announcing that ideal and the whole of his knowledge and strength were put to its achievement."
More important: he never flinched whatever the odds, never resorted to violence whatever the provocation. To quote Frank Moraes, a leading Indian editor and writer, and biographer of Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, Churchill, it is said, mesmerised England into resisting Hitler, by words.
The Quaid-i-Azam did the same with India's Muslims .... And he mobilised his followers by words. No contemporary Islamic leader more surely understood the Muslim mass mind of India, nor knew better how intuitively to appeal to it, to cajole and rouse it. Jinnah rang a bell which acted like a tocsin."
Likewise, friend and foe alike have acclaimed Jinnah's sagacity, farsightedness and unequalled political flair.
The Aga Khan III, himself a statesman of a rare caliber, considered Jinnah "the most remarkable of all great statesmen that I have known". To him, Jinnah's "courage and statesmanship" in accepting the Cabinet Mission proposals of 1946 put him "at a level with Bismark". Sarat Chandra Bose, the leader of the forward Bloc wing of the Indian National Congress, the elder brother of Subhas Chandra Bose and a revolutionary to his finger tips like his brother, considered Jinnah "great as a world politician and diplomat", while Dr Kailasnath Katju, the U.P. Law Minister during 1937-39 and the former Governor or West Bengal ranked him as "an outstanding figure of this century not only in India but in the whole world."
The measure of Jinnah's greatness and achievements was succinctly summed up by Sacchinanda Sinha, a veteran, legislator since 1910 and the first President of the Indian Constituent Assembly, who was by no means an admirer of Jinnah: "No movement was more strenuously resisted both inside and outside India than was Mr. Jinnah's demand for Pakistan. Its opponents were overwhelmingly influential and numerically so large, while its champions were so few outside the League.
That, in spite of it, Pakistan had not only become an accomplished fact but (what is even more notable) had been acquiesced in and accepted - albeit unwillingly - by the 'Nationalists' themselves, is a conclusive proof of Jinnah's deep-rooted strength of conviction, indomitable courage, political tact and tenacity of purpose."
Again, these strands in his leadership profile had enabled Jinnah to secure, in such a large measure, Pakistan's survival in the treacherous circumstances that had attended her birth.
Jinnah was, of course, helped by the tremendous surge of patriotism which the achievement of freedom had generated but to have it so adroitly canalised to impel the nation into energetic reconstruction which Jinnah accomplished so superbly, was no mean achievement.
That in accomplishing this task he had worked himself to death, but, as Richard Symonds remarks, he had, in the process, "contributed more than any other man to Pakistan's survival".
Finally, how true was Pethick Lawrence, the last Secretary for India, when he said, "Gandhi died by the hands of an assassin; Jinnah died by his devotion to Pakistan".
The writer was Founder-Director, Quaid-i-Azam Academy (1976-89), and authored "Jinnah: Studies in Interpretation" (1981), the only work to qualify for the President's Award for Best Books on Quaid-i-Azam. E.mail:[email protected]
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