The man who created history

Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three ....Jinnah virtually conjured that country into statehood by the force of his indomitable will," writes Stanley Wolpert in Jinnah of Pakistan.
Talk of will in a physical frame "as lean as a whipper," would sound incredible. Yet there it was for all the world to see and either admire or resent depending on their cast of mind.
Beverley Nichols, for example, found him a 'giant.' Jinnah not only did not write any autobiography, he also did not write a torrent of newspaper articles and personal letters to millions of people and on every topic under the sun, like his rival and contrast from the same native place of Gujrat, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.
The latter would, at one page in his autobiography, be advising a follower "to use turmeric to her diet;" at the next he would be 'promoting the need for cow protection, absolute punctuality and the need for Hindi.' Therefore, Gandhi's "published sayings, speeches, articles and letters run into around thirty million works." -(Patrick French; Liberty or Death, p.18).
Gandhi had Mahadev Desai as his faithful diarist, recording his every sneeze and cough. Jinnah had no such Boswell. His collected speeches, therefore, form quite a slim volume and stand no way near Gandhi's. Nor have as many books written on him or any movie made on him on the basis of distorted facts by an Attenborough. One writer therefore, calls him the "forgotten player in India's independence and division."
Jinnah's detractors often derisively refer to his plush home at London's Hampstead, his expensive attire; -he never wore a silk tie twice. But there is a valid explanation for all that. Jinnah was a hard worker, earning his oodles by the sweat of his brow.
He did not live on "lavish donations" (charity?) from the likes of Birla, Sarabhai and Bajaj families. He once remarked that he spent less than Gandhi on rail fares even though he travelled first class (Gandhi traveled third), since he only had to buy one ticket. Gandhi traveled with a large bogie-full of entourage).
As a successful lawyer both in India and England, he had no time to spare for gimmickry and frivolities, for experimentation with truth and sex and bowel movement and saline enemas.
After Ruttie's death, he did not take naked young damsels to bed and later proclaim that "It was in the spirit of God's eunuch that he approached what he considered as his duty" (M.K. Gandhi (2) vol. LXXXVI, p. 420).
Maybe if Jinnah had also "found himself unable to master his nervousness sufficiently to appear in a courtroom" like Gandhi, on return from London as a barrister he, too, would have tried his hand at sufi sainthood, founding a "khanqah" like Gandhi's ashram.
But he was not cut out for such role. It is difficult to imagine the immaculate Jinnah writing to his followers instructing them on matters such as 'the use of hip baths as a cure for vaginal discharge, or ask his female disciples every morning, 'Did you have a good bowel movement this morning, Sister?' An outspoken journalist, Ashok Row Kavi therefore describes Gandhi as an "anal fetishist" in his interview with Patrick French. (ibid. p.21)
Sir Malcolm Hailey, Government of India's senior consultative official at the 1930 Round Table Conference in his report to Viceroy Irwin uncharitably called Jinnah as slippery as the eels ..." But one provincial governor is also quoted as describing Gandhi as being 'as cunning as a cartload of monkeys.
In India, Jinnah remains the Hindutva's bugbear, as the man who 'singly' brought about the partition of the subcontinent. What if such a charge is patently absurd? It feeds a set perception, so why disturb it?
More intriguing, however, is the attitude of scholars like Professor Mushirul Hassan. In the wake of the controversy that L.K. Advani's favourable remarks about Jinnah during his Pakistan visit early this year ignited in India, he called Jinnah "Janus-faced," in an article in India's Outlook magazine.
Trying to outsmart the worst of the Sangh pariwar volcanoes-on-two-legs, Mushirul Hassan was staking his reputation by making facile fulminations. For example, he states that earlier Jinnah had 'opposed the mixing of religion with politics' but 'a few years later he was courting Muslim divines' and 'in February '39 he concurred with a deputation that religion and politics could not be divorced in Islam.'
Strangely, the learned scholar ignores the fact that the Mahatma accepted the Kaiser-e-Hind medal from the British government, but Jinnah refused knighthood offer from Lord Reading and preferred to die as 'plain Jinnah;' that Gandhi advised students when he stopped in Kolkata on his way to Rangoon (shortly after his return to India in 1915) that "politics should never be divorced from religion." (M.J. Akbar: Jinnah: before & after 1920 Congress session;), yet he is quoted as saying, 'As far as I am concerned, my heart owes allegiance to only one religion, -the Hindu dharma. I am proud to call myself a Hindu...."
He talked about ram rajya and cow protection, leading prayers and playing politics. Gandhi launched the non-co-operation movement in 1920 promising swaraj in one year but wound it up after one year. By contrast Jinnah never went on the back foot. So rather than calling Jinnah 'Janus-faced,' shouldn't Mushirul Hassan call Gandhi a 'chameleon?'
And finally, though the professor accuses Jinnah of courting religious leaders yet the facts on the ground show that all the religious parties, -Jamiatul Ulema-i-Hind, Ahrar, Khaksar and Jamaat-e-Islami bitterly denounced him and his Pakistan demand.
It was Gandhi who, at a war conference in new Delhi in 1918, supported a resolution by Viceroy Lord Chelmsford, encouraging the Indians to join the army. Mahadev Desai quotes him saying in a letter he wrote to Jinnah about the same time, "Seek ye first the Recruiting Office and everything will be added unto you."
Gandhi was also the first to emphasise the religious divide. In January 1915, to celebrate his return home from South Africa the Gujrat Sabha of Bombay organised a garden party.
Jinnah was the sabha's chairman. He read out the welcome address. Responding, Gandhi said he was 'glad to find a Mohamedan, not only belonging to his won region's sabha, but chairing it.' Commenting on Gandhi's uncalled for barb, Wolpert writes, '...he was not actually insulting Jinnah, after all, just informing everyone of his minority religious identity."
Mushir complains that "Jinnah's 1939 call for 'Deliverance Day' and for 'direct action' on August 16, 1946, sounded the death-knell for united India." But he ignored the slow and gradual build-up to those events, -such as the Wardha and Vidya Mandir schemes of the Congress, the compulsory singing of the provocative bande mataram song, the Muslim Mass Contact Movement, the overweening arrogance of the Congress in refusing to accommodate Muslims in its governments after the 1937 elections and finally such barbs as Jawaharlal Nehru saying, 'May I suggest to Jinnah that I come into greater touch with the Muslim masses than most of the members of the Muslims League.'
Alluding to such remarks one historian observes, 'The insults of the Congress stirred Jinnah into action.' He made the demand for Pakistan only in 1940, after repeated attempts to obtain constitutional safeguards for Muslims and attempts at power-sharing had failed.
In 1906 when the Muslim League was founded, its first president, the Aga Khan remarked that Jinnah 'was the only well-known Muslim' to 'come out in bitter hostility toward all that I and my friends had done... (and say) that 'our principle of separate electorates was dividing the nation against itself".
About the same time that the League was formed in Dhaka, Jinnah was in nearby Kolkata (Calcutta) with 44 other Muslims and roughly 1,500 Hindus, Christians and Parsis, serving as secretary to Dadabhai Naoroji, president of the Indian National Congress.
Jinnah entered the central legislative council in Calcutta, then capital of British India on January 25, 1910, along with Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and Motilal Nehru. Lord Minto expected the council to rubber stamp "any measures we may deem right to introduce".
His maiden speech shattered such pompousness. He rose to defend Gandhi, then working for his people in another British colony, expressing "the highest pitch of indignation and horror at the harsh and cruel treatment that is meted out to Indians in South Africa".
Minto objected to a term such as "cruel treatment". Jinnah responded at once: "My Lord! I should feel much inclined to use much stronger language." Lord Minto kept quiet.
In the early years, there was no great divide between the league and Congress. Jinnah was in Bankipur (Patna) in 1912 to attend the Congress session. There he also attended his first meeting of the League.
When he went to Lucknow later the same year as a special guest of the League (it was not an annual session), Sarojini Naidu was on the platform with him. Attending the League session of 1914 were Congressmen, Dr M.A. Ansari, Maulana Azad and Hakim Ajmal Khan and in 1915, 'the League tent had a quite unlikely guest list: Madan Mohan Malviya, Surendranath Banerjea, Annie Besant, B.G. Horniman, Sarojini Naidu and Mahatma Gandhi.' (M.J. Akbar; ibid).
When Jinnah did join the League in 1913, he insisted on a condition, set out clearly that his "loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated" (Jinnah: His Speeches and Writings, 1912-1917 edited by Sarojini Naidu).
The same year Congress president Gopal Krishna Gokhale hailed Jinnah's "freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him (Jinnah) the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity." In 1916 he launched the historic Lucknow Pact before the Muslim League.
In his presidential speech Jinnah declared that the new spirit of patriotism had "brought Hindus and Muslims together... for the common cause." Congress president A.C. Mazumdar announced that all differences had been settled and Hindus and Muslims would make a "joint demand for a representative government in India." Support also came from the Congress stalwart, Bal Gangadhur Tilak.
The rupture was caused at the Nagpur meeting of the Congress when the 'author of the Lucknow Pact was hounded down from the Congress meeting, because he opposed Gandhi's decision to launch satyagraha. That small rupture ultimately expanded into an unbridgeable gulf and the break-up of the country.
Historical facts are too well-known to require repetition. But what is not yet well known or accepted is Jinnah's real role in India's partition. The traditionalists, like Professor Mushir see him as one who engineered partition and Nehru et al dedicated to India's unity.
But another school of thinkers has since emerged to show that it was the other way round. For example, Nehru told Mosley in 1960: "The truth is that we were tired men getting on in years... the plan for partition offered a way out and we accepted it." (Mosley quoted by Asim Roy; India's partition)
Nor was he ever a communalist. Quoting Lala Lajpat Rai's letter to C.R. Das some' 12 or 15 years' in his address at the League's 1940 Lahore session, that 'Hindu-Muslim unity... is neither possible nor practicable. ...Although we can unite against the British, we cannot do so to rule Hindustan on democratic lines," Jinnah had complained, "when Lala Lajpat Rai said that we cannot rule this country on democratic lines it was all right, but when I had the temerity to speak the same truth about 19 months ago, there was a shower of attacks and criticism.
To quote from a recent article by political analyst Prem Shankar Jha, "The fact that Jinnah led the campaign for a Muslim homeland did not automatically make him communal. He had made it clear from the start that his motivation was political, not ideological.
What he was really looking for was a power-sharing arrangement between leaders of the Muslim and Hindu communities that would ensure the former weren't swamped some time in the future by a Hindu majority. Like any good lawyer, he pitched his initial demands too high and due to an inexplicable lack of direct engagement between him and Congress leaders, there was an absence of negotiation on his demands."
In 1920 after the Nagpur session of the Congress where he was hooted down for objecting to Gandhi's non-co-operation resolution, he told a journalist, Durga Das, "Well, young man. I will have nothing to do with this pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with Congress and Gandhi. I do not believe in working up mob hysteria." (Durga Das; India from Curzon to Nehru and After."
And in November 1946, when asked by a reporter during a press conference in November 1946, whether the creation of Pakistan would not poison relations between the two dominions from the very start, he lost his temper and said, "I envisage that India and Pakistan will be like two brothers, each coming to the other's aid when the need arises. Together we will forge a Monroe doctrine far stronger than that of the United States."
FINALLY RAJA OF MAHMOUDABAD: "My advocacy of an Islamic State brought me into conflict with Jinnah, He thoroughly disapproved my idea and dissuaded me from expressing them publicly from the League platform lest the people might be led to believe that Jinnah shared my view and that he was asking me to convey such ideas to the public." (Raja of Mahmoudabad, Some memories; India's Partition, p.418)
How uncharitable for anyone to call Jinnah a communalist or blame him for the partition of India!