How critical was Quaid-i-Azam's role in the making of Pakistan? Surprisingly though, it was most succinctly and most brilliantly summed up in rather unsuspecting quarters - in H. V. Hoc/son (d 2000)'5 The Great Divide (1969), perhaps the most authoritative British account of the imperial retreat from the subcontinent. He says,
Of all the personalities in the last act of the great drama of India's re-birth to independence, Mohammad Ali Jinnah is at once the most enigmatic and the most important. One can imagine any of the other principal actors ... replaced by a substitute in the same role - a different representative of this or that interest or community, even a different Viceroy - without thereby implying any radical change in the final denouement.
But it is barely conceivable that events would have taken the same course, that the last struggle would have been a struggle of three, not two, well-balanced adversaries, and that a new nation State of Pakistan would have been created, but for the personality and leadership of one man, Mr Jinnah. The irresistible demand for Indian independence, and the British will to relinquish power in India soon after the end of the Second World War, were the result of influences that had been at work long before the present story of a single decade begins; the protagonists on this side or that of the imperial relationship were tools of historical forces which they did not create and could not control.... Whereas the irresistible demand for Pakistan, and the solidarity of the Indian Muslims behind that demand, were creations of that decade alone, and supremely the creations of one man.
Of relevance here is how Alfred Broachard had evaluated the role of Kemal Ataturk (188 1-1938) in the making of modern Turkey:
"Without Napoleon, without de Gaulle, there would still be a France. Without Washington, there would certainly be the United States. Without Lenin, it is certain that there would be the Soviet Union; but without Ataturk, it is certain that there would have been no Turkey."
Turkey had, of course, had a territorial, political, cultural and ethnic existence in history for over five centuries before Ataturk transformed it into modem Turkey in 1923. In contrast, Pakistan fell even below the category of middle nineteenth century "Italy" which the Austrian Chancellor, Matternich (1809-48), had most disparagingly characterised as a mere "geographical expression". Pakistan was not even such an expression barely fifteen years before its emergence.
There was a "nation" called Turkey for several centuries, but there was none called Pakistan before 1947. Hence if Ataturk's presence in the early 1920s was so critical to the making of modern Turkey, how much more critical should have been Jinnah' s presence in the 1940s in the emergence of Pakistan, especially since she was bereft of any historical prototype and parentage?
Hence Leonard Mosley and a host of other contemporary observers and historians (including Penderal Moon, Ian Stephens, John Terraine, Margaret Bourke-White, Frank Moraes, and D. F. Karaka) rate Jinnah as being the critical variable in its emergence to a point that they characterise Pakistan as a "one-man achievement".
It is, among others, this aspect of Jinnah's achievement that Stanley Wolpert was referring to when he said, "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. Hailed as 'Great Leader' (Quaid-i-Azam) of Pakistan and its first Governor General, Jinnah virtually conjured up t6hat country into statehood by the force of his indomitable will."
Hindsight, it is said, helps to evaluate the significance of an event in perspective. In the case of Jinnah's achievement, however, even contemporary accounts speak of its magnitude. For instance, the Economist had this to say barely a year after Jinnah's death:
"In a recent poll the Germans voted Bismarck (18 15-98) the greatest of all time. On any standard they were wrong, for even in the same genre Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah stands higher. It took Bismarck the same seven years, from the Schleswig-Holstein war to the treaty of Frankfurt, to create the German Empire as it took Jinnah, from the Lahore Resolution of 1940 to Independence Day, to make Pakistan.
But Bismarck started with all the advantages; a hundred-year old nationalism, the Prussian Army and Civil Service, the Ruhr, 15 years of experience of high office, and youth enough still to have 20 years as Chancellor before him in 1879. Jinnah began with nothing but his own ability and the disgruntlement of a religious minority in which he was only an unobservant member of the most heretic sect, at an age so great that he only survived his creation by one year and without any experience of public office until he nominated himself Governor General."
On a theoretical plane, the above comments underline a basic assumption - that is, in the making of an historical event, the prime role is played by the individual rather than by mere circumstances that give rise to him, a view that has come to be known as a "Great Man" theory.
At the other end of the continuum is the social Darwinist theory that regards man as "a creature of his environment, whether natural or social", that gives primacy to circumstances in the making of an historical, event. The foremost exponent of this concept is, of course, Karl Marx, and his basic formulation runs as follows:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living.
And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.
By any criterion, the creation of an altogether new nation of Pakistan out of the body politic of India was an historical event of lasting significance in the post-war world. In the making of such an event, it may be argued, as does F. J. Heamshaw, both character and circumstances are equally crucial, if only because without their interacting on and mutually affecting one another all the while the final configuration of events, and the integration of interests, could never have been produced.
In the first instance, it is true, circumstances make the character what it is, and what it tends to become. But it is equally true that the character, once it has emerged on the scene, begins to play an increasingly critical role he moulds, shapes and exploits to the utmost the circumstances it inherits to suit, advance and achieve its ultimate purposes and objectives.
Interpreted thus, circumstances alone cannot create an historic character which rises to the occasion, helps crystallise the historical forces, causes a new integration by harmonising them with each other and by bringing about their confluence and configuration, and, finally, works through a series of bold decisions and heroic actions. And this more balanced approach is commended by historians called upon to valuate the measure of achievement of those credited with changing the course of history.
Speaking of Napoleon (1769-1820), for instance, J. Christopher Harold remark, in spite of the prodigious amount that has been devoted to the man and his times, there is still little general agreement as to whether Napoleon is more important as a product and a symbol ... of circumstances that were not of his making, or as a man who, pursuing his own destiny, shaped circumstances that governed the course of history. Like all great men, Napoleon was both, of course...
THE SAME IS EQUALLY TRUE OF JINNAH:
Opinion, may, of course, differ, even sharply, about the relative weight assigned to circumstances and the character - ie, about the measure of critically conceded to a character, in the making of an historical event; but unless the environment is characterised by certain "determining tendencies", circumstances alone, unmatched by the character, cannot create an event."
Applied to the case of Pakistan, it may, therefore, be contended that whatever be the strength, the momentum and the intensity of historical forces working towards Pakistan, without the matching of the character - in this case, that of Jinnah - with the circumstances, it could not have come the way, nor at the time it did. This was especially true in the present case, since Pakistan was apparently not in the realm of possibility, even a decade before its emergence. More so, because of the fundamental fact that "few statesmen", to quote The Times, "have shaped events to their policy more surely than Mr Jinnah". This he did especially after the adoption of the Lahore ("Pakistan") resolution in March 1940.
(The writer is HEC Distinguished National Professor, and has edited In quest of Jinnah (OUP, 2007), the only oral history on the founding father.)