In one respect, the epoch that ended with the birth of two nations on August 14-15, 1947, in South Asia, was the most remarkable in Indian history. It had produced an almost incredible galaxy of eminent thinkers, distinguished politicians, dynamic leaders. Some of these were leaders of rare caliber, born but after centuries.
Political giants by any definition, they were, in their lives and work and setting, comparable to some of the greatest names in modern history: Washington, Bismarck, Cavour, Lenin, Ataturk. Great as these leaders were as politicians, legislators, freedom fighters or as mass leaders, holding charismatic authority over countless millions, the one leader who combined in himself multi-dimensional roles, in various phases of his long, chequered career, was the Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Great and many were the roles that Jinnah was called upon to fill. So were his achievements. In his early life, he was a distinguished member of the Bar. In 1910, he became a member of the newly constituted Imperial Legislative Council. At one of its first meetings, he clashed with Lord Minto, the Viceroy, over the treatment of Indians in South Africa. He was also the first Indian to get a Private member's Bill on the Statute Book.
Jinnah, who was associated with this Council and its successor, the Central Legislative Assembly, for some thirty years, soon became the leader of a party inside the legislature and was one of its most influential members. Montague, at one time the Secretary of State for India, considered Jinnah "perfectly mannered, impressive-looking, armed to the teeth with dialectics. Jinnah", he remarked "is a very clever man, and it is, of course, an outrage that such a man should have no chance of running the affairs of his own country."
For about two decades since his entry into politics (1906), Jinnah was a confirmed nationalist. Gokhale had said of him, "He has true stuff in him and that is freedom from all sectarian prejudice, which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity."
And, Jinnah lived up to that faith in him: he became the architect of Hindu-Muslim unity, as the moving spirit behind the Congress-League Lucknow Pact (1916), the only pact ever contracted between the two organisations. No wonder, Sarojini Naidu waxes eloquent over "the remarkable breadth and boldness of his statesmanship, his consummate grasp of both the transitional phases and the abiding principles of political evolution".
While Jinnah was readily recognised as an illustrious politician and a statesman of his age, few ever expected that he could, to quote Naidu again "establish between himself and his people that instinctive and inviolable kinship that makes Mohammad Ali, for instance, a living hero of the Mussalmans and Mahatma Gandhi a living idol of the masses". Yet when he took up the leadership of the United League in 1934, he showed how dynamic a mass leader he could be - if and when he chooses.
The degree of rapport that he established among Muslim masses, no one had ever done before. His popularity was such that a foreign observer (Beverely Nichols) could safely remark in 1942, "He can sway the battle this way or that, as he chooses. His one hundred million Muslims will march to the left, to the right, to the front, to the rear, at his bidding, and at nobody else". In fact, his popularity among the Muslims was matched, if at all, by Gandhi's among the Hindus. No wonder, he became their Quaid-i-Azam - "the Greatest Leader".
In 1917, Sarojini Naidu had hopefully remarked, "Perchance, it is written in the book of the future that he whose fair ambition it is to become the Muslim Gokhale, may in the same glorious and terrible crisis of our national struggle, pass into immortality as the Mazzini of Indian liberation." That hope was squarely fulfilled, but with this difference that the terrible crisis of the Indian national struggle turned him into the Mazzini of Muslim freedom.
This role, which represents the crowning achievement of his political career, he donned in 1936 when he took up the leadership of the Muslims. The Muslims were then a crowd of gruntled and disillusioned men and women. Neither the Muslims, much less the Muslim League, which claimed to represent them, was a force to be reckoned with, so that Pandit Nehru thought he could conveniently write them off as a political entity. Worse still, divisive forces were ascendant and on the rampage.
In the face of such odds, Jinnah set about the task of uniting Muslims on one platform and under one flag. He had nothing to fall back upon except for his unswerving faith in his ownself and his people, his indomitable will, and the bold exhortations of a daring spirit whom the world knows as Iqbal.
And, yet, within three brief years, he had awakened the listless Muslims to a new consciousness, organised them on one platforms and under one flag, had given coherence to their innermost, yet vague urges and aspirations.
But this was not all. He also filled them with his own indomitable will, his own faith fin their destiny. From a mere rabble, he made them into a nation, united, strong, self-conscious. Thus, almost incredible was the metamorphosis the hundred million India Muslims underwent at his magic touch. From a confirmed minority, supplicating for paper safeguards in the future Indian dispensation, it became, within three years, a nation in its own right, a nation supremely conscious of its newly discovered nationhood, and a nation prepared to fight to the bitter and any attempt at cheating it of its high destiny.
No wonder, Muslim consciousness was stirred to a new pitch, and a hundred million people, under Jinnah's inspiration, discovered their soul and destiny. They shed their minority complex and developed a national consciousness of their own. A Bismarck or a Cavour could not have done better - with all the armies that they had commanded.
In discovering the fact of separate Muslim nationhood, Jinnah had formulated the intellectual justification for launching the demand for a Muslim homeland in the subcontinent. This demand he formally launched in 1940. Interestingly though, as early as that he was confident that "no power an earth could prevent (the establishment of) Pakistan."
Yet, as is well known to any student of history, there is many a hurdle between the perception of an idea and its realisation, between the launching of a movement and its consummation. And hurdles, almost insurmountable, he did of course encounter at almost every step.
To quote Dr Sachinanda Sinha, an otherwise bitter Indian critic, "No movement was more strenuously resisted, both inside and outside India, than was Jinnah's demand for Pakistan. Its opponents were overwhelmingly influential and numerically so large, while its champions were 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 accepted - albeit unwillingly - by the "Nationalists" themselves, is a conclusive proof of Mr Jinnah's deep-rooted strength of conviction, indomitable corage, political tact and tenacity of purpose."
Jinnah carried on the struggle, almost single-handedly - and, yet, won Pakistan. More creditable, however, is the fact that all through the bitter struggle, he never abandoned the constitutional path. A staunch believer in constitutionalism and in the evolutionary process, he never even for once called for violence and terrorism, although it was a fashion with every mass leader in those days to invoke them. Thus the Quaid founded a state without arms, without blood-baths, without an uprising, and through altogether peaceful methods.
And when Pakistan emerged in 1947, Jinnah stepped into the last great role of his career - as the architect of Pakistan. In spite of his failing health, he took upon himself the onerous duties of the head of the State, and set about the difficult task of consolidating it, and, moreover, securing its survival in uneasy, treacherous circumstances.
One wonders what would have become of Pakistan in those first, crucial twelve months had it not been for the steadying influence of this supreme leader who alone could wield the sort of authority he wielded, who alone could command the people's allegiance in a measure he did.
One is, therefore inclined to agree with Richard Symonds when he says, "he had worked himself to death, but had contributed more than any other man to Pakistan's survival". Similar sentiments were voiced by Lord Pethick Lawrence, the last Secretary of State for India: "Gandhi died at the hands of an assassin; Jinnah died for his devotion to Pakistan".
Great as Jinnah was as a leader of men, he was equally great as a master of situation, any situation. He had in him a rare combination of prescience, idealism, intellectual vigour, faith and resolution. Yet he was no visionary: he was pragmatic and down-to-earth all the time. These characteristics enabled him to see his chance clearly and unmistakably, and to seize it resolutely and unerringly.
He could rise to any occasion; he could crystallise a lifetime's faith into one single bold action. In such bold actions his political career abounds, and he was always known for his foresight and statesmanship in Indian political circles. And during the last two years of his life. Jinnah the statesman almost overshadowed Jinnah the politician.
(Sharif al Mujahid, HEC Distinguished National Professor, has recently edited Unesco's History of Humanity, vol. VI, and co-edited In quest of Jinnah (2007), the only oral history on Pakistan's founding father)
smujahid107@hotmail.com