Pakistan Observer - Jaswant and Jinnah
M D Nalapat
Sixty-two years have gone by since the British divided India and left, yet the ghost of Mohammad Ali Jinnah continues to haunt India. This columnist believes Partition to have been caused by the Gandhi-Nehru policy of “neutrality” between the Axis and the Allies during World War II. Indeed,the Mahatma had a unique solution for the British people. It was to “give up their resistance,their weapons”,and meet the Germans with “soul force”. According to Gandhi,this powerful “inner energy” would so melt the hearts of the Nazis that they would vacate their conquests and live happily ever after with the British.
Gandhi had a similar solution for the Jewish people, during the time when they were being persecuted and later exterminated by the Germans under Adolf Hitler.This was to cease all resistance to the Nazis and rely on the goodness of heart of the SS and other death squads to ensure a happy outcome. Fortunately for the Mahatma, India was ruled by the British and not by the Germans. Had it been the latter,he would swiftly have become another statistic,the way more than five million Jews were during 1939-45.
The Mahatma was a remarkable human being, sleeping between two nude girls in order to “test” his “commitment to virtue”, which - whether because of age or inclination - fortunately remained intact,except for a single occasion,which was duly recorded in the pages of his magazine,”Harijan”. Small wonder that he caused havoc within the anti-colonial movement in India,and confusion way past his time. It was Gandhi who propped up Jawaharlal Nehru, piggybacking the youthful, attractive Kashmiri over the heads of individuals more capable, such as Vallabhai Patel or Subhas Bose.Or, indeed Mohammad Ali Jinnah. It was Nehru’s dislike of the Quaid-e-Azam that drove the latter from the Congress,and into the arms of a British Raj grateful for support against a quixotic Congress.
The true father of Partition is less Jinnah (or Nehru and Gandhi) than it is Winston Churchill,who regarded Hindus as “beastly” and Indians as little better than baboons. Unlike Gandhi and Nehru,who failed to understand the consequences of their flirtation with the Axis at a time of war, Jinnah was steadfast in backing the Allies,who rewarded him by 1942 with a status equal to that given to the Congress leaders,and by 1946 with a plan to divide India so that the “Muslim” part would continue to remain an ally of the Crown, even as the “Hindu” part went its own way. Had the Congress Party backed the Allies during World War II the way Gandhi did during World War I, there would not have been the division of India that was witnessed in 1947. Several commentators in Pakistan point to the “lower” status of Muslims in India.They are wrong. Whatever the country’s other faults,India has always remained a secular state, except for spasms of communalism such as in Delhi in 1984 (when Sikhs were butchered after Indira Gandhi was killed by one) or Gujarat in 2002 (when Muslims were killed “in revenge” for the torching by fanatics of a train compartment in Godhra).
The Pakistani commentators see the superior status of Muslims in Pakistan as the norm, rather than accept the secular standard of equality of religions. For them, the “natural and acceptable” course would be to ensure that Islam be given the pride of place that the faith has in Pakistan,or in India during the Mughal period. In any part of the country,the 157 million Muslims who are citizens of India practice their faith, indeed with certain rights (such as the legal right to four wives) that they are not given in several Muslim-majority countries.
It is this fair treatment that has prevented Muslims in India (outside Kashmir) from adopting violent methods to deal with their problems Interestingly, it is in parts of India ravaged by Partition (and which saw the flight of the educated to Pakistan during 1947-49) that the condition of Muslims is still as bad as that for other sections that are relatively disadvantaged.In this columnist’s home state of Kerala,Muslims are among the most advanced in society, as indeed they are in most other parts of the South.Indeed,the world’s richest Muslim businessperson,Azim Hisham Premji, is headquartered in Bangalore. The silver lining is that these days,even in backward states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar (from where the bulk of Pakistan’s Mohajirs comes from), education has become a priority,including for women,thus leading to hope that the Muslims there will become as advanced as their counterparts in the south.
The Partition of India is a fact of history. Hopefully,the years ahead will see a common market and perhaps visa-free travel and residence within South Asia (India, Pakistan, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangla Desh), as there is within the European Union.This columnist favours such an outcome,rather than the present hostility,which benefits only a few outside powers,and enables them to dominate the subcontinent.
Jaswant Singh was External Affairs Minister and then Finance Minister during the six years (1998-2004) when A B Vajpayee was Prime Minister. He has written a scholarly book,that places much of the blame for Partition on Gandhi and Nehru, less on Jinnah. Surprisingly, the BJP leadership under L K Advani has sprung to the defense of the Congress leaders by not only banning the book in Gujarat but summarily expelling Singh from the BJP. More than anything else,this shows that the Vajpayee group has been reduced to zero within the BJP, now that the party has come into the hands of L K Advani (whose views on Jinnah are, interestingly, identical to those of Jaswant Singh). It was perhaps to signal the end of the Vajpayee era that Singh was given marching orders. In the process,the BJP has shown itself to be a party intolerant of dissent,and out of sync with the hundreds of millions of middle class that were once irs political base.
During the 2009 elections,all that the BJP had to showcase to match the undoubted charisma of the youthful pair of Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka was an ageing Advani and the same jaded faces that were rejected in the 2004 elections. It would appear that,on the lines of a US Supreme Court Justice or the leader of North Korea, L K Advani considers himself Leader for Life of the BJP. Because Jaswant Singh ( given his loyalty to Vajpayee,who was always vary of Advani) opposed the total grip of Advani over the BJP,the book on Jinnah was used as an excuse to remove him without even the issuance of a show-cause notice.
However, given their lack of rapport with either the BJP base or voters in India, it is doubtful that the Advani Group will for much longer control the BJP the way Sonia Gandhi and her children control the Congress Party. If the leaders of India were such paragons of perfection (the way “sarkari” historians depict them),then why is India in such a mess? Why is there no power or water,why are the roads so bad and the administration so corrupt? Jaswant Singh has only done what others have gingerly begun,which is to do away with the subcontinental culture of creating icons out of (very fallible) leaders. Unless the designs of the British Raj are studied, the people of the subcontinent will not understand how much they are losing from enmity,and how much they can gain from friendship. Sadly,”democratic” India has leaders as intolerant of criticism as the worst dictators in history.What happened to Jaswant Singh is a travesty of democracy,and indicative of the moral rot at the core of the BJP.
