Jinnah — a visionary for all ages

[Vivek Sharma]

WHAT WE MUST UNDERSTAND THAT WHTHER JINNAH WAS GREAT OR VILLIAN - OPIONIONS WILL DIFFER ....

ONE OF MY OPIONION ( " HIS ROLE-" WILL NOT SHARE IN THIS FORUM AS IT MAY NOT GO DONE WELL WITH MY PAKISTANI COUNTERPARTS

BUT FOR ONE THING HE MUST BE COMPLIMENTED THAT HE DID WHAT HE DECEIDED AND GOT IT THROUGH ANY MEANS .........

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

WHAT WE MUST UNDERSTAND THAT WHTHER JINNAH WAS GREAT OR VILLIAN - OPIONIONS WILL DIFFER ....

ONE OF MY OPIONION ( " HIS ROLE-" WILL NOT SHARE IN THIS FORUM AS IT MAY NOT GO DONE WELL WITH MY PAKISTANI COUNTERPARTS

BUT FOR ONE THING HE MUST BE COMPLIMENTED THAT HE DID WHAT HE DECEIDED AND GOT IT THROUGH ANY MEANS .........

Don't use all caps please - against online etiquette since it implies shouting.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Time Magazine's obituary for Jinnah:

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PAKISTAN: That Man - TIME

Monday, Sep. 20, 1948


Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent have come two symbols—a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of nonviolence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of an assassin. Last week the man of hate, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of the state he had founded. His devoted and equally fanatic sister, Fatima, was at his side; so was his daughter, Mrs. Dinah Wadia, whom he had disowned because she married a Parsee (as he had done before her).

Gandhi's death shamed Hindus and Muslims into halting the communal massacres which he had been unable to stop during his life. Jinnah's passing might release a new wave of fanaticism which even he would have opposed. As he died a crisis which might bathe all India in blood was boiling up. When the news of his death reached New Delhi, a Hindu said, "A man can be more dangerous in death than in life." He meant that the inflammatory preachings of Jinnah the agitator would live on, but the occasionally restraining hand of Jinnah the politician had been removed.

"The Best Showman." Jinnah was born in Karachi in 1876 of a wealthy trading family; at 16 he went to England to study law. As an advocate of the Bombay High Court he was, according to a colleague, "the best showman of them all ... His greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee."

He joined the Congress Party and for a while worked for Hindu-Moslem unity. In 1921, he abandoned the Congress to build the Moslem League and to work for a separate government for Indian Muslims. The walls of his meeting halls blazed with such slogans as: "Make the blood of slaves boil with the force of faith!" and "Make the small sparrow fight the big hawk!" He would stalk into meetings wearing his "political uniform"—native dress with a black astrakhan cap—and whip the Muslims into a frenzy. Sometimes, in his fury, his monocle would pop out of its socket. After meetings, he would go home, change to Western clothes and be again the suave Western lawyer.

Enemies among the Muslims whispered against him: "Jinnah does not wear a beard; Jinnah does not go to the mosque; Jinnah drinks whiskey." Yet his power increased to the point where he was able to force the Hindus and the British to split India into two dominions. He became governor general of Pakistan. With the split came the riots. His part in them will not soon be forgotten by Hindus. Last week, when news of his death reached New Delhi's bazaars, there was bitter exultation. A Hindu refugee said:

"I had six people working under me in the West Punjab. Because of that man, I now work as a watchman for one rupee, eight annas [45¢] a day. Now that man is dead, but what about me?"

"A Man of Destiny." The Hindustani Times devoted a page to an uncompromising attack on Jinnah's motives and methods. However, it concluded: "A man of destiny, he was perhaps the greatest man of Islam since Mohamed."

Jinnah did not underestimate his own importance. Recently, a delegation from the Moslem League called on him to urge a policy with which he disagreed. Gently, the League spokesman reminded Jinnah of a debt. "Sir," he said, "because of this league you got Pakistan." Jinnah snapped, "No. Because of my iron will I got Pakistan. I can see ahead 50 years-which you and even my Pakistan ministers cannot."

Last June he retired to a cool, quiet mountain resort in Baluchistan Province. Against the advice of his doctors, he flew back to Karachi last week to confer with Premier Liaquat Ali Khan on the war between India and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The strain of the flight was too much for his old heart. Two hours after his arrival he was dead.

Behind him Jinnah left no outstanding favorite, no one man who could command the unquestioning respect of other contenders. The cabinet hastily appointed as governor general Khwaja Nazimuddin, British-educated premier of East Bengal. The real struggle for influence would be between Liaquat Ali Khan and Foreign Minister Sir Mohamed Zafrullah Khan.

Liaquat, 53, is a plump, bald, practical politician, whom Hindus regard as a moderate. Zafrullah Khan, 55, Pakistan's spokesman in the U.N., is handicapped politically because he is a member of the Ahmadiyya community, an offshoot from Mohammedanism. Mizza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the sect, who died in 1908, taught that Christ had escaped alive from the cross, fled to Kashmir, where he died, and was buried at Srinigar. Hindus regard Zafrullah Khan as a brilliant fanatic.

Jinnah's death raised the possibility that his political heirs might seek the final solution for insolvent, disorganized governments: war.

For a piece characterizing Jinnah as a man of hate, its full of unbridled hate itself.

Would love to see the Americans describe their own founding fathers as 'men of hate' for seeking their destiny independent of the British - and they had far more in common than the people of India and Pakistan ever had.

Hypocrisy, and lies, at its best.

P.S: Let go of the hate and continued false demonization of Jinnah and Pakistan Halaku, among other things, such as your health, such unbridled and irrational hatred is not going to turn back the clock, nor such lies create an 'Akhand Bharat'.

Stop poisoning your minds against Pakistan and Jinnah - Jaswant Singh brought forth the courage to give Jinnah his due, somewhat - some other cowards and haters in India need to do the same.

Peace and peaceful coexistence - the message of Islam and Jinnah, perverted and distorted by some in India who seethe with hate fueled by their expansionist designs.

 

[Halaku Khan]

As says the Time article itself "Though direct, the action was supposed to be peaceful."

Beyond that speculation on whether Jinnah could have known, how he could not have known, is just that, speculation. Not a shred of conclusive evidence that Jinnah either plotted the violence or thought it would reach the levels it did.

For some Indians such negative speculation is an elixir, since it allows the perpetuation of the demonization of Jinnah, and through that a perpetuation of the prejudice and hatred directed at Pakistan - an issue that resulted in Jaswant Singh, due to his honest introspection of the rather skewed Indian views on Jinnah, getting fired from his long standing position in the BJP.

As regards whether Jinnah was complicit in the violence of the Direct Action, here is an excerpt:

As the new proposal was supported by the British as well, Jinnah condemned the British negotiators of treachery, and quickly washed his hands off further negotiations. He called a Muslim League meet in Bombay on 29 July 1946. Its resolution said, ‘It has become abundantly clear that the Muslims of India would not rest with anything less than the immediate establishment of an independent and full sovereign State of Pakistan’ and urged upon the Muslim masses to undertake ‘Direct Action to achieve Pakistan and get rid of the present slavery under the British and contemplated future caste Hindu domination.’

When Jinnah was pressed on whether the Direct Action would be violent, he ominously replied: ‘I am not going to discuss ethics. We have a pistol and are in a position to use it’(at the Muslim League convention on July 19, 1946). On his violent instigation, UK’s News Chronicle wrote: ‘…there can be no excuse for the wild language and abandonment of negotiations… Mr. Jinnah is totally wedded to complete intransigence, if, as now seems the case, he is really thirsting for a holy war.’ Source: Jinnah or Nehru: Who's Responsible for India's Partition?

I'm not interested in demonizing anybody, but it is important to view events in an unvarnished way. Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah all had their faults.

 

[Murshad]

Mohammad Ali Jinnah as ‘The Hindu’ saw him​

In the light of the controversy generated by Jaswant Singh’s book, 'Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence' (Rupa & Co., New Delhi, 669 pages), we reproduce The Hindu’s editorial of September 13, 1948 titled ‘Mr. Jinnah.’ It was published two days after the death of the founder of Pakistan.

The news of the sudden death of Mr. Jinnah will be received with widespread regret in this country. Till barely a twelvemonth ago he was, next to Gandhiji, the most powerful leader in undivided India. And not only among his fellow-Muslims but among members of all communities there was great admiration for his sterling personal qualities even while the goal which he pursued with increasing fanaticism was deplored. For more than half the period of nearly forty years in which he was a towering figure in our public life he identified himself so completely with the struggle that the Indian National Congress carried on for freedom that he came to be as nearly a popular idol as it was possible for a man so aristocratic and aloof by temperament to be. During the last years of his life, as the architect of Pakistan, he achieved a unique authority in his own community by virtue of the blind allegiance which the mass, dazzled by his political triumphs, gave him though the sane and sober elements of the community became more and more doubtful of the wisdom of his policies. In an age which saw centuries-old empires crumble this Bombay lawyer began late in life to dream of founding a new Empire; in an era of rampant secularism this Muslim, who had never been known to be very austere in his religion, began to dally with the notion that that Empire should be an Islamic State. And the dream became a reality overnight, and perhaps no man was more surprised at his success than Mr. Jinnah himself.
Mr. Jinnah was an astute lawyer. And his success was largely due to the fact that he was quick to seize the tactical implications of any development. His strength lay not in any firm body of general principle, any deeply cogitated philosophy of life, but in throwing all his tremendous powers of tenacity, strategy and dialectical skill into a cause which had been nursed by others and shaped in many of its most important phases by external factors. In this he offers a marked contrast to the Mahatma with whom rested the initiative during the thirty years he dominated Indian political life and who, however much he might adapt himself to the thrusts of circumstance, was able to maintain on a long range a remarkable consistency. Pakistan began with Iqbal as a poetic fancy. Rahmat Ali and his English allies at Cambridge provided it with ideology and dogma. Britain’s Divide and Rule diplomacy over a period of half a century was driving blindly towards this goal. What Mr. Jinnah did was to build up a political organisation, out of the moribund Muslim League, which gave coherence to the inchoate longings of the mass by yoking it to the realisation of the doctrinaires’ dream. Two world wars within a generation, bringing in their train a vast proliferation of nation-States as well as the decay of established Imperialisms and the rise of the Totalitarian Idea, were as much responsible for the emergence of Pakistan as the aggressive communalism to which Mr. Jinnah gave point and direction.
We must not forget that Mr. Jinnah began his political life as a child of the Enlightenment the seeds of which were planted in India by the statesmen of Victorian England. He stood for parliamentary democracy after the British pattern and with a conscientious care practised the art of debate in which he attained a formidable proficiency. At the time of the Minto-Morley Reforms, he set his face sternly against the British attempts to entice the Muslims away from their allegiance to the Congress. For long he kept aloof from the Muslim League. And when at last he joined it his aim was to utilise it for promoting amity between the two communities and not for widening the gulf. But Mr. Jinnah was a man of ambition. He had a very high opinion of his own abilities and the success, professional and political, that had come to him early in life, seemed fully to justify it. It irked him to play second fiddle. The Congress in those early days was dominated by mighty personalities, Dadabhai Nowroji, Mehta and Gokhale, not to mention leaders of the Left like Tilak. That no doubt accounts for the fact that Mr. Jinnah gradually withdrew from the Congress organisation and cast about for materials wherewith to build a separate platform for himself. At this time the first World War broke out and the idea of self-determination was in the air. It was not a mere accident that Mr. Jinnah came to formulate the safeguards which he deemed necessary for the Muslim minority in his famous Fourteen Points so reminiscent of the Wilsonian formula.
But in those days he would have pooh-poohed the idea of the Muslim community cutting itself off from the rest of India. He was so little in sympathy with the Ali Brothers’ Khilafat campaign because it seemed to him to play with fire. He was deeply suspicious of the unrestrained passions of the mob and he was too good a student of history not to realise that once the dormant fires of fanaticism were stoked there was no knowing where it might end. He kept aloof from the Congress at the same time. Satyagraha with its jail-going and other hardships could not appeal to a hedonist like him; but the main reason for his avoiding the Gandhian Congress was the same nervousness about the consequences of rousing mass enthusiasm. The result was that he went into political hibernation for some years. But he remained keenly observant; and the dynamic energy generated by a successful policy of mass contact deeply impressed him. He came to see that a backward community like the Muslims could be roused to action only by an appeal, simplified almost to the point of crudeness, to what touched it most deeply, its religious faith. And a close study of the arts by which the European dictators, Mussolini, Hitler and a host of lesser men rose to power led him to perfect a technique of propaganda and mass instigation to which ‘atrocity’-mongering was central. But Mr. Jinnah could not have been entirely happy over the Frankenstein monster that he had invoked, especially when the stark horrors of the Punjab issued with all the inevitability of Attic tragedy from the contention and strife that he had sown. He was a prudent man to whom by nature and training anarchy was repellant. At the first Round Table Conference he took a lone stand in favour of a unitary Government for India because he felt that Federation in a country made up of such diverse elements would strengthen fissiparous tendencies. It was an irony that such a man should have become the instrument of a policy which, by imposing an unnatural division on a country meant by Nature to be one, has started a fatal course the end of which no man may foresee. Mr. Jinnah was too weak to withstand the momentum of the forces that he had helped to unleash. And the megalomania which unfortunately he came to develop would hardly allow him to admit that he was wrong.
Mr. Jinnah has passed away at the peak of his earthly career. He is sure of his place in history. But during the last months of his life he must have been visited by anxious thoughts about the future of the State which he had carved. Pakistan has many able men who may be expected to devote themselves with wholehearted zeal to its service according to their lights. And India will wish them well in a task of extraordinary difficulty. But it is no easy thing to don the mantle of the Quaid-i-Azam. No other Pakistani has anything like the international stature that Mr. Jinnah had achieved; and assuredly none else has that unquestioned authority with the masses. The freedom that Pakistan has won, largely as the result of a century of unremitting effort by India’s noblest sons, is yet to be consolidated. It is a task that calls for the highest qualities of statesmanship. Many are the teething troubles of the infant State. Apart from the refugee problem, which is Britain’s parting gift to both parts of distracted India, the Pakistan Government has by its handling of the Kashmir question and its unfortunate attitude towards the Indian Union’s difficulties with Hyderabad, raised in an acute form the future of the relations between Pakistan and India. Mr. Jinnah at his bitterest never forgot that firm friendship between the two States was not only feasible but indispensable if freedom was to be no Dead-Sea apple. It is earnestly to be hoped that the leaders of Pakistan will strive to be true to that ideal.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

As regards whether Jinnah was complicit in the violence of the Direct Action, here is an excerpt:


I'm not interested in demonizing anybody, but it is important to view events in an unvarnished way. Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah all had their faults.

And in that process you are cherry picking and distorting events and Jinnah's message and ideology - some attempt at 'unvarnished events' that, more like a perpetuation of the varnish of hate and distortion.

I would like to see the entire excerpt of that interview/conversation, not cherry picked comments please ..

A larger excerpt ...

"After the "Direct Action" resolution was passed by the Muslim League on July 19, 1946, its president, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said in his valedictory speech: "What we have done today is the most historic act in our history. Never have we in the whole history of the League done anything except by the constitutional methods and by constitutionalism. But now we are obliged and forced into this position. This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods…. Now the time has come for the Muslim Nation to resort to direct action. I am not prepared to discuss ethics. We have a pistol and are in a position to use it."

Notice that the sentence you cherry picked to support your rather prejudiced and distorted narrative is not in response to a direct and specific question of whether 'Direct action would be violent', but part of his larger speech on Direct Action and how it represented a peaceful means, albeit outside of British Law in British India and therefore perhaps illegal, to push for Muslim demands, which is the true context of his comments.

Direct action was also advocated by MLK and Gandhi - that it degenerated into violence in the subcontinent is unfortunate, but Jinnah can hardly be blamed for it, nor is there any evidence indicating so.

 

[Halaku Khan]

"After the "Direct Action" resolution was passed by the Muslim League on July 19, 1946, its president, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, said in his valedictory speech: "What we have done today is the most historic act in our history. Never have we in the whole history of the League done anything except by the constitutional methods and by constitutionalism. But now we are obliged and forced into this position. This day we bid goodbye to constitutional methods…. Now the time has come for the Muslim Nation to resort to direct action. I am not prepared to discuss ethics. We have a pistol and are in a position to use it."

Interesting. If you have a link to that speech, please post it.

What does emerge from the speech is that in his call for Direct Action, Jinnah was bidding goodbye to constitutional methods, was not prepared to discuss ethics, and was declaring that he was ready to use his pistol. All in all, it amounts to a more or less overt call for violence.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

Interesting. If you have a link to that speech, please post it.

In a hurry so will post link/source later.

What does emerge from the speech is that in his call for Direct Action, Jinnah was bidding goodbye to constitutional methods, was not prepared to discuss ethics, and was declaring that he was ready to use his pistol. All in all, it amounts to a more or less overt call for violence.

I fail to see how it amounts to an overt call for violence - Peaceful Direct action can be illegal, and was according to Jinnah's speech.

The references to bidding 'goodbye to constitutional methods, not prepared to discuss ethics', and 'ready to use his pistol', are all likely references to the 'illegality' of Jinnah's call for peaceful Direct Action.

 

[Murshad]

"We are now all Pakistanis--not Baluchis, Pathans, Sindhis, Bengalis, Punjabis and so on--and as Pakistanis we must feel behave and act, and we should be proud to be known as Pakistanis and nothing else."

Reply to the Civic Address presented by the Quetta Municipality on 15th June, 1948.​

 

[Murshad]

"We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State."


Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11th August, 1947

 

[MilesTogo]

"We are now all Pakistanis--not Baluchis, Pathans, Sindhis, Bengalis, Punjabis and so on--and as Pakistanis we must feel behave and act, and we should be proud to be known as Pakistanis and nothing else."

Reply to the Civic Address presented by the Quetta Municipality on 15th June, 1948.​

You need to strike off Bengalis...

"We are now all Pakistanis--not Baluchis, Pathans, Sindhis,<s> Bengalis,</s>Punjabis and so on--and as Pakistanis we must feel behave and act, and we should be proud to be known as Pakistanis and nothing else."

 

[Murshad]

You need to strike off Bengalis...

"We are now all Pakistanis--not Baluchis, Pathans, Sindhis,<s> Bengalis,</s>Punjabis and so on--and as Pakistanis we must feel behave and act, and we should be proud to be known as Pakistanis and nothing else."

Thanks for telling me. I hope one day you will grow up and accept certain realities.

 

[Murshad]

"As you know, history shows that in England conditions, some time ago, were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State."

Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11th August, 1947