By Yasser Latif Hamdani
In a review of Nisid Hajari’s book “Midnight furies” in the Economist called “Searing Split“, a reviewer had this to say:
In particular he focuses, as do most histories of partition, on the troubling character of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding leader of Pakistan. Mr Hajari has little sympathy for Jinnah, a bitter and uncompromising man, calling him the “most polarising figure in the Partition drama”. Jinnah, more than anyone, was responsible for the creation of Pakistan, yet it remains unclear how much he really wanted it or whether he pursued the idea more as a tactic to increase Muslim clout within a larger India.
Mr Hajari judges him to have been “criminally negligent” in his thinking about the human consequences of his demand for Pakistan, calling him “vindictive” in his decision-making. Nehru deserves blame too, though, for example in his haughty dismissal of his rival. That fed Jinnah’s fears that India would “strangle Pakistan at birth”—deny it the economic means to prosper or to defend itself militarily—hence his determination to “fight it out”
Compare this to William Dalrymple’s review of the same book in the New Yorker:
At the center of the debates lies the personality of Jinnah, the man most responsible for the creation of Pakistan. In Indian-nationalist accounts, he appears as the villain of the story; for Pakistanis, he is the Father of the Nation. As French points out, “Neither side seems especially keen to claim him as a real human being, the Pakistanis restricting him to an appearance on banknotes in demure Islamic costume.” One of the virtues of Hajari’s new history is its more balanced portrait of Jinnah. He was certainly a tough, determined negotiator and a chilly personality; the Congress Party politician Sarojini Naidu joked that she needed to put on a fur coat in his presence. Yet Jinnah was in many ways a surprising architect for the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. A staunch secularist, he drank whiskey, rarely went to a mosque, and was clean-shaven and stylish, favoring beautifully cut Savile Row suits and silk ties. Significantly, he chose to marry a non-Muslim woman, the glamorous daughter of a Parsi businessman. She was famous for her revealing saris and for once bringing her husband ham sandwiches on voting day.
Jinnah, far from wishing to introduce religion into South Asian politics, deeply resented the way Gandhi brought spiritual sensibilities into the political discussion, and once told him, as recorded by one colonial governor, that “it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.” He believed that doing so emboldened religious chauvinists on all sides. Indeed, he had spent the early part of his political career, around the time of the First World War, striving to bring together the Muslim League and the Congress Party. “I say to my Musalman friends: Fear not!” he said, and he described the idea of Hindu domination as “a bogey, put before you by your enemies to frighten you, to scare you away from cooperation and unity, which are essential for the establishment of self-government.” In 1916, Jinnah, who, at the time, belonged to both parties, even succeeded in getting them to present the British with a common set of demands, the Lucknow Pact. He was hailed as “the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”
But Jinnah felt eclipsed by the rise of Gandhi and Nehru, after the First World War. In December, 1920, he was booed off a Congress Party stage when he insisted on calling his rival “Mr. Gandhi” rather than referring to him by his spiritual title, Mahatma—Great Soul. Throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the mutual dislike grew, and by 1940 Jinnah had steered the Muslim League toward demanding a separate homeland for the Muslim minority of South Asia. This was a position that he had previously opposed, and, according to Hajari, he privately “reassured skeptical colleagues that Partition was only a bargaining chip.” Even after his demands for the creation of Pakistan were met, he insisted that his new country would guarantee freedom of religious expression. In August, 1947, in his first address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, he said, “You may belong to any religion, or caste, or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” But it was too late: by the time the speech was delivered, violence between Hindus and Muslims had spiralled beyond anyone’s ability to control it.
And let us read what Nisid Hajari himself has to say in the book:
When they returned to Bombay at the end of the summer, Jinnah asked Sir Dinshaw how he felt about intermarriage. The Parsi didn’t realize what his Muslim friend was angling at. A capital idea, Petit declared – just the thing to help break down the foolish barriers that divided Indians from one another. Jinnah’s next question horrified him, though. The nearly 40-year-old Muslim marrying his teenage daughter? The idea was “absurd!” Sir Dinshaw not only refused but took out a restraining order against Jinnah.
Jinnah was not to be discouraged, however, either personally or politically. He and Ruttie continued to correspond secretly. Like many of the youth in her circle she was enthralled by the romance of the nationalist movement, and that winter she eagerly followed the news coming out of the graceful Mughal city of Lucknow, capital of the United Provinces, where Jinnah had helped arrange for the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress to hold their annual sessions simultaneously. For the first time the two parties agreed on a common set of demands to make of the British – what became known as the “Lucknow Pact.” Jinnah won for Muslims a guaranteed percentage of seats in any future legislature, among other safeguards that would ensure they were not perpetually outvoted by the Hindu majority.
The Lucknow Pact raised Jinnah’s political stock sky-high; he seemed a shoo-in to become president not just of the League, but perhaps even the much larger Congress one day. A few months later, soon after Ruttie had turned 18, she and Jinnah scandalized Bombay’s Parsi community by eloping. They quickly became one of the city’s most glamorous couples, cruising down Marine Drive in Jinnah’s convertible at sunset each night, her hair loose in the wind.
Then Jinnah threw it all away. Just as his political career was reaching its zenith, the spotlight shifted to another Gujarati lawyer, born just 30 miles from Jinnah’s ancestral village. In 1915 a 45-year-old Mahatma Gandhi had returned to India from South Africa, where he had lived for the past two decades, and where his efforts to organize South Africa’s Indian immigrant community had made him a celebrity.
Gandhi dubbed his strategy satyagraha – literally, “soul force” – and he now proposed replicating his methods in India. Jinnah balked. He did not challenge the principle behind satyagraha – the idea that Indians should peacefully refuse to cooperate with their British overlords. “I say I am fully convinced of non-cooperation,” Jinnah declared at a contentious Congress meeting in September 1920. But he did not believe that the Indian masses were educated or disciplined enough to ensure their protests remained nonviolent. He thought Congress leaders needed to prepare their followers first. “Will you not give me time for this?” he asked the crowd at the meeting, plaintively.
Not all of Jinnah’s motivations were so high-minded, of course. He was unquestionably a snob: later, when tens of thousands of Muslims turned out at rallies to see him, he would recoil from shaking hands with his own supporters. He also found Gandhi’s appeal to the largely Hindu masses dangerously crude. At his evening prayer meetings, the Mahatma would frame his political arguments using parables from Hindu fables; he described his vision for independent India as a “Ram Rajya” – a mythical state of ideal government under the god Ram. All the chanting and meditating that accompanied Gandhi’s sermons seemed to Jinnah like theatrics.
What is almost never acknowledged, though, is that Jinnah worried less about Hindus than about the danger of inflaming religious passions among Muslims. At the time mullahs across the subcontinent were threatening to launch a jihad if the British, who had defeated the Ottomans in World War I, deposed the Turkish Sultan – the caliph, or leader, of the world’s Sunnis. Led by a pair of fiery brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat Ali, this “Khilafat” movement had attracted an unsavory mob of supporters. The acerbic Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri remembers Khilafat volunteers as “recruited from the lowest Muslim riffraff…brandishing their whips at people.”
Jinnah had no sympathy for these rough-edged Muslims, or for their fanatic cause. He feared that their rage would inevitably turn from the British to Hindus. Gandhi, on the other hand, threw his support behind the Khilafat movement: in turn Muslim votes gave him the slight majority in Congress he needed to launch his satyagraha. Years later Gandhi recalled Jinnah telling him that he had “ruined politics in India by dragging up a lot of unwholesome elements in Indian life and giving them political prominence, that it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.”
Nowadays most Indian accounts put down Jinnah’s opposition to Gandhi to jealousy. At a follow-up Congress meeting in December 1920, they often note, Jinnah drew jeers by referring to “Mister” Gandhi in his speech, rather than the more respectful “Mahatma.” In fact, although he did slip once or twice more, Jinnah did switch to using “Mahatma.” What he absolutely refused to do was refer to Khilafat leader Mohammed Ali as “Maulana,” a term reserved for distinguished Islamic scholars. Jinnah was not about to encourage what he saw as religious demagoguery. “If you will not allow me the liberty to … speak of a man in the language which I think is right, I say you are denying me the liberty which you are asking for,” he vainly protested. The crowd’s howls chased him off the stage.
The humiliating scene marked the beginning of Jinnah’s long slide into irrelevance as a national political figure. Under Gandhi’s influence a new, less august crowd dominated Congress meetings – middle-class and lower-middle-class men and women, clad in saris and kurtas and sitting on the ground cross-legged rather than in chairs. Jinnah still got upset when his bearer laid out the wrong cufflinks for him. He no longer fit in.
Jinnah did not disappear from the political scene, but as Gandhi’s Congress grew larger and larger, the League leader was pushed further and further to the margins. He became what he had never wanted to be – a purely Muslim politician, reduced to petitioning for concessions for his community. By the end of the 1920s, the League had begun to break up into factions, and Jinnah’s influence had become negligible.
This was not the illustrious nationalist hero with whom the impressionable Ruttie had fallen in love. After giving birth to a daughter, Dina, in August 1919, Ruttie had plunged into a half-baked mysticism, taking up crystals and seances. She may have begun using drugs like opium to combat a painful intestinal ailment. The differences in the couple’s ages and temperaments became too obvious to ignore. “She drove me mad,” Jinnah told one friend. “She was a child and I should never have married her”
I leave it to the reader to decide whether this account is sympathetic or unsympathetic. Not that a man like Jinnah needs anyone’s sympathies to have his rightful place in history. What is clear is that whoever wrote the review for the Economist didn’t care to read the book for himself or is too prejudiced to write an honest revew.