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Jinnah and the Muslim League
By A.G. Noorani
1906 was a landmark in the history of Muslims of this sub-continent. On October 1 that year, the Aga Khan led a deputation of 35 Muslim leaders to the Viceroy Lord Minto at Simla to ventilate the grievances of the Muslims and press for acceptance of certain demands. Separate electorates was one of them. The move was scathingly attacked by a 30 years old rising barrister in Bombay, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. On October 7 Gujarati published his letter which raised questions that were answerable.
“May I know whoever elected the gentlemen who are supposed to represent Bombay?” Jinnah knew, as did many, of the British help to the Deputation, not that it did not reflect the Muslims’ urge to convey their views to the Government. Significantly Jinnah did not make any such sharp criticism of the establishment of the All India Muslim League at Dhaka on 30 December though he was a staunch Congresman. Only three days earlier, on 27 December, he had attended for the first time a session of the Indian National Congres, its 22nd, at Calcutta.
There is no question but that the League reflected an urge that had been simmering for sometime. Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk took the lead and sought the help of Nawab Mohsin-ul-Mulk. The upshot was the formation at Aligarh of the Political and Social Organization of the Muslims.
It withered away but blazed a trail. Nawab Salimullah Bahadur of Dhaka circulated his scheme for confederacy and convened a meeting around the same time as the All India Educational Conference. Nawab Viqar-ul-Mulk presided over the first meeting of the League. On a motion by the Nawab of Dhaka it was decided that a “Political Association be formed styled the All India Muslim League with three objects – to promote loyalty to the British, protect and advance the rights of the Muslims of India and represent their “needs and aspirations to the Government” and “to prevent the rise among the Musalmans of India of any feeling of hostility towards other communities without prejudice to the other aforementioned objects of the League.”
It was not a body of Nawabs. Men like Hakim Ajmal Khan, Maulana Mohammed Ali, Maulana Zafar Ali Khan and Sheikh Abdullah supported the resolution. The founder of the Congres Allan Octavian Hume was sensitive to the feelings of Muslims. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan had, in a famous speech on 26 December 1887, warned against adoption of the principle of majority rule in the Indian setup: “there will be four votes for the Hindu to every one vote for the Muslims”.
In the correspondence that followed, Badruddin Tyabji pointed out to him that the Congres accepted that “there are numerous communities or nations in India which had peculiar problems of their own to solve” but there were also questions that affected them all. In those days, words like “nation” and “communities” had not attained the precision they did later, a qualm mean either. In 1888 the Congres adopted a rule barring discussion of any subject “to the introduction of which the Hindu or Mohamedan delegates as a body object”. Any resolution they object “shall be dropped”, provided that “the Congres has not already definitely pronounced an opinion on it”.
Retrospect over a century would suggest that the rule embodied a wise caution indispensable to any plural society, fundamentally it accepted the existence of a plural society in India which cannot be run by majority rule, as in any homogeneous society. Lebanon has its famous National Pact between the communities. On 20 December, 1986 an LTTE spokesman demanded acceptance of the principle that it is possible for “two nations to co-exist in one country” this was the only “viable alternative to Eelam”. The partition of Sri Lanka. people grope for solutions in such situation. On 2 November, 1991 an LTTE spokesman put the idea differently: “Our basic demand is for an independent sovereign State that can probably be accommodated in a Union where both States enjoy equal status”.
It boils down to one principle. A significant minority cannot be fobbed off with paper safeguards. It must be allowed a share in power, a role in governance. This is the theme in Arend Lijphart’s Seminal work Democracy in Plural Societies (1982). In the four decades between the establishment of the Muslim League and the partition of India, its leaders and those of the Congres grappled with the problem of forging an understanding between them and between the two communities which could serve as a foundation on which an Indian federation could be erected.
They failed. This article is not about the causes of that tragedy, one of the ten in history. It is about its central figure, Mohammed Ali Jinnah; his changing relations with the League; his valiant efforts to forge that understanding till the very end in 1946, his failure, his success in establishing the alternative Pakistan, when partition became inevitable, and his tragic discovery that it did not resolve the question to whose resolution he had given his all.
He began his political life as a Congresman, became a member of the Muslim League on 10 October 1913 on the persuasion in London of Maulana Mohammed Ali and Sir Wazir Hasan. The Congres’ Constitution barred its members from membership of “a communal organization” whose activities, in its opinion, are “anti-national and in conflict with those of the Congres”. It was only in December 1938 that its Working Committee decided to enforce it vis-à-vis the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha.
Ironically, in 1937 Jinnah had made the League a mass body with complete independence as its goal. In the same year V. D. Savarkar became President of the Mahasabha and reiterated the two-nation theory which he had expounded in 1924 in his essay, Hindutva Lala Lajpat Rai had done so much before him in 1904 and went on to advocate partition of India on religious line in the Tribune of 14 December 1924: “a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India”.
Lajpat Rai is ranked as an Indian Nationalist; nonetheless, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in his Autobiography: “Many a Congresman was a Communalist under his national cloak”, while the Hindu Mahasabha “masquerades under a nationalist outlook”. He put it more explicitly on 11 May 1958 that the “communalism of the majority is far more dangerous than the communalism of the minority”. Why? Because, as he explained on 5 January 1961, “when the minority communities are communal, you can see that and understand it. But the communalism of a majority community is apt to be taken for nationalism.”
One would, therefore, have expected a partnership between Jinnah and Nehru. There was, instead, a deep ideological divide and, on Nehru’s side, an intensely personal one too. This contributed to failure to forge a Congres-League pact and to India’s partition. Nehru refused to accept the very existence of “the Communal question”.
The problem was uplift of the poor. He had no use for pacts “between handful of upper class people”. Marguerite Dove writes in her neglected work Forfeited Future that “in 1936, as soon as Jinnah uttered the phrase `minority right’ – including within this political questions – he forfeited his claim to be a nationalist in the eyes of those who lived by Nehru’s analysis”.
To Nehru the divide in Indian society was based on class, not religion. To Jinnah it was political, not religious, although it was a product of the religious divide. He wrote to M.C. Chagla on 5 August 1929 that the issue of separate electorate was a national problem and not a communal dispute”.
Contrary to myths in India and Pakistan, Jinnah’s nationalism as an Indian and his concern for his community, the Muslims, formed a seamless web. At no time was he indifferent to the interests of the one while espousing the cause of the other. There was no “conversion” from Indian nationalism to Muslim “communalism.” His concerns formed an integral whole in an outlook neither Indians nor Pakistanis care to appreciate even now. Pakistan is canonize him virtually.
Indians demonise him. No one has suffered such intense demonisation as Jinnah does even now. Nasser said he belonged to three concentric circles – Muslim, Arab and African. So did Jinnah – like most of us – Muslim, Indian (or Pakistani) and the Western intellectual tradition, which is very much a part of us in our thinking and discourse. This writer deeply indebted to the compilations made by Syed Sharifuddin Pirzada and Jamilluddin Ahmad.
At the 1906 Congres session, a resolution was moved by two Muslim members criticizing the Privy Council’s ruling that the Wakf-e-Ala-Aulad violated Muslim law. It was a common form of trust created for the settler’s progeny.
The community was in uproar. Jinnah’s remarks in support of the resolution revealed his outlook. “It is a matter of gratification to the whole of the Muhammadan community, that we have got on the programme of the Indian National Congres a question which purely affects the Muhammadan community. That shows one thing, gentlemen, that we Muhammadans can equally stand on this common platform and pray for our grievances being remedied through the programme of the National Congres”. Was Jinnah a nationalist in October and a communalist in December?
This was to be his approach for the next 30 years – staunch advocacy of India’s freedom and simultaneously, espousal of Muslims’ grievances without necessarily sharing the Muslim viewpoint. In 1906, the Congres was hospitable and sensible enough to pass the resolution that it did. In later years it was far less so. It was the liberalism of 1906 that made it possible for Jinnah to play the mediators role he did.
His credo can be summed up in eight themes.
(1) Muslims needed safeguards against majoritarianism to protect their rights and interests; they were entitled to their rightful share in power and governance.
(2) They needed to shed their social backwardness and improve their economic conditions by liberalizing their outlook, promoting social reform and investing in education
(3) They needed to play an active role in national affairs. Apart from political advance and constitutional reform, Jinnah was a powerful and consistent advocate of Indianisation of the army.
(4) Jinnah was committed to the rule of law and respect for civil liberties, not least those of his political opponents,
(5) Muslims must organize themselves and present a united front, not in a confrontationist stance, but in order to negotiate an accord with the Congres and the British, preferably a Congres-League accord to confront the British with
(6) The political and constitutional impasse could be resolved only by a National Pact between the Hindus and the Muslims.
(7) Jinnah adopted the role of a mediator between Muslim opinion and Indian Nationalists. He played the role skilfully. Like a strong leader, he led from the front; like a wise leader he was careful not to be alienated from Muslim opinion. He did not join the Khilafat movement but he did voice concern at the fate of the Ottoman Empire and its Sultan, the Khalifa. He was confident that his base in the nationalist constituency was safe. Jinnah sought to alert Indian nationalism to Muslim concerns and prod Muslims to join the nationalist mainstream.
Lastly, from the very outset of his career till he died he was opposed to the infusion of religion into politics.
The last needs particular emphasis. Speaking in the Central Legislative Assembly on 7 February 1935, on Constitutional reforms, Jinnah said “religion is merely a matter between man and God.” But was separate electorate “a question of religion purely? … No, Sir, this is a question of minorities and it is a political issue.” It concerned the organization of a polity.
On 1 February 1943, now the Quaid-i-Azam, he repeated that “religion is strictly a matter between God and man”. He advocated the establishment of Pakistan as a Muslim, but not Islamic, State, as a counterpoise because in his opinion federal ideas had failed; including the Cabinet Mission’s Plan (1946).
But he did not move one bit in his convictions “Religion … is the personal faith of each individual”, he told the Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947. As for Qadianis he told Kashmiri journalist on 24 May 1944 that he appealed to them “not to raise any sectarian issues”.
He said “any Muslim, irrespective of his creed or sect” could join the Muslim League if he adopted its policy and programme. It was not a fair cry from his exhortation in the central Assembly in 1925 “for God’s sake do not import the discussion of communal matters into this House and degrade this Assembly.”
At the 1906 Congres, Jinnah moved an amendment for deletion of the clause pertaining to reservation for “backward classes” in the “self-governing bodies”. The expression “meant the Mohammedan Community” and he urged that it “should be treated in the same way as the Hindu community. There should be no reservation for any class or community”.
Two other pronouncements reflect his dilemma as well as his integrity. At a public meeting of Muslims on 13 August 1909 he supported separate electorates for elections to the Legislative Council. But at the Congres in 1910 he opposed their extension to local bodies “I wish to make it clear that I do not represent the Muhammedan Community here nor have I any mandate from the Muhammedan Community. I only express my personal views here”.
The honesty was appreciated in the League circles and he was invited to participate in its annual sessions as a guest even when he was not a member. At the Bankipur session in 1912 Jinnah argued that “a system of self-government on colonial lines was not feasible for India where things were quite different”. On this, he said, the League was right and “though he was a Congresman, yet he knew that it was wrong in this matter and he prophesied that very soon the Congres would adopt the same form as suggested by the League.”
The press report in The Pioneer of 2 January 1913 is all too brief. Clearly, Jinnah had in mind a form of self government with safeguards in view of India’s plural society. The League’s Lucknow session in March 1913 was the last Jinnah attended “as a guest”. The League now adopted as its goal “the attainment, under the auspices of the British Crown of a system of self government suitable to India.”
The Congres hailed this at its Karachi session.
It expressed “its complete accord with the belief that the League has so emphatically declared at its last session that the political future of the country depends on the harmonious working and co-operation of the various communities in the country which has been the cherished ideal of the Congres. This Congres most heartily welcomes the hope expressed by the League that the leaders of the different communities will make every endeavour to find a modus operandi for joint and concerted action on all questions of national good and earnestly appeals to all the sections of the people to help the object which we all have at heart.”
Jinnah could now look forward to what he called an “entente cordiale”. This led to the famous Lucknow Pact when the Congres and the League met at Lucknow at the same time in 1916. It was based on separate electorates. Jinnah’s partner on the Congres side was Tilak. Jinnah presided over the League session as he did also at the 1917 session when he said “It is said that we are going on at a tremendous speed, that we are in a minority and the Government of this country might afterwards become a Hindu Government….. Do you think, in the first instances, as to whether it is possible that the government of this country could become a Hindu Government? Do you think that Government could be conducted by ballot boxes?
Do you think that because the Hindus are in the majority, therefore they could carry on a measure, in the legislative Assembly and there is an end of it? If seventy million of Mussalmans do not approve of a measure, which is carried by a ballot box, do you think that it could be enforced and administered in this country? Do you think that the Hindu statesmen, with their intellect, with their past history, would ever think of – when they get self government – enforcing a measure by ballot box? If this country is not to be governed by the Hindus, let me tell you in the same spirit, it was not to be governed by the Mohammedans either and certainly not by the English. It is to be governed by the people and the sons of this country.”
It is unnecessary to chronicle here the landmarks on the route of descent – the Congres’ Nagpur session in December 1920 which accepted Gandhi’s programme of non-cooperation, differences over the Nehru Report, and the split in 1939 culminating in the Lahore Resolution on partition. We are concerned here with the broad trend. None of the theories commonly bruited about to explain the change stands scrutiny — Jinnah had no taste for mass politics; he abhorred the masses; felt left out, and was embittered by his wifee’s death.
Only a couple of months after Jinnah’s humiliating defeat in December 1920 at the Congres session in Nagpur he expressed “the greatest respect and reverence for Gandhi and the men who were working with him because he knew of what noble stuff they were made.
He worked with them and was firmly convinced of their noble and sacrificing spirits. He was proud of them. But he would tell them again – he might be right or he might be wrong – that the programme of Mahatma Gandhi was taking them to a wrong channel.” This was on the sixth anniversary of Gokhale’s death (Bombay Chronicle, February 21, 1921), Jinnah continued to cooperate with Gandhi.
In December 1929 he went all the way to Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad to discuss the Viceroy’s announcement of a Round Table Conference. Documents published recently show Jinnah pleading with the Viceroy on his behalf and that of the Congres in 1929-30. “I am left with the impression that Mr. Gandhi himself is reasonable,” he wrote.One who participated so readily and frequently in meetings at Shantaram Chawl in Girgaum in the second decade of the century could not have been very far from mass politics. The popular demonstrations against the Governor, Lord Willingdon, at the Town Hall on December 11, 1918 – which he led from seven in the morning and which resulted in brushes with the police – could not have been led by a man averse to mass action.
Eight years after the Nagpur Session Motilal Nehru wrote to Purshottam Thakurdas: “So much depends on Jinnah that I have a mind to go to Bombay to receive him.” His importance in Indian politics was not diminished by Nagpur.
His wife Ruttie’s death on her thirtieth year, February 20, 1929 shook Jinnah to the core. He withdrew from society and became distant. To think that it changed his political outlook is to underestimate the man’s commitment and to fly in the face of the record. In 1937, eight years later, he saw “no difference between the ideals of the Muslim League and of the Congres, the idea being complete freedom for India.” He was consistently anti-British governor of Bombay Willingdon called him a “Bolshevik” in 1918 a proposal to depart Jinnah to Bombay was mooted by him and his success on George Lloyd. The home Member of the Viceroys executive council H. Haig called him “the arch-enemy of the British Raj” neither Sapin nor any other constitutionalist would have received such “attention.”
In so chequered a career, the interaction of the elements of change and continuity is a challenge to understanding. The challenge is not a very difficult one, provided only that one reads the entire rich record of his speeches and those of others. He comes out clean. One is less sure about them.
“I am an Indian first and a Muslim afterwards”, he said on September 10, 1931, “but at the same time I agree that no Indian can ever serve his country if he neglects the interests of Muslims, because it is by making Muslims strong, by bringing them together, by encouraging them and by making them useful citizens of the state that you will be able to serve your country.” It was his mediatory role that was being undermined by the Congres’ intransigence at every stage.
He organized the Muslims, in March 1927, to put forward agreed proposals based on joint electorates. The Congres and the League accepted them. The Hindu Mahasabha wrecked these efforts.
The All-Parties Conference appointed by the Congres ignored the accord, and set up the Motilal Nehru Committee. The Nehru Report was tilted in favour of the Mahasabha line. Uma Kaura ascribes the failure “to the inability of the Congres leaders to stand up firmly against the pressures of the Hindu Mahasabha.” Her book Muslims and Indian Nationalism (1977) is a mini classic.
Jinnah pleaded before the All-Parties Conference in 1928. “It is essential that you must get not only the Muslim League but the Mussalmans of India and here I am not speaking as a Mussalman but as an Indian. And it is my desire to see that we get 7 crores of Mussalmans to march along with us in the struggle for freedom. Would you be content with a few? Would you be content if I were to say, I am with you? Do you want or do you not want Muslim India to go along with you?” This was Jinnah the mediator.
He was not only defeated, he was humiliated. There was one in particular which proved as consequential as it was hurtful – that Jinnah represented only “a small minority of Muslims.” He had no option now but to prove his representative credentials.
He spurned the invitation to the Delhi Conference of Muslims led by the Aga Khan. Instead he healed the split in the League and drew up his famous Fourteen Points based on separate electorates but with a broad hint that they would be given up if general accord was forthcoming.
In the general elections, held under the new Government of India Act, 1935, the League and the Congres co-operated especially in the UP. “It was the desire of both parties to avoid a conflict as much as possible and to accommodate each other”, Jawaharlal Nehru recorded. But after the polls he rejected coalition and insisted that the League merge with the Congres in the U.P.
Basically the Congres was opposed to sharing power with the League and it refused to accept Jinnah as a representative of the Muslims.
Snubbed, the League passed the Lahore Resolution on March 23, 1940 demanding partition of India. There were a host of proposals. Of them all, Sikandar Hayat Khan’s draft was accepted but with a vital omission at the last moment – three paras envisaging a “central agency” were dropped, with fateful consequences.
The evidence is irrefutable that Pakistan was a bargaining counter which Jinnah had to devise because in 1939 the Viceroy kept asking him for a concrete “alternative” to the federation under the act of 1935 which he rejected.
(1) A Working Committee draft of October 22, 1939, spoke of a “confederation of free states”.
(2) On January 19, 1940, Jinnah wrote in the time and tide (London) of two nations who both must share the governance of their common motherland”.
(3) Only 24 hours earlier, the draft provided for “a central Agency… the Grand Council of the United Dominions of India.” Jinnah dropped it to raise the bargaining price.
(4) The Lahore Resolution itself envisaged in its last para a centre for the interim period (“finally”), a typical Jinnah tactic for bargaining.
(5) An English friend of Pendered Moon “who knew Jinnah” was told, “in reply to his expressions of surprise at such a dramatic revolution… that it was a tactical move.”
(6) There is similar and overwhelming testimony on this by several of Jinnah’s confidants. I. I. Chundrigar, a Leaguer close to him, told H.V. Hodson, the Reforms Commissioner, in April 1940 that the object of the Lahore Resolution was not to create “Ulsters” but to achieve “two nations… welded into united India on the basis of equality.” It was, he added, an alternative to majority rule, not a bid to destroy India’s unity. Jinnah himself told Nawab Mohammed Ismail Khan, one of the few who thought for himself, in November 1941, that he could not come out with these truths “because it is likely to be misunderstood especially at present”.
But “I think Mr. Hodson finally understands as to what our demand is.” Hodson regarded it as a bid for a set-up on “equal terms” motivated by the fear that Muslims might be reduced to being “a Cinderella with trade union rights and a radio in the kitchen but still below-stairs”.
(7) Professor R.J. Moore’s Escape from Empire refers to a file in the Jinnah papers in Pakistan’s archives containing his correspondence with Cripps in 1942 on “the creation of a new Indian Union”. Significantly, it is still embargoed.
(8) On April 25, 1946, he was offered two alternatives by the cabinet Minister – the Pakistan as it came to be established in 1947 or an Indian Union superimposed on groups of Muslim provinces. Jinnah rejected the first and said he would consider the second if Congres did the same.
(9) His own proposals of May 12 envisaged not Pakistan but a confederation.
(10) Mumtaz Daultana, a prominent Leaguer of Punjab, told Ayesha Jalal: “Jinnah never wanted a Pakistan which involved the partition of India and was all in favour of accepting the Cabinet Mission’s proposals” of May 16, 1946; which he did.
(11) Documents in Volume VI of The Transfer of Power 1942-47 record top League leaders like Nazimuddin and Ispahani of Bengal, Saadullah of Assam, Aurangzeb Khan of the North West Frontier Province and Khaliquzzaman to the UP expressing their skepticism to Governors early in 1946.
(12) Liaquat Ali Khan suggested federation, nor confederation, to Stafford Cripps in 1942.
(13) Jinnah said at Kanpur on March 30, 1941, that “in order to liberate seven crores of Muslims where they were in a majority he was willing to perform the last ceremony of martyrdom, if necessary, and let two crores of
Muslims be smashed”. It is unlikely that he was prepared for that, which itself suggests the bargaining tactic he used. But “smashed” they were thanks not least to his tactics and policies only an arrogant man could have fancied that the Muslims of India were his to permit to get “smashed”.
In a speech to the Punjab Assembly on 11 March 1941 Sir Sikandar dissociated himself from the resolution. “A Muslim Raj here and a Hindu Raj elsewhere”. To Panderel Moon he accurately predicted “Pakistan would mean a massacre.”
Jinnah himself told the Viceroy on 2 March 1939 that the only federation acceptable to him was one that contained “equipoise” to ensure a “Hindu-Muslim balance” – anything to prevent brute majority rule at the Centre. The Congres was against that. Its formula was simple – “democratic” rule on the Westminster model one man, one vote, a strong Centre and fundamental rights.
The League set up a Foreign Committee in December 1938 and a Constitutional Sub-Committee in March 1939. The former prepared a draft on 1 February 1940. On 6 February the League’s Working Committee adopted the FC’s draft as a basis for its resolution on the “outline” of the Pakistan proposal. It mentioned the two-nation theory. Strangely, the Lahore Resolution did not. The Lahore session began on 21 March 1940. The next day it deliberated on the Pakistan resolution. The first preliminary draft, which the Subjects Committee discussed on March 23 for adoption by the session in the plenary, provided for an All-India Centre.
The provisions read thus: (e) That the regions may, in turn, delegate to a Central agency, which for the convenience may be designated the Grand Council of the United Dominions of India, and on such terms as may be agreed upon, provided that such functions shall be administered through Committee on which all regions (dominions) and interests will be duly represented and their actual administration will be entrusted to the Units. (f) That no decision of this Central Agency will be effective or operative unless it is carried by at least a two-thirds majority. (g) That in the absence of agreement with regard to the constitution, functions and scope of the Grand Council of the United Dominions of India, cited above, the regions (dominions), shall have the right to refrain from or refuse to participate in the proposed Central structure. This was the Sikandar draft Jinnah got clauses (e), (f) and (g) deleted.
The Lahore Resolution said at the end “this session further authorizes the Working Committee to frame a scheme of constitution in accordance with these basic principles, providing for the assumption finally by the respective regions of all powers such as defence, external affairs, communication, customs and such other matters as may be necessary.” Dr. B.R. Ambedkar asked, “what does the word `finally’, which occurs in the last para of the Lahore Resolution, mean? Did the League contemplate a transition period in which Pakistan will not be an independent and sovereign State? “That scheme was never produced by the League. Nor did the Congres ask to see it!
On 11 February 1941 Sir Abdullah Haroon, Chairman of the Foreign Sub-Committee forwarded to Jinnah its draft Report for his perusal. It was dated 23 December 1940. It was not unanimous among its nine members was Dr. Syed Abdul Latif, Jinnah’s bete noire Leagues to the press annoyed him. In a sharp letter to the Doctor dated 15 March 1941 Jinnah denied that any such Committee had been set up at all. The Report pointed out that the Lahore Resolution did envisage “a transitional stage” under Centre.
It said: “A Common coordinating agency would be necessary…; for, under the third principle of the Resolution, it will be impossible to implement effectively the provisions of safeguards for minorities without some organic relationship subsisting between the States… an agreed formula has to be devised whereby the Muslims shall share the control at the Centre on terms of perfect equality with the non-Muslims: (page 88). In plain words, Pakistan would spell the ruin of Indian Muslims unless it had an “organic relationship” with the rest of India.
Jinnah did not wish publicly to concede a Centre. Confident of his tactical skills, not unjustifiably, he thought he would, when the chips were down, “pull it off”. He miscalculated. His abrasive rhetoric impaired his credentials as an interlocutor. Nehru wrote in his jail diary on December 28, 1943; “Instinctively I think it is better to have Pakistan or almost nothing if only to keep Jinnah far away and not allow his muddled and arrogant head from (sic) interfering continually in India’s progress”.
At the Madras session in April 1941 the League textually incorporated the Lahore Resolution into its aims and objects. Hailing from Hyderabad, Dr. Latif was opposed to Pakistan. “A complete separation is unthinkable”, he wrote to Jinnah on 16 May 1941.
It would afford no security to Muslims in the rest of India. He complained, “Mr Jinnah has many personal virtues; but his manners as a leader, his treatment of political opponents, his obstructionist tactics and his aggressive method of presentation of the Muslim standpoint have all gone to weaken what is intrinsically a strong cause of the Muslims which, I know, he deeply loves”.
Jinnah had miscalculated gravely. Rather than share power with him, the Congres preferred partition of India along with the partition of Punjab and Bengal. Nehru bluntly told the Cabinet Mission on 10 June 1946 that “The Congres was going to work for a strong centre and to break the group system and they would succeed. They did not think that Mr Jinnah had any real place in the country” — He would be expelled by giving him another country which they believed would not survive..
Jinnah knew that partition of Punjab and Bengal was inevitable, but concealed that from his followers lest he lost support. On January 17, 1942, he disclosed to Professor Reginald Coupland his readiness to concede the Ambala Division in Punjab and Bengal’s western districts, provided Assam was conceded – a tall claim. But he persisted in rejecting that fate publicly even while discussing privately the terms of reference of the Radcliff Commission on the partition of the two provinces, on 16 May 1947. Yet, Doon Campbell of Reuters was told on 21 May that he would “fight every inch” against the partition of Punjab and Bengal despite its huge chunks of Hindu majority areas.
On any honest reading, the phrase in the Lahore resolution “with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary” could refer only to them; especially when the object was that the “regions should be so constituted” – with such readjustments – that “the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority” should be grouped to form Independent “states”. Nothing could have been simpler than to mention the Provinces entirely name as was done in the resolution passed by the League Legislators’ Convention on 9 April 1946. It identified the Zones comprising all the seven provinces it named specifically as “Pakistan Zones where the Muslims are in a dominant majority”.
The Resolution contained want only offensive references to “the exclusive nature of Hindu Dharma and Philosophy” which were dear to millions whom the Resolution sought to make citizens of Pakistan.
That was no way to negotiate, surely. Inconsistently enough, Jinnah very much wanted to negotiate and compromise. The Resolution was discarded a month later when, on May 12, he offered the Cabinet Mission proposals for an Indian confederation, not Pakistan, conceding foreign affairs, defence and “communications necessary for defence” to be dealt with by “the Constitution-making bodies” of the Pakistan and India Provinces “sitting together”. Such bodies do not wield executive power; only legislative, constituent power. This was the astute statesman’s initial offer for bargaining. Hence, his acceptance of the Mission’s Plan of 16 May 1946 which the Congres wrecked and destroyed the last chance of preserving India’s unity.
Jinnah’s offensive language and arrogant demeanour and his bargaining tactics – he demanded a corridor between Punjab and Bengal in the Doom Campbell interview – wrecked his strategy. The two-nation theory made no sense. It however spread poisonous hate. If Muslims of India were one nation with those of Pakistan, it is not difficult to see the cloud of suspicion that the theory would cast over them. It did.
Jinnah’s lack of candour on partition of Punjab and Bengal, in order to preserve his following in East Punjab and West Bengal, was of a piece with his callous indifference to Muslims in Hindu-majority areas. The recipe of statutory safeguards which the Lahore resolution mentioned was unreal as he well knew. “All safeguards and settlements would be a scrap of paper, unless they are backed by power”, Jinnah told the League Session in October 1937.
He did worse than offer recipes that were unreal. He made promises he should not have made and could not have fulfilled. He said on 11 April 1946: “If Britain in Gladstone’s times could intervene in Armenia in the name of protection of minorities, why should it not be right for us to do so in the case of our minorities in Hindustan, if they are oppressed”.
Britain then was the world’s most powerful nation. Pakistan would be militarily inferior to India. Jinnah knew that this was a false promise to make. It was also a dangerous one for it made Muslims in India wards of a foreign protecting power of whom, according to Jinnah, they were part of one nation. Earlier, he had cited Hitler’s support to Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia.
When partition became a fact accompli Jinnah had no worthwhile advice to offer to them – except to be loyal to their own country. The Council of the Muslim League met on June 9, 1947, at the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi, to accept the Partition Plan of June 3. Jinnah was questioned sharply by members from Bombay, the United Provinces, Orissa and Bengal about the plight of the Muslims in India. He said blandly that he “could disclose nothing beyond his personal opinion that the safeguarding of the rights of Muslim minorities would depend upon the future relations between Hindustan and Pakistan”.
Since that was the reality, why did he unleash a cold war by advocating the ruler’s right to decide on accession, egg on the Nizam of Hyderabad, accept Junagadh’s accession, and reject Mountbatten’s offer in writing at Lahore on 1 November 1947 to hold plebiscites in all these contested states and in Kashmir? Jinnah Papers, Vol. 3 contain (at pp. 694-7) is advice to a delegation of Muslims from Coorg on 25 July, 1947: “Muslims in India have nothing to be afraid of.
They will still be several crores in number”. They would have been a hundred million in a united India without the odium of the preposterous two-nation theory. Jinnah’s speech of 1917 was more realistic than his proposal for Pakistan, a bargaining chip over-taken by events he could not control in a strategy ruined by his own flawed tactics.
The Congres inebriated with power drove him to extremes. He played into its hands. In Pakistani discourse, the establishment of Pakistan is regarded as an achievement but also as a reluctant necessity created by the Congres’ intransigence. In truth, it marked a defeat of the Muslims of the sub-continent. Jinnah could have accomplished much as a federalist without the two-nation theory. The Abdullah Haroon Report contained much sense. He could have built on it creatively.
Even in 1947, India meant something to him. He had a curious notion of an India which comprised two member states – Pakistan and “Hindustan”. He angrily wrote to Mountbatten on August 26: “It is a pity that for some mysterious reason Hindustan have adopted the word `India’ which is certainly misleading and is intended to create confusion.” Did he then have in mind on India comprising the two states?
If Jinnah, the partitionist, had a latent sense of an India above the two states, Jawaharlal Nehru, the ardent Unionist, not only contributed to the collapse of the 1946 plan but adopted a policy that would congeal the partition by adopting an intransigent policy on Kashmir. In this Patel supported him.
Jinnah began to lead the League in 1913 by sheer force of intellect and character. He was, however, only a primus inter pares the first among equals. Even in the early thirties, he asked Sir Wazir Hasan to preside over the League which he did. Sir Fazle Husain declined. From 1937 Jinnah put his stamp on the League and emerged as the Quaid-i-Azam. As late as 1942 he faced dissent on the Quit India movement from Khaliquzzaman, Raja Saheb of Mahmudabad and MAH Ispahani. As he acquired Charisma, the party ceased to be a platform from which he drew power. It became his appendage.
As fund raiser, he controlled the purse strings. Jinnah proved to be an excellent Organisation Man. In this he owed a lot to Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan. After 1937 the League had became what the Royist V.B. Karnik called a parallel nationalist movement with an enormous mass base.
The Congres continued in a state of denial. On 11 November 1945 Nehru went so far as to demand that the League must change its “present policy and its leadership”.
In his autobiography Nehru falsely caricatured him as one who “once privately” suggested that “only matriculates should be taken into the Congres”. No authority for this falsehood is cited. Nehru wrote thus in 1936. Nearly two decades earlier, Jinnah’s strong assertion to the contrary was made publicly and in London on August 13, 1919, in his evidence before the Joint Select Committee of Parliament on the Government of India Bill.
Lord Islington asked: Q: 3884: You would say that there are people in India who though they may be not literate, have a sufficient interest in the welfare of the country to entitle them to a vote? – I think so, and I think they have a great deal of common sense… I was astonished when I attended a meeting of mill hands in Bombay when I heard some of the speeches, and most of them were illiterates.” Could such a man have made the suggestion Nehru attributed to him in 1936?
Jinnah laid bare his heart in a much neglected speech at Aligarh in February 1938 in which he recalled the past: “At that time there was no pride in me and I used to beg from the Congres.” The first “shock” came at the Round Table Conference in London; the next, in 1937. “The Musalmans were like the No Man’s land. They were led by either the flunkeys of the British government or the camp-followers of the Congres…” Jinnah refashioned the League and made it a progressive body.
He told the students at the Aligarh Muslim University: “What the League has done is to set you free from the reactionary elements of Muslims and to create the opinion that those who play their selfish game are traitors. It has certainly freed you from that undesirable elements of Maulvis and Maulanas. I am not speaking of Maulvis as a whole class… Having freed ourselves from the clutches of the British government, the Congres, the reactionaries and so-called Maulvis, may I appeal to the youth to emancipate our women.” Later, he delivered “a warning to the landlords and capitalists who have flourished at our expense”.
But, let alone the League, the Congres had nothing to offer to the so-called Nationalist Muslims as Asaf Ali lamented in his memoirs.
Jinnah was an important figure in public life when Gandhi returned to India. But unlike others, he could not be domesticated or co-opted. He spoke as an equal. Liberals like Sapru were not his peers. In May 1924 he pleaded for a Congres-League Committee “to draw up a practical programme for the organisation of workers and peasants of India”. He was once President of the Postal Union which had 70,000 members. In the Central Assembly he spoke on a wide range of subjects e.g. the Motor Vehicles Act.
Jinnah’s ascendancy over contemporaries whether at the Bar or in politics and his appeal to his followers did not rest only on admiration for his intellect; but even more so on his stern, unbending rectitude. “It is doubtful if there is a politician in India to whom the adjective incorruptible can be more fittingly applied”, Ambedkar wrote in 1944 K.M. Munshi referred to Jinnah on 11 December 1918 as one “the like of whom he had never seen before”.
Jinnah did not “arrive” in 1940. But, both Indians and Pakistanis neglect the phase that preceded it – the conciliator and the legislator. The merits of Pakistan apart, the rhetoric Jinnah deployed was not calculated to make him a valued interlocutor. Not that the Congres was keen on compromise.
Once Pakistan was achieved, Jinnah threw the two-nation theory out of the window of the Constituent Assembly in his famous speech on 11 August 1947. Attention has focused exclusively on the passage on the irrelevance of religion to citizenship. But “the first observation” he made concerned “law and order”; “the second thing” was “bribery and corruption”; and next, “nepotism and jobbery”.
Partition was inevitable and all to the good, he said, “May be that view is correct, may be it is not, that remains to be seen”. He spoke of “a nation of 400 million”, not of 100 million and concluded with the classic remark on the communities ceasing to be such politically’, “not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individuals but in the political sense as citizens of the state”. It was too late Jinnah’s dream of Pakistan collapsed when the minorities in West Pakistan left the state. They were a vital component of the secular set-up he contemplated.
Contradicting this thesis, Jinnah insisted that the Muslim League continue to exist in India despite the opposition of the League’s leaders from India. The Council of All India Muslim League met in Karachi for the last time on 14-15 December 1947 and decided to split.
Jinnah asserted: “There must be a Muslim League in Hindustan. If you are thinking of anything else, you are finished. If you want to wind up the League you can do so, but I think it would be a great mistake. I know there is an attempt, by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and others, to break the identity of Muslims in India. Do not allow it. Do not do it.” This was a false charge to level against Azad.
Hussain Imam of Bihar then moved his amendment in the resolution, “…in place of the All-India Muslim League, there shall be separate league organizations for Pakistan and the Indian Union,” the word “shall” should be replaced by “may”. Imam said: People here do not know the difficulties the Muslims are facing in India. They should be left free to decide their future according to the circumstances.” No one supported the amendment. An obscure Mohammed Ismail of Madras was handpicked as convener of the League. His leadership only widened the breach in India.
By any test Quaid-i-Azam was one of the greatest men of his times. Indians and Pakistanis must come to terms with his record in its entirety. He was of a heroic mould but fell prey to bitterness. In the present age, some will be talking of his virtues; others of his failings alone. Posterity alone will do him full justice.
Some day, the verdict of history on Jinnah will be written definitively. When it is written, that verdict will be in the terms Gibbon used for Belasarius: “His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times: his virtues were his own, the free gift of nature or reflection. He raised himself without a master or a rival and so inadequate were the arms committed to his hand, that his sole advantage was derived from the price and presumption of his adversaries”.
A.G. Noorani is a prominent Indian Lawyer and writer.
