Jaswant Singh on Jinnah: A Bold Tribute
By Mohammad Ashraf Chaudhry
Pittsburg , Ca
“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”- James Russell Lowell.
Helen Exley, an editor, designer and researcher, is right when she says, “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled, ‘This could change your life’ ”. Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah is one such, ‘dangerous’ book. At least, many in India think so.
That the mere publication of a political biography, titled: “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence” could put its veteran author, a former BJP leader; its erstwhile finance, defense and external affairs minister ( a rare honor); a recipient of the Outstanding Parliamentarian Award for the year 2001; a liberal, acceptable and a respectable face of the BJP, could just for calling the founder of Pakistan, Mr. Jinnah, as “secular”, or “an ambassador for Hindu-Muslim unity”, earn such a hasty and ignominious expulsion from his party is just unthinkable.
Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah, after its release on August 17, 2009, has invited more comments on Janwant Singh himself than on Jinnah. One wonders rather bewilderingly as to whether this book is about Jinnah or Jaswant Singh! Jinnah had been held as a communalist for too long. Jaswant Singh just tried to set the records right, even that too carefully, that he found himself with the entire hell let loose on him. Bernard Shaw was right when he said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies”.
It is, however, not in the entire book that the author is found showering laudatory remarks on Jinnah, and yet he is deemed sufficiently qualified for his expulsion from a party he had joined and served for more than 40 years ago. Even Galileo (1564-1642) got a better treatment for at least he got his chance to appear before the Inquisition for defending his assertion that it is the earth that moves round the Sun, and not the Sun. Jaswant Singh just received a phone call from the BJP president, Mr. Rajnath Singh informing him that he was expelled. No wonder, Jaswant Singh cried out in lament, “I have been wounded by my own kith and kin”.
Remarks like “The basic and structural fault in Jinnah’s notion remains a rejection of his origins: of being an Indian, having been shaped by the soil of India, tempered in the heat of Indian experience. Muslims in India were no doubt subscribers to a different faith but that is all…”, or, “It is in this, a false ‘minority syndrome’ that the dry rot of partition first set in… the answer (cure), Jinnah asserted, lay only in parting, and Nehru and Patel and others of the Congress also finally agreed. Thus was born Pakistan”, or assertions like “ Pakistan alone gave him (Jinnah) all that his personality and character demanded. If Mr. Jinnah was necessary for achieving Pakistan, Pakistan, too was necessary for the fulfillment of Mr. Jinnah”, these and many more comments can hardly be construed as complimentary. What Jaswant Ji has tried to say in the book about Jinnah is the same what Harry Truman, the 33 rd president of America, had ventured to say in a conference of 50 nations in 1945, “I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell”. Truth like a dog always bites.
The epicenter of the BJP ire has been not as much what Mr. Jaswant Sing has said about Jinnah. His unpardonable crime, as described ably by Aman Sethi, a Delhi-based journalist for The Hindustan Times of Oct. 1, 2009 has been “his (Jaswant Singh’s) crime was suggesting that Patel had a role to play in the Partition. By denigrating Patel, the BJP alleged, Singh had gone against the Party’s ‘core ideology’ ”. The irony is that Patel himself as home minister had actually “banned the RSS - the BJP’s ideological parent”, writes Aman Sethi.
I myself had been hasty in my remarks on the book in my first article in which I had written that a few laudatory remarks on Jinnah are just a ploy to “get the horse to the water”, or that Jaswant Singh early on denudes himself of his objectivity. But that was regarding his views about Muslims’ assimilation in the Indian ethos. I may still hold on to the view that Muslims did not stay in India as aliens. Only they remained so in the Indian leadership’s perception.
On further reading the book, I found Jaswant Singh, especially with relation to his delineation of Jinnah’s character, as amazingly bold, un-dauntingly frank, and astonishingly fair. The controversy about his book, like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Flaubert’s Madam Bovary, or Socrates Dialogues, or Minto’s “Kali Shalwar,” or “Khol Do” is a blessing in disguise. It will provide to the book the necessary and essential exposure it deserves. 49,000 copies have already been sold in India alone and over 13,000 in Pakistan, and it is selling like hot cakes. “Dirty books are never dusty”, says one unknown author.
There is a whole world of negative propaganda that is being deliberately orchestrated against the book on the grounds that the facts mentioned in it are flimsy. Quite a few “unnamed sources” have unleashed their disapproving campaign against the book with the intention that Jinnah as a leader should never appear in the Indian perception in no other role except as a staunch “communalist,” a “real spoiler”, and Nehru, Patel and Gandhi as true saints, infallible and utterly holy. Jaswant Singh, in that sense, is a true lion-heart who ventures first time to prove that all the great leaders involved in the struggle for the independence of India were men with clay-feet.
Dr. JBP More, deputy director of the Institute of Social Science, based in France comments in a meet-the-press program in Kannur in Kerala with comments on the book which are reflective of his own shallow and biased tilt: “Jaswant Singh had reproduced a book written by Pakistani scholar Ayisha Jalal…only to get popularity”. According to him, this book is “without reflecting on authentic historical facts…it neither draws on new material from archives or recently unearthed correspondence, nor does it offer a radical new interpretation of the events of the partition or the men involved”. Or comments like Jaswant Singh “buried the real historical facts”, and instead, “blamed Congress Party leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhai Patel for the partition of India”. Dr. More’s real mindset becomes more transparent when he further remarks, “Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, harbored ‘sectarian views’, and that Jinnah should be held solely responsible for the partition”. What is different often becomes new. Jaswant Ji has tried to show that amicably.
Did Mr. Jinnah, a 15-year senior to Mr. Gandhi who arrives in India in 1915, and the most famous and the costliest attorney in combined India, ever get a chance to become the President of the Indian Congress whose membership he never quitted? Who was Tilak’s heir apparent for this post after his death in 1920? Did Mr. Jinnah, or for that matter even Allama Iqbal, ever join the religiously motivated Khilafat movement? It was Mr. Gandhi who did that notwithstanding all the warnings of Mr. Jinnah. History shows that even the staunchest members of Congress, like Mohammad Ali Jauhar who became the president of the Indian Congress in 1924, got reprimanded by his once secretary, Mr. Nehru, just because he happened to be sitting in the company of people like Mr. Agha Khan and Jinnah ub Karacgu ub 1928.
A similar situation arose for Mr. LK Advance in June 2005, when at a function organized by the Karachi Council on Foreign Relations, Economic Affairs and Law, he made, “the near-fatal mistake of praising Jinnah’s august 11, 1947 speech to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly as a “classic exposition of a secular state”.
Writes Aman Sethi, in the Hindustan Times, October 1. A party that basically thrived on “a life-time raging against “Muslim appeasement” and “minoritism”, how could it digest its senior-most leader calling Jinnah “secular”? Mr. Advani got off the hook because of his indispensability; but not so in case of Mr. Jaswant Singh. Such narrow mindedness cost the party dearly in the 2004 and 2009 elections, but it is always hard to extract and separate Vanilla flavor from the core ingredients of Vanilla ice-cream.
Dr. Julius Lipner, director of the Dharam Hinduja Institute of Indic Research, University of Cambridge, called Prof. Akbar S. Ahmed’s book on “Jinnah” 1997 as “a courageous book, based on careful and original research”. Prof. Sharif al Mujahid compared Prof. Akbar’s book to “A Mahabharata… readable, human oriented, multi-dimensional, unique. Superb”. I call Jaswant Singh’s book on Jinnah, “ A Geetanjali;…a Ramayan of the events as they folded themselves in 1947; an absolutely honest and astonishingly bold attempt on the part of a Hindu leader who in this book attempts to call a spade a spade… a must read for all those who believe that “a book is like an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our souls”, as would say Franz Kafka.
Not very few have attempted to write about Jinnah and about his character, especially if they hailed from the rival camps, as has been done by Mr. Jaswant Singh. I would love to kiss the hand that held the pen which wrote remarks that compare the “Two Kathiawaris”, Gandhi and Jinnah. A bold and brave man can venture to write, “One was devoutly and expressly Hindu, the other but a casual votary of Islam. One shaped religion to his political ends; the other shunned it on grounds of principle”, pg.99, “what strikes greatly is that at this stage, when most of his colleagues were not even ready for freedom of India, Jinnah was clearly and forcefully advocating his constitutional ideas for leading India to freedom”; by 1920’s “Gandhi had come fully into his own; that is by the Nagpur Congress, from where onwards Jinnah got increasingly marginalized in the Congress party”, Jinnah who once was called “a Muslim Gokhale… had it not been for the war perhaps he could have remained central to the Congress… the First World War changed all that; had fate willed otherwise? Or was Jinnah outwitted, out-maneuvered? Or, even more tragically, was it that being Muslim he was from the very beginning disadvantaged? In this heartless race of political influence in India, Jinnah always carried a heavy handicap then, and also later”, page 104. Only a man with conviction in his own ideas and in the veracity of the character he is writing about, can dare to write such words.
Those who accuse Jinnah of abetting religious fanaticism, better correct their records. According to Munshi, Jinnah warned Gandhiji not to encourage fanaticism of Muslim religious leaders and their followers”. Richard Casey, the then Governor of Bengal, once shared Gandhi’s own repentance in which Gandhi had acknowledged, “Jinnah had told him that he (Gandhi) 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”.
“Jinnah had always wanted the Swarajists to adopt purely constitutional methods but he had no desire to fight their battles for them”, page 133. …After the failure of the all party conference in 1925, the political distance between Motilal Nehru and Jinnah widened considerably. For Motilal Nehru confronted by this trenchant criticism of the Hindu Mahasabha, altering his stance became necessary…”, and then came the much talked about deadly blow to the hoped Hindu-Muslim unity, enshrined in the 1916 Allahabad Pact, resulting in the infamous 1928’s Nehru Report which finally resulted in the parting of the ways of the two communities.
How much could Jinnah have been marginalized becomes clear by reading the pages of history that relate to the First Round Table Conference held in November, 1930. The Manchester Guardian most clearly and succinctly highlights this rift beautifully, “The Hindus thought he (Jinnah) was a Muslim communalist, the Muslims took him to be a pro-Hindu, the Princes deemed him to be too democratic. The British considered him a rabid extremist with the result that he was everywhere but nowhere. None wanted Him”. As the lines clearly show, no one wanted him because of his principled stand in every matter: he stood firmly for Hindu-Muslim unity which annoyed the religious fanatics in the Muslim and Hindu camps as each saw the dawn of their own fancied past glory in this disunity; the Princes saw the death-knell sounding loud and clear in Jinnah’s democratic posture; and the British saw the presence of a dangerously clever mind before whose wit they always saw themselves out-witted. Who could dare to highlight all this, and much more because it entailed holding a mirror to the Indian public about the fallibility of their own heroes. Only a crazy person could do that. Jaswant Singh did that and I salute him for doing it.
Stanley Wolpert’s book on Jinnah of Pakistan became most famous because of his terse summation of Jinnah’s character in four sentences, “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation, state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three”. Jaswant Singh’s reference to Nehru’s most scathing condemnation of Jinnah’s 14 Points as expressed by him in the All Parties Conference is what in my estimation is the crux of this book. I have not found it re-produced in any book of repute on the topic. This bitter and biting sarcasm of Nehru supplies the answer to those who still dispute Jinnah’s “secularism”, his “non-communalism”, and his “sincerity to the cause of Indian independence”.
“I wonder if any purgatory would be more dreadful for me than to carry on in this way. If I had to listen to my dear friend Mohammad Ali Jinnah talking the most unmitigated nonsense about his 14 points for any length of time I would consider the desirability of retiring to the South Sea Islands where there would be some hope of meeting with some people who were intelligent enough or ignorant enough not to talk of the 14 points”. Jaswant Ji must pay the price for commenting on this kind of derogatory attitude when he writes, “How, in reality, could there be any effective joint working of a Jinnah-led League and a Nehru-led Congress? A parting, a partition had to come, eventually”.
Three kudos for Jaswant Ji for writing such a book on a man held as the main villain in India; for discovering goodness in him, and for staking his political career for a rival leader, a Muslim who had been dead for over six decades. Indeed, “Pious men of all nations have a share in the world to come” as says rabbinic literature. In my estimation, Jaswant Singh is a Galileo, a Socrates of the modern times, because it is in the honest and painful soul-searching efforts of people like him that people ultimately are able to learn about painful truths. And one painful truth about the founder of Pakistan had been that like Gandhi, Patel and Nehru he too was a great Indian leader, very genuinely interested in the independence of India. The main Hindu leadership of the majority population, then in their foresight, did not agree to give him even 33% in the federation of a United India and some safeguards for the Muslims; God gave him 100% in the form of Pakistan. Let’s accept this “painful truth”, and live with it.
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