JINNAH – WHY WRITE ABOUT HIM NOW?
JASWANT SINGH M.P

Susanne and Lloyd Rudolph in a thought provoking lecture have posed the question with elegant lucidity: “Jinnah continued to be perceived as liberal, eclectic and secular to the core”4, committed to India’s unity, he was thought of by Viceroy Lord Linlithgow as ‘more Congress than the Congress’5. “So what happened? How could so cataclysmic an event as partition occur when it hadn’t even been imagined as late as the 1940s”?6 And no intelligible definition of Pakistan existed uptil as late as 1946? How and why did this ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’, the liberal constitutionalist, an Indian nationalist – Mohammed Ali Jinnah, then become, in Viceroy Lord Wavell’s phrase, a “Frankenstein monster”7, working to dismember that very world which had so generously created him?

Jinnah had initially rejected membership of the Muslim League, opting from the very beginning for the Congress party, where he started as Secretary to Dadabhoy Naoroji in 1906. He also had the distinction of being the President of the joint sittings of the Congress and the Muslim League. Jinnah was present to welcome Gandhi back to India upon the latter’s return from South Africa, in 1915. By the 1920s, however, their paths began to part. Gandhi eased Jinnah out, first from the Home Rule League, and later also from the Congress. They had begun to differ on fundamentals, for example, on civil disobedience, which Jinnah termed as ‘unconstitutional;’ but to which Gandhi by then was totally committed. Jinnah believed that to “generate coercive power in the masses would only provoke mass conflict between the Hindus and Muslims”8, as in fact, sadly it did.

The Khilafat agitation was another issue. Jinnah opposed it as being essentially ‘religious’; Gandhi accepted it precisely for that reason, writing in Young India on 20 October, 1921 - “ I claim that with us … the Khilafat is the central fact, with Maulana Muhammed Ali because it is his religion, with me because in laying down my life for the Khilafat, I ensure the safety of the cow from the Mussalman’s knife, that is my religion”9. Jinnah, thereupon told Gandhi that he had ruined politics in India by “dragging up a lot of unwholesome elements”10 … and giving them “political prominence”11; “that it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done”12.

Their paths kept diverging, until by 1921, after the Ahmedabad Session, Jinnah was formally out of the Congress Party, having already joined the Muslim League, with reservations, in March, 1913. After leaving the Congress Party Jinnah gradually converted the League from being an effete assembly of rather elegant, ‘pan-chewing ashraf’ into becoming the instrument that eventually helped him carve out his Pakistan.