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

Jinnah oscillated almost till the last between ‘only Hindu-Muslim unity can drive the British out’ and ‘Muslims are a separate nation’. Not Gandhi, though, for that remarkable Indian struggled valiantly, indefatigably, and also so tragically, (controversially, too,) for sanity in Hindu-Muslim relations. That cause he had made as one of his life’s principal objectives. He had offered via Mountbatten, in earnest, the Premiership of India to Jinnah: also protesting when Jinnah was causally treated by the British in 1946, (Simla II) saying: “he is a great Indian, and the recognized leader of a great organization”.

Despite all this an unbelievably cruel partition did finally come about. There is, of course, no questioning in any form the reality of our neighbour, Pakistan; but that assertion of ‘Muslims as a separate nation’ did not endure. The greatest casualty of this great divide is tragically and indisputably – ‘Peace’; sadly, ‘peace’ has now abandoned all of us in the region. That is all the more why I struggle to find out; ‘What happened’? What made Jinnah become what he eventually did?, as Mountbatten, sort of defeatedly put it, a ‘frigid, haughty and disdainful’18 person? Gandhi had once gone to the extent of declaiming: “Jinnah [has] declared that in Pakistan the minorities would, if possible, have better treatment than even the Muslims”, if this “ideal set forth by Jinnah, [was realized] in practice, the whole of India would welcome” [this and] “the whole of India would be Pakistan”.19 What happened to this’? Also, how could Jinnah have reconciled an inherent conflict between the theocentric nature of Islam and the demands of a modern day state, claiming to be Islamic? Mercifully, he
was not put to test on that, ever. But this did not prevent me from undertaking my own journey of a ‘discovery of Jinnah’.

Another, perhaps final thought here is that in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – no matter how painful and tormented our past, yet, almost uniquely ‘our past’ is in reality not past at all, we continue to live it, often extremely destructively. That is why what is needed is a recognition of our common origins, our conjoined reality, and the inevitability of a common destiny
underlying this partition: yes, separate and sovereign countries – and yet together: ‘Rona bhee Sanjha, te hasna bhee sanjha’ – freely as this nugget of Punjabi folk wisdom informs us ‘we weep as one and laugh together, too’.

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Note: Jaswant Singh’s book India 1947: A fractured freedom Jinnah’s journey from ‘Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity’ to the ‘Quaid-e-Azam’ of Pakistan is due to appear later.