Winners
and
Partition
Losers
of
By Aijaz Zaka Syed – Dubai
What did Jaswant Singh expect? You can’t be in a party that
thrives on the demonization of Muslims and shower fulsome
praise on the founding father of Pakistan as a ‘great Indian’
and ‘freedom hero’ and get away with it.
No wonder the former soldier has been expelled from the party
that he helped found a day after the release of his biography
of Pakistan’s founder. But then the former foreign minister
has reached a stage in his career where he doesn’t give two
hoots what his party thinks of his extraordinary book on
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the man most Indians have grown up
despising as the man responsible for the country’s Partition.
The BJP has been out of power for more than five years. And
after the rout in the recent elections, it looks like it is
going to remain out there in the wilderness for a long time to
come.
Besides, going by the incredible attention and adulation Singh
and his book have been receiving at home and abroad with
television networks and newspapers queuing up to interview
him, his future appears more promising and secure than his
former party.
One of the BJP’s founding members, Singh handled crucial
responsibilities – defense, finance and external affairs
– with aplomb in the government of Atal Behari Vajpayee. He
deserved better than this from his party, which is going
through a serious existential crisis right now.
I haven’t had the opportunity to look at the book in question,
Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence (Rupa & Co) as yet.
However, Singh’s extraordinary interviews with Karan Thapar of
CNN-IBN and others, discussing his biography of Jinnah and why
and how he came to write it promise a rollercoaster ride
ahead.
Whatever the motives behind the book and its merits and flaws,
you’ve got to acknowledge the author’s intellectual audacity
in taking up such a daunting project. It takes real guts to
swim against the current.
In a party that loves to hate
everything Muslim and bristles at the mention of Pakistan,
singing hosannas to the man considered the ultimate iconoclast
of ‘Akhand Bharat’ (united India) is nothing short of heresy.
Of course, this is not the first book on the monumental
tragedy of the Partition and how Hindus and Muslims turned on
each other after living together in harmony for more than a
thousand years. There have been far more authoritative tomes
on the subject, such as Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman:
Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Stanley
Wolpert’s Jinnah of Pakistan and, most recently, Prof Akbar S
Ahmad’s Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for
Saladin.
But what makes this book on Jinnah truly unique is its
authorship — it is written by an Indian politician who is at
the other extreme of ideological spectrum and farthest
possible from Quaid-e-Azam and his much debated legacy. But
more than the biographer and his unusual choice of subject, it
is what he sets out to do with it that makes Singh’s Jinnah
seminal in every sense of the word.
By holding India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and
his deputy Sardar Patel as much responsible for the Partition
as Jinnah, if not more, Singh has turned the received history
and Indian understanding of the circumstances leading to the
creation of Pakistan on its head.
He seeks to demolish the popular myth that Jinnah was a
religious bigot and Hindu hater, elucidating rather
persuasively how the tallest leader of Congress until Mahatma
Gandhi arrived from the South Africa and a passionate champion
of Hindu-Muslim unity ended up as the man who divided India to
create a separate homeland for Muslims.
So how did the Gujarati lawyer, who felt slighted when a
fellow Gujarati, Gandhiji, once thanked and acknowledged him
as ‘a Muslim leader’ at a function that Jinnah hosted in the
Mahatma’s honor end up as the man who divided India? It was a
long journey that began with his disillusionment with and
isolation in the Congress after Gandhi took over the reins of
independence movement.
So it was not before a long sabbatical from politics and five
years of self-imposed exile in London that the brilliant
lawyer returned home into the welcoming arms of the Muslim
League, a party that he had strongly attacked at the time of
its inception in 1906 in Dhaka.
Singh, like so many others who have dealt with the subject
before, believes it was the intransigence and rigidity of the
Congress leadership, especially Nehru and Patel, that
inflicted the Partition on India.
By refusing to accommodate Muslim concerns about their
representation in power and decision making process in the
independent India and refusing to share power with the Muslim
League in provinces like Uttar Pradesh (United Provinces then)
and in Delhi, the Congress leadership virtually presented
Pakistan on a platter to Jinnah.
In fact,
tactical
the post
Muslims”
Pakistan
Singh concludes, Jinnah’s demand of Pakistan was a
gambit to extract greater role and say for Muslims in
British India. It was aimed at creating “space for
after the British left the country. “Jinnah wanted
inside India,” insists Singh.
I am not so sure about that. But you get a fair idea how the
man once described by Sarojini Naidu as the “ambassador of
Hindu-Muslim unity” was forced on the road to Pakistan.
Whoever was responsible for the Partition, Jinnah or Nehru,
all of us – Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis – have paid
for it in our own ways. But perhaps no one has suffered as
much as those remaining behind in India have. No one has paid
a greater price for the Partition as India’s Muslims have.
Sixty-three years after the creation of Pakistan, we continue
to carry the heavy cross of historic guilt on our shoulders.
Singh may be accused of resorting to hyperbole when he says,
“Look into the eyes of the Muslims who live in India and if
you truly see through the pain they live to which land do they
belong?” But indeed India’s Muslims have been the chief
victims of the catastrophe that left a million people dead on
both sides and millions more displaced and scarred forever.
It’s rather late in the day for hypothetical mind games and
‘what ifs.’ And this is not to question the existence of
Pakistan or Bangladesh either.
But I often wonder what a great and giant country this would
have been if it had not been split into two (later three).
Imagine the endless mass of a country, from Afghan frontier to
the green expanses of Burma and from the mighty Himalayas to
the Arabian Sea.
And imagine what a crucial role Muslims with their huge
numbers could have played in such a powerful country (“Muslims
on both sides have paid a price in Partition. They would have
been significantly stronger in a united India, effectively so
much larger land, every potential is here!”). But they gave up
all this, or were forced to give up, — for a ‘moth-eaten
Pakistan’ (Quaid-e-Azam’s words), founding a Muslim homeland
in areas that were in any case Muslim-majority regions. In
doing so, they broke away with the 1000-year-old legacy of
Muslim presence and struggle in the sub-continent. I do not
know who has benefited from the Partition.
At least, the
people who are accused of inflicting it on the sub-continent
haven’t. They have been the real losers of this geopolitical
drama.
– Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times.
He contributed this article to PalestineChroicle.com. Contact
him at: [email protected].