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Jaswant's Jinnah
By Karan Thapar
There’s a book published tomorrow that deserves to be widely read. It’s Jaswant Singh’s biography of Jinnah. Read on and you’ll discover why.
Singh’s view of Jinnah is markedly different to the accepted Indian image. He sees him as a nationalist, even accepting that Jinnah was a great Indian. I’ll even add he admires Jinnah and I’m confident he won’t disagree when I interview him tonight on CNN-IBN.
The critical question this biography raises is how did the man they called the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1916 end up as the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan in 1947? The answer: he was pushed by the Congress’s repeated inability to accept that Muslims feared domination by Hindus and wanted “space” in “a re-assuring system”. Singh’s account of how the Congress refused to form a government with the Muslim League in UP in 1937, after fighting the election in alliance, except on terms that would have amounted to its dissolution, suggests Jinnah’s fears were real and substantial.
The biography does not depict Jinnah as the only or even the principal villain of Partition. Nehru and Mountbatten share equal responsibility. While the book reveals that Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Azad understood the Muslim fear of Congress majoritarianism, Nehru could not. If there is a conclusion, it is that had the Congress accepted a decentralised, federal India, then a united India “was clearly ours to attain”. The problem: “this was an anathema to Nehru’s centralising approach and policies”.
Singh’s assessment of Partition is striking. After asserting that it “multiplied our problems without solving any communal issue,” he asks “if the communal, the principal issue, remains…. in an even more exacerbated form than before… then why did we divide at all?” The hinted answer is that no real purpose was served.
But Singh goes further. He accepts that because of Partition, the Muslims who stayed on in India are “abandoned”, “bereft of a sense of real kinship” and “not… one in their entirety with the rest… This robs them of the essence of psychological security.”
But that’s not all. He does not rule out further partitions: “In India… having once accepted this principle of reservation (1909)… then of partition, how can we now deny it to others…?”
Where the book compares the early Jinnah and Gandhi, the language and the analysis tilt in the former’s favour. At their first meeting in 1915, Gandhi’s response to Jinnah’s “warm welcome” was “ungracious”. Gandhi insisted on seeing Jinnah in Muslim terms and the implication is he was narrow-minded. Of their leadership, the book says Gandhi’s “had almost an entirely religious provincial flavour” while Jinnah’s was “doubtless imbued by a non-sectarian nationalistic zeal”.
Finally, “Jinnah… successfully kept the Indian political forces together, simultaneously exerting pressure on the government.” In Gandhi’s case “that pressure dissipated and the British Raj remained for three more decades.”
Unfortunately, I can’t assess the reliability of Singh’s viewpoint. I’m not an historian. But I can assert that it’s courageous and probably a valuable corrective. We need to see Jinnah without the prejudice of the past. It may be uncomfortable to accept suppressed truths but we can’t keep denying them.
This book will stir a storm of protest, perhaps most from Jaswant Singh’s own party. He realises that. But it did not deter him.
Filed under: Pakistan · Tags: Best Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity, BJP, Congress, Gandhi, India, Indian Muslims, Jaswant Singh, Jinnah, Nehru, Pakistan, Partition
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I have been saying for a very long time that Jinnah has been an abandoned Indian Hero. I am happy that it is now being discussed.
Anil sb good to see you here. Please contribute a piece or two.
“This book will stir a storm of protest, perhaps most from Jaswant Singh’s own party. He realises that. But it did not deter him”.
I have yet to read the book but Jaswant Singh has risen up in my eyes already. It sometimes takes a lot of courage to tell the truth; but one cannot build great nations without having truthful men and men of courage.
Perhaps my country is indeed moving from darkness towards light. What better Independance day gift can one give to a nation than restoring the good name and the honorable legacy of one of its finest sons.
Hi folks !
This is great … I always thought … how could a conceiver and maker of a nation be so maligned … thank you Singh saheb for a perspective on Jinnah saheb.
I am too small to compare, though … I think of Jinnah saheb and shri Subhas Chandra Bose … the leaders over looked because of their back ground / approach … both misunderstood … because they thought different from the main stream at that time … both had the conviction and persistence in their beliefs and endeavours and goodness of the people … (however debatable their views and actions, but never to be disrespectful) … an exemplary and befitting set of leaders … but eventually, Jinnah saheb being a level up having established a nation.
May we continue to learn more about, appreciate and respect our leaders. Amen.
Yashwant Singh has told a truth, that millions of Indians know, regardless of the systematic fabrication of pre independence history of India, a product of the Congress-Marxist conspiracy.
It is hard to understand why the educated class of India never stood upto this Congress lead fabrication of Indian history.
Myself, like millions of Indians, do not look at the Nehru-Gandhi dynesty in the same way, it has been made out to be by the media.
And I totally detaste naming of every Institution, Road & Stadium in India in the name of the Nehru family members.
It would be great if Pakistanis also start acknowledging their heroes with non Muslim background.
There’s more on this. After this news hit the headlines on NDTV two or three days ago, and its publication in ToI yesterday or day before (I had posted the whole article elsewhere on PTH), there’s yet another headline item in ToI today.
This is not going away in a hurry.
As neel123 guessed already, the Congress has screamed ‘foul’. The BJP is maintaining a grim silence.
Good for the Major Sahib! I don’t entirely agree with his thesis, not all of it, but with the bulk and the sentiment, oh, absolutely.
Time for the skeletons to be thrown out of their closets.
In a way, I am a pioneer. About five years back when I debuted on chowk I was about the only Hindoo Indian Jinnahite (possibly anywhere on the cyberspace). Now more and more Hindoos are jumping on the bandwagon.
Regards
Though I have been an admirer of Jinnah for years it was not until I visited PTH that the full panorama of Nehru’s arrogant blunders was revealed.
And you Majumdar sir are a genuine pioneer. This book actually belonged to you.
I long for simpler times when the Hindu and Muslim right wing in India both dissed Jinnah. Politicians, nowadays, just can’t get their “act” together.
Maybe as Gorki saab points out, Jaswant Singh is a man of courage. He is intellectually honest even to the point of upsetting his own apple cart. But could someone please point out why the Advani did what he did. I mean, I get all that man of courage stuff and all but at the end of the day, how did Advani benefit, or even think he would benefit by saying what he did about the J-man?
Not that I totally disagree/agree with either but I’m a bit confused by this Jinnah Love-fest and its motives and methinks there would not be a better forum to answer my doubts than PTH.
@Karaya
Just a cotton-pickin’ moment!
Let’s get some things clear (I speak for myself here).
It became clear during the course of personal investigations into our recent political history that there had been some imbalance in the characterisation of different historical personages.
On further investigation, and this included detailed discussions with knowledgeable people on this forum, what emerged clearly was that Jinnah’s character, political stance and ideology had been been traduced by a general habit of thinking of him as a malevolent Machiavellian figure bent on the destruction of the secular, non-violent Ram Rajya that Gandhi and Nehru had planned.
This was manifestly not true. In fact, he came out as a decent person and a gentleman, and a much-liked figure in Indian political circles (there is Noorani’s comment on his much-sought-after status for committee work, where cooperation and ability to get along with others was at a premium).
As far as I am concerned, this is a setting right of a wrong. Beyond that, with regard to later events, including some where after the separation of the British domain into two sovereign states, Jinnah acted against the interests of India, where is the question of love-fests? Can an Indian not acknowledge his sterling character and probity, and his innate secularism, his frustrated work, amounting to a Titanic struggle, to keep the two major communities together before a Partition which was thrust upon him, without being considered sycophantic and an unquestioning supporter?
That is a very dry pond that you are fishing, dear Sir.
Has anyone read the Jawed Naqvi interview on Dawn (thanks, D_a_n)? YLH must be rolling on the floor, laughing his head off. It will be impossible to speak to him for a week or more. I intend to stay away until he comes back to earth.
Is it possible to check if Hayyer48 is actually Jaswant Singh? If not, has JS been logging into PTH and making downloads?
here you go all….
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/the-newspaper/columnists/14-jawed-naqvi-jinnah-gets-approval-from-an-unlikely-indian-admirer
Jinnah acted against the interests of India
you mean one of the two sovereign states, not ‘India’. don’t you?
Hayyer 48 is not js. Js is not a sikh.
my love for nehru remains as strong as ever.
“my love for nehru remains as strong as ever.”
For logical reasons I hope.
Ofcourse.
I am a rationalist .
Jaswant Singh is a bjp wallah and calls himself a liberal democrat .What a fucking oxymoron!
Bonobashi:
If JS is Hayyer you must be Dr. Watson.
Koschan:
How did you deduce that I am a Sikh? If religious belief is so important, I pray you sir, what are you; Not his Highness’ dog at Kew?
And you might deign to add your pedigree too for our information.
@Bloody Civilian
Yes, that’s right.
Anyway, since you lot walked out on us, instead of asking us to change our minds, which is ALL we were waiting for (the exception being Mazumdar), we are the residual India. Accept no substitute.
Grammar fascist strikes:
To be perfectly honest, I’ve never seen an oxymoron engaged in such earthy activities.
Unless it is a foxy moron.
Nothing New read Rafiq Zakaria’s ” The Man Who Divided India ” . But this time it comes from BJP MP.
we are the residual India. Accept no substitute.
us too. you don’t either.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/nehru-as-responsible-for-partition-as-jinnah-jaswant/99321-37.html
Monday sees the publication of a biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah which challenges the way we in India have seen the founder of Pakistan. It reassess Nehru’s role in Partition, it sheds fresh light on the relationship between the Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh’s book is likely to attract considerable attention and may be even a fair amount of controversy. Karan Thapar, in a special two-part interview with the author, discusses the book with Singh, a former defence, foreign and finance minister of India and also a former soldier.
Karan Thapar: Mr Jaswant Singh, let’s start by establishing how you as the author view Mohammed Ali Jinnah? After reading your book, I get the feeling that you don’t subscribe to the popular demonisation of the man.
Jaswant Singh: Of course, I don’t. To that I don’t subscribe. I was attracted by the personality which has resulted in a book. If I wasn’t drawn to the personality, I wouldn’t have written the book. It’s an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination.
Karan Thapar: And it’s a personality that you found quite attractive?
*
Part II Gandhi, Jinnah both failed: Jaswant
Jaswant Singh: Naturally, otherwise, I wouldn’t have ventured down the book. I found the personality sufficiently attractive to go and research it for five years. And I was drawn to it, yes.
Karan Thapar: As a politician, Jinnah joined the Congress party long before he joined the Muslim League and in fact when he joined the Muslim League, he issued a statement to say that this in no way implies “even the shadow of disloyalty to the national cause”.
Would you say that in the 20s and 30s and may be even the early years of the 40s, Jinnah was a nationalist?
Jaswant Singh: Actually speaking the acme of his nationalistic achievement was the 1916 Lucknow Pact of Hindu-Muslim unity and that’s why Gopal Krishna Gokhale called him the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.
Karan Thapar: In your assessment as his biographer, for most if not the predominant part of his life, Jinnah was a nationalist.
Jaswant Singh: Oh, yes. He fought the British for an independent India but he also fought resolutely and relentlessly for the interest of the Muslims of India.
Karan Thapar: Was Jinnah secular or was he communal?
Jaswant Singh: It depends on the way you view the word ‘secular’ because I don’t know whether secular is really fully applicable to a country like India. It’s a word borne of the socio-historical and religious history of Western Europe.
Karan Thapar: Let me put it like this. Many people believe that Jinnah hated Hindus and that he was a Hindu basher.
Jaswant Singh: Wrong, totally wrong. That certainly he was not. His principal disagreement was with the Congress party. Repeatedly he says and he says this even in his last statements to the press and to the constituent Assembly of Pakistan.
Karan Thapar: So his problem was with Congress and with some Congress leaders but he had no problem with Hindus.
Jaswant Singh: No, he had no problems whatsoever with the Hindus. Because he was not in that sense, until in the later part of his years, he became exactly what he charged Mahatma Gandhi with. He had charged Mahatma Gandhi of being a demagogue.
Karan Thapar: He became one as well?
Jaswant Singh: That was the most flattering way of emulating Gandhi. I refer of course to the Calcutta killings.
Karan Thapar: As you look back on Jinnah’s life, would you say that he was a great man?
Jaswant Singh: Oh yes, because he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn’t really like him.
Karan Thapar: So you are saying to me he was a great man?
Jaswant Singh: But I am saying so.
Karan Thapar:Let me put it like this. Do you admire Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: I admire certain aspects of his personality: his determination and the will to rise. He was a self-made man–Mahatma Gandhi was a son of a Dewan.
Karan Thapar: Nehru was born to great wealth.
Jaswant Singh: All of them were born to wealth and position, Jinnah created for himself a position. He carved out in Bombay a position in that cosmopolitan city being what he was, poor. He was so poor he had to walk to work. He lived in a hotel called Watsons in Bombay and he told one of the biographers that there’s always room at the top but there is no lift and he never sought a lift.
Karan Thapar: Do you admire the way he created success for himself, born to poverty but he ended up successful, rich?
Jaswant Singh: I would admire that in any man, self-made man, who resolutely worked towards achieving what he had set out to.
Karan Thapar: How seriously has India misunderstood Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: I think we misunderstood because we needed to create a demon.
Karan Thapar: We needed a demon and he was the convenient scapegoat?
Jaswant Singh: I don’t know if he was convenient. We needed a demon because in the 20th century the most telling event in the entire subcontinent was the partition of the country.
Karan Thapar: I’ll come to that in a moment but first the critical question that your book raises is that how is it that the man, considered as the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1916 had transformed 30 years later by 1947 into the ‘Qaid-e-Azam’ of Pakistan?
And your book suggests that underlying this was Congress’ repeated inability to accept that Muslims feared domination by Hindus and that they wanted “space” in “a reassuring system”.
Jaswant Singh: Here is the central contest between minoritism and majoritarianism. With the loss of the Mughal empire, the Muslims of India had lost power but majoritarianism didn’t begin to influence them until 1947. Then they saw that unless they had a voice in their own political, economical and social destiny, they would be obliterated. That is the beginning. That is still the purpose.
Karan Thapar: Let me ask you this. Was Jinnah’s fear or anxiety about Congress majoritarianism justified or understandable? Your book in its account of how Congress refused to form a government with the League in UP in 1937 after fighting the elections in alliance with that party, suggests that Jinnah’s fears were substantial and real.
Jaswant Singh: Yes. You have to go not just to 1937, which you just cited. See other examples. In the 1946 elections, Jinnah’s Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet they do not have sufficient number to be in office because the Congress party has, even without a single Muslim, enough to form a government and they are outside of the government. So it was realised that simply contesting election was not enough.
Karan Thapar: They needed certain assurances within the system to give them that space?
Jaswant Singh : That’s right. And those assurances amounted to reservation, which I dispute frankly. Reservations went from 25 per cent to 33 per cent. And then from reservation that became parity, of being on equal terms. Parity to Partition.
Karan Thapar : All of this was search for space?
Jaswant Singh: All of this was a search for some kind of autonomy of decision making in their own social and economic destiny.
Karan Thapar: Your book reveals how people like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari and Azad could understand the Jinnah or the Muslim fear of Congress majoritarianism but Nehru simply couldn’t understand. Was Nehru insensitive to this?
Jaswant Singh: No, he wasn’t. Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was a deeply sensitive man.
Karan Thapar: But why couldn’t he understand?
Jaswant Singh: He was deeply influenced by Western and European socialist thought of those days. For example dominion status would have given virtual independence to India in the 20s (but Nehru shot it down).
Karan Thapar: In other words, Nehru’s political thinking and his commitment to Western socialist thought meant that he couldn’t understand Jinnah’s concerns about majoritarianism? Nehru was a centralist, Jinnah was a decentraliser?
Jaswant Singh: That’s right. That is exactly (the point). Nehru believed in a highly centralised polity. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity.
Karan Thapar: Because that would give Muslims the space?
Jaswant Singh: That even Gandhi also accepted.
Karan Thapar: But Nehru couldn’t.
Jaswant Singh: Nehru didn’t.
Karan Thapar: He refused to?
Jaswant Singh: Well, consistently, he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India.
Karan Thapar: In fact, the conclusion of your book is that if Congress could have accepted a decentralised federal India, then a united India, as you put it, “was clearly ours to attain”. You add that the problem was that this was in “an anathema to Nehru’s centralising approach and policies”.
Do you see Nehru at least as responsible for Partition as Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: I think he says it himself. He recognised it and his correspondence, for example with late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal, his official biographer and others. His letters to the late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal are very moving letters.
Karan Thapar: You are saying Nehru recognised that he was as much of an obstacle.
Jaswant Singh: No, he recognised his mistakes afterwards.
Karan Thapar: Afterwards?
Jaswant Singh: Afterwards.
Karan Thapar: Today, Nehru’s heirs and party will find it very surprising that you think that Nehru was as responsible for Partition as Jinnah.
Jaswant Singh: I am not blaming anybody. I’m not assigning blame. I am simply recording what I have found as the development of issues and events of that period.
Karan Thapar: When Indians turn around and say that Jinnah was, to use a colloquialism, the villain of Partition, your answer is that there were many people responsible and to single out Jinnah, as the only person or as the principal person, is both factually wrong and unfair?
Jaswant Singh: It is. It is not borne out of events. Go to the last All India Congress Committee meeting in Delhi in the June of 1947 to discuss and accept the June 3, 1947 resolution. Nehru-Patel’s resolution was defeated by the Congress, supported by Gandhi in the defeat.
Ram Manohar Lohia had moved the amendment. It was a very moving intervention by Ram Manohar Lohia and then Gandhi finally said we must accept this Partition. Partition is a very painful event. It is very easy to assign blame but very difficult thereafter. Because all events that we are judging are ex post facto.
Karan Thapar: Absolutely, and what your book does is to shed light in terms of a new assessment of Partition and the responsibility of the different players. And in that re-assessment, you have balanced differently between Jinnah and Nehru?
Jaswant Singh: All vision which is ex post facto is 20/20. It is when you actually live the event.
Karan Thapar: Quite right. Those who have lived it would have seen it differently but today, with the benefit of hindsight, you can say that Jinnah wasn’t the only or the principal villain and the Indian impression that he was is mistaken and wrong?
Jaswant Singh: And we need to correct it.
Karan Thapar: Let’s turn to Jinnah and Pakistan. Your book shows that right through the 20s and the 30s, or may be even the early years of the 40s, Pakistan for Jinnah was more of a political strategy, less of a target and a goal. Did he consciously, from the very start, seek to dismember and divide India?
Jaswant Singh: I don’t think it was dismemberment. He wanted space for the Muslims. And he could just not define Pakistan ever. Geographically, it was a vague idea. That’s why ultimately it became a moth-eaten Pakistan. He had ideas about certain provinces which must be Islamic and one-third of the seats in the Central legislature must be Muslims.
Karan Thapar: So Pakistan was in fact a way of finding, as you call it, ‘space’ for Muslims?
Jaswant Singh: He wanted space in the Central legislature and in the provinces and protection of the minorities so that the Muslims could have a say in their own political, economic and social destiny.
Karan Thapar: And that was his primary concern, not dividing India or breaking up the country?
Jaswant Singh: No. He in fact went to the extent of saying that let there be a Pakistan within India.
Karan Thapar: A Pakistan within India was acceptable to him?
Jaswant Singh: Yes.
Karan Thapar: So in other words, Pakistan was often ‘code’ for space for Muslims?
Jaswant Singh:That’s right. From what I have written, I find that it was a negotiating tactic because he wanted certain provinces to be with the Muslim League. He wanted a certain percentage (of seats) in the Central legislature. If he had that, there would not have been a partition.
Karan Thapar: Would you therefore say that when people turn around and say that Jinnah was communal, he was a Hindu hater, a Hindu basher that they are mistaken and wrong?
Jaswant Singh: He was not a Hindu hater but he had great animosity with the Congress party and Congress leadership. He said so repeatedly: I have no enmity against the Hindu.
Karan Thapar: Do you as an author believe him when he said so?
Jaswant Singh: I don’t live in the same time as him. I go by what his contemporaries have said, I go by what he himself says and I reproduce it.
Karan Thapar: Let’s come again to this business of using Pakistan to create space for Muslims. Your book shows how repeatedly people like Rajagopalachari, Gandhi and Azad were understanding of the Jinnah need or the Muslim need for space. Nehru wasn’t. Nehru had a European-inherited centralised vision of how India should be run. In a sense was Nehru’s vision of a centralised India, a problem that eventually led to partition?
Jaswant Singh: Jawaharlal Nehru was not always that. He became that after his European tour of the 20s. Then he came back imbued with, as Madhu Limaye puts it, ‘spirit of socialism’ and he was all for highly centralised India.
Karan Thapar: And a highly centralized India denied the space Jinnah wanted.
Jaswant Singh: A highly centralised India meant that the dominant party was the Congress party. He (Nehru) in fact said there are only two powers in India — the Congress party and the British.
Karan Thapar: That attitude in a sense left no room for Jinnah and the Muslim League in India?
Jaswant Singh: That is what made Jinnah repeatedly say but there is a third force — we. The Congress could have dealt with the Moplas but there were other Muslims.
Karan Thapar: So it was this majoritarianism of Nehru that actually left no room for Jinnah?
Jaswant Singh: It became a contest between excessive majoritarianism, exaggerated minoritism and giving the referee’s whistle to the British.
Karan Thapar: Was the exaggerated minoritism a response to the excessive majoritarianism of Congress?
Jaswant Singh: In part. Also in response to the historical circumstances that had come up.
Karan Thapar: If the final decision had been taken by people like Gandhi, Rajagopalachari or Azad, could we have ended up with united India?
Jaswant Singh: Yes, I believe so. It could have. Gandhi said let the British go home, we will settle this amongst ourselves, we will find a Pakistan. In fact, he said so in the last AICC meetings.
Karan Thapar: It was therefore Nehru’s centralising vision that made that extra search for united India difficult at the critical moment?
Jaswant Singh: He continued to say so but subsequently, after Partition, he began to realise what a great mistake he had made.
Karan Thapar: Nehru realised his mistakes but it was too late, by then it had happened.
Jaswant Singh: It was too late. It was too late.
Karan Thapar: Let’s end this first interview there. In the next part I want to talk to you about the relationship between the early Gandhi and Jinnah, the questions you raise about Partition and the predicament of Indian Muslims.
Bonobashi da,
Whoa! I’m afraid, you haven’t got my question.
To put it in plain and simple English, why is Jinnah’s true character being appraised now? To be a bit of a cynic, what will Advani/Singh get out of it? Will it further their careers? If so how?
As I said, all that talk about the truth (notice the lack of quotes around the word) is all quite grand but…
Can an Indian not acknowledge his sterling character and probity, and his innate secularism, his frustrated work, amounting to a Titanic struggle, to keep the two major communities together before a Partition which was thrust upon him, without being considered sycophantic and an unquestioning supporter?
Unless that Indian is acknowledging it anonymously, I would say that it’s a very rare occurrence. Which is unfortunate.
——————————–
Anyways, I still remain hopeful for a few pointers as to my original query.
Thapar might as well have been interviewing YLH for the most part…
Just Read Lal’s post.
Excellent job thank you.
Now someone call an attorney; I am convinced the PTH has a good case against JS for intellectual theft.
Seriously, found the interview very interesting and fair.
Stanley Wolpert on Jinnah — “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 the three.”
I think this quote sums it up pretty well the kind of impact the man had on history. The world is yet to recognize the greatness of this man.
@Karaya
Your post was in several sections, and I answered the part that seemed most relevant, the part assuming that Indians on this forum were sucking up to the administrators and moderators in order to ‘curry’ favour. I did see your previous para but was not aware that you meant it in all seriousness, considering its thrust and direction.
What you are saying is that any right-wing appreciation of Jinnah has to have a political purpose, and such a purpose doesn’t seem obvious.
The simplest political explanation is that this is a useful counter to the Congress, which has today become to be identified with Nehru, and doubly useful because the praised individual and his movement will have no resonance within the right-wing constituency in India today. It gives the Sangh Parivar a new stick with which to beat the Congress. It also does not create a new political force; the Muslim League will not re-launch itself and there is no second Mr. Jinnah.
Karaya
while we wait for bonobashi-da to respond… M J Akbar and others have an interested take on Advani’s gimick. but JS has not made a statement. he has written a book. lets read it first.
the praised individual and his movement will have no resonance within the right-wing constituency in India today
and the alleged motivation behind advani’s little gimmick in karachi was: if it’s wrong to call jinnah secular, then secularism is obviously a good thing. so he was really addressing his own people.. saying that we would hit a brick wall at 25% of the national vote. if we wish to grow bigger, in a sustainable way without having to rely on ram raths, nuke tests, pak-related big ‘events’ etc… we’ll have to move towards the centre.
again, JS has written a book. we should read it first.
Is this book available at Amazon etc.?
I would hate to comment on a book that I have not read first. Since I don’t plan to read the book anyway, I will just comment on the interview posted above by lal.
Jinnah may or may not be everything that JS mentioned. It appears to me that JS is just using Jinnah to attack Nehru. This is something started by Advani couple of years back and I had mentioned it somewhere at that time too that without dismantling the Nehru and Gandhi legacy, BJP or the RSS cannot successfully propagate their political ideology in India.
I have no clue about JS background. The only thing I know about him is that some time ago he was India’s foreign minister. Is he qualified to write history and touch on something that fundamentally alters the political narrative that was built by the INC and Indian left? The BJP and RSS not only built on that narrative but extended it as part of Hindutva political ideology.
Now why this new found love with Jinnah? BJP and RSS have sold a certain kind of narrow nationalism based on religion in India. A good majority of Indian middle class and the Indian youth has bought that hook, line, and sinker. It is a powerful narrative and the Indian Nation Congress finds it difficult to challenge that politically. Indian National Congress might win many cycles of elections in India but as I see it, congress would not be able to publically oppose the narrative that BJP and the RSS have created. Now after forcing the congress to accept the ideological plank that BJP has created, BJP and RSS would continue to disfigure the remaining foundations of the secularism that Gandhi and Nehru built in India.
Political ideologies are not just about winning elections. The followers of the ideologies want their approach to be accepted as mainstream, dominant or the only dominant ideology. I can guarantee that now that the story in JS’s book is not Jinnah but about the number of mistake Nehru made.
Interestingly, many Pakistanis have seen those errors in Nehru and Gandhi’s approach. Only Indians could not see them because of the halo effect about Nehru and Gandhi in India. When JS attacks Nehru, hiding behind Jinnah, he tends to emphasis those things that Nehru was partially responsible for. Nehru was not the dictator or the undisputed leader of Congress. He was the leader of the liberal wing of the Congress party. The conservative wing of the Party was led by Sardar V.Patel . As we know, the conservative wing was more supportive of the partition than the liberal wing of the Congress. Gandhi was the undisputed leader of the Party and he made final decisions based on who influenced him most on a given situation and issue. Let us also not discount the influence the British had over the congress and the Muslim League leadership and that played a role in partition too.
I am astonished at the ignorance of Indians. They have no clue as to why the partition took place and why people like JS exploit that partition for the their narrow political goals.
As I said I can guarantee now that this book is yet another attempt to create doubts about Nehru and his philosophy to promote the Hindutva storyline.
Comparing Jinnah to Subhash Chandra Bose is a little bit of stretch. Jinnah was probably more efficient, but Bose dared to dream and his dreams were dreams for all. There were no Hindus and Muslims in his dream. As much as it is a gaining fad to pillory Nehru, since Gandhi is rarely touched, one just needs to read “The Discovery of India” by Nehru to gauge his intellectual depth and thinking. He might have been an autocrat but he has been, by far, the best prime minister we ever had. Compared to pygmies that infest our country in recent times, he was a colossus.
On the other hand, it is wrong to assume that Jinnah is demonized across length and breadth of India. Very few people dispute his nationalism, his integrity, and his honesty. One can also, to an extent, understand his vitriol against the congress, but then, all leaders are judged by their effect on the posterity. When people deride Jinnah, it’s because of the present situation between India and Pakistan. Who knows, maybe, it was always meant to be for Hindus and Muslims to be separate nations. But, he who starts the fire is the arsonist. He wasn’t a very pleasing man, to be honest, and some of the methods adopted were, frankly, very confusing and damaging.
hossp
so the next revisionist scholarship should be on patel, in that case.
akash
jinnah was a constitutionalist, unlike bose.
Who knows, maybe, it was always meant to be for Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and Muslims to be separate nations
i don’t know what do you mean by ‘not very pleasing’, but jinnah certainly did not write any books nor even kept a diary.
“so the next revisionist scholarship should be on patel, in that case.”
Bloody Civilian,
It never occurred to me that someone can draw the above conclusion from my post. Would you care to elaborate how your assertion is logical?
Note to Bonobashi:
Akash is not me writing under another name; honset.
@Bloody Civilian
A quick aside about what seems to be the interpretation of the word ‘secular’ in Indian political circles, with a caveat that this is to be considered a trivial exercise, subject to proper semantic analysis by those properly equipped for the job.
As we have already discussed on several occasions, the Western concept of secularism stemmed from the religious divisions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; if a point of time is sought, it would be the Peace of Westphalia, with its constituent treaties, the Treaty of Osnabrueck, May 15, 1648, and the Treaty of Muenster, October 24, 1648. In this concept, the question of religion was initially decided by the religion of the ruler; that would be the religion of the ‘state’ in question and no other. We have of recent times come to imagine or to assume for the purposes of discussion that all ‘states’ are typically liberal democracies. This puts a thick coat of whitewash over the myriad differences that still exist. At the time of the Peace of Westphalia, these differences were all the more acute insofar as they were considering the detritus of the fragmenting Holy Roman Empire, which, after the downfall of the Habsburgs, was fast approaching its end and its conversion into the humbler Austrian Empire. As a result, religious orthodoxy, under this principle, could be enforced, and this word is used with knowledge of the implications, on a widely diverse population. It is another matter that under the impact of the spread of learning through increasingly cheaper printed material, and the Enlightenment, ruling methods and practices mellowed dramatically, at least in Europe, and the draconian methods of the sixteenth century seemed outdated and uncalled for even a hundred years later.
This school of governance increasingly began to consider that efficient governance could be achieved not by the ruler imposing his/her religious faith on the people, but by completely extricating religious practice from the day-to-day business of running a state. Over a period of three to four hundred years, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this brand of European governing practice was what was taken to be ‘secularism’.
One may note in passing that the ranks did not hold firm; Britain, at least, has given a great deal of weight to ‘multi-culturalism’, a concept whereby every practice, cultural or religious, is given respect and is considered seriously for inclusion in the set of behavioural patterns and activities that constitute ‘acceptable’ behaviour and activity for a state; particularly for the police and the intelligence services responsible for maintaining peace in civic matters.
In our sub-continental context, however, it would seem that we were impelled into consideration of multi-culturalism much earlier. Perhaps a useful point, although not an altogether neutral point, would be Gandhi’s support for the Khilafat movement, after the defeat of Ottoman Turkey in the First World War. This introduced two ideas: that a community, the ‘Hindu’, considered as a coherent unit, could extend support to another community, the ‘Muslim’, considered as another exclusive-of-the-first coherent unit, without compromising its own internal practices and beliefs; secondly, that these divisions of the populace into categories based on community following a religious practice uniformly were legitimate political paradigms.
In defence of Gandhi, it must be said that the concepts of religious division of the populace were hardly his original contributions, so he is as unlikely to be awarded the ‘credit’ for this as he is so readily awarded ‘obloquy’; there were other, clearly-defined concepts evolved out of the governing practices of the British, and even out of theology, so he had nothing frightfully original or novel to say. It is just that he said these things at a very sensitive point of the freedom struggle, and re-introduced, or perhaps strictly speaking, reinforced the concept of religious community into the political discussion then going on. It is the opinion of some that this act, and his subsequent very strong adherence to the concept of a state run on terms of equal freedom to practice religion based on the tolerance and conscious granting of space to other religious communities by the majority was disastrous.
It is a separate exercise to examine where this idea originated, apart from Gandhi; a diligent student will without question find half-a-dozen other roots and sources which fostered the idea. For our discussion, it is enough to know that this was the fons et origo of what seems to be the current concept of secularism in India.
All religious practices are to be tolerated, as the dominant religion, Hinduism, permits such toleration without violating its tenets and practices.
This is different from British multi-culturalism, I think, although the effects seem to be the same, and both are far from the French or generally continental European idea of the matter.
Coming back to the Indian (meaning Bharat that is India, I hasten to add for the sake of the short temper that BC seems to have brought back from his holiday), this has both its less pleasant expressions in day-to-day practices, as well as a role in the discussion between Congress and BJP. As far as the discussion is concerned, the Congress feels that this covers everything. If a minority is ‘looked after’, meaning if what its religious leaders stand for receives the support of the state, never mind if it is the most mediaeval expression of that religion, then all will be well. So, to spread our net wider than the usual suspects, the vilest acts of horrific murder by ‘khap’ panchayats are met by passive hand-wringing by the state; the abominable inheritance practices of some southern Christian communities are left alone by law-maker and judge alike until these are agitated against and reformed almost at the point of a gun. The State tends not to take a position, and when it does, it is typically the path of least resistance.
This is the Congress stand. The BJP objects to it in very strong terms.
To the BJP, this is a distortion. To them, this is nothing but an abdication by the state of all the responsibilities of a state, and the creation of micro-states within the formal, legally-sanctioned state, governed by religious leaders. To them, this brand of secularism is nothing of the kind at all; it is only ‘pseudo-secularism’. So the most offensive treatment of women is condoned for women of faiths other than Hindu, because of the fear of administrators of violating the sensitivities of religious leaders of those faiths. It goes on to a litany of detailed grievances, including the inequity of the state subsidising Haj pilgrimages massively, while equivalent pilgrimages of other faiths are never even considered.
The purpose of this is to remind ourselves of what secularism means in the context of current political discourse in India, and to some extent, what secularism means in the context of Jaswant Singh’s book.
It needs serious additional study, of course, but is offered here as a burnt offering to you on the occasion of your re-entry into the atmosphere.
I am astonished at the ignorance of Indians. They have no clue as to why the partition took place and why people like JS exploit that partition for the their narrow political goals.
- Contributed by an ignorant Indian, clueless like all others of his ilk.
@Gorki:
Akash is not me writing under another name; honset.
Whew. Saved by the bell. I was just about to ‘call’ you for using a pseudonym and sneaking your views in.
Facts can’t be veiled for long!
@Maani
I know. There are lots of naughty people here pretending to be somebody else.
Terrible, the deception people practise.
@hossp
Could I say, without seeming to be picking a fight (emphatically not my intention: I am a coward of international renown), that your post was interesting but at places disastrously inaccurate?
If you are open to the idea that some of the assertions that you have made with such daunting certainty and complete self-assurance may be debatable, I would like to comment further, after returning from the morning chores, tasks and meetings.
Hayyer,
On the contrary this seems to be a very sensitive treatment of Jawaharlal Nehru.
May I suggest a more plausible reason for Jaswant Singh’s book?
His very close friend is Nusli Wadia and they seem to both share a vision for a secular business friendly India. Of all the leaders of the independence movement, Jinnah’s image most fully fits where the Indian bourgeoisie wants to see India.
My estimate of Mr. Nehru has gone up not down after reading the interview. Remember- as you point out- we have known Nehru’s blunders for a while…so much of what Mr. Singh sensitizes us to Nehru’s position.
Does it have to be a devious BJP conspiracy that Advani (hesitatingly) and JS unavowedly saw the light.
It is the right time to publish the book. Elections are not due for another five years and JS is not an RSS favourite anyway. He did not come up through the RSS.
The book will certainly set a genuinely secular cat among the pseudo-secularist pigeons. The official narrative accepted by the BJP (because the Hindu right wing was always complicit in rejecting political space for Muslims?) demonized Jinnah. Till I began reading for myself I never saw Jinnah as anything but a saturnine inflexible splittist.
Because the book comes from the right of the political spectrum, and from the Hindu right at that, it cannot be brushed aside. Arguing from facts it reopens the debate that Azad tried to ignite but failed with his book in 1957. Nehru never publicly accepted his ‘mistake’. His vision of a strong centralized state was more important to him than a united India. He may have been right. I don’t know. It is too early to say.
What we were brought up on, and fed with mothers milk was the official narrative. For the larger swath of Indians Jinnah’s villainy is axiomatic, as is Gandhi’s saintliness and Nehru’s visionary nation building. The minutae leading upto partition are hidden from the public mind.
The book will strip away the hyper-real fabric that clothes the posturing nakedness of Nehru. We ought to refrain from condemning or pre-judging the book till its potential for modifying majoritarian predispositions of the political intelligentsia has been fully exploited.
I started on the book yesterday. And, Bonobashi, if you think Ayesha Jalal could write more clearly wait till you go through JS’ weighty perorations. I used to wonder where to place his English accent. ‘Royal Rajputana’ came to mind; his prose is very much more more of the same. A grammar fascist such as yourself can only wince at his publishers liberties with commas, semicolons and stops.
Read an excerpt.Sounds promising.Going out to buy the book now.
Dear Simply61,
Can we have a review from you under your real name. A review from a person of your stature will do wonders for our website.
YLH: Our posts probably got mixed up. My comments on Nehru were not with reference to JS’ book.
JS politically is of no account. He got to his present position on his own merit, much like Jinnah, and he mentions his reasons for admiring Jinnah in the interview.
JS is known as a liberal in the BJP not comfortable with the RSS world view. However I very much doubt if he would risk whatever remains of his career with a book that will certainly make the RSS cover its nose.
bonobashi
your explanation of indian secularism is informative. but the AIML-led struggle that somehow resulted in partition was about political and not religious space.
because of the fear of administrators of violating the sensitivities of religious leaders of those faiths
why not fear violating the sensitivities/aspirations of the bourgeoisie? in case of the muslims, for example, the bourgeoisie completely ignored and defied the religious leadership en masse in ’46 (and even in ’37). i believe they’ll do it again and every time… as they do in pak.
@Bloody Civilian
One tends to lose nuance in writing these preposterous monster posts that only the innate courtesy of PTH readers would accommodate.
What I meant was that Gandhi found precedents for seeking a religion based paradigm for social and political analysis, and he would have found precedents, if he had needed them. These precedents did not relate to the AIML. They were both, the AIML and Gandhi, seeking paradigms, but they did not necessarily take inspiration from each other.
Gandhi’s views on religion in society and in politics are important, because as Hayyer48 has pointed out elsewhere, it was this that imbued the Congress before, during and after partition.