Jinnah

"Like political contestation between India and Pakistan, their respective nationalist historiographies are equally contentious and, in their efforts to offer grand narrative, they do not shirk from an abrasive self-righteousness. While amongst Pakistani nationalist historians, their country has been a historically ordained reality varying from its Indus Valley distinctness to its predominantly Muslim credentials, whereas in India its formation is perceived as a forced as a forced partition of an otherwise untied Mother India. Here, the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, has often been posited as the spoiler who, in cahoots with the imperial dictum of divide and rule, facilitated this vivisection. Amidst this reductionism augmented by enduring Indo-Pakistani bickering over Kashmir, water resources and proxy wars on each other’s territories, Jinnah is the father figure in Pakistan but a demolition man in the mainstream Indian mega-narrative. The ultra right Hindu forces unite in their suspicion of Pakistan’s inevitability and exceptionalise Jinnah as an evil genius, though often fail to accept that the creation of the fifth largest state in the world cannot be explained through a single factor. Jinnah was at the vanguard of various historical events and the dissolution of the Raj owed itself to several forces and partition as a part of a decolonisation process has not been strictly unique to the sub-continent. A former foreign minister of India belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Jaswant Singh was determined to study Jinnah with a fresher perspective so as to seek out the factors behind the division of the sub-continent. His book caused some uproar amidst his own colleagues due to their strong reservations against Pakistan and Jinnah, but in Pakistan it has been well received with Singh enjoying superb and cordial hospitality across the Indus lands. Initially, his own ultra-right party expelled him for writing this book on Jinnah but, given his high profile and a lifetime commitment towards his country and Hinduist ideology, he has been taken back into the BJP’s fold. For a while and quite often, Singh’s narrative takes its reader away from Jinnah himself and turns into a familiar historical narrative of known political history of the decades preceding 1947. His verdict often focuses on the British imperial policy, which simply dwelt on prioritising its own divisive imperatives. In other words, the false consciousness internalised by an otherwise astute lawyer became a solidified demand for Muslim rights initially anchored on quest for parity with the Hindu majority and then turned into a full-fledged struggle for sovereignty. While Jinnah as a proponent of Hindu-Muslim unity tried to cultivate closer relationship with Mahatma Gandhi, B G Tilak, G K Gokhale and the Nehrus, most of the Congress leaders either ignored him out of sheer snobbery and arrogance or merely derided him as a spoiler. As early as 1915, on his return from South Africa, Gandhi did not properly appreciate Jinnah’s sincerity for a united nationalist cause and instead, unnecessarily, hinted towards his Muslim origins. Motilal Nehru always reciprocated towards Jinnah until he came under the Mahasabha pressure in 1927-8, but his son, Jawaharlal, often looked down upon Jinnah, as is noted by Singh."