The crisis in the BJP caused by L K Advani’s remarks in Pakistan appears to be over. Nevertheless, his remarks need to be examined from the point of view of historical truth. Advani said that Jinnah was a secular person. He also said that he was the founder of Pakistan. The first remark is both right and wrong, as I shall explain. Advani’s second remark, judging from the recently unsealed British top secret archives, is not quite correct. I shall explain that too. On return from London with a Barrister’s degree, Jinnah joined the Congress Party, opposed separate electorates and exhorted the Muslims to resist British machinations to divide and rule. Jinnah’s career in the Congress floundered on Mahatma Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1915. Jinnah opposed Gandhi’s policy to bring about a socio-political mass revolution, preferring constitutional methods and gradualism. At the Nagpur Congress session in 1920, when he tried to argue against Gandhi’s views he was hounded out of the pandal and Gandhi did not intervene to let him have his say. This was a crushing blow to his ego because his young wife Rati was with him. He did not abandon the Congress. He protested against the Rowlat Act of 1921 by resigning his seat in the Imperial Legislative Council. Before the 1928 Congress session in Calcutta, he secured Muslim support for abandoning separate electorates in return for the Congress Party agreeing to give 33 per cent seats to Muslims in the Central Legislature instead of then existing 27 per cent. But the Congress refused to agree to this small concession. ‘‘I am not speaking as a Muslim but as an Indian. Would you be content that (only) a few Muslims (like me) go along with you?’’ he had pleaded. Jinnah was at that time unpopular with the pro-British Muslim group led by the Agha Khan as well as with the British authorities. ‘‘Jinnah of course was always the perfect little bounder and as slippery as the eels which his forefathers purveyed in Bombay market,’’ reported Sir Malcom Hailey on his performance at the first two Round Table Conferences. He was dropped from the third. Totally frustrated he retired to England to practice before the Privy Council. There the Agha put him in touch with Churchill’s friends and his ambitions revived. In 1939, the Congress refused to actively co-operate in the war unless the British promised independence thereafter. The Congress governments ruling eight provinces resigned. Interpreting this as blackmail, the British then looked for those in India willing to help them in their life and death struggle against Hitler. Earlier that year, Jinnah had been told by his doctor that he had terminal TB. It was now or never. The British quandary presented him an opportunity which he seized with both hands. His search for power took him to proclaim the two-nation theory, support direct action — the precursor of modern day Islamic terrorism — and co-operate with Britain to divide India. After Pakistan was formed and Jinnah’s ambition fulfilled, he could afford to dispense with the theories he had developed to achieve power. Jinnah’s speech of August 11, 1947 in Karachi, quoted by Advani, indicates that at heart he remained secular. Jinnah was never a practising Muslim: he never offered obligatory five-time prayers a day or performed Haj or indeed followed the Muslim prohibition on food and drink. The Sunni ideologue of his time — Abdul Ala Maududi of Hyderabad (who founded the Jamaat-i-Islami in 1941 which is such a powerful force today) considered Jinnah unfit to guide the Muslims of India because of Jinnah’s lack of religious commitment. Whatever Jinnah did was to satisfy his personal hunger for power and soothe his inflated ego, and not because of fanaticism. On the other hand, a man was to be judged by his actions and the results of his actions and not merely by his beliefs or words. Whatever his motives, he did in his later years embrace anti-secular policies and communalism and help to divide the country. Should such a weather-cock be eulogised? As to Advani’s second remark, according to British top secret documents, it was Britain who founded Pakistan, not Jinnah. Britain could ill-afford to lose control over the entire Indian sub-continent that had served as its military base to dominate the Indian Ocean area and the countries around the Persian Gulf for more than half-a-century, especially at a time when, on the one hand, Soviet ambitions were growing and, on the other, the region of the Persian Gulf with its oil fields — the Wells of Power — was increasing in importance for them. Once the British realised that the Indian nationalists, who would rule India after independence, would deny them military co-operation to restrain the Soviets, they settled for those in India willing to do so. Jinnah’s two-nation scheme was utilised to detach the strategic north-west of India and establish a separate State there — the truncated Pakistan. The modus operandi was to give veto powers to Jinnah on all constitutional developments, on the ground of protecting the minorities, and let the Muslim League put communal pressure. ‘‘He (Jinnah) represents a minority and a minority can only hold its own with our (British) assistance,’’ wrote the Viceroy, the piper who called the tune. The author is former ambassador to France and ADC to Mountbatten in 1947-48
