Indian historiography has come full circle. The past six decades have been spent in demonizing the Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity, Mr. Jinnah. By using Mr. Jinnah as an escape goat, the Indian National Congress (INC) has tried to hide the inadequacies and blunders of its leaders. By avoiding to identify the mistakes of the INC the Bharati historians have done a great disservice to world history and to the fabric of South Asia. By using Mr. Jinnah as as escape goat the Bharati intellectuals have been unable to identify the error of their ways. This paradigm continues to haunt the Delhi politicians and has led to the huge tensions and wars.

The latest book by Mr. Jaswath Singh about Mohammad Ali Jinnah titled “”Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence” bring about a rethinking about the Quaid e Azam. What is amazing is the fact that this “rethinking” is coming from the most extreme right wing section of Bharati society. The Bharati media and the English speaking elite may consider this a unique opinion, but it is neither isolated nor unitary. Mr. Singh discusses Federalism versus state rights. The discussion of Pakistani was exactly that, a discussion of majoritarianism and Muslim rights. It is very true that Mr. Jinnah’s primary concern was to secure the rights of the Muslims and the minorities of the Subcontinent.

The best evidence of this was the Cabinet Mission Plan. The Cabinet Mission Plan was the best hope for a multiethnic and multireligious  South Asian confederation which would have prevented the majoritariansim in Bharat, or in Pakistan for that matter. Today the same majoratarianism is an issue for Lanka, Bangladesh and even the Maldives. The British parliamentary system of government does not allow security for the minorities–as evidenced by the unicameral legislature of the United Kingdom. The impotent and selected House of Lords cannot be really considered as a house representing the people–it represents the aristocracy and the wealthy. The bi cameral system of government in Bharat would have railroaded the rights of the minorities—as evidenced in the past 60 years. Mr. Jinnah’s Cabinet Mission Plan (CBM) showed a way to the Hindus to avoid the alienation of the Muslims. Mr. Gandhi approved the Cabinet Mission Plan. Nehru accepted it briefly, but then he couldn’t go through with it. In this sense the Cabinet Mission Plan was the last hope of preventing Pakistan. Mr. Nehru by torpedoing the CBM in fact destroyed any chance of the Muslim Hindu reconciliation.

Was Pakistan inevitable? 

Mr. Singh didn’t come up with a strange and weird theory. This is precisely the opinion among a huge majority of the Muslims who became Pakistanis and among a large section of the Muslims who remained in Bharat. The same opinion is also more or less shared by the 450 million Dalits.

• “I admire certain aspects of his personality.” “I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon… we needed a demon because in the 20th century, the most telling event in the sub-continent was the partition of the country.” Jaswant Singh said India had not only misunderstood Jinnah but demonized him.
• Nehru believed in a high centralised policy. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’t. Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India,”
• In his new book “Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence”, which will hit the stands on August 17, he recalls the events leading to Partition as well as the “epic journey of Jinnah from being the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, the liberal constitutionalist and Indian nationalist to the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan”. Times of India
• “It is ironical that among the great constitutionalists of those times, Jinnah and Nehru became the principal promoters of ‘special status for Muslims’; Jinnah directly and Nehru indirectly.
• “…The irony of it is galling when sadly, we observe that both of them, these two great5 Indians of their times were either actually or in effect competing to become the ‘spokesman of Muslims’ in India.”
• “Oh yes, because he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he stood against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn’t really like him… Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don’t we recognise that? Why don’t we see (and try to understand) why he called him that

1920: Subcontinental Federalism vs. Provincial State rights give way to separatism: Cripps & CMP fails. HISTORICAL BASIS FOR THE INDPENDENCE AND SOVEREIGNTY OF MUSLIM PROVINCES. Most countries have struggled with Federal rights vs. State rights. American history is full of these discussions. Today Iraq struggles with these aspects of poltical science. Pakistan also faces some of these questions that dogged the politicians in the Subcontinent before independence.

Throughout history, the struggle for the independence of the Subcontinent has been struggle against centralism and the struggle has been waged to create for provincial autonomy. The Government of India Act of 1919 set out in clear terms the subjects which were to belong to the provincial sphere and those to the Central sphere. But both the Congress and the Muslim League boycotted the elections to the provincial and Central Legislatures held in November 1920 under the Act, because they felt that the Central vernment had still retained too much of power over the provinces.

When the Congress Party appointed a Committee to prepare a blueprint of the future Constitution for India under the chairmanship of Motilal Nehru, the then Congress President M.A. Ansari spelt out the fundamental principles on which the future Constitution was to be founded. Speaking at the annual session of the Congress on 28 December 1927 at Madras, Ansari had said:

“Whatever be the final form of the Constitution, one thing may be said with some degree of certainty that it will have to be on federal lines providing for a United States of India with existing Indian States as autonomous units of the Federation taking their proper share in the defence of the country, in the regulation of the nation’s foreign affairs and other joint and common interests.”

The Muslims cooperated with the Congress as long as they felt that the sovereignity of the Muslim majority provinces would be kept. When the Muslims felt that their sovereignty would not be honored, they deserted the ranks of the Congress and joined the Muslim League

DELHI: After BJP president L K Advani, it’s the turn of another senior BJP leader, Jaswant Singh, to court controversy with his reappraisal of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

In an interview on the eve of the launch of his book on Jinnah, Singh took a divergent stand from the Sangh as well as popular Indian historiography by blaming the creation of Pakistan on the Congress party and Jawaharlal Nehru rather than Jinnah’s determination to carve a Muslim state out of India. Times of India

We have analyzed South Asian history from various dimensions. Many artilces on the re-birth of Pakistan as a Muslim state are posted on Pakistan Historian. One of our recent articles tackles the question raised by Mr. Singh. Was Pakistan inevitable? The INC made major mistakes before and after 1947.  Among the many visions for the Subcontinent, the vision of the Quaid e Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah won out. There are two major tectonic political events that shattered the trust between the Muslims and the Hindus of the Subcontinent. This that led to the re-creation of Pakistan:

1) The rejection of the 14 points of Jinnah by the Nehru report

2) The rejection of the Cabinet Mission Plan in 1946 by the INC. The CMP would have created a Group “A” (Hindustan), Group “B” (Kashmir, Punjab, Sarhad, Sindh, Balauchistan), Group “C” (Bengal, Orissa, Asaam). Each would have 11 members in the center in a kind of a Senate.

Why we created Pakistan? The Pakistan Ideology. ONT vs TNT. Could the Indus people have joined the Gangetic people in 1947? Possibly! But the events before 1940s since 1947 teach us that the Gangetic people are fundamentally different from the Indus people, and could not have lived together. Mr. Singh has written a new book and BJP leader is all praise for Jinnah. His new book has been Published: August 17, 2009

NEW DELHI (Online) – Walking in the footsteps of party senior LK Advani, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh has called Pakistan’s founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah ‘a great Indian’, saying he was ‘demonised’.

In an interview with CNN-IBN, the former external affairs minister blamed India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru for the partition. “Nehru believed in a highly centralised polity. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn’t. Consistently, he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India,” Jaswant told Karan Thapar in Devil’s Advocate.

Jaswant strongly contested the popular Indian view that Jinnah was the villain of the 1947 partition or the man principally responsible for it. Asked if he thought this view was wrong, Jaswant said: “It is. It is not borne out of the facts… we need to correct it. I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon… We needed a demon because in the 20th century the most-telling event in the Subcontinent was the partition of the country,” Singh said.

Jaswant, whose biography on Jinnah would be released today (Monday), said he did not subscribe to the popular demonisation of Jinnah and said he was attracted by the personality of the Pakistani leader. “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 was not drawn to the personality I wouldn’t have written the book. It’s an intricate, complex personality, of great character, determination,” Singh said

Proponents of the TNT were originally the Hindus and then the Muslims.Proponents of the ONT were the Muslims and then the Hindus. What happened and why did loyal Indian Muslims like Iqbal ask for Pakistan. Why did nationalist leaders like Jinnah leave the Indian National Congress and join the Mulims League. The reasons are discussed in many of my articles on this site. Here are some major milestones preceding independence in 1947.

In the 1937 Indian elections, Tharoor points out, Muslim voters failed to support the Muslim League – which later led Muslims to independence under Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But the popular, and integrated, Congress Party made the mistake of resigning from office to protest the British government’s lack of consultation over its 1939 war declaration.“

It was a huge political blunder because it left the field open for the British … to kick the Congress people out of office and put unelected Muslim Leaguers in power in a number of key provinces,” says Tharoor.Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, opposing British rule at the height of World War II, was also a mistake, he adds. The Congress protesters were jailed, later to re-emerge “completely out of touch.”

The Muslim League, later won a majority of the Muslim provinces.“Until that happened, partition was not inevitable.”Part of the problem, says Pakistani-born historian Ayesha Jalal, was the failure of Congress leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to cut a power-sharing deal with the Muslim League.And, she says, Jinnah was astonished by the violence that overtook India in the final months of the British Raj:

“The complete absence of adequate security measures to tackle an unexpected breakdown of law and order has to be blamed for the sheer magnitude of the killings.“

Leeway can be given to Mr. Singh for using every opportunity he can get to demonize Mr. Nehru. However it is unfair to use Mr. Jinnah as a vehicle to use it. Mr. Jinnah was not great becuase Mr. Nehru was bad. Mr. Jinnah was great in his own right. 

Singh contested the popular Indian view that Jinnah was the villain of Partition or the man principally responsible for it. Maintaining that this view was wrong, he said, “It is. It is not borne out of the facts…we need to correct it.”

He feels Jinnah’s call for Pakistan was “a negotiating tactic” to obtain “space” for Muslims “in a reassuring system” where they would not be dominated by the Hindu majority.

He said if the final decisions had been taken by Mahatma Gandhi, Rajaji or Maulana Azad — rather than Nehru — a united India would have been attained, he said, “Yes, I believe so. We could have (attained an united India).”

Singh said the widespread opinion that Jinnah was against Hindus is mistaken.

When told that his views on Jinnah may not be to the liking of his party, he replied, “I did not write this book as a BJP parliamentarian. I wrote this book as an Indian…this is not a party document. My party knows I have been working on this.”

Singh also spoke about Indian Muslims who, he said, “have paid the price of Partition”. In a particularly outspoken answer, he said India treats them as “aliens”.

“Look into the eyes of the Muslims who live in India and if you truly see the pain with which they live, to which land do they belong? We treat them as aliens…without doubt Muslims have paid the price of Partition. They could have been significantly stronger in a united India…of course Pakistan and Bangladesh won’t like what I am saying.”DN India

CMP: The Cabinet Mission Plan proposed by  Quaid-e-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and initially approved by Nehru was the last hope for the Subcontinent to stay as one country. After the Indian National Congress  rejected the CMP both major parties the INC and the All India Muslim League had lost all trust in each other and went their different wasy. The INC was busy consolidating their power while the ML was busy consolidating its power in the Muslim majority areas.

In the 1937 Indian elections, Tharoor points out, Muslim voters failed to support the Muslim League – which later led Muslims to independence under Muhammad Ali Jinnah. But the popular, and integrated, Congress Party made the mistake of resigning from office to protest the British government’s lack of consultation over its 1939 war declaration.“It was a huge political blunder because it left the field open for the British … to kick the Congress people out of office and put unelected Muslim Leaguers in power in a number of key provinces,” says Tharoor.Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India Movement, opposing British rule at the height of World War II, was also a mistake, he adds. The Congress protesters were jailed, later to re-emerge “completely out of touch.”

The Muslim League, later won a majority of the Muslim provinces. “Until that happened, partition was not inevitable.”Part of the problem, says Pakistani-born historian Ayesha Jalal, was the failure of Congress leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to cut a power-sharing deal with the Muslim League.And, she says, Jinnah was astonished by the violence that overtook India in the final months of the British Raj: “The complete absence of adequate security measures to tackle an unexpected breakdown of law and order has to be blamed for the sheer magnitude of the killings.”

The Cabinet Mission Plan proposed by Quaid-e-Azam, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and initially approved by Nehru was the last hope for the Subcontinent to stay as one country. After the Indian National Congress rejected the CMP both major parties the INC and the All India Muslim League had lost all trust in each other and went their different wasy. The INC was busy consolidating their power while the ML was busy consolidating its power in the Muslim majority areas.

Here is the Jaswant Singh interview:

Mr Jaswant Singh, let’s start by establishing how you as the author view Mohammed Ali Jinnah. You don’t subscribe to the popular demonisation of the man?

Of course, I don’t. 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…

And it’s a personality that you found quite attractive?

Naturally, otherwise, I wouldn’t have ventured down the book. I found the personality sufficiently attractive to go and research it for five years.

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?

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.

Many people believe Jinnah hated Hindus?

Totally wrong. His principal disagreement was with the Congress party. He says this even in his last statements to the press and to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. He had no problems whatsoever with the Hindus.

As you look back on Jinnah’s life, would you say that he was a great man?

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. He was a self-made man. 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.

How seriously has India misunderstood Jinnah?

I think we misunderstood because we needed to create a demon.

We needed a demon because in the 20th century, the most telling event in the entire subcontinent was the partition of the country.

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?

No, he wasn’t. Jawaharlal Nehru was a deeply sensitive man.

But why couldn’t he understand?

He was deeply influenced by Western and European socialist thought of those days. Nehru believed in a highly centralised polity. That’s what he wanted India to be. Jinnah wanted a federal polity.

Because that would give Muslims the space?

That even Gandhi understood.

You conclude that if Congress could have accepted a decentralised federal India, then a united India, as you put it, “was clearly ours to attain”. Do you see Nehru at least as responsible for partition as Jinnah?

He says it himself. He recognised it and his correspondence, for example with the late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal, his official biographer and others. His letters to the late Nawab Sahab of Bhopal are very moving.

When Indians say Jinnah was the villain of Partition, your answer is there were many people responsible and to single out Jinnah, as the only person or the principal person, is both factually wrong and unfair?

It is. It is not borne out of events. Go to the last All India Congress Committee meeting in Delhi in June of 1947 to discuss and accept the (partition) resolution, Nehru-Patel’s resolution. 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.

So, Pakistan was in fact a way of finding, as you call it, ‘space’ for Muslims?

He (Jinnah) 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.

And that was his primary concern, not dividing India or breaking up the country?

No. He in fact went to the extent of saying, let there be a Pakistan within India.

In other words, Pakistan was often ‘code’ for space for Muslims?

That’s right. 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.

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. And a highly centralised India denied the space Jinnah wanted?

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.

So, this majoritarianism of Nehru actually left no room for Jinnah?

It became a contest between excessive majoritarianism, exaggerated minoritism and giving the referee’s whistle to the British.

Your book raises disturbing questions about the partition of India. You say it was done in a way “that multiplied our problems without solving any communal issue”. Then you ask “if the communal, the principal issue, remains in an even more exacerbated form than before, then why did we divide at all?”

Yes, indeed, why? 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? We treat them as aliens, somewhere inside, because we continue to ask, even after Partition you still want something? These are citizens of India — it was Jinnah’s failure because he never advised Muslims who stayed back.

One of the most moving passages of your biography is when you write of Indian Muslims who stayed on in India and didn’t go to Pakistan. You say they are “abandoned”, you say they are “bereft of a sense of kinship”, not “one with the entirety” and then you add that “this robs them of the essence of psychological security”.

That is right, it does.

Your book also suggests you believe India could face more Partitions. You write: “In India, having once accepted this principle of reservation, then of Partition, how can we now deny it to others, even such Muslims as have had to or chosen to live in India?”

The problem started with the 1906 reservation. What does the Sachar committee report say? Reserve for the Muslim. What are we doing now? Reserve. I think this reservation for Muslims is a disastrous path. I have myself, personally, in Parliament heard a member subscribing to Islam saying we could have a third Partition ,too. These are the pains that trouble me. What have we solved?

You are being honest enough to point out that this intellectual contradiction lies today at the very heart of our predicament as a nation.

It is. Unless we find an answer, we won’t find an answer to India-Pakistan-Bangladesh relations.

Are you worried that a biography of Jinnah, that turns on its head the received demonisation of the man; where you concede that for a large part he was a nationalist with admirable qualities, could bring down on your head a storm of protest?

I have written what I have researched and believed in. I have not written to please – it’s a journey that I have undertaken, as I explained myself, along with Mohd Ali Jinnah – from his being an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity to the Qaid-e-Azam of Pakistan

In 2005, when L K Advani called Jinnah’s August 11, 1947 speech secular, he was forced to resign the Presidentship of the party.

This is not a party document, and my party knows I have been working on this. They might disagree, that’s a different matter. Why should there be anger about disagreement? Let a self-sufficient majority, 60 years down the line of Independence, be able to stand up to what actually happened pre-47 and in 1947.

Let me raise two issues that could be a problem for you. First, your sympathetic understanding of Muslims left behind in India. You say they are abandoned, they are bereft, they suffer from psychological insecurity. That’s not normally a position leaders of the BJP take.

The BJP is misunderstood also in its attitude towards the minorities. Every Muslim that lives in India is a loyal Indian and we must treat them as so.

But you are the first person from the BJP I have ever heard say, “Look into the eyes of Indian Muslims and see the pain.” No one has ever spoken in such sensitive terms about them before.

I am born in a district, that is my home – we adjoin Sind, it was not part of British India. We have lived with Muslims and Islam for centuries. They are part…. In fact in Jaisalmer, Muslims don’t eat cow and the Rajputs don’t eat pig.

The second issue that your book raises, which could cause problems for you, is that at least theoretically, you accept that their could be, although you hope there won’t be, further partitions.

I am cautioning India, Indian leadership. I have said that I am not going to be a politician all my life, or even a member of Parliament. But I do say this – we should learn from what we did wrong, or didn’t do right, so that we don’t repeat the mistakes. Business Standard