Bastion of Free Speech

Last week I wrote about the guiding light of Independent India, Jawaharlal Nehru. This week's column is about another historic figure, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and the state, Pakistan, he helped bring into being.

Pakistan has figured prominently in the news after September 11, 2001. Today, the New York Times reports that several Pakistani transport planes landed at Kunduz, which has been besieged by the Northern Alliance, and took off with regulars of the Pakistani Army who had been trapped along with the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in the city. It is Pakistan, of course, which has armed, supported and succoured the Taliban during the latter's entire life. And Pakistan it was, until it broke off relations this week, the only country in the world to recognize the Taliban regime. Two convicted terrorists, Mir Amal Kamsi and Ramzi Yusef, one convicted of opening fire at the CIA building in Langley, and the other termed the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, are both from Pakistan. The entire top rung of its nuclear scientific community is being investigated for passing on nuclear technology to Al Qaeda.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah loathed mass politics and lived among the elite. He denigrated Gandhi's attempt to bring the common people into the political calculus. Not one day did he spend in a British jail. He was a member of the Viceroy's Council, and believed, so he said, in a constitutional progression to freedom. He deplored Gandhi's appeal to religious values, saying it would unleash the most violent instincts among the people.

It seems a paradox, then, that a country founded by such a self-proclaimed constitutionalist would end up, half-a-century later, with a military dictator at its head and terrorism as its chief export. A closer inspection would reveal, however, that despotism, fanaticism and intolerance were built into the very fabric of Pakistan. Jinnah himself was never specific (maybe out of political necessity) about what his new country would be, keen only that there be a new country - come hell or high water. The kinds of statements he made about Pakistan could have been made today in any of Pakistan's infamous madrassas. Here is Jinnah, in 1938:

There is no need to find a program for Muslims. They have a complete program since 13 hundred years and that is the Holy Qur’an.

Is this really any different from the sentiments of Zia-ul Haq, who imposed the Shariat as the law in Pakistan?

In my last article, "A Stroke of Good Fortune", I referred to The Discovery of India, a book by Jawaharlal Nehru, where he gave his understanding of India, and his views on how it should develop. That book was written during his final stint in jail (1942-44). Jinnah, never having spent any time in jail, perhaps did not have the leisure to write a similar screed outlining his dreams for Pakistan. Evidently, he just made it up as he went along.

Lest this should sound like a caricature of Jinnah, let me hasten to say that he was a brilliant man and a gifted lawyer. In his time he was reputed to be the most expensive attorney in India. "To watch him argue a case...", wrote M C Chagla, his assistant, who later rose to be the Foreign Minister of India, "was to see a work of Art." The Early Jinnah was a broad minded, non-sectarian, liberal, who wanted nothing more, as he himself put it, "than to be the Muslim Gokhale". He was a member of the Indian National Congress, and a close associate of Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Sarojini Naidu. It was Jinnah who successfully defended Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his famous sedition trial of 1916.

It seems natural that Jinnah, with his background and outlook, should have been most comfortable amongst his intellectual and liberal peers in the Congress. He was, instead, destined to throw in his lot with some the most retrograde elements in both political and intellectual terms, the Muslim League. Many writers have blamed both Gandhi and Nehru for Jinnah's departure from the Congress. He was, of course, always a member of the Muslim League (in those days many people belonged to both). But as with the Solomonic tale, the woman who said, Fine, saw the baby in half, was being legal, not compassionate. Her attitude fits Jinnah the lawyer remarkably well.

Gandhi's advent into India, particularly post-Jallianwallah Bagh in 1919, was a watershed in the Freedom Movement. He changed the Indian National Congress from a once-a-year debating club into a mass movement. He electrified the nation, but also gave it a moral self-respect. Many prominent personalities took the transition well, others did not. Jinnah was not a mass leader by temperament. He also had serious, sincere, reservations about Gandhi's introduction of religious motifs into the political idiom. And he had a horror of agitational politics. Gandhi had a different view, "The life of the millions is my politics", he wrote, "which I cannot deny without denying my life work and God." We can see that these were two different men with completely different views of the world. The differences are genuine.

From the time he left the Congress in 1920, to the mid 1930's, Jinnah spent some of his time dabbling in Muslim League politics, but mostly on a lucrative law practice and shrewd real estate investments. Ironically, he was generally suspect within the Muslim League, where the orthodox regarded him as a false Muslim, both for his western lifestyle and his liberal past. The aim of the Muslim League was mainly to act as a lobby to safeguard Muslim rights and interests in an independent India. The notion of a separate homeland for Indian muslims was, if ever proposed, laughed away. And rightly so, for Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other religious groups had lived together in India for millennia. It would be as absurd as saying that all people with brown hair should have their own state in the USA - so interspersed was the population.

The role of sectarian parties is always dubious. Whenever one encounters a party for the rights of a particular community, one is tempted to ask what rights that community requires that others don't. Why not then fight for the rights of all? Gandhi successfully blocked a move by the British to split the Freedom Struggle by introducing separate electorates for a section of the Hindus. To Gandhi, sectarianism was anathema. But not to the former liberal, Jinnah, who, by this time, had become a fully vocal proponent of separate everything, going so far as to say that Hindus and Muslims were two separate 'Nations'. This was the pernicious Two Nation Theory. He pushed the case that Muslims could never get a fair deal in a Hindu dominated India. He wanted a separate homeland for the Muslims.

The Second World War was a godsend to Jinnah. While Gandhi and the Congress leadership were thrown in jail for demanding freedom for India, and the Congress rank-and-file was dealt with an iron hand by the British, the Muslim League, never a party to oppose the British (supplication being more its style), had the blessings of the British to propagate the Two Nation Theory, and a clear three-year window for an unchallenged promotion of their views. Despite this opportunity, they failed to win majorities in either the two main provinces where they had staked a claim based on the muslim majority - Punjab and Bengal. Britain was not displeased with the rise of the Muslim League, which gave them a counterweight to the Congress.

In August 1946, after the War ended, the great constitutionalist, Jinnah, called for a "Direct Action Day", when violence on an unprecedented scale was unleashed by the Muslim League in Bengal. This was to show the Muslim League's muscle power - to terrorize the country and the British into recognizing Jinnah's strength. The other Muslim League leaders were men of no great liberal bent - when you are demanding a separate state on the basis of religion, how liberal could you be anyway - but this particular action goes to show how far Jinnah had traveled from his early days. By this time he had also jettisoned his earlier notions - "[Muslims] would not live under any system of govenrment that was based on the nonsensical notion of of Western democracy".

Jinnah also knew he had to hurry - all the lifelong paeans to progressive, parliamentary, orderly, transfer of power were thrown to the winds. His language became more militant, as did actions on the ground. Of course, there were enough Hindu goondas to respond - the carnage in Bihar in answer to the Calcutta massacre was no less gruesome. Jinnah was singleminded and brilliant - when Congress leaders tried to answer his purported concerns of 'Hindu Domination' by a policy of appeasement - power sharing, etc., he thwarted every move toward reconciliation. He knew he had a terminal illness, and he had only a one-point agenda - to obtain Pakistan before dying. It did not really matter to him what a state founded on religious exclusion would lead to. A man of his intelligence clearly would have known this, but he was approaching the matter much as he would approach the defense of a criminal. "To me", he had once declared to an astounded Muslim acolyte, "Pakistan is a case - no more, no less."

Many blame Mountbatten, Wavell and Britain itself for their duplicity in breaking up India. To me that seems like an unfair charge, even if true. For, why should we expect the British, who had stripped and robbed India for over two centuries, now suddenly to worry about its integrity? Besides, it was certainly not in Britain's interest that the new nation burst upon the world intact, the sooner to reach its inevitable status as a major power. If the Indians were happy to be disunited, was it Britain's responsibility to unite them? No, India was let down by its own leaders, Jinnah prominent among them.

Well, freedom came, and with it the unholy compromises on the part of the Congress leaders, including Nehru, who accepted Partition without referring the matter to the Indian people. Jinnah, who had conducted the entire campaign for Pakistan on the basis of his Two Nation theory, namely that Hindus and Muslims could never coexist (Nehru correctly asked - why just Two-Nations, for there were plenty of other religions in India), now made that famous speech, which his apologists frequently quote:

"You may belong to any religion or caste or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the state ... We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and citizens of one state... in the course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.."

Hot damn! And here we were, believing Jinnah all along when he assured us that Hindus and Muslims could never coexist. Evidently, that was only in India - in Pakistan - voila! - they could! If ever there was ever a greater essay in hypocrisy, it is not on record. Not only that. The Quaid-E-Azam (literally, Great Leader - Fuehrer would not far wrong - in 1934 the Muslim League proclaimed him President for Life) had no difficulty swallowing the fact that even after the Partition, there would still be tens of millions of Muslims remaining in India. How did this situation fit with his thesis that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist? His title did not say Quaid-E-Punjabi-Muslim or Quaid-E-Bengali-Muslim. If he claimed to represent all muslims, how then could this anamoly be explained? But the Great Hypocrite never answered these questions. And Pakistan, his handiwork, remains one of history's biggest hypocrisies.

From the start, Pakistan has led a schizophrenic life. At the time of its creation, Pakistan was the only major country, after the United States in 1776, to be formally founded. The latter was founded on the highest principles known to man - "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness". Pakistan was founded with the supremely inspiring, "A country where the Muslims will be in a majority". His objective accomplished, Jinnah was ready to revert to the liberal theme of his Congress days - democracy, secularism, equality of all citizens regardless of religion, etc. etc. His cohorts in the Muslim League had many faults - frequently they held bigoted, ignorant, and obscurantist views. But at least they were honest in their beliefs. Not one of them could have approached the monumental hypocrisy of their Quaid. Having employed this great lawyer to use his skills to obtain their pound of flesh, they now ignored his high talk and proceeded to live up to the true ethos of the nation they had helped found - religious persecution, extremism and bigotry.

For Pakistan's non-muslims, life as second-class citizens commenced on the day the country came into existence. But what about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, a devout muslim and one of India's greatest sons, and a relentless foe of the British? Badshah Khan got an early taste of life under Jinnah's 'democracy' - less than a year into Jinnah's reign, he was thrown in prison for a 3 year sentence. His crime - speaking up for democratic freedoms. A state founded on religous exclusivity, Pakistan's apartheid has not looked back since. Its laws of oppression have grown to cover even Muslims of the 'wrong' brand - Shias, Ismailis, Ahmedias... Just saying, Assalam Alaikum, the traditional greeting of muslim lands, is forbidden to anyone defined as a non-muslim (including the sects above). Praying in the traditional muslim fashion is considered blasphemous, and several members of the Ahmedia community are in prison for this very offense. As to any (perceived) criticism of Islam, perish the thought. Or perish yourself. It is punishable by death. There are schoolchildren on death row for alleged insults to Islam.

Jinnah died about a year after Pakistan was founded. Some feel that had he lived on some ten or fifteen years after Freedom, as Nehru did, he might have placed Pakistan on a firm foundation of democracy. I am not so sure. For unlike the Congress, the Muslim League had few popular leaders with either domocratic instincts or experience of governance. Not having struggled for freedom, Pakistan had no second and third rungs of political leadership (aside from Jinnah and Liaqat Ali Khan, it scarcely had a first!). Jinnah was therefore prescient when he observed, "Each successive governement in Pakistan will be worse than its predecessor".

When apologists for Jinnah in the Pakistani press, such as the veteran journalist Ardeshir Cowasjee, keep quoting Jinnah's speech of August 11, 1947 (You may belong to any religion or caste or creed...(reproduced earlier), they fail to present the full picture - for the larger record is different. Jinnah wanted a totally Islamic state, and his pronouncements favoring a secular state were born of naivete or of mendacity; neither conclusion does him much credit. In his game of revenging himself on Gandhi and the Congress, Jinnah (whose title of Quaid-E-Azam was conferred by the Mahatma, incidentally), was not averse to the uprooting of millions of people, the death of thousands, and the sowing of a communal fury which continues till today. An aspiring Shakespearean actor in his youth, one wonders if these lines ever crossed the Quaid's mind, "The evil that men do lives after them - the good is oft interred with their bones."

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