ASSESSING JINNAH by A.G. Noorani
A thought-provoking essay:
...Gandhi and Jinnah had cooperated at the Amritsar session of the Congress in November 1919. At the Calcutta Congress in September 1920, Gandhi unfolded his programme of non-cooperation. Jinnah said that while he was "fully convinced of non-cooperation" he found Gandhi's programme unsound. Gandhi was able to win over the doubters. He failed with Jinnah. Maulana Shaukat Ali tried to assault Jinnah, but was stopped by his friends. Gandhi took the battle to the HRL and presiding over its session on October 3, 1920, had its objectives changed in breach of his promises. It was a coup. Nineteen veterans resigned from the HRL, including Jinnah, Jayakar and K.M. Munshi (vide Jayakar, page 405 for the text of the letter). Gandhi flouted his promises to Jayakar, as he recorded.
On October 30, 1920, Jinnah wrote a letter to Gandhi which is of historic importance: "I thank you for your kind suggestion offering me `to take my share in the new life that has opened up before the country'. If by `new life' you mean your methods and your programme, I am afraid I cannot accept them; for I am fully convinced that it must lead to disaster. But the actual new life that has opened up before the country is that we are faced with a Government that pays no heed to the grievances, feelings and sentiments of the people; that our own countrymen are divided; the Moderate Party is still going wrong; that your methods have already caused split and division in almost every institution that you have approached hitherto, and in the public life of the country not only amongst Hindus and Muslims but between Hindus and Hindus and Muslims and Muslims and even between fathers and sons; people generally are desperate all over the country and your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganisation and chaos. What the consequence of this may be, I shudder to contemplate; but I, for one, am convinced that the present policy of the Government is the primary cause of it all and unless that cause is removed, the effects must continue. I have no voice or power to remove the cause; but at the same time I do not wish my countrymen to be dragged to the brink of a precipice in order to be shattered. The only way for the Nationalists is to unite and work for a programme which is universally acceptable for the early attainment of complete responsible government. Such a programme cannot be dictated by any single individual, but must have the approval and support of all the prominent Nationalist leaders in the country; and to achieve this end I am sure my colleagues and myself shall continue to work."
This was not an intimation of parting of ways but a plea for unity against the British, differences on the methods notwithstanding...
Jinnah knew what was at stake. He accurately predicted that the movement would divide the communities and breed disrespect for law and order. He supported the Khilafat cause, opposed the Ali brothers' methods, and gave up once Turkey made its own decision. He told the League: "We are not going to rest content until we have attained the fullest political freedom in our own country. Mr. Gandhi has placed his programme of non-cooperation, supported by the authority of the Khilafat Conference, before the country... . The operations of this scheme will strike at the individual in each of you, and therefore it rests with you alone to measure your strength and to weigh the pros and cons of the question before you arrive at a decision. But once you have decided to march, let there be no retreat under any circumstances... . One degrading measure upon another, disappointment upon disappointment, and injury upon injury, can lead a people only to one end. It led Russia to Bolshevism. It has led Ireland to Sinn Feinism. May it lead India to freedom... I would still ask the Government not to drive the people of India to desperation, or else there is no other course left open to the people except to inaugurate the policy of non-cooperation, though not necessarily the programme of Mr. Gandhi."
He convened a meeting of representative Muslims in Delhi in March 1927, which put forth four major demands. One of these was for a one-third representation in the Central Legislature. A committee of the Congress, set up to examine their import, accepted the demands. Its members were Motilal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu, Maulana Mohammed Ali and Srinivasa Iyengar. The AICC accepted the committee's views with minor changes.
The Hindu Mahasabha led by Madan Mohan Malaviya opposed these demands, as did Muslims in some provinces. Opposition to the Simon Commission divided the League, but Jinnah supported the Congress in the campaign to boycott this all-White body. The alternative constitutional proposals adopted in the famous Nehru Report dashed Jinnah's hopes. The Report did not even refer to Jinnah's proposals, or to their acceptance by the Congress. Jinnah now put forth his 14-points. Their rejection and his personal humiliation at the All-Parties Convention are chapters in a story told several times over. (For a crisp, documented account vide Uma Kaura's classic Muslims, and Indian Nationalism; Manohar; 1977.)
Three myths must be laid to rest. First, it did not mark "a parting of ways". Jinnah said in his speech at the Convention: "We are all sons of the soil. We have to live together... If we cannot agree, let us at any rate agree to differ, but let us part as friends." The second myth is that soon after this Convention, "Jinnah found himself in the company of the Aga Khan" and other reactionaries. The Aga Khan convened an All-India Muslim Conference in Delhi on December 31, 1928, around the same time as the All-Parties Convention on the Nehru Report in Calcutta. Wolpert `records' how Jinnah came late, looked around and what he wore. It is a fabrication. While the Ali brothers and even radicals like the Leftist poet Maulana Hasrat Mohani participated, in sheer disgust at the outcome of the Calcutta Convention, Jinnah did not. He had rejected the invitation brusquely.
The third is about Motilal Nehru's attitude. His letter to Gandhi on August 14, 1929, reported his talks with the Hindu Mahasabha leaders: "We agreed that the Hindu opposition to the Muslim demands was to continue and even be stiffened up by the time the Convention was held." He concluded: "You will see that the stumbling block in our way is this question of one-third Muslim representatives and on this point even the most advanced Musalmans like Dr. M.A. Ansari, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Mr. T.A.K. Sherwani and others are all very strongly in favour of the concession. I would therefore ask you to direct your attention now to the Mahasabha leaving Ali Brothers and Mr. Jinnah to stew in their own juice." (The Indian Nationalist Movement 1885 - 1947; Select Documents; edited by B.N. Pandey; 63-64). This document establishes that: the convention failed because of the Hindu Mahasabha's obduracy; Motilal Nehru cooperated with the Mahasabha leaders though he saw no harm in the demand; and the "advanced Musalmans" failed to stand up to the Congress leaders for the community's rights, which Jinnah did without falling in the Aga Khan's camp of pro-British reactionaries. This is what made Jinnah truly unique - clarity of thought, moral courage, and sturdy, uncompromising independence. These were the qualities that made him so formidable an adversary later and so tragic in his fall from the ideals he once espoused....
It was Azad, not Nehru, who gave the surrender terms to Khaliquzzaman: the League's group "shall cease to function as a separate group" (for the text vide Indian Politics 1936-1942; R. Coupland; p 111). Sapru's letter to B. Shiva Rao of The Hindu, dated November 16, 1940, referred to his experience of "party dictatorship or Congress Ministries wherever they have existed... . So long as these people were in power they treated everybody else with undisguised contempt". That experience led him to believe that the "Western type of majority rule in India will not do. And we shall have to come to some arrangement by which we may take along with us the minorities in matters of general interest" (Crusader for Self-Rule; Rima Hooja; p 280). This is precisely what Jinnah came to hold and for the same reason - the Congress' refusal to share power.
He had received short shrift from Gandhi and the British at the Round table Conference in London and decided in desperation to settle down there. Returning to India, he arrived at a pact with Rajendra Prasad in 1934, in which he abandoned separate electorates. In the light of 1928, he insisted that the Congress secure the Mahasabha's assent as well (for the text vide Marguerite Dove's Forfeited Future; page 462). Nehru, however, went so far as to assert: "There are only two parties in the county, the Congress and the government." Jinnah retorted: "There is a third party in the country and that is the Muslims." If in 1928 Jayakar questioned Jinnah's credentials as a representative, in 1937 Nehru did likewise: "May I suggest to Mr. Jinnah that I come into greater touch with the Muslim masses than most of the members of the League." The Congress, at one remove Nehru himself, represented everybody and would lay down the terms for the future.
Jinnah accepted the challenge and built up through mass politics a representative capacity that stunned all. Nothing in his past should have surprised any. Men like Mohammed Iqbal and Maulana Mohammed Ali had come to regard him as the "only" Muslim leader. At the League's session in October 1937, Jinnah pleaded: "Let the Congress first bring all principal communities in the country and all principal classes of interest under its leadership." He had in mind, not merger, but "a pact", a concept he had "always believed in". But Nehru had no use for "pacts" between "handfuls of upper-class people". Jinnah, in his view, represented them alone. There really was no "minority problem". The people were concerned with bread and butter. Economic issues alone mattered....
In a real sense our leaders were a profoundly ignorant and arrogant lot. They failed the crucial test which Edmund Burke propounded in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents written in 1770. He held that "the temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought to be the first duty of a Statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn".
It is not any "interest" alone which prevents self-education. So does Hubris. Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru were men of colossal pride and vanity beyond the ordinary. Jinnah should have known that besides the inherent falsity of the poisonous concept, a nationalism based on religion degenerates into violent sectarianism. Gandhi acting as "the supreme leader" never seriously strove for conciliation in a plural society. Nehru denied the validity of the concept itself. Both spurned Jinnah. He painted himself into a corner from which he did not know how to escape.
We know in retrospect how and why things went wrong. Jinnah did not devise a formula for power-sharing in a united India. The Congress was adamant against sharing power with him. Nehru forgot the lessons of 1914 when socialists expected the workers to rise against their governments when they went to war. The workers turned out to be more chauvinistic than the "upper classes". So it was with communal feeling in a deeply religious society which Nehru least understood. Neither did Jinnah. He espoused the two-nation theory. While its consequences affect India, it holds his own state hostage.
We now find the problem of a "permanent majority" in all plural societies in Europe, Asia and Africa. On December 20, 1986, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's spokesman in Madras (now Chennai) said "two nations... coexist in one country". The LTTE does not propound sincerely a "viable alternative to Eelam", though. Arend Lijphart's seminal work, Democracy in Plural Societies propounded the concept of "consociational democracy". This would have been unthinkable to the Congress. It implied a national pact on power sharing. Safeguards are not enough. Empowerment is crucial.
From 1906 to 1936, the basis for discourse on the minority problem in India was a pact on safeguards for the minorities. What Jinnah said at the RTC in London on September 5, 1931, was conventional wisdom then: "The new Constitution should provide for reasonable guarantees to Muslims and if they are not provided, the new Constitution is sure to break down." Jawaharlal Nehru had no patience with anything that preceded his arrival on the scene of Indian politics. In a letter to Gandhi on September 11, 1931, he branded Jinnah's proposition as "narrow communalism".
Nehru's was a nationalism that denied the very fundamentals of Indian society, so far removed was he from the realities. Even Jinnah's moderation in 1931 was of no avail against Nehru's obdurate refusal to recognise that minorities were entitled to some rights. Nehru's was an absolutist secularism garnished with a socialism that he could only dimly perceive. A colossal intellectual failure all round produced a tragedy of cataclysmic proportions. Tragedy, it has been said, lies not so much in the conflict between good and evil as between one good force and another.
Like Nehru, Jinnah also shattered the established basis of discourse. Nehru did so on the minorities' rights, Jinnah on India's unity; Nehru in arrogant ignorance, Jinnah in arrogant reliance on his tactical skills. Jinnah's greatness lay in the pre-1940 record when he was a tireless conciliator, a real statesman. Both men were secularists. Therein lies the tragedy. Nehru harmed secularism by denying the legitimacy of minority rights. Jinnah ruined it by the two-nation theory...
