[Reader-list] More on Jinnah- Indian Express

[Ravi Agarwal]

      So many Jinnahs 
     
     
      Was he an avowed communalist or advocate of a secular Pakistan? 
     
     
            IAN TALBOT          
           
     
      Posted online: Thursday, June 09, 2005 at 0000 hours IST

     
     
       The furore surrounding L.K. Advani's recent visit to Pakistan and his homage to its founder at Jinnah's mausoleum in Karachi has reopened the debate about the Quaid-e-Azam's vision for the subcontinent. A rhetorical reply to the question, will the true Jinnah stand up, is the response which one do you want? For there is the Jinnah of the 1916 Lucknow Pact, dubbed by Sarojini Naidu as the "Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". Then there is the Jinnah of the 1940 Lahore Resolution and the two-nation theory basis for dividing the subcontinent. Another Jinnah speaks of making Pakistan "a laboratory for Islam", while contradicting this is the celebrated espousal of a secular state in the speech of August 11 1947 which Advani cited with approval in Karachi. One could go even further and add the Jinnah of Ayesha Jalal's Sole Spokesman construction who is portrayed as arguing only for Pakistan as a bargaining counter in the constitutional round with Congress and the British. Jinnah was, however, finally forced to accept the "moth-eaten" Pakistan of the 3 June Plan as the only realistic option. 

      Nearly 60 years later, the debate continues to swirl around Jinnah's enigmatic vision for Pakistan. Its academic and public dimensions, as at the present, frequently generate more heat than light. Why the controversy? First and foremost, it stems from Jinnah's own vagueness about Pakistan. This was a deliberate attempt to provide as much common ground as possible in the Muslim League struggle. Lack of a clear vision hindered post-colonial nation building. It left the field open to conflicting understandings of the role of Islam, language and ethnicity in the new Pakistan state. Jinnah's early death enabled his legacy to be appropriated by all manner of aspirants to power. The fact that he did not commit his innermost thoughts to paper provided further scope for mythologising. For the carefully preserved record of his public utterances reveal them for what they are. Addresses finetuned for their differing audiences and contexts. They are as much all things to all men as was the Pakistan demand itself. Selective quotations frame the Jinnah required by those who seek to refer to history to legitimise contemporary concerns. Founders of nations are always used in this way. Jinnah however is a particularly rich symbolic resource for a subcontinent negotiating conflicting sources of identity. 

           
           
      The view of Jinnah in India has been much more consistent than in Pakistan. Despite the attempts by such writers as H.M. Seervai and Gandhi's grandson Rajmohan to row against the current, the tide of opinion is overwhelmingly negative. This intellectual view finds a popular echo in bazaar level portrayals of Jinnah as Ravana. With varying degrees of sophistication, Jinnah is thus the maligned "other" of Indian nationalism; the communal counterpoint to Nehru's secular vision of a united India. Personal circumstances, the desire for power and the divide and rule policies of the Raj have all been used to explain his 20 years' transformation from Muslim nationalist to communalist. The final descent to the dark side is marked by the passage of the Lahore Resolution. Jinnah the architect of Pakistan, the destroyer of Indian unity in this discourse cannot be readily accorded a "secular" mantle once Pakistan is created. The speech to the Constituent Assembly of August 11 is thus ignored, or glossed over as damage limitation, a desire to keep the minorities and more importantly their money in Pakistan. Political considerations aside, this way of thinking about Jinnah in India inevitably casts Advani's comments on Jinnah's secular credentials in a dissonant note. 

      For Jinnah, the secularist, resplendent in the clarion call, "Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will 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", we have to turn to the liberal discourse in Pakistan. Why is Jinnah its hero? It needs to be recognised that successive bouts of martial law have hindered civil society and freedom of expression. In such circumstances even muted liberal sentiments require the buttressing of the founding father's favour. The key text as Advani rightly recognised is the August 11 1947 speech. In times of enlightened moderation, Jinnah's Karachi Constituent Assembly address is available in full. During the martial law regime of Zia-ul-Haq, it was removed from collections of his speeches. Newspaper articles on the occasion of the anniversary of Jinnah's birth in 1981 omitted the key "secular" phrases of the speech. This censorship was consonant with the regime's self-perceived commitment to the preservation of the Pakistan ideology and the "Islamic character" of the state. 

      It was also during the period 1977-88 that a number of unconvincing attempts were made to depict Jinnah as wanting to establish an Islamic state. Karam Hydri's work (Millat ka pasban) was typical of this genre. The restoration of democracy in 1988 encouraged liberal interpretations which played down the two nation theory and the conception of Pakistan as a "theocracy". Saeed R. Khairi (Jinnah Reinterpreted) contrasted the pragmatic and reasonable Jinnah with the Utopian and irrational Gandhi who introduced religion into politics and the insensitive Nehru who dealt the final blow to Indian unity with his "re-writing" of the 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan. 

      The most ambitious reinterpretation of Jinnah was produced by Akbar S. Ahmed, social scientist and civil servant. He grandiloquently called Jinnah's August 11 speech as part of his "Gettysburg address". Ahmed, however, ran into controversy surrounding his multi-media projects on Jinnah because his portrayal was too socially liberal, rather than because it undermined nationalist orthodoxy. Indeed he castigated Jalal for disconnecting Jinnah from his cultural roots and portraying him like a "robot" "programmed to play for high stakes". Attempts to provide Jinnah with a "human face" with respect to his Parsi wife Rattanbhai Petit did not however play well. With a good deal of sophistication and scholarship, Ahmed maintained that in the closing period of his life, Jinnah increasingly moored his concern for tolerance and the safeguarding of minority rights in his understanding of Islam. In other words, Jinnah's secular vision had an Islamic rather than western basis. This squaring of the circle enabled Ahmed to claim that Jinnah provides a paradigm for Muslim identity and leadership in a modern world obsessed with western media images of Islamic fanaticism and terrorism. 

      This view is as much a construct as the many other images of Jinnah created by devotees and opponents alike. The real Jinnah remains as ungraspable as the aloof stereotypical portrayals of Pakistani painters. His inscrutability is nothing new. It frequently frustrated Mountbatten during the series of meetings which took place between them early in April 1947. Historians may well gnash their teeth at the futility of projecting backwards contemporary understandings of secularism and fundamentalism in order to label Jinnah. Competing visions for the subcontinent he helped divide will continue to appropriate his legacy in the quest for legitimacy. 


      Talbot is director of the Centre for South Asian Studies, Coventry University, and author of 'Pakistan: A Modern History' 

     



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