[Reader-list] Jaswant’s Jinnah -view across the border

[Kshmendra Kaul]

Dear Asad
 
How Indians will view Jinnah or how Pakistanis will view Gandhi is, in my opinion, of minor consequence when it comes to quality of relations between India and Pakistan.
 
Jaswant Singh's (identified with Hindu Fundamentalists) lauding or Jinnah or tomorrow a Qazi Hussain (identified with Islamic Funadamentalists) singing praises of Gandhi is, in my opinion, not going to impact Indo-Pak equations.
 
The constant scrutiny of personalities or events involved in and/or leading to the 1947 Partition might be interesting for Book-Authors, Commentators, Academics but, in my opinion, have little (if any) relevance of how India and Pakistan will behave with each other today. What is likely to be more pertinent is how they have behaved with each other since 1947. In that lie the mistrust and recriminations. 
 
While policies of the State are supposed to reflect the minds of the People, it is rarely so in Foreign Policy. At most times People will only pay attention after-the-event when they are impacted by Foreign Policy (War, Economics).
 
As two examples, India's intrusions into East Pakistan leading to creation of Bangladesh or Pakistans intrusions into India in 1965 or the Kargil excursions were not through the expressed or implicit will of the respective People of the two countries.
 
I personally do not see much purchase in the much vaunted people-to-people contact also. Those are elitist interactions at most times. Only when such attitudes catch the imagination of the common people to such an extent that they are talk of every 'gali, koocha' can they see themselves reflected in State Foreign Policy. If we know the people of the two countries then it might be reasonable to assume that such scenarios are of the distant future.
 
In my opinion, for India and Pakistan to achieve some degree of amiable relations, they have to completely disregard both the personalities and events of the past and concentrate on mutual concerns of the today.
 
Kshmendra
 
 
--- On Tue, 8/18/09, asad abbasi <asad_abbasi at hotmail.com> wrote:


From: asad abbasi <asad_abbasi at hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: [Reader-list] Jaswant’s Jinnah -view across the border
To: kshmendra2005 at yahoo.com, 2tahamehmood at googlemail.com
Cc: reader-list at sarai.net
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009, 9:13 PM




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Dear kshmendra and Taha,

I came across an editorial about the same book today. 
Subject matter and author of this book are surely make headlines in South Asia.

I wonder, Jinnah as presented in this book, for how long will sustain in popular culture in India?Will it be in limelight for a fortnight and then to be forgotten? Will it be a catalyst to a kind of unity? or excitement will fade away eventually?

If Jinnah's life can play a significant role in Hindu Muslim unity, almost after 60 years of his death, then that would be creating "Something out of nothing"

Regards,
Asad



http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\08\18\story_18-8-2009_pg3_1


Editorial: Let’s agree on Jinnah’s role
In his new book, Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, India’s former foreign minister who later also served as finance minister in the last BJP government, Mr Jaswant Singh, has given India a positive portrait of Pakistan’s founder, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Given the fact of Mr Singh’s BJP affiliation, the book is being treated as an extraordinary event in India.

Because of his rightwing credentials, no one in India can doubt Mr Singh’s patriotism. That is why the book is going to be an important Indian revision of a highly demonised Muslim leader. Some other Indians too have done the job of balancing the distorted Indian view of Mr Jinnah, but this time history may be reinterpreted more permanently in favour of an Indo-Pak détente through a “reinterpretation” of Mr MA Jinnah.

Mr Singh has been blunt in his promotional interviews: “[Jinnah was a great man] 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?”

Perhaps more significantly than anything else he has said in praise of his subject, Mr Singh’s explanation of the last-minute rupture between Nehru and Jinnah will become important in the coming days: “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”.

Although pointed out earlier by Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose in their book Modern South Asia, Pakistani writers have ignored this real foundation of disagreement which made Pakistan possible. Both Allama Iqbal and Mr Jinnah wanted a confederal or federal arrangement in which the Muslims could attain a measure of autonomy and freedom from Hindu majoritarianism. The Cabinet Mission Plan which promised this arrangement as late as 1946 was scuttled, not by Mr Jinnah, but by Mr Nehru.

Mr Singh puts forward a point of view rejected in the past as a “communal” stance: “Muslims saw that unless they had a voice in their own economic, political and social destiny they will be obliterated.. That was the beginning (of their political demands). For example, see the 1946 election. Jinnah’s Muslim League wins all the Muslim seats and yet they don’t have sufficient numbers to be in office because the Congress Party has, without even a single Muslim, enough to form a government and they are outside of the government”.

Pakistan’s myth of Indian opposition to the existence of Pakistan is based on the frequently expressed Indian view that Partition was wrong and that it was brought about entirely by Mr Jinnah and British machinations. Where the great Parsi Indian judge Mr HM Seervai had failed to remove the bilateral myths of partition with his book Partition of India (1994), Mr Singh might succeed. If that happens, both Pakistan and India will have to “rationalise” their view of Mr Jinnah.

In Pakistan, the conservative right and the liberal intellectuals are hopelessly divided on the person of Mr Jinnah. But both tend to stand together when it comes to what they think is Indian prejudice against the great man. Now that Mr Jaswant Singh has set the record straight in India, it may be easier for Pakistan to frame Mr Jinnah in a more realistic national reference. The identity of the state of Pakistan has been consciously moulded over the years in relation to India as the “enemy” state.

The Quaid can save Pakistan from its internal crisis if Pakistanis are prepared to see that the terrorists hiding behind “Islam” are opposed to what he wanted Pakistan to be. Pakistan’s statute books that contain laws against the minorities should be revisited in light of what he really stood for. He was never an enemy of India; India can reclaim him now. And in the process, India and Pakistan can change their bilateral equation, abandoning the path of an arms race, and accepting the mutual cooperation and economic interdependence dictated by history and current circumstances. 



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