Jinnah's tragedy

Catastrophic events incubate their own revisionist histories. The partition of India — its attendant bloodbath, the portfolio of unresolved issues and legacy of mistrust and hostility — is a case in point. Earlier narratives were linear: The two-nation theory of the Muslim League led to the partition. In Pakistan this was intrinsic to its founding ideology — that Muslims had always sought a separate homeland and Qaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the leader who steered this aspiration to its destiny in the form of separate nationhood. The partition debate and the Jinnah debate were, and are, therefore, inseparable. Ayesha Jalal’s 1985 book, The Sole Spokesman,  undermined to an extent this prevailing orthodoxy with its argument that Jinnah was not taking an ideological position with regard to the two-nation theory but was a tactician manoeuvring for position. Partition happened because the Congress did not do what politicians must do — negotiate and compromise. Jalal’s conclusion, thus, was: “It was Congress that insisted on partition. It was Jinnah who was against partition”. If many boggled at this, it is useful to remember that all revisionist accounts stretch themselves and the evidence, often unduly, to challenge prevailing orthodoxies. 

Yasser Latif Hamdani’s Jinnah: A Life is to be seen in this context. The author is a well-known lawyer and columnist in Pakistan who stands out for his enlightened and liberal views on many of the contested issues Pakistan confronts. Broadly, Hamdani’s treatment has three themes. First, resurrecting the forgotten Jinnah who was, in the first two decades of the 20th century, a protagonist of Hindu-Muslim unity and a committed Congressman. The high point was the 1916 Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League — in a sense, Jinnah’s personal achievement. This was in Hamdani’s words an “extraordinary victory” for Jinnah and “the highest point in his political career and the point where he probably and legitimately thought of himself as leading India to self government”. 

How and why that this was not to be forms the next major theme and is an account of “the tragic demise of the old Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity and Jinnah’s rebirth as the Quaid i Azam of Muslim India”. The argument that Jinnah’s journey from being a national leader to a Muslim leader was forced on him by Nehru, Gandhi and the Congress has been made before. In Hamdani’s telling, however, it is the story of a tragedy: “India lost out on Jinnah and Jinnah missed out on the true greatness which the providence seemed to have earmarked him, becoming instead the founding father of a country that has remained in a perpetual identity crisis since birth and tragically more a discredit than credit to the man that he was.” 

This is a perspective of Jinnah fighting hard for his constituency but striving throughout for compromise but handed a final denouement he had not anticipated: “The concession of a completely separate Pakistan divorced from the rest of India must have come as a rude shock for Jinnah. His entire strategy had rested upon the assumption that Gandhi in particular would never allow the Congress to agree to a complete irrevocable division of India and would in turn negotiate with the Muslim League on the basis of an Indian Union,” Hamdani writes. 

Jinnah: A Life 

Author: Yasser Latif Hamdani

Publisher: Macmillan

Pages: 380

Price: Rs 499

 

This is, however, a more deeply contested terrain than Hamdani concedes, with multiple accounts,  since what is being debated is the responsibility for the bloodbath accompanying partition  for which no one wanted to take the blame . 

These first two themes in the book involve in large part an engagement with the Indian view— but one also widely shared elsewhere — of Jinnah having destroyed subcontinental and communal unity. There is, however, a third theme that pits Jinnah against the many issues that bedevil Pakistan — the obsession with the Ahmedias, the long failure of constitutionalism, the narrow religious orthodoxy that dominates policy-making, the dire situation of non- Muslims, the role of the military in politics and governance and others. In Hamdani’s account, Jinnah’s journey to disillusionment was quick and evident in the brief period that he lived after Pakistan’s creation. He is believed to have “frankly told his doctor that Pakistan had been the biggest blunder of his life and that he wanted to go to Delhi and tell Jawaharlal Nehru to be friends again”. In Hamdani’s view the biggest reversal for Jinnah’s vision has been Pakistan’s troubled relationship with India” and “that vision had suffered a backlash in his lifetime with the Kashmir conflict”.

The discussion of Kashmir in the book is, however, very brief and almost cryptic notwithstanding that Jinnah was at the helm of affairs in Pakistan for a significant part of the first Kashmir War. Hamdani holds that Jinnah was probably ignorant of what was happening with the tribal invasion but also goes on to talk of Jinnah’s “miscalculation” in not mobilising the Pakistan army and it “would be fair to say that had the Pakistan army moved at that time the Kashmir dispute would have been resolved in one fair blow”. How far this accords with the historical record and evidence is a different matter. The treatment here is insufficient for an issue of such continuing significance and Hamdani’s account undermines the credibility of his analysis. 

Nevertheless  Jinnah: A Life  is an engrossing read made distinctive by the fact that its subject’s life also becomes in the author’s hands a reflection on Pakistan and South Asia today and the journey taken over the past 70- plus years. 

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The reviewer is a former high commissioner to Pakistan