Ahmed - Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History

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ISHTIAQ AHMED

JINNAH

His Successes, Failures and Role in History

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

I dedicate this book to all those who inspired me and taught me
to ask critical questions, seek answers and dare to share them.
It is in this spirit of inquiry that the political career of
Mohammad Ali Jinnah is examined in detail.

List of Abbreviations

ADC	Aide-de-camp
AIKC	All-India Kashmir Committee
AIML	All-India Muslim League
BJP	Bharatiya Janata Party
C.-in-C.	Commander-in-Chief
CA	Constituent Assembly
CPEC	ChinaPakistan Economic Corridor
CPI	Communist Party of India
DIR	Department of Islamic Reconstruction
GHQ	General Headquarters
HMG	His Majestys Government
HRCP	Human Rights Commission of Pakistan
INA	Indian National Army
INC	Indian National Congress, Congress Party, the Congress
JUH	Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind
MQM	Muttahida Quami Mahaz
NWFP	North-West Frontier Province (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa)
PBF	Punjab Boundary Force
PBUH	Peace be upon him
PPP	Pakistan Peoples Party
PTI	Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf
PUP	Punjab Unionist Party
RSS	Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
SAARC	South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
SGPC	Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee
UP	United Provinces

Chapter 1

Jinnahs Role in History: A Scheme of Analysis

The establishment of Pakistan in mid-August 1947 is proverbially attributed to the sterling leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The British writer Beverley Nichols, who met Jinnah in 1943, described him as the most important man in Asia.

Jinnah had to surmount stiff opposition from the Indian National Congress (hereafter referred to also as the Congress Party, the Congress or the INC), which was then the biggest political party in India, a grass-roots mass organization since the 1920s, with branches all over undivided India and long years of political organization and activity. It demanded freedom from British rule in the name of all Indians in a united India.

Although Jinnah won the case for Pakistan, the partition of India and the two Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and the Punjab resulted in unprecedented violence and rioting, in which more than a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died, and the biggest migration in history, mostly to escape death and injury, took place; some 1215 million crossed the international border drawn between India and Pakistan.

In the Pakistani nationalist narrative, Jinnah is eulogized as the Man of Destiny, fired by a true love for Islam and Muslims who liberated Muslims from the yoke of Hindu imperialism spearheaded by the Indian National Congress.

Farooq Ahmad Dar, in his book, Jinnahs Pakistan: Formation and Challenges of a State , mentions several occasions when, after the Muslim League moved the Lahore Resolution on 23 March 1940 demanding the creation of separate Muslim states, the Indian National Congress tried to dissuade Jinnah from demanding Pakistan:

1.The first instance was in June 1940, when the Congress president Subhas Chandra Bose offered Jinnah the post of the first prime minister of independent India, but contingent on his withdrawing his demand for the division of India.

2.A few months later, C. Rajagopalachari went even further: he offered the Muslim League not only the right to nominate the prime minister but also the cabinet of their choice.

3.As late as April 1947, Gandhi was ready to hand over power to Jinnah at the centre with an all-Muslim administration if he gave up his demand of Partition.

Dar then presents Jinnahs steadfast resistance to such overtures in the following words:

These temptations could not, however, mould the solid man in Jinnah and he stood firm on his stance, which he thought was in the best interests of the Muslims of South Asia. Even when such efforts failed to persuade Jinnah, the Congress leaders continued their efforts to impede the creation of Pakistan till the last day. Yet, they failed to do so.

Dar and others, however, shy away from explaining why Jinnah accepted the 16 May 1946 Cabinet Mission Plan proffered by British ministers to break the deadlock between the Congress and the Muslim League. The Cabinet Mission Plan rejected the Pakistan demand; it recommended instead a loose Indian union with a weak Centre whose constituent federating units were entitled to reconsider their relationship with the Union after ten-year intervals. Additionally, the princely states were required only to cede defence and foreign affairs to the Union while retaining control over all other sectors of society: something which was already the praxis under British paramountcy. The Congress leaders found the Cabinet Mission Plan unacceptable and rejected it.

In sharp contrast to Jinnah being identified as pivotal to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan, Ayesha Jalal, in The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985), originally her PhD dissertation, came to the novel conclusion that Jinnah sought to be recognised as the sole spokesman of Indian Muslims on the all-India level... From the late nineteen-thirties his main concern was the arrangements by which power at the centre was to be shared once the British quit India.

In an article Between Myth and History, published in the Dawn on 23 March 2005,

Jalal refers to the 1940 Lahore Resolution, which, she argues, avoided any mention of partition or Pakistan, while calling for the grouping of the Muslim-majority provinces in north-western and north-eastern India into Independent States, in which the constituent units would be autonomous and sovereign.

Does avoiding any mention of partition or Pakistan while calling for Independent States in which the constituent units would be autonomous and sovereign warrant that it did not mean demanding Partition and Pakistan? In the conclusion she underscores: It was Congresss unwillingness to countenance an equitable power-sharing arrangement with the Muslim League which resulted in the creation of a sovereign Pakistan based on the partition of Punjab and Bengal along ostensibly religious lines.

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