That our past has a way of constantly impinging on our present was amply demonstrated by the sordid saga surrounding Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s portrait at Aligarh Muslim University in recent weeks.
To recap, activists of the Hindu Yuva Vahini, a fringe political group, entered the AMU campus to forcibly remove Jinnah’s portrait. Predictably, this led to violence between the activists and AMU students.
Just when one thought things couldn’t plummet further, there were reports of Jinnah’s picture appearing in the restrooms across Aligarh including a college. The college authorities thankfully acted swiftly in removing them but not before the Hindu Yuva Vahini activists proudly acknowledging that it was their handiwork.
A well-regarded man
Interestingly, it is not just the much-derided “Left-Liberal” intellectuals who consider Jinnah a tall leader in India’s Independence movement before he espoused the cause of Pakistan. Senior BJP leader LK Advani, who was the Deputy Prime Minister in the Vajpayee government, visited Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi in 2005 and called him “a great secular leader and an Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity”. This was the first time a senior BJP leader had openly praised Jinnah and, predictably, it led to a lot of hand-wringing within the Sangh Parivar, which ultimately distanced itself from Advani’s comments.
Jaswant Singh, who held the External Affairs and Finance portfolios in the Vajpayee government, was another senior BJP leader who praised Jinnah in a book he wrote in 2009 titled Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence . Singh said Jinnah was needlessly demonised in India and controversially said that Nehru, in his quest for a strong-centralised union government, acquiesced to the Partition of India — a view shared by historian Sugata Bose. Singh’s comments attracted criticism from both the Congress and the BJP. The BJP even expelled him from the party.
Jinnah remains a deeply controversial figure, not just among historians but also in common consciousness. There is little doubt that he was a secular leader of the Congress early in his political career and stood for Hindu-Muslim unity. He was the architect of the Lucknow Pact of 1916 uniting the two communities in their fight against British rule.
Changing tack
Later, he distanced himself from the Congress after he opposed Gandhiji’s first non-cooperation movement in 1921 and eventually left the party. But it was only in the 1930s that the Muslim League invited him to head the party. By the end of that decade, the idea of a separate Muslim homeland within the Indian sub-continent slowly started taking shape in Jinnah’s mind, culminating in the now famous, or infamous, Lahore Declaration of 1940. Though he was not solely responsible for the Partition — there were other important players, with the Hindu Right playing no small part — he was certainly one of its prime movers.
Some historians believe that Jinnah used the idea of Pakistan more as a bargaining chip to get a better deal for Muslims in independent India. Chief among them is US-Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal. Sugata Bose has also argued that the Congress ultimately agreed to Partition as it preferred a partitioned India with a strong union government instead of a united India with a weak Centre, as suggested by the Cabinet Mission plan of 1946, which was the last vain attempt made by the British colonial power to keep India united.
Historian Venkat Dhulipala takes a contrarian view and argues that, far from being a vague, inchoate idea used as a bargaining chip, the idea of Pakistan was clearly formulated in the mind of Jinnah in the 1940s. Dhulipala asserts that there were vigorous debates within the Muslim community over the shape and contours of Pakistan. However he also says that since the Congress leadership was behind bars during this period after the Quit India movement, the most vehement opposition to the idea of Pakistan also came from the Muslim community — the nationalist Ulema. That there would be a substantial number of Muslims who would continue to live in India despite the creation of Pakistan, was also a contradiction Jinnah didn’t seem willing to deal with.
Contesting history
So history, for both historians and lay people, remains a contested site where past facts are constantly being re-evaluated, reappraised and reinterpreted to enrich our understanding of what happened. History is never a “settled” or “definitive” account of our past, and nuance and complexity are at the very heart of the discipline.
History is also a political minefield. Politicians never pass up the opportunity to twist historical facts and fit them into their ideological narrative and suppress or ignore others that question that narrative. The current Jinnah-AMU controversy is just another grotesque example in a long list of such distortions.
The bizarre battle fought between the BJP and the Congress in Karnataka over Tipu Sultan’s legacy is yet another instance of the combustible mix of history and politics.
Today, there are several Muslim intellectuals in India who blame Jinnah for his stubborn pursuit of Pakistan, a move that hardly did any favours for the Muslims who chose to stay back and make India their home. The scars of Partition are still etched in the psyche of this nation.