EDITS | Tuesday, August 25, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Flawed thesis on partition
A Surya Prakash
Although Mohammed Ali Jinnah propounded the pernicious two-nation theory and forced the partition of India on the ground that Muslims constitute a separate nation, he is not wholly to blame. Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and other Congress leaders who failed to stop Jinnah ought to take the rap. In fact, Nehru is the draftsman of India’s partition! Further, even after partition and the emergence of a secular, democratic India, those Muslims who chose to remain in India find themselves abandoned and bereft of “psychological security” and so, by implication, the secular majority must take the rap!
These are some nuggets from Mr Jaswant Singh’s book, Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, which has resulted in his ouster from the Bharatiya Janata Party. Mr Singh’s sympathetic treatment of Jinnah, the author of that sinister theory that pitted man against man and resulted in the bloodiest exchange of human populations, not only challenges some of the fundamental beliefs of the BJP but of all Indians. Jinnah claimed that Muslims constituted a separate nation and that they cannot co-exist with Hindus. Jinnah said this a thousand times between 1940-47.
Throughout this period, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Rajagopalachari and many others tried to talk him out of it. All the initiatives taken by these individuals to avert this tragedy are also fully documented (for key excerpts of all the letters and documents exchanged during those days, see Secular Politics, Communal Agenda by Prof Makkhan Lal, one of our leading historians). Eventually, when all else failed and when members of Jinnah’s Muslim League resorted to barbaric massacre of Hindus in Muslim majority areas, Nehru, Sardar Patel and others gave in to Jinnah’s demand in the hope of stopping the slaughter of the innocents.
The partition meant untold suffering for millions. Over 15 million people were uprooted on both sides of Jinnah’s inhuman divide and over half-a-million were butchered in the senseless communal frenzy. This was the largest killing of human beings instigated by a politician in this part of the world. While the killing of Hindus went on unabated,
Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the Congress, all of whom were sufficiently indoctrinated in the most noble traditions of secularism and peaceful co-existence by the Mahatma, took firm measures to stem the violence against Muslims on the Indian side.
These are historical facts which are well chronicled. Yet, the burden of Mr Singh’s argument is that the leaders of the Congress must take the blame for partition. Secondly, Mr Singh seems to hold the Hindu majority responsible for the secessionist tendencies among Muslims prior to partition. Finally, lo and behold, even after partition, the Hindu majority must take the blame for the maladjustment of Muslims in democratic India!
We are all now sufficiently familiar with what has become of the Islamic state that Jinnah created and the road traversed by secular, democratic and liberal India. Pakistan is an Islamic Republic which constitutionally prohibits non-Muslims from holding certain public offices. The population of the Hindus in Pakistan has crashed from 25 per cent in 1947 to 1.6 per cent in recent times. For much of the last 62 years that have gone by since partition, Pakistan has been under military dictatorship.
Contrast this with India. The Muslim population in India has risen from around 35 million in 1947 to over 150 million. We have a secular, democratic Constitution that ensures equity and equality. Indeed, we are so secular that since 2004, those who call the shots in India (and this includes the Prime Minister) are non-Hindus. Yet, if you go by Mr Singh’s logic, we get no marks at all for our humanistic approach to life and nation-building.
Shockingly, Mr Singh says, “Those Muslims who remained or were left behind in India now find themselves as almost abandoned, bereft of a sense of real kinship of not being ‘one’, in their entirety with the rest. This robs them of the essence of psychological security”. This is not all. Mr Singh fuels the demand for reservations for Muslims when he says “having once accepted this principle of reservations, circa 1909, then of partition, how can we now deny it to others, even such Muslims as have had to or chosen to live in India? Which is why some voices of Muslim protest now go to the extent of speaking of a ‘Third Partition’.”
In short, Mr Singh’s thesis is terribly flawed. He is so enamoured of Jinnah that he even describes Nehru as “one of the principal architects, in reality the draftsman of India’s partition”. He is also contemptuous of leaders like Nehru and Patel when he says he was struck by “the petty preoccupations of most ‘leaders’ of those times”. His misplaced sympathy for Jinnah and antipathy for Nehru, Patel and other Congress leaders does violence to our secular, democratic ideals even as it treats the perpetrators of religion-based hatred with much compassion and understanding. This is a dangerous argument. Every citizen who values secularism and democracy and hopes for the extension of these ideals, specially into non-secular frontiers like Pakistan, must summarily reject Mr Singh’s formulation.
Equally extraordinary is his claim (despite the thousand cuts inflicted on us by Pakistan, including 26/11) that Pakistan is now “somewhat mellowed” and “accommodative”.
Therefore, our secular, democratic enterprise amounts to nothing but the Islamic state that has crushed religious minorities and is now the epicentre of terrorism is “accommodative”.
Finally, a word about the political fallout of this book. While it must be emphasised that no leader of a party has the right to shock and awe his party colleagues and workers, there is nothing in the book to warrant Mr Singh’s summary expulsion from the BJP. Further, there is hardly any ground for banning the book because there are no references to Sardar Patel or Nehru which warrant a ban. Sadly, the expulsion and the ban in Gujarat have given life to a book that would have otherwise gathered dust in the back shelves of book stores.
If the BJP had treated this book with the contempt it deserves, Mr Singh’s Jinnah — India, Partition, Independence, would have been another ‘weighty’ tome that would have been sold by weight by the publishers from their godowns in Daryaganj after a futile wait for customers. The party has, unfortunately for itself and for our country, given currency to a flawed and muddled thesis that glorifies Muslim communalism and separatism and condemns secular, democratic India and its great leaders.
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