जिन्ना एक चालाक , अंग्रेजियत पसंद राजनीतिज्ञ जिसने कांग्रेस को नचा दिया – मूल्यांकन व् नया भारत

पाकिस्तान मैं कहते हैं की हंस के लिया पाकिस्तान लड़ के लेंगे हिंदुस्तान !

यह झूठ नहीं है . जिन्नाह पाकिस्तान के नायक , कायदे आज़म एक दिन भी जेल नहीं गए और नेहरूजी की १९२० से १९४७ तक की आधी जिंदगी अंग्रेजी जेलों  मैं बीत गयी . भगत सिंह , चंद्रशेखर ,सावरकर जैसे कितने नवयुवक देश भक्ति मैं अनेकों जुल्म सहते रहे और पाकिस्तानी समर्थक मुसलमान ऊँगली कटा के शहीद बन गए. पर जब आज़ादी आई तो सूरज की धुप की तरह सब पर बराबर बरसी . जो सौ साल जेलों मैं सड़े  और जो बंगलो मैं व्हिस्की पीते रहे सब बराबर के राजा  बन गए . शायद पाकिस्तानी व् बंगलादेशी पतन वह  इश्वारीय न्याय है जो हिंदुस्तान के त्याग और बलिदान की देर आये दुरुस्त आये सरीखी भरपाई है . परन्तु उस ईश्वरीय न्याय पर अत्यधिक भरोसा सोमनाथ के मंदिर के ध्वंस से को रोकने की पूजा जैसा है . राम चरितमानस मैं भी कहा है ‘ देव देव आलसी पुकारा ‘ .

जब अडवाणी व् जसवंत सरीखे पढ़े लिखे लोग भी वही गलती करते हैं जो जिन्नाह के समकालीन गाँधी व् नेहरु ने की तो दुःख होता है . अब सुधीर कुलकरनी जैसे लोग मोदी को बरगला रहे हैं की देश द्रोह के समकक्ष  छद्म धर्मनिरपेक्षता को फिर से अपने सिर पर बिठा लो तो अत्यंत दुःख होता है . क्या बीजेपी भी किसी भ्रष्टाचार या आतंकी दबाब मैं आ कर यह सब कर रही है ? मोदी ने दिखा दिया की बिना मुस्लिम वोट बैंक के भी चुनाव जीता जा सकता है तो क्यों साठ  सालों से प्रतीक्षा कर रहे हिन्दुओं को न्याय नहीं मिल रहा .

क्या भारत का हिन्दू सदा प्रजातंत्र के कीमत ही चुकाता रहेगा .

एम् जे अकबर का यह लेख उनके कांग्रेस के समय का है . परन्तु इसे बिना तोड़े मरोड़े इस लिए दिया जा सके की पाठक पूरी भावनाओं से परिचित हो सके .

विभाजन इसलिए नहीं हुआ की जिन्नाह बहुत बड़े नेता थे बल्कि इस लिए हुआ की पानीपत की लड़ाईयों  की तरह ही हिन्दू ‘ डायरेक्ट एक्शन डे ‘ से हार गए थे .

उसकी कीमत लाखों सिखों को लाहौर व् अन्य स्थानों को छोड़ कर चुकानी पड़ी .अयूब खान ने इसलिए १९६५ मैं हमला किया था की उसे विश्वास था की हिन्दू एक मुक्के मैं ढह  जायेंगे . हमारे शक्ति प्रदर्शन के अभाव ने हमें व्यर्थ के  युद्ध की त्रासदी झलने के लिए मजबूर कर दिया. वाही फिर सियाचिन और फिर कारगिल मैं हुआ .

इसलिए सरकार को इस छद्म धर्म निरपेक्षता को त्याग कर एक नए शक्तिशाली राष्ट्र की नींव डालनी चाहिए जो हमारी हज़ारों वर्षों की संस्कृति का द्योतक हो .

जिन्ना के समय के अन्याय का यही ईश्वरीय न्याय होगा .

JINNAH WAS LIBERAL-SECULAR FOR MOST OF HIS LIFE,
BUT NOT ALL HIS LIFE!

Mohammad Ali Jinnah,
aristocrat by temperament, catholic in taste, sectarian in politics, and the
father of Pakistan, was the unlikeliest parent that an Islamic republic could
possibly have. He was the most British of the generation of Indians that won
freedom in August 1947. As a child in the elite Christian Mission High School in
Karachi, he changed his birthday from 20 October to Christmas Day. As a student
at Lincoln’s Inn, he anglicised his name from Jinnahbhai to Jinnah. For three
years, between 1930 and 1933, he went into voluntary exile in Hampstead,
acquired a British passport, set up residence with his sister Fatimah and
daughter Dina, hired a British chauffeur [Bradley] for his Bentley, kept two
dogs [a black Doberman and a white West Highland terrier], indulged himself at
the theatre [he had once wanted to be a professional actor so that he could play
Hamlet] and appeared before the Privy Council to maintain himself in the style
to which he was accustomed. He wore Savile Row suits, heavily starched shirts
and two-tone leather or suede shoes. Official portraits in Pakistan present him
in a more “Islamic” costume, but the first time he wore a lambskin cap and
sherwani was on 15 October 1937 when he presided over the Lucknow session of the
Muslim League. He was 61 years old.

Despite being the Quaid-e-Azam, or the Great Leader of
Muslims, he drank a moderate amount of alcohol and was embarrassingly unfamiliar
with Islamic methods of prayer. He was uncomfortable in any language but
English, and made his demand for Pakistan — in 1940 at Lahore — in English,
despite catcalls from an audience that wanted to hear Urdu. His excuse was
ingenious: since the world press was in attendance, he said, it was only right
that he speak in a world language. The brilliant lawyer was never short of a
convincing argument.

He married a beautiful young Parsi girl, Ruttie
Petit, child of a wealthy non-Muslim Bombay business family who was disowned by
her parents for marrying outside her faith. Ruttie wore fresh flowers in her
hair, silk dresses, headbands that sparkled with diamonds, rubies and emeralds,
and smoked English cigarettes in ivory holders. The marriage frayed, but it
produced a daughter, Dina, who loved her father but was more reticent about the
nation he created. Dina stayed back in India, and must have been the only Indian
to wave a Pakistani flag from her balcony on 14 August 1947. In an incident
poignant with Wodehousian overtones, Jinnah, who wore a monocle as a young
barrister, recalled his first “friction with the police” to his biographer,
Hector Bolitho [Jinnah, Creator of Pakistan, John Murray, 1954]. It was during
an Oxbridge boat race: “I was with two friends and we were caught up with a
crowd of undergraduates. We found a cart in a side street, so we pushed each
other up and down the roadway, until we were arrested and taken off to the
police station … [and] let off with a caution.” It was the only time Jinnah
went to jail. In contrast, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru,
who gave up Savile Row for unshaped homespun cotton, spent half the years
between 1920 and 1947 in a series of British prisons.

1920 was a seminal
year of the freedom movement, for Mahatma Gandhi took over its leadership and
launched the non-cooperation, or Khilafat, movement with a marriage of two
currents: the overall anger against British colonisation and the Muslim outrage
against the defeat of the Caliph of Muslims, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, and
the fall of the holy cities, Mecca and Medina, to the British in the First World
War. When Gandhi allied with the ulema, and challenged the rule of law, Jinnah,
a pre-eminent leader of the Congress as well as the Muslim League, objected. He
walked out of the Nagpur session of the Congress rather than endorse Gandhi’s
leadership. As he said, “Well, young man. I will have nothing to do with this
pseudo-religious approach to politics. I part company with Congress and Gandhi.
I do not believe in working up mob hysteria.”

The young man was a
journalist, Durga Das. The older man was Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The reference is
from Durga Das’ classic book, India from Curzon to Nehru and After. Jinnah said
this after the 1920 Nagpur session, where Gandhi’s non-cooperation resolution
was passed almost unanimously. Jinnah’s decision was entirely in character with
his liberal-secular record.

On 1 October 1906, 35 Muslims of “noble
birth, wealth and power” called on the fourth Earl of Minto, Curzon’s successor
as Viceroy of India. They were led by the Aga Khan and used for the first time a
phrase that would dominate the history of the subcontinent in the 20th century:
the “national interests” of Indian Muslims. They wanted help against an
“unsympathetic” Hindu majority. They asked, very politely, for proportional
representation in jobs and separate seats in councils, municipalities,
university syndicates and high court benches. Lord Minto was happy to oblige.
The Muslim League was born in December that year at Dhaka, chaired by Nawab
Salimullah Khan, who had been too ill to join the 35 in October. The Aga Khan
was its first president.

The Aga Khan wrote later that it was “freakishly
ironic” that “our doughtiest opponent in 1906” was Jinnah, who “came out in
bitter hostility toward all that I and my friends had done. He was the only
well-known Muslim to take this attitude. He said that our principle of separate
electorates was dividing the nation against itself”. ON PRECISELY the same dates
that the League was formed in Dhaka, Jinnah was in nearby Calcutta with 44 other
Muslims and roughly 1,500 Hindus, Christians and Parsis, serving as secretary to
Dadabhai Naoroji, president of the Indian National Congress. Dadabhai was too
ill to give his address, which had been partially drafted by Jinnah and was read
out by Gopal Krishna Gokhale.

Sarojini Naidu, who met the 30-year-old
Jinnah for the first time here, remembered him as a symbol of “virile
patriotism”. Her description is arguably the best there is: “Tall and stately,
but thin to the point of emancipation, languid and luxurious of habit, Mohammad
Ali Jinnah’s attenuated form is a deceptive sheath of a spirit of exceptional
vitality and endurance. Somewhat formal and fastidious, and a little aloof and
imperious of manner, the calm hauteur of his accustomed reserve but masks, for
those who know him, a naïve and eager humanity, an intuition quick and tender as
a woman’s, a humour gay and winning as a child’s, a shy and splendid idealism
which is of the very essence of the man.”

Jinnah entered the Central
Legislative Council in Calcutta [the capital of British India then] on 25
January 1910, along with Gokhale, Surendranath Banerjea and Motilal Nehru. Lord
Minto expected the Council to rubber stamp “any measures we may deem right to
introduce”. Jinnah’s maiden speech shattered such pompousness. He rose to defend
another Gujarati working for his people in another colony across the seas,
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Jinnah expressed “the highest pitch of indignation
and horror at the harsh and cruel treatment that is meted out to Indians in
South Africa”. Minto objected to a term such as “cruel treatment”. Jinnah
responded at once: “My Lord! I should feel much inclined to use much stronger
language.” Lord Minto kept quiet.

On 7 March 1911 Jinnah introduced what
was to become the first non-official Act in British Indian history, the Wakf
Validating Bill, reversing an 1894 decision on wakf gifts. Muslims across the
Indian empire were grateful. Jinnah attended his first meeting of the League in
Bankipur in 1912, but did not become a member. He was in Bankipur to attend the
Congress session. When he went to Lucknow a few months later as a special guest
of the League [it was not an annual session], Sarojini Naidu was on the platform
with him. The bitterness that divided India did not exist then. Dr M.A. Ansari,
Maulana Azad and Hakim Ajmal Khan attended the League session of 1914, and in
1915, the League tent had a truly unlikely guest list: Madan Mohan Malviya,
Surendranath Banerjea, Annie Besant, B.G. Horniman, Sarojini Naidu and Mahatma
Gandhi. When Jinnah did join the League in 1913, he insisted on a condition, set
out in immaculate English, that his “loyalty to the Muslim League and the Muslim
interest would in no way and at no time imply even the shadow of disloyalty to
the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated” [Jinnah: His Speeches
and Writings, 1912-1917, edited by Sarojini Naidu]. Gokhale that year honoured
Jinnah with a phrase that has travelled through time: it is “freedom from all
sectarian prejudice which will make him [Jinnah] the best ambassador of
Hindu-Muslim unity”. In the spring of 1914 Jinnah chaired a Congress delegation
to London to lobby Whitehall on a proposed Council of India Bill.

When
Gandhi landed in India in 1915, Jinnah, as president of the Gujarat Society [the
mahatmas of both India and Pakistan were Gujaratis], spoke at a garden party to
welcome the hero of South Africa. Jinnah was the star of 1915. At the Congress
and League sessions, held in Mumbai at the same time, he worked tirelessly with
Congress president Satyendra Sinha and Mazharul Haque [a Congressman who
presided over the Muslim League that year] for a joint platform of resolutions.
Haque and Jinnah were heckled so badly at the League session by mullahs that the
meeting had to be adjourned. It reconvened the next day in the safer milieu of
the Taj Mahal Hotel. The next year Jinnah became president of the League for the
first time, at Lucknow.

Motilal Nehru, in the meantime, worked closely
with Jinnah in the Council. When the munificent Motilal convened a meeting of
fellow-legislators at his handsome mansion in Allahabad in April, he considered
Jinnah “as keen a nationalist as any of us. He is showing his community the way
to Hindu-Muslim unity”. It was from this meeting in Allahabad that Jinnah went
for a vacation to Darjeeling and the summer home of his friend Sir Dinshaw
Manockjee Petit [French merchants had nicknamed Dinshaw’s small-built
grandfather petit and it stuck] and met 16-year-old Ruttie. I suppose a glorious
view of the Everest encouraged romance. When Ruttie became 18 she eloped and on
19 April 1918 they were married. Ruttie’s Parsi family disowned her, she
separated from Jinnah a decade later. [The wedding ring was a gift from the Raja
of Mahmudabad.]

As president Jinnah engineered the famous Lucknow Pact
with Congress president A.C. Mazumdar. In his presidential speech Jinnah
rejoiced that the new spirit of patriotism had “brought Hindus and Muslims
together for the common cause”. Mazumdar announced that all differences had been
settled, and Hindus and Muslims would make a “joint demand for a Representative
Government in India”. Enter Gandhi, who never sat in a legislature, and believed
passionately that freedom could only be won by a non-violent struggle for which
he would have to prepare the masses.

IN 1915 Gokhale advised Gandhi to
keep “his ears open and his mouth shut” for a year, and see India. Gandhi
stopped in Calcutta on his way to Rangoon and spoke to students. Politics, he
said, should never be divorced from religion. The signal was picked by Muslims
planning to marry politics with religion in their first great campaign against
the British empire, the Khilafat movement.

Over the next three years
Gandhi prepared the ground for his version of the freedom struggle: a shift from
the legislatures to the street; a deliberate use of religious imagery to reach
the illiterate masses through symbols most familiar to them [Ram Rajya for the
Hindus, Khilafat for the Muslims]; and an unwavering commitment to the poor
peasantry, for whom Champaran became a miracle. The massacre at Jallianwala Bagh
in 1919 provided a perfect opportunity; Indian anger reached critical mass.
Gandhi led the Congress towards its first mass struggle, the Non-Cooperation
Movement of 1921.

The constitutionalist in Jinnah found mass politics
ambitious, and the liberal in him rejected the invasion of religion in politics.
When he rose to speak at the Nagpur session in 1920, where Gandhi moved the
non-cooperation resolution, Jinnah was the only delegate to dissent till the end
among some 50,000 “surging” Hindus and Muslims. He had two principal objections.
The resolution, he said, was a de facto declaration of swaraj, or complete
independence, and although he agreed completely with Lala Lajpat Rai’s
indictment of the British Government he did not think the Congress had, as yet,
the means to achieve this end; as he put it, “it is not the right step to take
at this moment. You are committing the Indian National Congress to a programme
which you will not be able to carry out”. [Gandhi, after promising swaraj within
a year, withdrew the Non-Cooperation Movement in the wake of communal riots in
Kerala and of course the famous Chauri Chaura incident in 1922. Congress
formally adopted full independence as its goal only in 1931.] His second
objection was that non-violence would not succeed. In this Jinnah was
wrong.

There is a remarkable sub-text in this speech, which has never
been commented upon, at least to my knowledge. When Jinnah first referred to
Gandhi, he called him “Mr Gandhi”. There were instant cries of “Mahatma Gandhi”.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Jinnah switched to “Mahatma Gandhi”. Later, he
referred to Mr Mohammad Ali, the more flamboyant of the two Ali Brothers, both
popularly referred to as Maulana. There were angry cries of “Maulana”. Jinnah
ignored them. He referred at least five times more to Ali, but each time called
him only Mr Mohammad Ali.

Let us leave the last word to Gandhi. Writing
in Harijan of 8 June 1940, Gandhi said, “Quaid-e-Azam himself was a great
Congressman. It was only after the non-cooperation that he, like many other
Congressmen belonging to several communities, left. Their defection was purely
political.” In other words, it was not communal. It could not be, for almost
every Muslim was with Gandhi when Jinnah left the Congress.

HISTORY MIGHT
be better understood if we did not treat it as a heroes-and-villains movie. Life
is more complex than that. The heroes of our national struggle changed sometimes
with circumstances. The reasons for the three instances I cite are very
different; their implications radically at variance. I am not making any
comparisons, but only noting that leaders change their tactics. Non-violent
Gandhi, who broke the empire three decades later, received the Kaiser-I-Hind
medal on 3 June 1915 [Tagore was knighted the same day] for recruiting soldiers
for the war effort. Subhas Bose, ardently Gandhian in 1920, put on uniform and
led the Indian National Army with support from Fascists. Jinnah, the ambassador
of unity, became a partitionist.

The question that should intrigue us is
why. Ambition and frustration are two reasons commonly suggested in India, but
they are not enough to create a new nation. Jinnah made the demand for Pakistan
only in 1940, after repeated attempts to obtain constitutional safeguards for
Muslims and attempts at power-sharing had failed. What happened, for instance,
to the Constitution that the Congress was meant to draft in 1928? On the other
hand, Congress leaders felt that commitments on the basis of any community would
lead to extortion from every community. The only exception made was for Dalits,
then called Harijans.

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who remained opposed to
partition even after Nehru and Patel had accepted it as inevitable, places one
finger on the failed negotiations in United Provinces after the 1936-37
elections, and a second on the inexplicable collapse of the Cabinet Mission Plan
of 1946 which would have kept India united — inexplicable because both the
Congress and the Muslim League had accepted it. The plan did not survive a press
conference given by Nehru. But to blame Nehru alone is completely erroneous. He
had just been named Congress president, replacing Azad, since the party
president would head any interim Government pending freedom. But he was hardly
the supreme authority in the party. Gandhi could have intervened at any moment,
but did not. Nehru had strong reservations about the right of the units to
secede; Jinnah may have accepted a “moth-eaten” Pakistan but Nehru was not ready
to accept a “moth-eaten” India. Azad disagreed, arguing the classic Congress
case that since communalism was a British poison, it would ebb once Indians
ruled their own state; he was ready, in other words, to give Indians a chance to
prove that communalism was a passing phenomenon and flourish as a united
nation.

Jinnah responded with the unbridled use of the communal card, and
there was no turning back. His protest culminated in the call for Direct Action;
this in turn engendered the carnage of the Calcutta riots; which, in turn, led
to the massacres of Bihar riots. The prospects of unity were washed away in the
blood on the streets and mudpaths. A deeply saddened Gandhi spurned 15 August
1947 as a false dawn [to quote Faiz]. He spent the day not in celebrations in
Delhi but in fasting at Calcutta. Thanks to Gandhi — and H.S. Suhrawardy — there
were no communal riots in Calcutta in 1947.

Facts are humbling. They
prevent you from jumping to conclusions