Understanding Pakistan Project

Understanding Pakistan Project Team June 18th, 2007

Guest Column* By: Yasser Latif Hamdani

As we look at and comment upon Jinnah’s tenure as the first Governor General of Pakistan in the final year of his life, it is worth discussing some of his earlier contributions to Indian politics and his legacy, more broadly. Indeed, an argument can be (and has been) made that by the time Jinnah was sworn in as the first Governor General of Pakistan, he was well past even the twilight of an illustrious and remarkable political career and that his legacy had already been determined and What was to come later had much less to do with how the world remembered him. With that let me turn to Jinnah’s Pre-Pakistan legislative career and his overall legacy.

Jinnah’s Pre-Pakistan Legislative Career

As we celebrate M.A. Jinnah’s birth anniversay today, December 25, it behoves us to think deep and hard on his true legacy that, in addition to the creation of a country, included a long and extremely effective legislative career as a member of the central legislative assembly of India.

Indeed the greatest tragedy of the subcontinent is that both India and Pakistan have chosen to selectively remember this great man, especially by choosing to ignore his politics prior to the Pakistan Movement. However if both India and Pakistan were to revisit Jinnah’s pre-1937 Indian nationalist career, we would find much to celebrate together, even if we continue to differ on his later role as the champion of Muslim separatism.

Jinnah’s legislative career spanned over close to four decades, out of which 37 years were spent serving the cause of India’s progress. Most ironic was his very first election in 1910, where Congressman Jinnah, who was to one day lead Muslim League to hilt against the Congress, defeated the Muslim Leaguer Rafiuddin Ahmad from Bombay to successfully enter into the legislative council. Who could imagine then that this young Congressman barrister would one day end up becoming Muslim League’s most famous leader.

Barely a month into the assembly, he took on Lord Minto by denouncing the “cruel and harsh treatment that is meted out to the Indians in Natal” in support of Mohandas Gandhi, who too was to become his principal foe in the future. When Lord Minto reprimanded him for using “harsh language”, he replied, “Well my Lord, I should feel inclined to use much harsher language.”

In 1912, Jinnah alienated many of his Muslim supporters by giving his wholehearted support to the Special Marriage Amendment Bill, which sought to provide mixed religion marriages legal protection. He argued that the bill would provide equality but he was opposed by many members on the grounds that the bill contravened the Koran. Undaunted Jinnah asked the law member who had opposed the bill if he “would deny that there is a certain class of educated and enlightened people who rightly think that a gravest injustice is done to them as long as liberty of conscience is held from them”.

Rubbishing the idea that Muslim sensibilities would be hurt, he asked: “Is this the first time in the history of legislation in this country that this Council has been called upon to override Musalman Law or modify it to suit the time? The Council has over ridden and modified the Musalman law in many respects.” It was the same year that he stood up to argue that universal elementary education ought to be “compulsory”. He declared unfettered by any opposition religious or otherwise:

“In no country has elementary education become universal without compulsion. Find the money; if necessary tax the people. But I shall be told that people are already taxed. I shall be told that we shall face great unpopularity… My answer is that we should do all this to improve the masses of this country to whom you owe a much greater duty than anyone else. My answer is that you should remove the reproach that is leveled against the British rule, that is, the neglect of elementary education. My answer is that it is the duty of every civilised government to educate masses, and if you have to face unpopularity, if you have to face certain amount of danger, face it boldly in the name of duty.”

Later defining self government, he spoke of a government for the people and by the people unfettered and unconditionally. Here too Jinnah was at his best, a secular liberal politician who fought for what he believed in. While he opposed forces of religious reaction and espoused the cause of freedom, he did not turn his back to the legitimate demands of his community and this manifested itself in form of the Wakf Bill, which was his great legislative triumph for the Muslims. But if the Muslims thought Jinnah had changed his ways, they were sorely mistaken when he supported the Child Marriages Restraint Bill which outlawed marriages of girls below the age of 16. When questioned, Jinnah declared that religion had nothing to do with it, but that this was a question of common sense.

At other times, he pushed forward an agenda that sought to drive the British into a corner. In February 1924, he introduced a legislation that called for the Government of India to buy its stores through “Rupee tenders” instead of Pound sterling which had proved costly for India and had blatantly favored the British. In introducing this measure, he recounted 75 different British imperial purchases that had inhibited India’s economic development. His resolution passed and has been held by many historians as the single most important event in India’s pre-partition history that had stimulated indigenous Economic growth and development. Opposing a British move to introduce passports as a necessary pre-condition to enter India, Jinnah declared that “all regulations that impose passports are the biggest nuisance and the sooner they are done away with the better.”

Speaking against the deportation of Bombay Chronicle Editor, B. G. Horniman he declared:

“I do maintain, and I have drunk deep at the fountain of constitutional law, that the liberty of a man is dearest thing in the law of any constitution and it should not be taken away in this fashion.”

On Indian soldiers fighting British wars, Jinnah and Gandhi clashed publicly. Gandhi wanted to use Home Rule League to recruit soldiers for the British Empire, something which Jinnah found abhorrent and opposed. Jinnah believed that as long as Indians were not allowed to become officers or India remained in subjection, they could not be asked to fight for the empire. Jinnah said:

“We cannot ask young men to fight for principles, the application of which is denied to their own country. A subject race cannot fight for others with the heart and energy that a free race can fight with for the freedom of itself and others. If India has to make great sacrifices in the defence of the Empire, it must be as a partner in the Empire and not as its dependency. Let her feel that she is fighting for her own freedom as well as the freedom of a commonwealth of free nations under the British crown and then she will strain to stand by England to the last.”

Jinnah’s legislative career prior to his taking up the Muslim separatist case was marked by secular Indian nationalism and his desire to see India as a great and free nation of the world, inspired by constitutionalism and democracy. Jinnah stood for universal education, women’s rights, equality of Indians irrespective of religion, caste, creed or gender and against obscurantism of all forms. It is this part of his career that can not only help to bridge the gap of distrust between Pakistan and India, but can also inspire liberals in the nation that he founded to work for a modern, democratic and pluralistic Pakistan in line with Jinnah’s ideas of constitutionalism and democracy.

Jinnah’s Legacy: South Asia’s Clarance Darrow

57 years since his death and he still ends up on the front page of every major newspaper in India for several days repeatedly. I think it is about time the subcontinent came to terms with one of its most illustrious sons and certainly the most interesting.

An anglicized barrister who ended up founding a separate Muslim majority state is an apparent paradox but not really so, because had this urbane lawyer been any more religious he would have been unable to maintain unity amongst the ranks of his constituents, the deeply fractured and disjointed millions in the Muslim community. He would either be denounced as a Sunni or Shia or Barelvi or a Deobandi or something else.

Throughout his struggle for the Muslims, he maintained a very deliberate distance from them, for had he fraternized with one section, the other section would be alienated. Jinnah had to be quintessentially aloof and isolated, in an unapproachable ivory tower of impartiality. This, which was his greatest strength, is often presented as a paradox i.e. the paradox of a Bond street gentleman with no apparent hint of religiosity leading the unwashed and deeply religious masses of the subcontinent.

Indeed this was his solution to the deep divisions between Indians and India that had been his first and most important love. The young Lincoln`s Inn returned Barrister, perhaps the youngest to be called to bar, could not find any reason why a United India could not work. He had opposed his co-religionists on the issue of separate electorates. Walking in the footsteps of Dadabhoy Naoroji and Gokhale, he saw himself as an Indian first, second and last. Such was his unwavering faith in this national goal that he made it a pre-condition to his joining the Muslim League in 1913 while remaining simultaneously a Congressman.

His advocacy of Hindu Muslim Unity won him the accolades of his countrymen and he was widely hailed as the Best Ambassador of “Hindu Muslim Unity.” At the height of his legal career he represented Tilak against the sedition charges leveled by the British government. It was around this time that he led a successful protest against Lord Wellingdon, which the British broke up by sending the police. In his honor there stands the Jinnah Memorial hall and education trust even today, serving each and every community equally and fairly, in the city that he loved the most - Bombay.

What was the nature of his relationship with the British rulers?

He was their harshest critic but never a rebel. While the Indian nationalist movement increasingly cried out “Free India or sink to our level”, Jinnah said “Free India or raise us to your level”. His vigorous campaigning got Indians the right to serve in army as officers and equals of the British.

Mahomed Ali Jinnah was by nature and role a lawyer and a legislator. He was instrumental in passing of such monumental bills as the restraint of child marriages, which he did so against the will of the obscurantist elements within the Muslim community, declaring forcefully as he had always done that legislation had nothing to do with religion and this certainly wasn`t a religious matter. On several occasions he rose to defend some Indian dissident or the other, none more famous than Bhagat Singh, the young Sikh revolutionary who had been left high and dry by the so called national leadership.

In what was in my estimate his finest speech, he castigated the British for ignoring the long held standards of British justice and what he considered tyranny of the worst kind.

And what of his most famous rival, the one the world considers one of the greatest ever? Jinnah respected Gandhi as a man of conviction but was uncomfortable with his style of mass politics. Gandhi had the finger on India`s pulse. He gave up his western dress and law practice to become the “Mahatma” of the masses. He became one with them and in doing so he released, perhaps inadvertently, those dark forces that Jinnah had always feared.

Not only did Gandhi appeal to religious superstitions of the Hindu masses who were ready to worship him like a God, but he also encouraged Muslim divines to topple secular leadership like Jinnah and take matters into their own hands. Perhaps the approach would have worked, but the benefits were short lived as soon the dark forces turned on each other.

It was not out of some temporary irritation or annoyance that Jinnah, this secular and nationalist Congressman, turned to separatism, as some would have us believe. Nor was it some opportunism. H V Hodson ruled it out by saying that even his doughtiest opponents acknowledged his incorruptibility and steadfast idealism. He was supremely a man of honor and integrity, prompting Dr. Ambedkar to say that there was no other politician in the whole of South Asia to whom the word “incorruptible” more fittingly applied.

In the mid 1930s when a group of Muslim students visited Jinnah in London with their “Pakistan scheme”, he is supposed to have told them to “stay away, before I think of you as stooges of British imperialism”. Then what changed? Why did Jinnah become the separatist mass politician that he himself had once despised? This question awaits its historian, but Woodrow Wyatt offers a simpler explanation. In an interview with Christopher Mitchell, the producer of a documentary on the life of Mr. Jinnah, Wyatt said that Jinnah was a lawyer brought up in England and lawyers brought up in England have a funny habit of fighting for justice.

Having taken up the case of the Muslim salariat and nobility in 1937, Jinnah slowly broadened the base of his litigants to include the entire Muslim community. This he was forced to do after the Congress party had refused to share power with the Muslim League in places where it had won all Muslim constituencies. In what was to seal the fate of a United India, Jawaharlal Nehru had taunted the Muslim League and its leader challenging them to find their own inherent strength.

It was then, that for the first time Jinnah had concluded that the Muslim minority of South Asia could no longer depend on small mercies by the majority. Like any good lawyer, and he considered him exactly that, he thus set out to win the case but what was the brief? The nuanced idea of a secular state with a Muslim majority is not always easy to relate to. Even harder is the idea of such a demand being a bargaining counter for ironclad safeguards within the union. It is here that Jinnah is cut down to size by occam`s razor into a Darth Vader like figure, which he never was.

“My father never wanted separation,” declared Dina Wadia famously. Recent discoveries seem to favor her assertion. Jinnah`s idea was of a loose federal union of India constituting Hindu majority and Muslim majority areas, which was to many a logical solution to a communal problem that had existed for centuries and a problem that Jinnah certainly did not invent or ascribe to at any point in his life.

But one thing is clear. Throughout his agonizing last few years, dying of Cancer and Tuberculosis, he was forced to take on not just the Congress Party or the British but also the Mullahs, who in large numbers opposed the Pakistan demand using the most humiliating and disgraceful language against him. There was pressure from within to declare an Islamic state based on Quran and Sunnah which he resisted tooth and nail, even expelling from the party his close friend the Raja of Mahmudabad. The impetuous Raja later repented and was allowed back in.

As Pakistan became certain, he showed his hand. His vision of Pakistan, which he repeated on numerous occasions, was one where sovereignty rested unconditionally with the people regardless of religion, caste or creed. On 11th August 1947, speaking to the constituent assembly he made plain that a person`s religion was a personal matter and would have nothing to do with the business of the state. Citing the example of Catholic and Protestant conflict in England, Jinnah spoke of a modern nation state which would rise up above these differences and work towards the betterment of the people of Pakistan without distinction.

As if to cement his words, he appointed a Hindu Law minister to undertake the task of law-making in the new state. Sadly today every dictum laid down by him has been ignored as Pakistan is an avowed Islamic Republic.

What did he imagine Pakistan`s relations to be with India? He certainly did not foresee a nuclear arms race. He once told a young lady, who happens to be author Tariq Ali`s mother, that he wanted open borders between Pakistan and India. Kuldip Nayyar, the Indian writer and parliamentarian, recalls often how Jinnah had told him that Pakistan would stand side by side India in the common defense of the subcontinent against all foreign invasions. On the eve of his departure from India he had appealed to let bygones be bygones and start afresh, an appeal no one has paid any heed to.

Many tributes have been paid to the life and times of Mr. Jinnah in the past. None greater than Saadat Hassan Manto`s famous “Mera Sahab” or M N Roy`s obituary for him, which are two of a kind because Manto was not the kind of person who wore his political opinion on his sleeves and M N Roy was a secular humanist of international stature.

He has been described as Pakistan`s George Washington, its King Emperor, its arch bishop of Canterbury, its Prime Minister all rolled in one, but I have a feeling he would have settled for much less. Nay he would have preferred to be called South Asia`s Clarence Darrow, for like Darrow, Jinnah too had been a champion of unpopular causes, like the Suffrage movement with which he was deeply associated in England in the 1890s.

Jinnah too had championed reason and logic over superstition and he too had taken on a figure like William Bryan Jennings, said to be the greatest figure in American history since Thomas Jefferson. In the end Jinnah wanted to be acknowledged as a lawyer above all and he was, for his portrait today graces the most hallowed hall of British legal tradition i.e. the Great Hall of Lincoln`s Inn, where he stands with some of the finest legal minds produced in 500 years.

(Editor’s Note: This article is a combination of two earlier articles written by the author. It is being published with minor editorial modifications necessary to merge the article. The first portion of this article was published at Pakistaniat.com on December 25, 2006. The second portion was published at Chowk.com on August 13, 2005)

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[Editor’s Note:  Like all other contributions to UPP, the views expressed in the piece, unless otherwise cited, are the author’s own and not those of UPP. If you don’t agree with the subject and content of any contribution, we invite you to post a comment and provide appropriate references for your viewpoint.]

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