Prafull Goradia
Keenly convinced that Hindus and Muslims could not coexist in one country, Jinnah even unleashed ‘Direct Action’ in Calcutta in 1946
With Independence Day just gone by, India has entered its 75th year as an independent nation after colonial rule. But as our Prime Minister also declared that August 14 — which is our neighbour Pakistan’s independence day — will be remembered as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, it is apt to recall Partition. This human tragedy was set in motion by Mohammad Ali Jinnah formally on March 23, 1940, in the Muslim League’s plenum on the eve of passing a resolution to divide India. Excerpts from Jinnah’s speech the previous day make it evident that the Qaide-e-Azam was clear about what he was advocating.
“Muslims are not a minority; we are a nation,” Jinnah claimed. He further said: “Hindus and Muslims are distinct and separate civilisations, deriving their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics. Very often, the hero of one is a foe of the other and, likewise, their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two such nations under a single State must lead to growing discontent and the final destruction of the fabric. The history of 1,200 years has failed to achieve unity; India was always divided into Hindu India and Muslim India. Therefore, they must have their homeland, their territory and their State.” For Jinnah and his League, this was their inexorable logic.
Jinnah did not stop at mere rhetoric. To convince the British that the two communities could not coexist in one country, he unleashed the “Direct Action” in Calcutta on August 16, 1946. Riots erupted not only in Bengal but spread up to Bhagalpur in Bihar. For a man of the elite, who wore only Saville Row suits, did not wear pyjamas or sherwanis before embracing Muslim politics, couldn’t do a namaz and enjoyed his pork, this was a complete U-turn. The Qaid’s younger brother Ahmed Ali, also my maternal grandfather’s friend (they met frequently), told my grandpa that the brothers were culturally Parsi, and ate and drank what they liked. The elder Jinnah had married a beautiful Parsi girl, Ruttie Petit.
A telling incident narrated by Pran Chopra, later the editor of The Statesman, as a reporter witnessing a Muslim League rally at Jalandhar in the campaigning during the 1945-46 elections reveals how Jinnah was the man of the moment for the country’s Muslims. He could address gatherings only in English; the only other language he knew was his native Gujarati; certainly not Urdu. In the middle of his speech, the call for azaan (Muslim prayer) was sounded. While the crowd trooped off to pray, Jinnah sat down on a chair to smoke a cigar, resuming his speech after the crowd had returned. No one minded. For them, he was the messiah who would deliver them what they ardently wanted — freedom from Hindu domination after the British quit. Cigar smoking and pork gorging were small details that didn’t matter.
Jinnah, the highest paid barrister in the British Empire, was a brilliant courtroom advocate but remained only that. To him, the Muslim League and his Muslim followers were clients; his final fee was a place in the hall of fame in history as the founder of a new country for his community. The Muslim desire for a separate homeland existed before Jinnah, but he was its effective articulator, winning it for them after unleashing violence on Hindus and convincing the British of the imperative for Partition. Jinnah talked to his Muslims only in English as he did with all his clients, except Gujaratis. Unlike Jawaharlal Nehru, Jinnah did not offer the Governor-Generalship to Lord Mountbatten for a year or so, but kept it for himself.
In the minds of the Muslim League leaders, on the eve of Partition, it was clear that all or most Muslims of India’s provinces must relocate to Pakistan. Through 1946 and early 1947, Jinnah and his senior colleagues demanded an exchange of population at Partition. His press appeal was published on November 26, 1946, on the front page of the Dawn which was still being published from Delhi. On December 19 the same year, Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan stated in the Dawn that the population map of India must change. The League President of Punjab made a statement that such an exchange was good. The other leaders who publicly agreed were Sir Mohammed Ismail of Madras and Syed Ilahi Bux of Sind. They and others were of the view that if Hindus and Muslims could have coexisted, what was the need for Partition? Justice Gopal Das Khosla, ICS, and a member of the Punjab High Court, also held that an exchange of population was an integral part of Partition.
The view wasn’t confined to Jinnah and the leaders of the Muslim League. India’s first President Dr Rajendra Prasad propagated the same in his book, India Divided. He proposed that Muslims in India and Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan unable to migrate should be allowed to stay on with visas issued by New Delhi and Karachi. Qaid-e-Azam MA Jinnah had endorsed his proposal. But the Nehru regime, adamant on hoisting a rootlessness that would later come to be called “secularism”, sold the falsehood that Partition was a ‘territorial’ division and not a religious one, the consequences of which India continues to battle even today.
(The writer is a well-known columnist, an author and a former member of the Rajya Sabha. The views expressed are personal.)
