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 Jennings Bryan, 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.
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