Tilak died soon after on 1 August 1920. Gandhi and Lajpat Rai were among the mourners at his funeral at Chowpatty in Bombay. Soon Gandhi would carry forward many of the ideas that the Lokmanya had initiated.
He was the first leader to realize that no nationalist movement could succeed without the support of the masses. He worked to raise the political consciousness of the people and make them proud of India’s heritage and culture. However, unlike his contemporaries Gokhale and G.R. Ranade, he was not very keen on the social reform of Hindu society. There was an anti-western streak in him that made him suspicious of any attempt at social reform by the government, like the raising of the age of marriage of girls. Gandhi was equally convinced that our freedom movement had to include the masses and he even took his Satyagraha to the villages but he also worked to reform the ills in society like untouchability and the inferior condition of women.
It was Tilak who spoke first about passive resistance, the boycott of foreign goods, non-cooperation with the government and the campaign of Swadeshi to win Swaraj. All these principles were at the heart of Gandhi’s Satyagraha. And one day, like Tilak, Gandhi too would travel to Britain to win the support of the British people.
Fiercely independent, an eloquent speaker and a subtle and forceful writer, Tilak was a man who could feel the pulse of the people and communicate his vision to them with clarity and power. The Lokmanya was the first truly mass leader of our freedom movement and one of India’s greatest champions of the people.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah & the Partition of India
‘Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.’
—Stanley Wolpert
There is an old saying about Delhi that whenever any king builds a new capital city here, the days of his dynasty are numbered. One wonders if the British knew about this when, at a glittering durbar at the Red Fort in 1911, King George V announced the shifting of the imperial capital from Calcutta to Delhi.
Some ancient ghosts must have watched in amusement as the new red sandstone city rose arrogantly over Raisina Hill. It was formally inaugurated in 1930 and in less than two decades the British had packed their bags and left India. They left behind a country divided into two nations, and worse, a land and its people in the grip of a carnage that left hundreds of thousands dead, cities and villages plundered and destroyed, millions of lives darkened by the tragedy of loss—of families, land and homes. The legacy of the partition of the country into India and Pakistan is a bitterness that still colours the relationship between the two countries many decades later.
The story of the Partition of India is inextricably woven with the life and work of one man—Mohammed Ali Jinnah. To understand how and why India was divided we have to first study Jinnah’s life and the extraordinary transformation of his character. He began his public life as a nationalist and a genuinely liberal and secular man who was hailed as a champion of Hindu–Muslim unity. He metamorphosed into a demagogue who declared that the two communities could never live together and demanded a separate nation on the basis of religion alone.
Mahatma Gandhi discarded his suits and hats for a khadi dhoti because he lost faith in the justice and fair play of the British government. What made Jinnah give up his pinstriped suits for the sherwani and the fur cap?
Mahomedali Jinnahbhai was born in Karachi, Sindh, on 25 December 1876, the eldest son of Mithibai and Jinnahbhai Poonja, a Gujarati businessman. Sindh was a province of the Bombay Presidency of British India then. Young Jinnah passed the matriculation examination from the University of Bombay at the age of sixteen. The same year he left to work at the London office of Graham’s Shipping and Trading Company, which had dealings with his father’s Karachi firm. But he left it to study law at Lincoln’s Inn in London and became, at nineteen, the youngest Indian to be called to the bar. In London he became an admirer of Dadabhai Naoroji—he had just been elected to the House of Commons and Jinnah heard his maiden speech from the visitor’s gallery. The constitutional approach towards, Indian self-government that men like Naoroji, Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta espoused appealed to him and on coming back to India in 1896, he chose to stay in Bombay. The city had a cluster of outstanding lawyers and in 1906 Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress.
He soon became one of Bombay’s most successful lawyers, shooting to fame when Pherozeshah Mehta asked Jinnah to defend him in what was known as the ‘Caucus Case’, and built a mansion on Malabar Hill. Jinnah was not rigidly religious and lived a westernized life, being very much the brown sahib, always impeccably clad in pinstripes and preferring to speak in English instead of his mother tongue Gujarati. When Tilak was put on trial for sedition, he hired Jinnah as his defence lawyer. Jinnah’s spirited defence stated that it was not sedition for any Indian to demand freedom from a foreign power. In spite of Jinnah’s efforts, Tilak was found guilty and jailed.
In the Congress Jinnah was soon among the rising young leaders, admired for his elegant speeches and legal logic. Like most Congress members at the time, he thought India would achieve a gradual self-government through petitions and acts of parliament. He was comfortable within the Congress that was like an old-boys club with westernized, urban gentlemen giving leisurely speeches in English. Most of India, especially in the villages, was unaware of their activities. The problem was that the government did not take these gentlemen too seriously and reforms came in reluctant drips. The first rebellion against this conformist style of politics came from Tilak and the Extremists, and it had led to the split in the Congress in 1907 at Surat.
The arrival of Gandhi changed the character of the Congress in a way that Jinnah could not accept. Gandhi was talking about gaining Swaraj immediately, while Jinnah did not think the country was ready for it. He thought the plan to widen the movement and start mass protests would lead to violence. Gandhi’s use of Hindu symbolism like Satyagraha and ahimsa made him uncomfortable as he was convinced it would divide Hindus and Muslims. He even wrote agitatedly to Gandhi, ‘Your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means complete disorganization and chaos. What the consequence of this may be, I shudder to contemplate.’
In 1918 Jinnah was the rising star of the party, being applauded for his well-reasoned, erudite speeches. Then this odd-looking man in a tilting turban arrives from South Africa full of anarchic ideas about non-violent protest. Instead of joining their urbane political discussions in drawing rooms, he begins to wander in the villages, talking directly to the people. As Jinnah watched in horror, the party cadre was completely swayed by Gandhi’s ideology, and joined in his various social and political campaigns with great enthusiasm. In 1920 at the Nagpur Congress when Jinnah stood up to criticize the plans for a non-cooperation campaign, he was booed off the stage. He left the gathering immediately and resigned from the party soon after.
The contrasting characters of the two men and their attitude to the freedom movement coloured all the important events from then on. Gandhi was the quintessential man of the people while Jinnah was a rather patrician figure, uncomfortable in crowds. Leading demonstrations, facing police lathis and going to jail was not the path for a constitutionalist like Jinnah. Unlike the Congress leaders he fastidiously stayed away from any unorthodox action that could invite arrest or a term in jail. Gandhi’s interest lay equally with the political movement and social reform while Jinnah was completely focused on his goal of a Muslim nation. As historian John Keay writes, while he was ‘lacking the charm of Nehru, let alone the fire of Bose or the popular appeal of Gandhi … Jinnah possessed a formidable mind in which intimidating resolve combined with unequalled skills as a tactician.’
Jinnah, who is described as a ‘lofty and awesome figure’, came up with the slogan of ‘Islam in danger’ to stoke the fears and misgivings of Muslims and built up the image of t
he Congress as an antagonistic ‘Hindu’ party that would not let Muslims survive in independent India. It defeated Gandhi’s lifelong efforts at creating a united, secular nation. Jinnah’s biographer Stanley Wolpert calls this man who was to later become Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam (Father of the Nation) the ‘jilted gentleman’. Intriguingly, both Gandhi and Jinnah would end up on the rupee notes of their countries.
Initially Jinnah had refused an invitation to join the All India Muslim League as he felt that the party was too feudal and communal for his taste. It had been formed by a group of rich landowners and Muslim princes who had grievances against the British but had little popular support. Jinnah joined the party in 1913 and for a while was a member of both the Congress and the League and everyone hoped he would become a bridge between the two organizations. He played a leading part in the Lucknow Pact in 1916 that created an alliance between the two parties. As a matter of fact, when the Congress supported the Khilafat movement, he had protested as he felt that religion should not be injected into a political movement.
However, by 1939 he was convinced that Muslims should have a separate nation. One of the reasons was the growth of Hindu communal parties like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS). These parties declared that Hinduism was in danger from Islam and accused the Congress of giving in to Muslim demands. The RSS wanted independent India to be a Hindu nation, where Muslims lived as second-class citizens.
After leaving the Congress Jinnah became the president of the Muslim League. At the time of the Simon Commission, the League demanded that Muslims should get separate seats in the legislature while the Nehru Report presented by the Congress was in favour of common electorates. Jinnah was not personally in favour of separate electorates, but drafted a compromise putting forward ‘Fourteen Points’ that he felt would satisfy the parties. They didn’t, and the talks failed over this impasse. Then he attended the Round Table Conferences but once again could not make any progress towards his goal of getting more power for the League whose disunity he was now getting upset with. In frustration he decided to quit politics and settled in London to practise law. He came back to India in 1934 at the request of the Muslim leader Aga Khan and the poet Mohammad Iqbal.
The League fought the elections in 1937 for the provincial assemblies and in comparison to the Congress its performance was dismal. The Congress swept the general seats, and even in the areas with a Muslim majority like Punjab, the League did badly. Jinnah had hoped to win enough seats to compel the Congress to agree to his demands but now that was no longer possible. He offered to join the Congress governments in an alliance against the British but insisted that they accept the League as the sole representative of the Muslims. The Congress could never do so; it was a national party and had Muslim leaders within its ranks. Jinnah wanted to turn the Congress into a Hindu party and that would have had disastrous consequences for the country. The Congress made a counter offer—that the League should merge with the Congress. Jinnah refused and from then inexorably took up the cause of a separate nation for Muslims—Pakistan.
The idea of Pakistan first appeared in 1932 in a pamphlet printed in Cambridge by some Muslim students. It was to comprise Muslim majority states like Punjab, North West Frontier Province, Kashmir and Sind, though oddly enough Bengal was not included. Pakistan meant ‘the land of the pure’. Iqbal talked about it at public gatherings, but it was still an idea on the fringes of the freedom movement. Iqbal’s idea was of religion-majority nations—India and Pakistan—and he felt that the less undiluted the majority, the better. He played a big role in convincing Jinnah that Muslims needed a separate nation to protect their rights.
However, it was only after the 1937 elections that Jinnah picked it up and made it the core of the League’s goals. He did it with much ambiguity in the beginning, never openly using the name, but gradually as Independence drew closer as a reality, his attitude hardened and he refused to agree to anything except a partition of the country.
Jinnah unveiled his ‘Two Nation Theory’, which said that Muslims and Hindus were two different peoples by religion and culture and that Muslims would become second-class citizens in ‘Hindu’ India. Having now embraced the idea of separate electorates and the right of the League to exclusively represent Muslims, he reiterated that ‘Islam was in danger’ from a ‘Hindu’ Congress and that all Muslims should unite behind the League and support its demand for a separate nation. Every utterance took on a religious timbre as he declared, ‘a vote for the League and Pakistan was a vote for Islam’. By 1946 the League had a much larger share of the Muslim vote. It is hard to imagine this was the same man who once spoke of being an Indian first and not a Muslim, but then as historian Bipan Chandra writes, ‘Once the basic digits of communal ideology are accepted, the ideology takes over a person bit by bit.’
At the League session at Lahore in 1940 the ‘Pakistan Resolution’ was passed, making it the main goal of the party, though the word ‘Pakistan’ was not mentioned. It was rejected by Muslim leaders like Maulana Azad and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan as well as the Jamaat-I-Islami party. Both Ghaffar Khan and Maulana Azad would face the wrath of League leaders for their secular stand, being described as traitors to the Muslim cause. In 1939 when India was involved in the Second World War, the Congress governments resigned in protest, but Jinnah offered his support to the government. He declared this the ‘Day of Deliverance’. During the war years the government did not want to antagonize the League and this led to the League getting its tacit support in all later negotiations.
All through the negotiations with the Cripps Mission of 1942 and the Cabinet Mission of 1946 the core of the deadlock between the League and the Congress lay in Jinnah’s demand that only the League represented the Muslims. The Congress as a national party could not allow Jinnah to turn it into a party only of Hindus and thus betray its Muslim members. More seriously, it feared that it would lead to a division of the country along religious lines with various parties springing up, claiming to represent various religious communities. As leaders like Gandhi, Nehru and Maulana Azad knew so well, the only way the country could stay united was as a secular, democratic nation. At one time Jinnah would have agreed with them. Not any more.
The League had left the hard work of winning freedom to the Congress, and now that Independence was on the cards, they came forward with their demands. Gandhi held long talks with Jinnah but failed to convince him. Jinnah called for ‘Direct Action’ on 16 August 1946 to ‘achieve Pakistan’. For years tensions between Hindus and Muslims had been stoked by various communal parties belonging to both communities; now it exploded into honific violence. Calcutta saw devastating riots; the Noakhali District in Bengal calmed down only when Gandhi walked from village to village talking of peace as thousands died in Bihar. Bengal had a League government but Jinnah blamed Gandhi for the riots.
One last attempt at a national coalition was made in 1946 when the League reluctantly joined an interim government under Nehru. Jinnah did not join himself, but Liaquat Ali Khan, a League leader, became the Finance Minister. The League members acted more like an opposition than allies and the distrust between the two parties had become too overwhelming for them to work together. The fear of a civil war grew and finally the Congress leaders agreed to a division of the country. Gandhi withdrew from a future that negated his lifelong quest for unity and religious harmony and allowed Nehru, Maulana Azad and Patel to work with the new viceroy Lord Mountbatten to partition India.
Pakistan had been created in the hope that it would avert a civil war. What Partition brought, in fact, was human tragedy of a magnitude no one could have anticipated. As millions crossed the borders, violence erupted in Punjab and Bengal and spread across north India. The two new governments of India and Pakistan struggled with the sudden arrival of thousands of homeless, penniless, traumatized refugees. Even then a large population of Muslims refused Jinnah’s call and chose to remain in India. In 1971 East Bengal broke away from Pakistan and dec
lared independence as the new nation of Bangladesh. What was once envisaged by Gandhi as one, great, many-hued nation, was fractured into three countries.
Jinnah became the first governor general of Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam, Father of the Nation. In 1917 Sarojini Naidu had written his biography and titled it—Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity. Now he headed a nation built on religious division. He seemed to believe that once he had got a separate country it could go back to being a secular one, but history has proved him wrong.
By Pakistan’s Independence Day on 14 August 1947, Jinnah was seriously ill, suffering from tuberculosis and lung cancer. He died on 11 September 1948 and was buried in a huge mausoleum in Karachi. He had abandoned his own principles, divided a people and watched millions die for his goal of a separate Islamic nation. Sadly, Mohammed Ali Jinnah did not live long enough to enjoy the fruits of an office that he had won with such grim determination and will power.
What Happened and When
1857 :
The Great Uprising
1885 :
The Indian National Congress is founded.
1905 :
Lord Curzon partitions Bengal. Widespread protests follow
1905 :
Swadeshi Movement and boycott of foreign goods
1907 :
Split in the Congress between Moderates and Extremists
1909 :
Minto–Morley Reforms. Separate Hindu and Muslim electorates for elections to the legislative councils of the provinces
1914 :
First World War
1914 :
Ghadar Movement led by Lala Hardayal
1916 :
Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the Muslim League
A Flag, a Song and a Pinch of Salt Page 14