To the end of his life, Jinnah showed no respect for Quranic principles and tenets. In his will, he bequeathed certain monies on the basis of interest that would accrue and willed the whole of his property, instead of one-third, the maximum permitted under the Shariat. He was indifferent to the importance of the holy month of Ramzan to the Muslims. For example, to welcome Lord and Lady Mountbatten during their visit to Karachi to inaugurate the creation of Pakistan on 14 August 1947, he ordered an official luncheon. Since he did not practise the Islamic faith, he forgot that the luncheon had fallen in the month of Ramzan, during which the Muslims fast from dawn to sunset. The luncheon had to be changed to a dinner party at the last minute.27
Towards the end of the 1930s he acquired two elegant houses. The first was a large mansion with Italian marble floors in Malabar Hill, Bombay, which, after partition, became the UK Deputy High Commissioner’s residence. The second was an architectural gem surrounded by gardens that he purchased in the heart of Edwin Lutyen’s leafy New Delhi, that is today the Royal Dutch Embassy. These houses were not acquired for his progeny; he had no son and, by this time, he had distanced himself from his only daughter, willing her merely a paltry sum. For whom then were these opulent acquisitions, but to satisfy his vanity? The same trait is reflected by his purchasing an ivory-coloured Packard car in which he moved about in Delhi at a relaxed, royal, speed. And, of course, in his decision to become the first governor-general of Pakistan, ‘His Excellency’, in the very town of Karachi, in which in the 1880s, he lived as a simple student called ‘Jinnahbhai’.
As Lord Mountbatten, resplendent in his naval uniform, decorations, Garter and all, marched to the dais to inaugurate Pakistan, he noted that there was only one special chair there. The viceroy’s first thought was that it would be inappropriate for Jinnah, who was to become the governor-general of Pakistan, not to have an equally important chair as himself. He was taken aback when Jinnah promptly sat down on the special chair and motioned Mountbatten to take the one by its side.* Maybe he wished to pay back Mountbatten for the humiliations he had suffered at British hands in his early days, or for forcing him to accept a truncated Pakistan, despite all the help he gave them against the Congress Party during the war. But most likely it was megalomania in his old age.
If Colonel Elahi Baksh, the doctor who attended on Jinnah during his last phase of his illness in August–September 1948 at Ziarat near Quetta, is to be believed, he heard his patient say: ‘I have made it [Pakistan] but I am convinced that I have committed the greatest blunder of my life.’ And, around the same period, Liaqat Ali Khan, the prime minister of Pakistan, upon emerging one day from the sick man’s room after receiving a tongue-lashing, was heard to murmur: ‘The old man has now discovered his mistake.’ Was this Jinnah’s final metamorphosis?28
Notes and References
1. MSS/EUR F 9/5, S. No. 32, p. 190 (Oriental and Indian Collection, British Library, London).
2. MSS/EUR F 129/V, Zetland’s letter to the viceroy, May 1940, Para 27 (OIC, British Library, London).
3. MSS/EUR F 125/8, Vol. V, pp. 191–95 (OIC, British Library, London).
4. India Office Records (IOR), L/P&J/8 506, note by Francis Mudie, chief secretary, UP, on his talk with Khaliq-uz-Zaman and M.B. Kidwai, 31 March 1940.
5. Transfer of power (TOP) IX, S. No. 396, p. 170, Sardar Patel to Lord Wavell, 14 February 1947, enclosing a cutting from Free Press Journal, dated 8 February 1947 giving excerpts from Ghanzafar Ali’s speech in Lahore.
6. S.K. Majumdar, Jinnah and Gandhi (Minerva Associates, Calcutta, 2000, pp. 205–06), quoted by Rafiq Zakaria in The Man Who Divided India (Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 2001).
7. See Hector Bolitho, Jinnah (John Murray, London, 1954, p. 41).
8. Mary (Countess of Minto), India, Minto and Morley (Macmillan, London, 1934, pp. 47–48).
9. Hector Bolitho, op. cit., p. 42.
10. Rafiq Zakaria, op. cit., p. 12, and Agha Khan, Memoirs (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1954, pp. 122–23).
11. Ibid., p.19.
12. Syed S. Pirzada (ed.), Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah’s Correspondence, 3rd revised edition (National West Publishing Company, Karachi, year not available, p. 159).
13. Ibid., p. 82. Jinnah to Gandhiji, 4 July 1918.
14. Ibid., pp. 181–88.
15. Ibid., pp. 264–65.
16. Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, ninth edition (Oxford University Press, London, 2002, pp. 71–72). (This is based on a Times of India report dated 13 January 1921.) Dr Naeem Qureshi Papers (Pakistan Historical Society, Vol. IV. 1, p. 229) and Jamil-ud-Din, Glimpses of Quaid-i-Azam (Education Press, Karachi, 1960, p. 2).
17. John Campbell, F.E. Smith: Earl of Birkenhead (Pimlico, London, 1983, p. 515). Birkenhead to the viceroy, Lord Irwin, 19 January 1928. MSS EUR D 703.
18. Stanley Wolpert, op. cit., pp. 100–02 (based on an account by Syed S. Pirzada, op. cit., pp. 426–29 and 432–35).
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. MSS/EUR/22, 34, Lord Hailey to Lord Irwin, 14 November 1930 (India Office Records, London).
22. Stanley Wolpert, op. cit., pp. 159–60 (based on papers in the National Archives of Pakistan, F/77) quoted by Z.H. Zaidi, ‘M.A. Jinnah – The Man’ (National Archives of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam Papers, IV. 1, Vol. III, p. 45).
23. Stanley Wolpert, op. cit., pp. 166–67.
24. Ibid., pp. 161–62 (based on Memoirs of the Second Marquis of Zetland, John Murray, London, 1956). The fact that Jinnah met the acting viceroy at Simla on 16 August 1938 is confirmed by document F/1095 in the National Archives of Pakistan.
25. Stanley Wolpert, op. cit., pp. 170–71.
26. Hector Bolitho, op. cit., p. 210, and speeches of Quaid-i-Azam (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Karachi, 1950, pp. 133–36).
27. Report on ‘The Last Viceroyalty’, 16 August 1947, No. 17, p. 249 (OIC, British Library, London).
28. Member of Parliament Dr M. Hashim Kidwai’s letter printed in The Times of India, 27 July 1988, on the basis of reports published in Frontier Post, Peshawar, and Muslim India, New Delhi.
* Most Indian Muslims are Sunnis with a history of conflict with Shia Muslims. But in a struggle against non-believers, the Sunnis and Shias were likely to make common cause with each other. It needs to be pointed out that the Agha Khan and Jinnah, two leading politicians of India, were Shias, belonging to the Khoja sect.
* Despite his earlier reservations about Jinnah’s scheme, Mawdudi shifted his headquarters to Pakistan after it came into existence (Jamaat-i-Hind became a separate organization), and after Pakistan agreed to call itself an Islamic state in 1956 (though in name only), the Jamaat found a justification to start obtaining financial help from the government. It also became an important conduit for funds from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries to the subcontinent for funding madrasas (Islamic schools) and preaching fundamentalist views. In the 1980s the Jamaat became the instrument of the ISI (Inter-services Intelligence, Pakistan’s secret service) to further Pakistan’s policy in Afghanistan, Tajikistan and India, where it worked through the terrorist group Hizb-ul-Mujahideen in Kashmir and in other parts of India. It was in the madrasas and camps set up by the Jamaat-i-Islami in Pakistan’s northwest frontier region that fundamentalist ideological and military training was imparted to Afghani, Pakistani and youths of other countries who served the Taliban and later Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
* ‘Pak’ means pure; thus Pakistan referred to a country that did not contain people of an impure or a different faith.
* A majority of Parsis nowadays live in Bombay. They follow the Zoroastrian faith and their ancestors had to flee Persia in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. to India to escape conversion by the Islamic hordes from Arabia. Over the years, many Parsis have achieved both fame and glory in modern India. For instance: Dadabhai Naoroji (an eminent freedom fighter and reformer); Jamshedji Tata (an illustrious industrialist); Homi Bhabha (a renowned physicist); and Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw, who led t
he Indian Army that defeated Pakistan in the 1971 Bangladesh war. Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s father, Feroze Gandhi, was a Parsi.
* Earlier that year Gandhiji had irritated Jinnah by writing a letter to Ruttie asking her to coax him to learn Hindustani or Gujarati.
* See the transcript of the remarks made by Sir Martin Gilbert, OBE, FRSL, on 28 January 2005, available at the India International Centre, New Delhi.
* His standard legal fee by 1936 was Rs 1500 per day (equivalent to at least Rs 90,000 in today’s terms) the highest in India. He earned Rs 24,000 per annum from his rented flats in Mayfair (equivalent now to Rs 14 lakh) and Rs 40,000 per annum from dividends in the Stock Exchange (equivalent now to Rs 24 lakh). He was one of the elite group of Indian tax-payers whose income required ‘super tax’ as well as ‘supplementary tax’ payments, and like many very wealthy Indians, he was at times several years late in remitting his taxes.22
* Muslims were elected through seperate electorates; the elections were held on a 14 per cent franchise.
* The above is based on what Lord Mountbatten told me in Broadlands (in Hampshire), a few years before his death. The Report on the Last Viceroyalty, dated 16 August 1947 to London, reads: ‘The following day I addressed the Pakistan Constituent Assembly…Jinnah had wanted to take the principal seat himself as President of the Constituent Assembly, but I refused to give up my rights as Viceroy and he eventually gave way.’
4
The Churchill–Roosevelt Clash over India
THE NEWS OF THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR WAS RECEIVED in London on the evening of 7 December 1941. Winston Churchill records in his memoirs his feelings of relief and elation that Japan had, by this act, drawn the United States into the war: ‘So we had won after all…Britain would live. The Commonwealth and Empire would live. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not end.… Being saturated and satisfied with emotion and sensation I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.’1
On waking up the next morning, his first act was to plan to go to Washington to review with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ‘the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts as well as the problems of production and distribution’. It was during this visit, recounts Churchill, that Roosevelt ‘first raised the Indian problem with me on the usual American lines’, meaning on anti-‘Empire’ lines. He continues: ‘I reacted so strongly at such length that he never raised it verbally again.’2
On the way to the United States on board the brand new battleship, the Duke of York, while dodging German U-boats in the Atlantic, he had premonitions of the coming ‘Indian danger’. On 7 January 1942, he cautioned Clement Attlee, the deputy prime minister and in charge in London in his absence, as follows:
I hope my colleagues will realize the danger of raising constitutional issues, still more of making constitutional changes, in India at a moment when [the] enemy is upon the frontier. The idea that we should “get more out of India” by putting the Congress in charge at this juncture seems ill-founded. Yet that is what it would come to if any electoral or Parliamentary foundation is chosen. Bringing hostile political elements into the defence machine will paralyse action.… The Indian troops are fighting splendidly, but it must be remembered that their allegiance is to the King Emperor, and that the rule of the Congress and Hindu priesthood machine would never be tolerated by a fighting race.3
Immediately after getting back to London, worried that Roosevelt would return to the Indian situation, Churchill asked the War Cabinet to develop a policy to forestall American pressure for self-government in India. As he writes: ‘The concern of the Americans with the strategy of a world war was bringing them into touch with political issues on which they had strong opinions and little experience.… In countries where there is only one race broad and lofty views are taken on the colour question. Similarly, states which have no overseas colonies or possessions are capable of rising to moods of great elevation and detachment about the affairs of those who have.’4 Roosevelt’s interest in India was based on enlisting popular support there against the advancing Japanese, ensuring India’s freedom and the subsequent building up, after the war, of a post-colonial order in Asia.
The central point of the top-secret recommendation that was submitted to Churchill and the War Cabinet by the secretary of state for India, Leopold Amery, on 28 January 1942, was as follows:
The talk of Hindu and Muslim communities as majority and minority is a dangerous misuse of terms because it tends to imply that the right of the numerically smaller community to have its individuality respected is less than that of the larger. It is, after all, in defence of that right that we are at war today. Yet this fundamental issue has been throughout ignored by the Congress Party – which, in spite of the efforts to keep a Muslim element in its façade is essentially a Hindu Party.… We have in the 1940 declaration [that gave to the minorities a veto on India’s constitutional development] the only long-term policy which can achieve a settlement. We cannot go back on the pledges which it embodies: Our business is to stand by it and expound it confidently and with conviction and not apologetically. On that ground we can weather the immediate storm which is sweeping down upon India.… There is no immediate further interim constitutional advance that we can make.5
From India, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, advised that a time of military reverses was not the best time to offer concessions. He went on to add:
India and Burma have no natural association with the Empire, from which they are alien by race, history and religion, and for which neither of them has any natural affection, and both are in the Empire because they are conquered countries which have been brought there by force, kept there by our control, and which hitherto it has suited them to remain under our protection.6
The views of Amery and Linlithgow were after Churchill’s own heart. However, he had to contend with the opposition of his deputy in the War Cabinet, namely, Attlee:
India has been profoundly affected by the changed relationship between Europeans and Asiatics which began with the defeat of Russia by Japan at the beginning of the century. The hitherto axiomatic acceptance of the innate superiority of the European over the Asiatic sustained a severe blow.… The reverses which we and the Americans are sustaining from the Japanese at the present time will continue this process.… The fact that we are – necessarily – driven to a belated recognition of China as an equal and of Chinese as fellow fighters for civilization against barbarism makes the Indian ask why he, too, cannot be master in his own house. Similarly, the success against the Axis of a semi-oriental people, the Russians, lends weight to the hypothesis that the East is now asserting itself against the long dominance of the West. A Pan-Asiatic movement led by Japan has been recognized as a danger; a Pan-Asiatic bloc of our Allies [meaning with China and India] is a possibility that should not be ignored. Incidentally, American sentiment has always leaned strongly to the idea of Indian freedom.
The Secretary of State thinks we may weather the immediate storms. Such a hand-to-mouth policy is not statesmanship. All [of] India was not the fruits of conquest; large parts of it came under our rule to escape from tyranny and anarchy…. We are condemned by Indians not by the measure of Indian ethical conceptions but by our own which we have taught them to accept. My conclusion therefore is that a representative with power to negotiate within wide limits should be sent to India now, either as a special envoy or in replacement of the present Viceroy, and that a Cabinet Committee should be appointed to draw up terms of reference and powers.7
This line of thinking placed Churchill in a cleft. According to Amery, pressure on Churchill from Roosevelt and on Attlee and company from their own party, plus the admission of Sir Stafford Cripps to the War Cabinet, suddenly opened ‘the sluice gates’. However, with typical aplomb and cunning Churchill used Amery’s and Attlee’s concepts to forge a bold policy that would (1) help to deflect American pressure for immediate self-government in India, (2) give a new turn to Britain’s pol
icy in the subcontinent, (3) put the Congress Party in a dilemma and (4) appease Churchill’s coalition partners of the Labour Party. Cripps, a leading socialist member of the War Cabinet and the leader of the House of Commons, who knew Gandhiji and Nehru – in 1939 he had been a guest at the latter’s home in Allahabad – would be sent out to India to make an offer to the Indian people on HMG’s behalf. Attlee was also to be roped in for the cause by being made the head of the newly constituted India Committee of the War Cabinet. Of course, neither Churchill nor Amery nurtured any hope – or wish – that the Cripps Mission would succeed. Moreover, Churchill did not have any great admiration for Cripps: ‘The trouble is his chest is a cage in which two squirrels are at war, his conscience and his career.’8 Churchill was not at all disappointed, as we shall see later, when Cripps failed.
The offer that was initially worked out in London and would be later made by Sir Stafford in India may be summarized as follows:
Immediately after the war India could have full independence inside or outside the Commonwealth on the basis of a constitution framed by the Indians themselves. And in the interim period leaders of Indian political parties would be asked to enter the Viceroy’s Executive Council and enjoy considerable autonomy except for the conduct of the war that would remain in British hands. [These concessions would catch the American eye.] However, there would be a caveat to all this. The Indians must accept the right of any British Indian Province, or Princely State, to stay out of the proposed Indian Union at independence if it so chose, and that the proposal was to be “accepted as a whole or rejected as a whole”, which meant that the Indian Parties’ agreement to assume office in the Government of India would commit them to accept the principle of the partition of India, when British withdrew after the war.9
The Shadow of the Great Game Page 10