Jaswant Singh (Jinnah: India-Partition Independence) is not the first to ignore the main issues that divided the pre-1947 Congress and Muslim League, or to blame Nehru’s arrogant attitude towards the Muslim League for the partition of British India.
He is merely following the footsteps of a long line of Indian, Pakistani and British writers — as well as Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru’s own colleague in the Congress Working Committee. And if his book is based on any outstanding new primary sources, they are remarkably well concealed. That is why it is quite difficult to understand the headlines inspired by his account.
Admittedly, Jaswant Singh’s favourable judgement of Jinnah and condemnation of Nehru is of interest, since he belonged to a Hindu communal party – and his former colleagues in the BJP are not admirers of Jinnah, the Muslim League and Pakistan. (Nor can they stand Nehru’s idea of a secular democratic India. ‘Hindutva’ and Pakistan are two sides of the same poisoned communal coin; both Hindu and Muslim communalists refuse to believe that different communities can coexist peacefully and both stoke communalism to achieve political ends).
Perhaps that is a reason why the book has aroused such great interest in Pakistan. Pakistanis are probably pleasantly surprised to find a Hindu communalist praising Jinnah. Especially at a time when the western branding of extremist-nurturing Pakistan as a failed state has led some people of Pakistani origin (mostly living in Britain and the US) to think that the very idea of Pakistan was unsound, it must be comforting to feel that if the “bad” or inchoate idea of Pakistan “succeeded” in 1947, it was because of Nehru’s high-handedness.
The inference is that Jinnah did nothing wrong, ignoring the facts that he demanded an independent Muslim homeland in the subcontinent; that his Muslim League resorted to force to achieve Pakistan, and that on his own admission, he refused to discuss ethics as Muslim Leaguers planned Direct Action in Calcutta in August 1946.
And then, as communal violence raged through northern India after March 1947, he told the British that all talk of the unity of India was “part of machinations for destruction and bloodshed after their departure”.
What then was the main issue that divided the Congress and League? One aspect of the personalities of Nehru and Jinnah which might reflect something about their politics — or vice versa — is that Nehru spent nine years in jail (and Mahatma Gandhi 11) simply because he did not want the Congress to collaborate with India’s British rulers. Therefore, the Congress frequently broke the laws of the Raj — and its leaders ended up in prison — because those laws implied acceptance of indefinite imperial rule.
At no time did Jinnah go to prison for his brand of nationalism — which, in its opposition to the Congress was recognised, in 1941, by the then Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, as thwarting the success of “a great political party which represents unquestionably the spearhead of nationalism in this country.”
Jinnah’s Muslim League was, therefore, useful to the British. The League was dependent on political handouts from the British, the outstanding one being the maimed, moth-eaten Pakistan which Jinnah finally extracted from them in 1947. “I do not care how little you give me”, he told Lord Mountbatten in April 1947, “as long as you give it to me completely.”
The first strand in the anti-Nehru argument is that Nehru’s ideological rigidity and arrogance led him to dismiss the prospect of a coalition with the UP Muslim League in 1937. Embittered Leaguers concluded that they would not be able to collaborate with the high-handed Congress and, in March 1940, demanded a sovereign Pakistan.
In fact, the basic difference between the League and the Congress lay in their attitude to the British Raj and their vision of an independent India. That schism was highlighted and deepened during political negotiations in 1937 and 1946, but it did not alone make for Partition. In the 1937 provincial elections the League won 4.8 per cent of the total Muslim vote in India under an electoral system based on separate representation for Hindus and Muslims. It was not in a position to form a government in any Muslim majority province where regional parties swept the board. Clearly, even in its chosen Muslim constituency the League had little popular appeal.
Talks for a coalition took place between the UP Congress led by G.B. Pant and Chaudhury Khaliquzzaman. Jinnah opposed the negotiations from the outset and carried most provincial Leaguers with him. So, the failure of the negotiations for a coalition could not have been the reason for his demand for a sovereign Pakistan in 1940.
