In the wake of the demand by Aligarh MP Satish Gautam that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s portrait be banished from the walls of the Aligarh Muslim University students union office where it has uninterruptedly hung since 1938, perhaps, the time has come to revaluate Jinnah’s relationship with post-Partition India and our quarrels with our own past. It of course is no small coincidence that Mr Gautam is affiliated to the BJP. His Lok Sabha profile page states that he is a businessperson, asserts his educational qualifications as “matric” and proclaims his active association with the RSS from school days.
Given that his myriad preoccupations may not have provided him with the time or opportunity to read the 700-page work authored by the extremely versatile Jaswant Singh entitled, Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence, it would be instructive for him to do so during the long summer vacation. However, it is surprising that the member has not come across L.K. Advani’s statement of June 4, 2005 at Jinnah’s mausoleum in Karachi where he described the founder of Pakistan as secular and an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. It would also be fair to point out that Mr Singh was expelled from the BJP after the book was released and then taken back. Even Mr Advani lost his job as the president of the BJP after the Jinnah episode only to remerge later as the prime ministerial face of the party in the 2009 general elections.
Perhaps, Mr Gautam was only taking a leaf out of the Prime Minister’s book for whom a revisionist and a distorted view of history is more than a fair game in the run up to the 2019 elections. In his play book Field Marshal Cariappa; Gen. Thimayya; freedom fighters Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev are all fair game to discredit, malign and slander their opponents. By that yardstick using Jinnah to further the cause of social polarisation — a cause extremely dear to the hearts of the right-wingers may only tantamount to kicking around in the basement while the heavy hitters are trying to twist more contemporaneous historical facts.
However, far removed from all this hysteria and histrionics — the pointless hype or hoopla of a photograph hanging or not hanging on a wall — the larger question is how do we deal with our history that is at the least complex if not convoluted and by no stretch of imagination an exercise in linearism? There is the usual brouhaha about who should claim legitimate parentage about the two-nation theory — should it be Mohammad Ali Jinnah in 1940 or Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in 1937? However, a perusal of a piece written by A.G. Noorani in the last fortnight of 2001 in the Frontline throws up a fascinating piece of historical trivia. Noorani articulates: “The Hindu Mahasabha leader Lala Lajpat Rai wrote in the Tribune of December 14, 1924: ‘Under my scheme the Muslims will have four Muslim states: (1) The Pathan Province or the North-West Frontier; (2) Western Punjab (3) Sindh and (4) Eastern Bengal. If there are compact Muslim communities in any other part of India, sufficiently large to form a province, they should be similarly constituted. But it should be distinctly understood that this is not a united India. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India.’ This was 16 years before the League adopted the Pakistan Resolution in Lahore, on March 23, 1940.”
Now no one can ever accuse Lala Lajpat Rai of not being a nationalist. He was supremely patriotic and martyred himself at the alter of nationalism. However, he had a view, may be a minority view, but he was unafraid of articulating it like so many other stalwarts of the freedom struggle. While history may be important, nations cannot become hostages of their own past. The European continent was at war with itself since millennia, but that did not stop them after two devastating world wars in the 20th century to come together and first create the European Common Market that led to the evolution of the European Union. Anyone who has a nodding acquaintance with European history is acutely conscious of the deep divisions between the various ethnic sub-nationalities that make up the nations of Europe. However, the laundry list of historical grievances did not stop them from putting it all aside and working towards creating a better future. If they had continued to live in the graveyard of bitterness would Europe have emerged from the rubble of World War II?
History is being rewritten all around us. The historic meeting between the President of South and the dictator of North Korea is now being followed up by a summit in Singapore between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on June 12. It may just pave the way for a new reality in North Asia. Earlier too the world has been a witness to the remarkable reunification of the two Germanys beginning with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 or for that matter the creation of Asean setting aside old prejudices in Asia. In the subcontinent too we need to liberate ourselves of our prejudices and inane politics. Even a child now understands that Jinnah, Tipu Sultan or any other historic figure is nothing but a code for crude Muslim bashing. It will not get India anywhere. In the process we forgo the vast opportunities that a unified, integrated and cohesive South Asia offers. Jinnah is as much part of undivided India’s past as anyone else. Nothing will be gained by rattling old skeletons. Let them rest in peace and let’s look towards the future for we owe it to succeeding generations. As Winston Churchill famously remarked: “If we open a quarrel between past and present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”
