There is more than one way of looking at India’s political trajectory in the past decade or so, in the light of the Two-Nation Theory that propelled the Subcontinent’s trifurcation. 

The current drift towards Hindutva can be seen as confirmation that the notion of separate, and ultimately incompatible, Hindu and Muslim identities was reasonably accurate. On the other hand, until fairly recently, India had more or less conformed to the flawed, but nonetheless dominant, secularism projected by its founding fathers. 

Were these founding fathers misguided, or delusional? Is what we are witnessing a logical culmination of that theory, or one of its consequences? Was Mohammad Ali Jinnah right all along, through the communitarian and ultimately communalist phases of his political evolution?

It is well known that, before his political evolution, Jinnah was a prominent Indian nationalist, hailed as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in the early 20th century. Much has been written in the intervening decades about Jinnah’s ultimate choice of a very different path, grounded in alienation and focused on separatism.

That path was strewn with complications and contradictions, and a clear picture of the thought processes behind it remains elusive. The details of that journey remain open to conjecture and perhaps always will, not least because Jinnah — unlike contemporaries such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi — left behind no written record of his political evolution. 

Ishtiaq Ahmed’s latest book sets out to challenge the assumption that Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah was a staunch secularist, but offers only an interpretation rather than incontrovertible proof

There are no memoirs or diaries one could turn to. All we are left with is Jinnah’s public statements and speeches, plus some correspondence. In his new book, Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History, political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed delves deeply into this evidence in his endeavour to demonstrate that, once the All India Muslim League opted for separatism, there was no going back, and that there is no compelling evidence that Jinnah envisaged Pakistan not as a Muslim-majority, but as a secular state.

There was one obvious problem with the separatist demand: it would still leave about a third of Indian Muslims outside a putative Pakistan. How would that fit with the argument that congenial Hindu-Muslim coexistence was impossible? 

Geographically, the dilemma was irresoluble. Politically — as this book amply illustrates — Jinnah did not consider it insuperable. Muslims in the Muslim-minority states, who had rallied to the Muslim League’s call well before their co-religionists in the Muslim-majority states, were expected to make a sacrifice.

Once the deal was done, they were advised to pledge loyalty to Hindustan — just as the Hindus and Sikhs in the new entity were expected to be loyal to Pakistan. Ahmed refers to the notion that Muslims in India would not be mistreated because it was in New Delhi’s interest for minorities in Pakistan not to be victimised as “the hostage theory.”

That feeds into Ahmed’s analysis of Jinnah’s uncharacteristic speech on Aug 11, 1947 to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly, in which he declared that any Pakistani citizen’s “religion or caste or creed ... has nothing to do with the business of the state”, which has frequently been cited as evidence of his devotion to secularism. 

But the speech was an anomaly. Uniquely among Jinnah’s public statements during the 1940s, it does not mention Islam. In the years since the Lahore Resolution of 1940, Jinnah had invariably stopped short of articulating, in any detail, his vision of Pakistan. Ahmed acknowledges that Jinnah “evaded categorical commitment regarding the establishment of an Islamic state. However, he let others freely indulge their fantasy...”

Let us pause, though, to consider that the Raja of Mahmudabad recalls in his memoirs — as cited in India’s former finance minister and former external affairs minister Jaswant Singh’s book Jinnah: Indian - Partition - Independence, that “My advocacy of an Islamic state brought me into conflict with Jinnah. He thoroughly disapproved of my ideas and dissuaded me from expressing them publicly from the League platform lest the people might be led to believe that Jinnah shared my view...”

Ahmed accepts historian Ayesha Jalal’s contention that “Since 1940 Jinnah had maintained an immaculate silence on the inner meaning of the Pakistan demand”, but highlights Jinnah’s consistent emphasis on the notion that what conclusively differentiated Indian Muslims from their compatriots was a distinct way of life dictated by their faith.

He contends that all too many fellow historians have ignored the evidence offered by Jinnah’s recorded utterances from 1940 onwards that, thenceforth, the idea of Pakistan was never merely a bargaining chip. 

On the other hand, a bargaining chip would have little value if it could readily be identified as such: a coherent and convincing argument for Pakistan would have been the sine qua non of seeking an alternative arrangement within a confederal India.

The Muslim League’s acceptance of the 1946 Cabinet Mission plan — a three-way division of the Subcontinent within a loose federation — is frequently cited as evidence of Jinnah’s ambivalence. The idea of a weak centre was anathema to the Congress. But was the League’s stance seriously intended as a concession to an interim solution — given that the north-western and north-eastern Muslim-majority blocs would have had the opportunity, after 10 years, to opt out — or was it primarily a ploy to ingratiate the League with the colonial overlord?

The League was a key component of the Raj’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy, and Jinnah thrived as an interlocutor with governors-general the Marquess of Linlithgow and the Viscount Wavell. Jinnah was at a disadvantage with the Viscount Mountbatten, who was enamoured of Jawaharlal Nehru almost as much as Mountbatten’s wife Edwina was. The British Labour Party that came to power in 1945 also looked upon Nehru as a kindred spirit, and Winston Churchill’s encouragement to Jinnah — their correspondence remains shrouded in obscurity — counted for less.

Ahmed dismisses the dietary claims cited in historian Stanley Wolpert’s “hagiography” as a youthful indulgence, and Jinnah’s predilection for a tipple as a common inconsistency among Muslims. The Aug 11, 1947 speech is explained away as an effort to reassure non-Muslim minorities that Pakistan wouldn’t be a theocracy, so that the 35 million Muslims in India would not be dispatched Pakistan-wards, making it ungovernable and, quite possibly, unsustainable.

That’s a plausible view, but not incontrovertible proof. As in so many aspects of Jinnah’s journey from the “ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” to an inveterate separatist, the intellectual mechanisms behind it remain something of an enigma.

Ahmed’s valuable addition to the historiography of the journey to Partition traverses plenty of familiar territory, albeit in greater detail than most comparable accounts, to illustrate Jinnah’s remarkably successful endeavour to convert an initially fringe demand into a mass obsession with a separatist goal. Faith, inevitably, was a key component of that single-minded quest, although the author concedes that Pakistan’s subsequent — and arguably consequent — drift towards fundamentalism would have appalled its founding father.

The author also acknowledges that the bones of contention will continue to rattle in the tinderbox of Pakistan’s past, but hopes to have laid to rest the progressive illusion of Jinnah as a devoutly secular parliamentarian, suggesting that Jinnah’s accumulation of power as the first governor-general is not unrelated to the autocratic tendencies that have consistently throttled pluralist democracy.

There is plenty of scope here for arguments and debates, but can they be freely conducted in early 21st century Pakistan?

The reviewer is a journalist based in Australia and a columnist for Dawn

Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History
By Ishtiaq Ahmed
Vanguard, Lahore
ISBN: 978-9694026329
808pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 15th, 2021