BJP MLA Mangal Prabhat Lodha’s recent demand to demolish Jinnah House, Mumbai and replace it with a ‘Maharashtrian cultural centre’ is not only atrocious but tantamount to an erasure of history. Lodha’s belief that the house was a den for hatching ‘conspiracies’ to divide India is ignorant, to say the least.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leading lawyer and political luminary in British India, lived for most of his political and professional life in Bombay, as it was then known. In this house, originally a 19th century Goanese Bungalow, Jinnah rose to great heights in India’s politics first as a passionate Indian nationalist and the best Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity. Jinnah People’s Memorial Hall, located inside the compound of Indian National Congress building on Lamington Road was built by citizens of Bombay in 1918 to commemorate Jinnah’s inspiring leadership against the country’s British rulers.
It was only most reluctantly and after many reversals and rejections by the Congress leadership that Mr. Jinnah, very late in his life, chose to champion the demand for Pakistan. Even so his demand for Pakistan was not as much based on division of India as it was a redistribution of power and safeguarding Muslim minority rights. As late as 1946, Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan, which would have kept India united. Another legendary citizen of Bombay, H M Seervai’s Partition of India Legend and Reality documents that partition for Jinnah was at best a maximum demand which he calculated would help ensure the Muslims of India an effective share in the governance of their common motherland.
Whatever the politics of partition may have been, one thing is certain: Jinnah’s heart was always in Bombay. Even in his last days, he expressed his wish to retire there. Sri Prikasa, India’s first High Commissioner to Pakistan, recorded this in his memoirs.
The Jinnah House in Bombay was where history unfolded. It was here that Jinnah and Gandhi huddled together many times discussing the future of an independent India. The Jinnah House in Bombay is therefore part of history of the subcontinent. It can be a monument to friendship between Pakistan and India.
After the partition, Jinnah House has been taken care of by the Indian government for decades to preserve its historical importance. Since the BJP is a hardliner right-wing party, allied with the notorious RSS and Shiv Sena, the demand to raze down the house by one of its politicians is a sign of how the disease of ultra-nationalism is eating into the secular foundations of India. While Pakistan is trying hard to remove senseless religious extremism from its veins, India is rapidly heading towards religio-nationalist extremism.
Foreign Office Islamabad spokesperson Nafees Zakaria has demanded to handover Jinnah House, Mumbai, given its special significance for the people of Pakistan. There are other claimants to house too, including Jinnah’s only daughter, Dina Wadia, now in the 98th year of her life. For decades, Pakistan has been asking successive Indian governments for the house’s acquisition and was even promised by certain Indian regimes. However, no progress has been made over the years for the government wished to convert it into a diplomatic mission.
We do not take a position on what ultimately should be the solution but one thing is certain- Jinnah House must be preserved for posterity. *