Daily Times

I started writing op-eds and book reviews for the Daily Times in May 2002 and till about 2015 I was regularly contributing my pieces to it. Then I started researching my book on Jinnah which has now been published.

The opportunity to resume my publications in the Daily Times, I would like to convert into a privilege to present the fascinating life of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Looking at the existing literature on Jinnah, some scholarly but most either hagiographical or contemptuous, I found to my very great surprise that his long political career (1906 – 1948) lacked proper classification into distinctive stages based on his changing political aims, objectives and priorities. Most studies identify his career as an Indian nationalist and then as a Muslim nationalist.

I have placed his career into four stages: Indian nationalist, Muslim communitarian, Muslim nationalist and the all-powerful head of State of Pakistan. Each stage epitomizes a central political objective on which he concentrated and the concomitant arguments, decisions and actions undertaken by Jinnah to achieve that objective.

I have discussed conceptually and theoretically the role of a leader in history, recognizing that Jinnah was a leader of the proverbial top quality whose charisma can animate the masses into actions because he can convince them that the political objective he has chosen is in their best interest.

However, for mobilizing support of the public, a leader needs to advance ideas and arguments and take critical decisions. In doing so, he generates mass consciousness. The mass consciousness he creates places him and his followers in an informed but binding social contract.

Consequently, the leader cannot easily and arbitrarily extricate himself from that social contract even though he does enjoy an advantage in manoeuvring or manipulating to some extent the terms of the contract.

The mass consciousness he creates places him and his followers in an informed but binding social contract.

Let me illustrate this rather theoretical point with a very familiar and concrete example. For seven years, from 22 March 1940 when Jinnah delivered the presidential address at the Lahore session of the Muslim League, he kept reiterating his two-nation theory describing Hindus and Muslims as not only two separate religious communities, but also two inimical and hostile political nations who if the British were to force to live in a united India would explode into a civil war wreaking havoc.

From that time onwards, Jinnah was to reiterate and hammer in, day in and day out, with all the skills of a lawyer the absolute need to partition India, and create Pakistan and India as two separate states, and thus make possible peace in the subcontinent.

This basic argument pervaded even on 4 April 1946, under an ultimatum from the Cabinet Mission Delegation that if he could not show that East and West Pakistan would constitute a militarily defensible state, then he was forcing them to leave India united, and that meant according to the stand of the Indian National Congress. I shall have plenty of occasions to return to this controversy as we proceed with the third phase of Jinnah’s political career.

The important thing to point out is that having mobilized Muslim voters from all over India on the basis of the two-nation theory and successfully brought about the partition of India, which entailed the partition of Punjab and Bengal as well, then on 11 August 1947 making a diametrically opposite statement in the great State of Pakistan that Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense as that is a matter of private faith, but as citizens of the state.

He was fully conscious of the fact that Pakistan has been won for Muslims as their separate state, which he said would treat religious minorities in the best spirit of Islam. But such a state would be a secular state was never a proposition he set forth.

That is why after 11 August 1947, Jinnah never invoked that speech or followed it up with supportive speeches in favour of secularism. He was an astute politician who was fully aware of the mass consciousness and expectations. He had made them believe that Pakistan will be an Islamic/Muslim polity fairer than Western democracy and freer than the Soviet type of socialist society.

Such ideas had gained a life of their own and there was no chance of putting the genie back in the bottle. There is no denying the fact that non-Muslim Pakistanis were marginalized in such mental exercises about a unique Muslim alternative to state and nation-building.

We will dwell on these questions at length but in this introductory article to the series on my Jinnah book I wanted to highlight the structure of the book, its conceptual and theoretical frameworks as well as the methodological innovations I have introduced to analyse Jinnah’s career by relying heavily on his own original words, ideas, arguments and decisions.

(To be continued)

The writer is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University; Visiting Professor Government College University; and Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com