Skip to main content

Jinnah: the making of a communalist


Top post on IndiBlogger.in, the community of Indian Bloggers


Communalism and greed for political power are like iron and magnet.  Mohammed Ali Jinnah is a good case study. 

Jinnah returned to India in 1906 having become a Barrister.  He was a secular, liberal nationalist then, a follower of Dadabhai Naoroji.  He joined the Congress and opposed the Muslim League staunchly.  Aga Khan, the first president of Muslim League, called Jinnah “our toughest opponent” and Sarojini Naidu gave him the title “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.”

When he entered the Central Legislative Council from Bombay as a Muslim member under the system of separate electorates for Hindus and Muslims, Jinnah became what historian Bipan Chandra calls “a communal nationalist.”  Jinnah was still a member of the Congress but had stepped on to the slide of communalism.  Once you are on the slide of communalism, the downward motion is quick and natural.

Yet as late as 1925, Jinnah could tell a young Muslim who claimed he was a Muslim first: “My boy, no, you are an Indian first and then a Muslim.”  Jinnah was not at all a religious person at heart.  By temperament he was secular.  By faith, he was an atheist.  (V D Savarkar was an atheist too.) But greed for power made him a communalist.  He wanted to be the Prime Minister of independent India.  If not India, then Pakistan.

In 1937-38, Jinnah understood the real potential of communalism as an easy route to political power.  The liberal nationalist, the atheist, now started crying that Islam was in danger in India.  “The High Command of the Congress is determined, absolutely determined, to crush all other communities and cultures in this country and establish Hindu raj in this country,” declaimed the atheist-turned-communalist. 

The Hindu communalists did not fail to add fuel to the fire that was being lit.  “We Hindus are (already) reduced to be veritable helots throughout our land,” proclaimed V D Savarkar in 1938.  Soon the RSS Bible, We, was published highlighting the ominous risks run by the “Hindu National life.”

In addition to all this mounting hatred and mutual suspicion was the British desire and policy to “divide and rule.”

Then there were other vested interests like traders and landlords who found it apt to use the communal forces to secure their own interests.  The Muslim landlords in West Punjab, for example, had much to gain by supporting the Muslim League.  The Hindu zamindars, merchants and moneylenders in North and West India drifted to Hindu communal parties and groups for their own interests rather than the nation’s. 

Personal interests are better taken care of when projected as the interests of a community, if not the nation itself. 

Almost seven decades after we won Independence, we still hear talks of a particular religious community being in danger in the country and hence the need to rewrite the history of the country.  The Union education minister has already approached certain historians of a particular hue for rewriting the history textbooks of NCERT.  We are reminded of what happened when the BJP came to power earlier and Murli Manohar Joshi was the education minister.  

Historian Bipan Chandra said in his classical work, India’s Struggle for Independence, “The communalists increasingly operated on the principle: the bigger the lie the better.  They poured venom on the National Congress and Gandhiji...”

How many national heroes are going to have their faces blackened and how many theirs whitened by the new histories that will be written, we can wait and watch.  Atheists have fought and killed for religions and villains have become heroes in the history of our species. 



Comments

  1. Replies
    1. Thanks, Abhi. I thought this would invite some sort of a discussion...

      Delete
  2. You are right. Very few people put the interest of the nation above, or even aligned with, their own interest. They are short sighted as a stable nation is the safest environment in which to carry on doing business long term.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But young India is demanding changes, KM. See the way the RSS office in Delhi's Jhandewala was gheraoed yesterday by the youth of Delhi. Young India is moving beyond outdated views.

      Delete
  3. Gandhi admitted that he could not influence two persons: one was his own son, Harilala Gandhi and another was Jinnah.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jinnah and Gandhi were poles apart. The former was an atheist who made use of religion just the way many of our contemporary leaders (including the PM) are doing it. The latter was a staunch believer in Hinduism but who would not use it as a political tool.

      Delete
  4. I hate both the leaders Jinnah and Gandhiji for what happened in 1947. Reading your post I understand that this was not something that happened over night it had been brewing for a while. Jinnah was greedy and Gandhiji to whom the country used to listen could have stopped the split. Yet their personal ambitions just pushed them over the line.

    This fighting over religion is I guess every Indians pass time.

    ReplyDelete
  5. In retrospect,there is 1 evidence of the genius of Jinnah, which is providentially proven by the Hindoo Nazis.

    Jinnah - is the only sentient,ever,who sensed the evil of the Hindoo and the Indian vermin, and placed it on documentary record.This is inspite of the fact, that he was surrounded by Hindoo liberals and philosophers,and so called liberals.He saw through the mist, for 100 years into the future.

    He saw that Nehru and Gandhi would die and be killed soon and the nation of the Hindoos,would be overrun by the Hindoo Nazis,as it was, in 2014.The Dialectics of History !

    It is a simple deconstructed fact of history.The largest extermination in Human history was that of the Buddhists and Buddhism - by the Hindoos,and the philosophy of the Hindoo Pope - Adi Shankara and his litter of impotenticas .And Jinnah read history.

    The dubious "Indian Muslims" who are basically the lower caste Hindoos,who converted,are numb nuts and dumb shits (still enslaved to upper caste Hindoos) - who believed the secular nation theory,and the bunk of the Ganga-Jamuna-Saraswati Culture ! There are 200 million of these dumb shits ! It is no wonder that these numb nuts did not create a new Pakistan or join Pakistan !

    They are lower caste Hindus who tolerated Hindoo evil for 5000 years - with not a single record of insurrection !

    Those who left India in 1947 - did not have the "Indian DNA" - they were not the lower caste hindoos who converted to Islam

    Even the Prophet of Islam,did not sense the evil of the Hindoo vermin - although there were several Hindoo vermin, in Mecca,then.The Prophet is supposed to have made statements on the cool winds of Hind and the Prophet-hood of Krishna - which are dubious and meaningless Hadeeths.The Hindoo vermin say that Ramadan is Rama-adan and the "Indian Muslims" say that Rama is a Imam ! This is the Harry Potter tale !

    Ghazwa-E-Hind is a prophecy of eventuality (like those of Nostradamus) - not a statement of evil !dindooohindoo

    Do these "Indian Muslims" deserve doom ? After 80 years of cinderella and Harry Potter tales,the dubious "Indian Muslims" still do not get it ! These fools believe in the Hindoo Constitution and Judiciary !

    https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/caa-nrc-may-affect-status-of-indias-muslim-minority-congressional-research-service/article30409109.ece

    And Jinnah saw it in 1930-47 ! The man from London ! There was another genius from London - called - Churchill - who said “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

    There is something about London - the air,weather,wine and women !

    And Jinnah's example,is w/o any peer in human history - wherein, a warrior,king or saint has made a nation by extricating itself from the pits of evil,sensing evil and documenting evil,and then,being proven right,in a span of 80 years.

    Jinnah - the genius - the man's trajectory from wine,pork,cigars,pipes and women to the Qaid !

    This is E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N !

    The 1 flaw in Jinnah - minutae of intellectual discrimination ! Never eat from the hands of a Kaffir or allow the human body to be touched by a kaffir ! He was poisoned by a Hindoo - just like the Prophet was poisoned by a Jew-ess ! dindooohindoo

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some