Partition was good

The ostensible reason for Jaswant Singh’s ignominious ouster from the BJP was his favourable view of Jinnah, the man credited with the creation of Pakistan. While we need not shed tears for a party so committed to harakiri, I am not sure the BJP’s objections to Jinnah being lionised are without merit. There is a good reason why Jinnah has been rubbished in India and it’s because he played the communal card to gain personal power, albeit in a moth-eaten Pakistan. Like Satan, he believed that it was better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. He managed to convert Pakistan into hell and realised his folly before he died. Whatever their other faults, Nehru and Sardar Patel dragged India back from that precipice. They prevented the whole of undivided India from being a part of Jinnah’s hell. They deserve our undying gratitude.

Jinnah’s alleged admirers in India and so-called secular historians have one good reason, and one bad one, for white-washing his record. The bad reason is to appear secular in India. Many politicians wrongly believe that the keys to India’s Muslim vote bank lie in Jinnah’s Pakistan. Hence the need to call him secular. The good reason for re-evaluating Jinnah is that historical figures must not be judged by their darkest hours or worst misdeeds.

But was Jinnah’s decision to become a Muslim messiah a one-off aberration? By the mid-1930s, when it became clear to him that he could never call the shots in an undivided India, he bought fully into the Pakistan dream. After that, he did everything to encourage communal polarisation, erasing his previous secular credentials. When a thinking man cynically abandons all cherished beliefs and embraces what he abhorred earlier, how can this act be judged positively?

Jinnah’s communal politics stretched for over a decade and was not a single event in his life. It was, in fact, his whole life from the 1930s till his death in 1948. He sparked off full-scale communal carnage with his call for a Direct Action Day in August 1946. After that, there was regular bloodshed in eastern India and Kolkata, which only Gandhi’s heroic fast and Partition finally ended. To put things in perspective, both Jinnah and Narendra Modi were guilty of the same crime — seeking power by stoking communal hatred. So why is Jinnah a secular hero?

Coming back to Jaswant’s book, what is truly surprising about the BJP’s response to it (and the rest of India’s, for that matter) is the assumption that Partition itself was a mistake. We are dead wrong. Partition could have been avoided only if the Muslim League and the Congress, then considered proxies for Muslim and Hindu interests, had agreed on the basic issue of secularism — where the state is driven by a constitution rather than communal vetoes. Jinnah wanted a Muslim veto everywhere and he demonstrated this in the interim government where League ministers opposed everything the Congress proposed, resulting in deadlock. Partition prevented this deadlock from becoming the future of undivided India. It allowed Pakistan to experiment with its Muslim identity and India with its Hindu-dominated, but secular, ideology. Today it is more or less clear which approach is right. It is also significant that Jinnah, who was so insistent on a Muslim veto in undivided India, did not give the same veto to minorities in Pakistan. His stand was thus totally hypocritical and self-serving.

But it is still too early to declare victory for secularism. The ideological battle will have to be fought to the bitter end, and only one can win. Jinnah’s ideological progeny in India continue to oppose secular laws in India and the army in Pakistan still believes in perpetual conflict with India. The only difference is that the ruling powers in Pakistan have shifted to indirect action — through jihadi terror in Kashmir and elsewhere — against India and secularism. That struggle is not about to end and our prime minister’s pusillanimity towards Pakistan is not going to help. Nothing emboldens Pakistan’s army and the ruling elite more than signs of indecisiveness and confusion in India.

Coming back to the idea of Partition, despite frequent lip-service to the idea of an undivided India by the Sangh Parivar and even secularists, the bitter truth is that it was the best thing to happen to us. An undivided India on Jinnah’s terms would have reduced the whole of the region to Pakistan-like chaos. We would have had not just three countries, but more than 20 of them, allowing none to survive as secular nations. By agreeing to Partition, Nehru and Patel saved the rest of the nation from the mess Jinnah created. They did the right thing.

The real tragedy is not that Indians have been unable to see Jinnah differently, as some secular historians would have us believe, but that we still hold rose-tinted notions about undivided India. It is time to abandon the idea.