Dina Wadia daughter of Jinnah and Nusli Wadia objected Pakistan’s move to make his house as “house of consul-general”. Will they agree now?
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/FD30Df03.html
The house that Jinnah built
By Tarini Unnikrishnan
NEW DELHI - Far from the madding crowd of the Indian elections, away from the high-profile glare of the twin core issues of Kashmir and cross-border terrorism that more often than not divide India and Pakistan, a beautiful old house in Mumbai’s plush Malabar Hill area patiently waits for the hammer of history to write yet another chapter in the relationship of the two nations.
This is the house that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the man who painstakingly founded a brand new nation in 1947 called Pakistan, built barely 11 years earlier, when he returned from London to Bombay (as Mumbai was known then) to take charge of the Muslim League.
Now, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf wants India to “give” Pakistan the house as an outright gift, or perhaps “lease” it in perpetuity, as a symbol of New Delhi’s faith in the new peace initiative with Islamabad.
The subject is said to have come up already twice this year, the first time when Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Musharraf’s delegations met in January in Islamabad. Then in March, on the margins of a one-day international cricket match between India and Pakistan in Lahore, the matter was raised with the visiting Indian National Security Advisor, Brajesh Mishra, by his Pakistani host and counterpart, secretary of the National Security Council, Tariq Aziz.
In January, in drafting the most important document between the two nations ever, a promissory note that would ultimately take into account the core concerns of both nations - Islamabad would promise to end violence and hostility in Kashmir in exchange for talks on the “disputed” state - Pakistani officials interwove a plea for the Jinnah property.
It would, they said, be like the icing on the cake. The house that Jinnah built in Mumbai, the two-and-a-half acre property in which he spent the happiest years of his life with his Parsi wife Ruttie and their only daughter Dina, a house which overlooks the Arabian Sea - on the other side was Karachi, the city to which Jinnah would permanently emigrate after 1947 - should be “given” to Pakistan as the residence of Pakistan’s consul-general.
“Its not only a house made of brick and mortar,” one Pakistani diplomat said. “It’s a slice of our history. And it belongs to us.”
Clearly, Jinnah’s home has immense historical significance. It was here that the Qaid-e-Azam, Pakistan’s dearly-remembered founding father, held talks with Mahatma Gandhi, India’s own iconic leader and statesman, in September 1944, perhaps over the fate of their still-undivided nation. Ironically, the man in the loincloth (Gandhi) would resist the bifurcation of India until the day it happened, in 1947, while the man in the monocle wouldn’t stop fighting for separation. But both were destined to die soon, within nine months of each other, in January and September 1948, respectively.
It was here, too, that Jinnah held talks with two other key Indian leaders, ideologically disparate but united in their vision of a free India, namely Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru. Bose thought little of allying with the Germans and the Japanese if they could throw out the British from India. Nehru, on the other hand, believed Lord Mountbatten would play by the English code of “fairness” when he presided over the breakup of the sub-continent. All three leaders met in Jinnah’s house on August 15, 1946, exactly a year before their various trysts with destiny.
It wasn’t as if over the years, the Pakistani side said, New Delhi had never promised to hand over the property or that the subject did not command political consensus in India. Indeed, when Vajpayee visited Pakistan in his earlier reincarnation as foreign minister in 1978, he had pointed out that the Jinnah house would be “returned” once the British consul-general evacuated the property (that happened in 1982). In 1981, foreign minister P V Narasimha Rao of the Congress also told the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of parliament, that India had promised to do right by Pakistan, and so the Jinnah house would go back to the Pakistani people. Unfortunately, though, nothing has come of it so far.
To a nation that still sets much sentimental store on the past, the Pakistanis indicated, to a people still largely governed by emotion, that the return of the 70-year-old property in 2004 would be the biggest confidence-building measure yet between the two sides. Almost like coming home.
The Indians responded with a deafening silence. On the eve of the January summit, perhaps anticipating such a request, New Delhi announced that the property, now commandeered by its Foreign Office, would house a new South Asian cultural center.
By March, when Tariq Aziz was to make a second request for the property with Brajesh Mishra, New Delhi had formalized its own request. Let Pakistan reopen the Indian consulate in Karachi that had been shut since rioters broke into it in 1994. India’s high commissioner to Pakistan, Shiv Shanker Menon, even travelled to Karachi in early February to take a look at the vandalized property and sent back photos of the same.
An unwritten quid pro quo has come into play: Pakistan would reopen India’s Karachi consulate if New Delhi gave the Jinnah house to Islamabad. Pakistani diplomats said they would now take this “link” to the senior official for the six-item composite dialogue that will take place in July between the two sides.
By July, the two foreign secretaries will have already met and begun a revivified discussion on Kashmir - the first time since 1998. A month later in August, the two foreign ministers are due to get together to politically underwrite the discussions of their bureaucracies. If the talks go well, Pakistani diplomats say, there is no reason why India would willfully refuse Islamabad something it so desperately wanted.
“We’ve been waiting since the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan 57 years ago for India to give it to us,” one diplomat said, adding, “we’ll wait another three months to discuss it again. We hope New Delhi will at last listen to this cry from our heart.”
As the heat and dust of the Indian election takes its toll across the countryside, everything else moves backstage. But once the hurly-burly’s done by mid-May, both nations will again have the opportunity to lay the past to rest. If Jinnah’s solitary manor helps them do that, it will have played the last chapter in their tumultuous history.
Tarini Unnikrishnan is based in New Delhi, India, and has been writing on foreign affairs for the past 10 years.