I noticed that you seem to rate Rafiq Zakaria and his publication on Jinnah pretty highly. So, I decided to share with you a review of his book, a review I think you probably would not have shared with us all like you so kindly tend to. I found the article on tehelka-dot-com. Anyways I am not in favour of blind hero worksip as is commonly practised in our part of the world. However, condemning a person for made up charges is even worse. So read on..
Contested Space: Mohammad Ali Jinnah
The Man Who Divided India - An Insight into Jinnah’s Leadership and its Aftermath
BY PATRICK FRENCH
Since this is a book about reputations, it might be as well to say something about the author’s. Rafiq Zakaria has had a distinguished career as a scholar, politician and educator. Now in his ninth decade, he is the author of such works as A Study of Nehru, Price of Partition and Gandhi and the Break-up of India. In The Man Who Divided India, his approach remains that of the old-style Indian nationalist, whose thinking is not troubled by new scholarship or fresh ideas. For Zakaria, Jinnah was a villain, his motivation was invariably malign, the division of the subcontinent in 1947 can be placed squarely on his shoulders, and the louder these truisms are repeated, the truer they will become.Although the present condition of Pakistan is far from the “land of the pure” envisaged by its founder, the country’s strategic impact on South Asia has been colossal. Jinnah is the most undervalued world statesman of the 20th century. He managed, from a weak political position, to alter not only the course of history but the map of the world, carving out the fifth largest nation state on the planet. Yet in The Man Who Divided India, like in Attenborough’s movie Gandhi, Jinnah’s attempts to represent the interests of nearly a quarter of India’s population are reduced to a matter of spite, revenge and personal vanity.Jinnah was a shrewd and complex man, who began his political life as a staunch nationalist, constitutionalist and proponent of communal harmony, and ended by demanding the breakaway of those parts of India where Muslims formed a majority. This change was largely the result of the failure of the Indian National Congress to accommodate the justifiable demands of the Muslim community in the 1930s, as well as catastrophic misjudgements by Gandhi, Patel, Nehru, Azad and others between 1942 and 1947. Although Jinnah was a strong negotiator, that fact that he was successful in his claim for territorial separation was largely a matter of timing and circumstance, aided by British government incompetence and the mistakes of his opponents.In the years after independence, India’s leaders bound the nation together in the traditional way, by mythologising the role of the founding fathers. Aided by tame historians, mainly of a left-liberal persuasion and dependent on state patronage, Jinnah was denigrated and Gandhi in particular was inflated. More recently, historians have started to look at this period with greater distance and clarity. Works such as Aijaz Ahmad’s Lineages of the Present, Rajmohan Gandhi’s India Wins Errors, my own Liberty or Death and Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman have challenged aspects of the old consensus. More importantly, the documentary evidence published in the twelve Transfer of Power volumes and Z.H. Zaidi’s Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers has fatally undermined many of the old truisms (or falsisms) about how and why India was divided. Rafiq Zakaria takes the Admiral Nelson approach to these unwelcome publications. He sees no ships. Rather than dissecting and disagreeing with them, he ignores them: none of the books mentioned above makes it as far as his source notes, and only The Sole Spokesman reaches his bibliography.The result is a curious, irrelevant, lop-sided sort of history. Gandhi’s opportunistic backing of the Khilafat movement (Islamic headbangers who would be holed up in caves in Afghanistan were they around today) is presented as fair and reasonable. The resultant upsurge in sectarian violence across the subcontinent is blamed not on Congress, but on that old bogeyman “British hirelings”, who magically “instigated communal riots in several cities and towns in different parts of India”. Jinnah’s return to active politics at the end of the 1930s is depicted as psychopathic, rather than public-spirited: "With his own hands he dug the grave of Hindu-Muslim unity…The rage within so overwhelmed him that nothing could sway him from the path he now charted to avenge the ignominy to which he had been subjected. He was hell-bent on showing to Gandhi and the Congress that he and his followers could destroy their dream of a united India."There was a moment in the book when I thought Zakaria had turned up something fresh. He reports a conversation between Jinnah and members of the Cabinet Mission in 1946.Jinnah said: "Exactly. If one state mistreats its minorities, the other state will retaliate against its minorities. It will be tit for tat."The Mission was aghast at this reply and remarked: "That is a horrible concept which did not work even in medieval times."Jinnah stood his ground and asserted: "Fear is the most potent weapon."This exchange gives a disturbing view of Jinnah as a man of violence. I had not seen it before. Turning to Zakaria’s source notes, I was greeted by the sentence: “This was the gist of the dialogue which the Mission had with Jinnah and which was narrated to me by Lord Alexander, a member of the Mission who I met soon after the Lordship’s return to London.” What a tortuous route history must take! Zakaria, fifty-five years on, remembers a version of what Jinnah may have said, as narrated to him by Alexander, a man who was rarely sober. At a time when India is under vicious external attack, needing all the lucidity of thought it can get, this sort of mock history should be avoided.