Hindu overhauls Jinnah's legacy

NEW DELHI - In Pakistan he is known as Quaid-e-Azam or "great leader". But in India, and beyond, there are those who have considered Mohammad Ali Jinnah as little more than a criminal, a man whose unyielding insistence on a separate country for Muslims led to the brutal division of a nation and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

However, 62 years after the partition of India, Jinnah's legacy is receiving an overhaul from an unlikely quarter.

A controversial new book by a senior politician from India's Hindu nationalist party suggests that Jinnah, a secular man who drank and smoked and rarely visited the mosque, has too long been demonised by Indian society.

Furthermore, it argues he only raised the prospect of a separate Pakistan with independence leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi as a bargaining tool and that it was the inflexibility of Jawaharlal Nehru, the man who became independent India's first prime minister, that led to the division of the subcontinent.

"I think we have misunderstood him because we needed to create a demon," the book's author, Jaswant Singh, a veteran politician, told the CNN-IBN television channel. "We needed a demon because, in the 20th century, the most telling event in the subcontinent was the partition of the country."

The partition of India in August 1947, when both Pakistan and an independent India won independence from Britain, resulted in one of the largest forced migrations of people in history.

As millions of Hindus travelled east into the new India and millions of Muslims travelled West into the new country of Pakistan - there were perhaps 15 million refugees in total - there was terrible violence. Some estimates suggest up to one million people may have lost their lives in sectarian killings.

The British authorities' decision to grant sovereignty and to divide the country was rushed through in months.

A British lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, headed a committee that hurriedly decided which territories should go to the new Pakistan and which should form part of India.

The urbane and cultivated Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, has most often been cast as the villain, unyielding in his demand that the Muslims required a separate country.

Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of the British Indian empire, whose wife is widely believed to have had a long-running affair with Nehru, once remarked: "I tried every trick I could play to shake Jinnah's resolve. Nothing would move him from his consuming determination to realise the dream of Pakistan."

But the 71-year-old Singh, a former foreign minister, argues that far from being set on a separate Pakistan, Jinnah's overwhelming concern was the well-being of his fellow Muslims. He wanted to ensure Muslims would have "space in a reassuring system".

He said Jinnah envisaged that some areas of the new country would have Muslim majority areas and some Hindu majority areas and believed a federal system that kept the country as one was desirable. Nehru, by contrast, demanded a system that was centralised.

"Nehru believed in a highly centralised policy. That's what he wanted India to be," Singh said. "Jinnah wanted a federal polity. That, even Gandhi accepted. Nehru didn't. Consistently he stood in the way of a federal India until 1947 when it became a partitioned India."

In India the questioning of received truths by such a leading figure has sparked a degree of controversy. Singh says he has not written his book, Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence, on behalf of the BJP.

It was the Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru and his descendants who appeared most angry. A party spokesman told local newspapers that the BJP ought to be known as the Bharatiya Jinnah Party because of its repeated praise of the Pakistani leader.

NATION'S LEADER
Name: Mohammad Ali Jinnah
Born: Christmas Day 1876, in Karachi
Studied: Bombay University, became a lawyer
Politics: A member of the Indian National Congress. He joined the Muslim League in 1913 and became its president in 1916
British rule: Jinnah resigned over Congress' policy of non-cooperation with British rule. Partition: In 1940 the Muslim League demanded the partition of India and the creation of a Muslim state of Pakistan. Pakistan was formed on August 14, 1947.
Leader: Jinnah became the first Governor General of Pakistan, but died of tuberculosis in September 1948.

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