Full circle

Mahatma Gandhi (left), Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammad Ali Jinnah

General de Gaulle was the quintessential soldier-statesman of the last century. By all accounts he was not overly enamoured of political parties. In 1962, he famously observed: "Since a politician never believes what he says, he is always astonished when others do."

LK Advani, the outgoing President of the BJP and Leader of the Opposition in India may not be aware of this dictum of de Gaulle. Otherwise he would not have been so exercised by the visceral over-reaction to his innocuous and unexceptionable comments in Pakistan. The reaction came from his party faithful and the medley of unabashedly communal organisations that provide the sinews of his Party. His remarks were of a piece with the broad objectives of his goodwill visit to Pakistan, namely the strengthening of confidence and amity between the two countries. He deplored the demolition of the Babri mosque in December 1992, describing the day as the saddest of his life. No one with aspirations to be recognised as a statesman would wish to be associated with the wanton destruction of a place of worship, which was also a monument. He described Jinnah as a maker of history; a true enough observation, but not necessarily a compliment, after all Hitler and many other kindred souls also made history. And he referred to Jinnah's speech at the inaugural session of the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947, to underscore the view that Jinnah had a secular vision of Pakistan. Incidentally, the late Justice Munir saw in the speech -- as recounted in one of his books -- one of the clearest expositions of a secular state. The BJP is not exactly seen as a paragon of secularism, either within India or without. It is thus an irony and a paradox that influential elements of the Party and its affiliates should regard Advani's description of Jinnah as secular, as a compliment rather than a criticism.

Advani's visit to Pakistan was in a sense a trip back in time. He was visiting, with family, the place of his birth, possibly for the first time since he left after Partition. There was also the poignancy of a septuagenarian's sense of human mortality. The result could only be an epiphany of sorts. And yet he said nothing that went beyond the remit and dictates of diplomacy and courtesy for a visiting dignitary on a goodwill trip.

Either to defuse the controversy of his comments or possibly because he took umbrage, Advani resigned from the office of party president, but was persuaded to reverse his decision. Differences within the BJP, however, persisted and under continual sniping, Advani, of his own accord or under pressure, has announced that he would be stepping down as party chief by the end of the year. He will continue as leader of the opposition. None of the party stalwarts spoke out in his support. The beleaguered party chief may justifiably feel let down by many on whose support he would have counted.

As mentioned, Advani said nothing in Pakistan that was extravagant. Why then this continued pother? Perhaps it has more to do with the fact of Partition than with communalism and Jinnah. In the last phase of the freedom movement, the three pivotal leaders in British India were assuredly Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nehru. This is not to diminish in any manner so many others of the premier ranks of leadership.

Jinnah, Gandhi, and Nehru were all barristers. Of them, only Jinnah was pre-eminent in the profession. He had, in fact, attained considerable stature in national politics as well, much before Nehru was called to the Bar, and Gandhi had returned to India permanently from South Africa. Senior "moderate" leaders, like Dadabhai Naoroji, Sir Pherozeshah Mehta and GK Gokhale, held him in affection. He was equally at ease with, and enjoyed the confidence of, the staunchly "pro-Hindu" and "extremist" leader BG Tilak, whom he twice defended in courts against sedition charges. Jinnah, unlike many Muslims, was opposed to the partition of Bengal in 1905, and declined to join the Muslim League when it was founded in 1906; he even advised Muslims to be chary of any policy of "divide and rule." He considered separate electorates -- assured by Lord Minto and provided for by the Indian Councils Act of 1909 -- as an invidious ploy to keep Hindus and Muslims politically apart. He enrolled as a member of the Muslim League as late as 1913, and that only after being assured by his sponsors, Mohammad Ali and Wazir Hasan, that this would not "imply even a shadow of disloyalty to the National cause." In 1915, after Gandhi's return from South Africa, the Gujrat Sabha organised a fitting welcome reception for him, presided over by another distinguished Gujrati, MA Jinnah. At the personal level, Jinnah belonged to the Khoja community. He was singularly free of orthodoxy in matters of religion, and in respect of food and drink, uninhibited by religious injunctions. The portrait that emerges is not that of a communalist or closet separatist.

Gandhi was devout in matters of faith but completely non-communal. His interests transcended politics, and some of his experiments in search of truth would surely have seemed bizarre, even to avid supporters. In appearance Gandhi was unprepossessing; this was a matter of pride with him. And yet there was surely something very special in him. Within a space of five years of his return from South Africa, he ascended to a place of unassailable predominance and leadership, both in politics, and in the minds and hearts of the people. His position in the Congress was that of permanent super-president, although formally he held the office of party president only once. He transformed the nature and substance of politics. Truth and non-violence were the irreducible elements of his creed. Religious imagery in his speeches was perhaps to infuse a moral sense in politics and also to communicate in language easily understood by the people. He was of a rare breed; he never doubted the rightness of his actions or decisions. On the communal issue, as recounted by Nehru, his object was to win over the minority, and not to bargain with them. To this end he was prepared to agree to everything the Muslims might demand as safeguards. Gandhi's emphasis was on generosity and goodwill on the part of the majority. He could not, or did not, at crucial moments, live up to this impossibly high moral ground that he had set; but more on this later.

In outlook and approach, Nehru would be somewhere in between the two. Westernised and also at ease with mass politics. He accepted Gandhi wholeheartedly as leader and mentor without sharing many of his ideals. Nehru was a person of vision and learning, of courage and convictions, of culture, refinement and immense charm. Religion was never a priority with him. He enjoyed a special stature as Gandhi's anointed political heir.

British India, including the Princely States, represented an empire that was appreciably larger than any ruled by Indian Emperors of old. The suggestion for some sort of division along communal lines was first mooted by one Bhai Parmanand -- an obscure personality today, but a considerable influence at one time in the Arya Samaj and the Hindu Mahasabha. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, Bhaiji proposed the unification of territories beyond Sind, with Afghanistan and the North West Frontier as a Muslim country. This was to be accompanied by an exchange of populations. Much later in 1926, the Lion of the Punjab and Congress stalwart, Lala Lajpat Rai, outlined his solution of the communal issue: "Under my scheme, the Muslims will have four Muslim States, the Pathan province of the North West Frontier, Western Punjab, Sind, and Eastern Bengal. It means a clear partition of India into a Muslim India and a non-Muslim India." Annada Shankar Roy gives Lalaji's quote in one of his books. Lalaji would seem to have anticipated the Lahore resolution 14 years before the event, and thus deserves a share of the credit for the two-nation theory.

Communal politics became a cause of serious concern in India only from the decade of the 1920s. Earlier in 1916, the Lucknow Pact, of which Jinnah was the principal architect, addressed the issue of Hindu-Muslim unity and sought to bring the Congress and the Muslim League on a common political platform. Tilak was closely associated with this endeavour, which persuaded Hindu Mahasabha and Congress stalwart, Madan Mohan Malaviya, to accept separate electorates -- hitherto anathema to the Congress. The Pact also provided for weightage for Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces and similar concessions to non-Muslims in Muslim majority provinces. 1916-1922 was a period of exemplary communal harmony.

Jinnah parted company with the Congress after the Nagpur session of the Party in 1920, when Gandhi was in full ascendancy. He was uncomfortable with Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, which he was convinced would lead to mob hysteria. He was equally ill at ease with unrealistic promises -- Swaraj within a year -- and what he perceived to be a pseudo-religious approach to politics. He vainly, but strenuously, opposed the Khilafat movement. The conflict, of course, was between the rebel and the constitutionalist.

After Chauri Chaura, Gandhi called off the non-cooperation movement. The Khilafat itself was abolished in Turkey. These developments were followed by a recrudescence of communal politics. The "shuddhi" programme of the Hindu Mahasabha, which was endorsed by leaders like Malaviya and Lalaji, could only contribute to communal tensions, and Congress president, Maulana Mohammad Ali, pleaded with Gandhi to intervene. Gandhi's response was an anodyne and enigmatic statement. He did not accept that Malaviya and others were enemies of Muslims, nor would he call Mohammad Ali an enemy of Hindus. To Malaviya this would have been an imprimatur from the Mahatma himself. The consequences were clear in the 1926 Council entry elections. CR Das had passed away, and it fell to Motilal Nehru to contend with -- in his own words -- the "Malaviya-Lala gang." He was attacked as "anti-Hindu" and pro-Muslim, and individually voters were told that he ate beef. Such hate tactics paid electoral dividends. A distraught Motilal wrote in anguish to son Jawaharlal in December 1926, that he was contemplating retirement from public life, that the "Malaviya-Lala gang" aided by "Birla's money" were frantically trying to capture the Congress and would probably succeed.

Jinnah again tried to be the unifier. He met Motilal, and was instrumental in formulating the "Delhi proposals" of March 1927, quashing strong opposition in his own party. For the first time the Muslim League accepted joint electorates, subject to constitutional safeguards for Muslims. These included proportional representation in the Punjab and Bengal Legislative Councils and one-third reserved seats in the Central Legislature. The All-India Congess Committee endorsed the proposals. Rafique Zakaria, in one of his books, writes that Malaviya too was supportive. There are, however, other versions also of Malaviya's reactions in this regard. The Delhi proposals eventually came to nought. They faced strident opposition from communal elements and organisations at the All-Parties Conference convened in February 1928 to discuss constitutional arrangements. A committee headed by Motilal Nehru was set up by the Conference to prepare a draft constitution. The Nehru Report, made public in August 1928, in effect did away with the constitutional guarantees that Jinnah had sought for Muslims. Jinnah would not have expected support from the likes of Daulatram, Moonje, Aney, Jayakar, or Lalaji. He would have hoped though that progressive leaders, and especially Gandhi, would wholeheartedly endorse his suggested amendments -- along the lines of the Delhi proposals -- to the Nehru Report at the Calcutta Congress of 1928, but to no avail. Jinnah's modest conditions for Joint Electorates should not have posed insuperable difficulties. The delegates did not, however, have the wisdom of hindsight, and political expediency thus prevailed over high statesmanship. Jinnah's influence, even among Muslims, seemed to be on the wane, and communal passions were a potent factor in any election -- the experience of 1926 had made it very clear.

Incidentally in September 1932, Gandhi undertook a fast unto death to negate the British Government's award of separate electorates to the scheduled castes. His fast ended after understanding was reached with Dr. Ambedkar. The scheduled castes accepted joint electorates in return for significantly larger representation in the Central and Provincial legislatures through reserved seats. A similar unequivocal stand by the Mahatma four years earlier -- he was said to be personally in favour of the Delhi proposals -- would surely have made a difference.

Jinnah went to London for the First Round Table Conference in 1930, after which he stayed back. He had wearied of politics and needed a respite. He felt rebuffed by the Congress and had antagonised important sections among Muslims. His law practice thrived in London. He returned to India a few years later. His party colleagues had been urging his return. And Pandit Nehru, in one of his less diplomatic pronouncements, had described him as an anachronism, or finished, in Indian politics. Thus provoked, Jinnah returned with a vengeance.

In 1937, the first elections were held under the Government of India Act, 1935, which provided for a measure of provincial autonomy. The Congress won an absolute majority in five of the major provinces, and emerged as the single largest Party in four. The Muslim League, though fortified by the return of Jinnah, performed reasonably well only in Bombay and the UP. A cogent case could be made for coalitions wherever possible. After all, the overarching shared purpose of the major parties was the end of colonial rule, and a concerted effort toward this, rather than for the parties to expend their energies against one another in Parliament, should have been the preferred option. In the UP, the most populous province, an understanding of sorts in this regard had been reached; 2 cabinet posts would go to the ML, which in turn had assured support for the Congess programme. Maulana Azad recounts in his memoirs that he was fully satisfied in this regard after talks with ML leaders of the UP. Congress President Pandit Nehru, however, was prepared to concede only one cabinet post. Azad tried desperately to reverse this decision, even seeking the Mahatma's intervention, but to no avail. There would be no grand coalition in the UP, which could have been a pointer to some other states as well.

One person with views similar to Azad's was the UP's Premier-designate, Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant. He went to Delhi to request Gandhi to intercede. Pant's plea was simple and earnest. ZH Lari, Liaquat Ali, and Khaliquzzaman were old friends and comrades. Giving two ministerships to the ML would in no way compromise the Congress position, rather it could resolve the communal issue. True the Congress could form a government without ML support but generosity in this regard should yield rich political dividends. Gandhi did not respond. It was his weekly day of silence. On such days he would communicate only in writing, and that too if circumstances so warranted. Pant's request apparently did not warrant a written response. Nehru, who was present, summarily overruled Pant. The above account was related to me years back by an eminent public man, who as a young boy had been present at the meeting. Till the end, Pant never wavered in his belief that a coalition in the UP at that time could have resolved the communal issue. Pant, considered ideologically closer to Patel than to Nehru, had a special bond with the latter. During the Simon Commission boycott, the Congress had organised demonstrations in different places. At one such demonstration, the police had targeted Nehru for a vicious lathi charge. Pant reportedly shielded Nehru with his own huge body and took the blows himself. As a result he was permanently afflicted with a form of palsy, and as a privilege was allowed to speak in Parliament without getting up from his seat.

To be fair, Nehru, by nature warm-hearted and generous, perceived the ML as the antithesis of all that he espoused, and was not disposed to make any concession that could add to its prestige. He saw the issue of coalition simplistically in terms of political tactics, while Azad, Pant, and reportedly also Gandhi and Patel, could discern the underlying aspects of symbolism and confidence building.

The Lahore Resolution three years later was apparently the Rubicon, but as Patrick French points out in "Liberty or Death" between 1940-46, the ML never quite clarified its precise meaning and implications. This begs the question. Did Jinnah at that time believe in a totally independent Pakistan, or was the concept a bargaining counter to obtain certain safeguards for Muslims which he had long sought?

The Cabinet Mission Plan offered the last chance of resolving the communal problem without partition. It sought through a complex constitutional arrangement to meet the minimum demands of all, a united country and guarantees for the minority through provincial autonomy. The Plan foundered, ironically after the ML and the Congress had accepted it, both with some reservations and misgivings, and after considerable persuasion. Speaking to the press after succeeding Azad as Congress president, Nehru made the cavalier comment that the Congress had agreed only to go to the Constituent Assembly, unfettered by agreements and free to meet all situations as they arise. To the ML this was a clear message; once ensconced in power, the Congress would alter the Plan as it wished. It promptly withdrew its earlier acceptance. A hurriedly convened meeting of the Congress Working Committee reiterated its acceptance of the Plan, but the ML would not relent. Azad in his memoirs blamed Nehru -- his closest friend and colleague -- for the Plan's failure. Even the imperturbable "Iron Man" Patel, was provoked to comment on Nehru's "emotional insanity" which undid months of painstaking effort. The Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who scrupulously maintained a journal, attributed blame for failure principally to Gandhi and also to two members of the Mission, who tilted to the Congress and were not neutral, as they should have been.

By the time Mountbatten was named Viceroy, British policy in respect of India had completed its metamorphosis, from "divide and rule" to "unite and quit" and finally to "cut and run." Gandhi had always likened partition to vivisection of his own body. He was devastated that his two closest followers, Nehru and Patel, had committed themselves to partition without consulting him. Others were affected by the allure of high office. Gandhi did not celebrate the end of British rule, which he did so much to bring about. Instead he summoned all the moral authority at his command in an attempt to stem the mindless mayhem that preceded and accompanied partition. He went on a fast against his own government on the issue of Pakistan's share of British Imperial sterling assets. He perhaps never seriously envisaged the possibility of partition until it loomed upon him. Wavell's comments in his journal after Gandhi's assassination, representing, of course, the former Viceroy's personal appraisal, are nevertheless of interest. To Wavell, Gandhi was an extremely astute politician, a remarkable man with more malevolence than benevolence in him, who had wrecked the Cabinet Mission Plan. Gandhi did not, Wavell felt, work for an understanding with the Muslims when his influence might have secured it. A blunt, even harsh, assessment.

Interpersonal relations and chemistry, between and among leaders, can bear upon political decisions and developments. Jinnah's relations with Nehru, never very cosy, had deteriorated over time to such a degree as to preclude any worthwhile dialogue between them to build mutual confidence and trust. Soon after Mountbatten assumed office, Nehru gave him a personal assessment of Jinnah. In Nehru's view, Jinnah was a successful but mediocre lawyer, who achieved eminence only late in life -- an ungracious comment for a person of Nehru's intellect. A mediocre lawyer could not have achieved a thriving law practice in British India and before the Privy Council in London. In politics, Jinnah had achieved considerable stature when Nehru was still struggling with Latin verbs at Harrow. Gandhi-Jinnah relations had drifted over the years to a point beyond redemption. The two, at Gandhi's initiative, did hold talks spread over two weeks in 1944, but to no avail. Talking to his biographer Louis Fischer in 1946, Gandhi described Jinnah, in distinctly "unsaintly language," as a maniac. Jinnah's private comments on Nehru and Gandhi would have been just as ungenerous. Wavell's entry in his journal, after Jinnah's death affords a neutral perspective. Wavell "never liked Jinnah, but had a certain reluctant admiration for him and his uncompromising attitude. He certainly had much justification for his mistrust of Congress and their leaders."

Jinnah's political transformation was the consequence of repeated rebuffs from those he would have expected to be his natural allies, but who refused to treat him as an equal or even to take him seriously. Sir Chimanlal Setalvad in his memoirs recounts that Jinnah was always sensitive to any suggestion of a slight and would never be browbeaten.

Jinnah was not the only person in politics to resent an undeserved snub. Subhas Bose's politics was even more radically altered for very much the same reason. Bose was re-elected President, over the express reservations of Gandhi, at the Tripuri Congress in 1939. Gandhi, by that time, had severed all formal links with the party and yet wielded overwhelming "hidden power." Bose found his position as party chief untenable without the cooperation of party stalwarts who constituted his Working Committee. His earnest attempts for an accommodation with Gandhi were spurned, obliging him to resign. His ouster, whatever his differences with Gandhi, was inconsistent with every democratic norm. Tagore praised his sense of dignity and forbearance. Initially Bose was content to form the Forward Bloc within the Congress, but later opted for more revolutionary politics, which took him to the waiting arms of Hitler and Tojo, from where he would pass into history, song, and legend. Perhaps there was no room for Bose's brand of "radicalism" in Gandhi's vision of free India. Niceties or norms seldom deterred Gandhi from the pursuit of a goal in which he believed strongly.

By the time of Partition, Jinnah was ravaged by disease. He would visit the most populous province of his country only seven months after the emergence of Pakistan. He surely sensed during his visit a rebuff at the popular level on the issue of state language. He was not happy with the state of affairs in the Punjab and wished to replace Mamdot with Daultana. Reportedly he was not fully satisfied with even Liaquat. In the final months of his life, he was said to be inclined to a dialogue with Nehru -- after he had recovered sufficiently -- about improved or special relations between the two countries. Whether or not all, or any, of this is true, both countries would have recognised the economic and political imperatives of having friendly bilateral relations.

Gandhi, Jinnah, and Nehru were remarkable men; to many they were great men. In part, at least, this was because they were conditioned and tempered by great events and the heroic times in which they lived. The present Indian and Pakistan governments are committed to significantly improved bilateral relations. If this does happen, tangible benefits should accrue not only to both countries but to the region as well. Can Pervez Musharraf and Manmohan Singh succeed where the titans of old did not? There are two reasons why they could. Firstly, the intervening decades have largely dissipated the bitterness and distractions of Partition. And secondly, they enjoy the advantage of hindsight.

A recent catalogue of Oxford University Press, Pakistan includes two books on Partition: "The Partition of India, Legend and Reality" by Indian jurist HM Seervai, and "Quaid-I-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, His personality and Politics" by former Pakistani diplomat and earlier of the ICS, SM Burke. The catalogue assures that both books are the results of painstaking research. According to the description in the catalogue, Burke posits the thesis that "Congress policies under Gandhi drove the Hindus and the Muslims irreconciliably apart and eventually convinced Jinnah, who had long fought for Hindu-Muslim unity, that his dream of united India was nothing but a mirage." Seervai's conclusion is similar, namely that "Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress leadership were primarily responsible for the decisions leading to the partition of India."

Jean De La Bruyere was a French satiric moralist, of the 17th century. There is a street in Paris named after him. A one-line apothegm of his deserves to be remembered even today. He had written: "The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth."