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Default Jinnah's crucial role

Jinnah's crucial role
By Prof Sharif al Mujahid
Dawn,2004

The measure of criticality of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's role in the making of Pakistan depends on the answer to other interrelated questions: Did Jinnah create the forces that ultimately brought Pakistan into existence? Or, did he merely channel those forces which were already in momentum, towards a definite goal? While historians generally proffer the latter view, contemporary observers take the former one.

Historians, whether because of their wide-ranging scholarship and long insight into history, or because of a general tendency among them to interpret events in terms of a deterministic approach, are prone to explain contemporary events within the framework of the outworking of historical forces and ideological factors - factors long embedded in a country's or a nation's body-politic.

More specifically, some historians tend to believe that Pakistan was somehow in the "womb" of history and that its emergence was inevitable, whether or not there was a Jinnah to lead the movement to a successful culmination.

At the other end of the continuum stand contemporary observers and those involved one way or another in the pre-1947 developments which led to partition and the emergence of Pakistan.

They not only rate Jinnah as being the critical variable in its emergence: some like Leonard Mosley even regard Pakistan as a one-man achievement. More important, they even doubt whether, without him at the helm of Indo-Muslim affairs in that epochal decade of 1937-47, Pakistan would ever have come into being.

Sweeping as this assertion may sound, it is sought to be buttressed with an array of arguments, at once solid and convincing. A.V. Hodson, the author of perhaps the most authoritative British account of the imperial retreat from India and "the Great Divide", has brilliantly summed up the case for this viewpoint:

"Of all the personalities in the last act of the great drama of India's re-birth to independence, Mohammad Ali Jinnah is at once the most enigmatic and the most important. One can imagine any of the other principal actors... replaced by a substitute in the same role - a different representative of this or that interest or community, even a different viceroy - without thereby implying any radical change in the final denouement.

But it is barely conceivable that events would have taken the same course, that the last struggle would have been a struggle of three, not two, well-balanced adversaries, and that a new nation state of Pakistan would have been created, but for the personality and leadership of one man, Mr Jinnah.

The irresistible demand for Indian independence, and the British will to relinquish power in India soon after the end of the Second World War, were the result of influences that had been at work long before the present story of a single decade begins; the protagonists on this side or that of the imperial relationship were tools of historical forces which they did not create and could not control... whereas the irresistible demand for Pakistan, and the solidarity of the Indian Muslims behind that demand, were creations of that decade alone, and supremely the creations of one man."

The two divergent viewpoints sum up the alternatives in the age-long controversy between the social determinists and the "Great Man" theorists. In essence, the basic issue boils down to the fundamental question: Which one plays the prime role in the making of a historical event - the circumstances that give opportunity to a character or the character itself?

The creation of a new nation of Pakistan out of India's body-politic was, by any criterion, a historical event of profound significance. As F.J.C. Hearnshaw argues both character and circumstances are equally crucial in the making of such an event.

Why? Because without their interacting on each other and mutually affecting one another, the final configuration of events and the integration of interests are simply inconceivable.

Speaking of Napoleon, for instance, J. Christopher Harold remarks. "In spite of the prodigious amount that has been devoted to the man and his times, there is still little general agreement as to whether Napoleon is more important a product and a symbol... of circumstances that were not of his making, or as a man, who, pursuing his own destiny, shaped circumstances that governed the course of history.

Like all great men, Napoleon was both, of course..." The same is equally true of Jinnah.Opinion, may, of course, differ about the relative weight assigned to circumstances and the character - that is, about the measure of criticality conceded to a character, in the making of a historical event. But unless the environment is characterized by certain "determining tendencies", circumstances alone cannot create an event.

Application of this criterion invariably leads to the following conclusion: whatever be the strength, the momentum and the intensity of historical forces working towards centrifugalism in India's body politic and towards Pakistan, without the fortuitous matching of the character - in this case, that of Jinnah - with the circumstances, it could simply not have come the way, it did.

This was especially true in the case of Pakistan, since this state was not in the realm of possibility barely a decade before its emergence nor the demand formulated even nebulously before Chaudhry Rehmat Ali did in 1933, nor was it even a "geographical expression", before that date.

More so because of the fundamental fact that "few statesmen have shaped events to their policy more surely than Mr. Jinnah," as The Times (London) put it. This explains why underlying everything that has been said or written about Jinnah is the central theme of his achievement of Pakistan.

The critical role of achievement motivation in society may also be explained and buttressed by a close examination of the implication of the "womb" theory in respect of Pakistan's emergence.

This theory, succinctly summed by Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), while explaining Lenin's role in the coming and the culmination of the Russian revolution, lays down "that a man and his period had to be considered together and that both were determined by the antecedent state of culture."

In terms of the Trotskyian formulation, could it be said that Jinnah was not an accidental element in the historical development of Muslim India and that both Jinnah and his party were the product of the whole gamut of Indo-Muslim history? It could not, for it would amount to a tautology, because had Jinnah and his party not strived for Pakistan, and having strived, had failed to accomplish it, they would still have been a product of past Indo-Muslim history.

An integral product in the same way as Sayyid Ahmad Shahid (1786-1831) and the Mujahidin movement (1820s-1860s) or Muhammad Ali (1878-1931) and the Khilafat Movement (19920-22) were, although in both cases they encountered failure in the end.

Not to speak of the non-League Muslim leadership, even the past role of the League or of its leadership during 1937-47 seemed always prone to striking a compromise with the Congress, more or less on the latter's terms.

Even Jinnah's past role as a an eloquent Congress leader (1910-20), as an 'ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity' (1915-20), as one of the foremost advocates of Indian freedom, as the author of the Delhi Muslim proposals (1927), and as a Muslim leader striving to evolve a compromise formula acceptable to both Hindus and Muslim till 1937, and as late as 1938 in his correspondence with the Congress leaders - all of which could, of course, be put down as a natural product or the recent historical past of Muslim India.

But even this role fails to provide any clue to which of the alternative paths of developments presented to Muslim India he would take. Not to speak of 1937, even in the middle 1940s Pakistan's emergence could not have been predicted on the basis of available historical evidence as the only likely future development of Indo-Muslim polity.

Indeed, even as late as June 1946, whatever the political forces and conditions at work, the alternative path of united India seemed more likely choice. It was Jinnah who made the critical decision that led Muslim India directly to Pakistan within a year.

Hence, while both Jinnah and the Muslim League were, indeed, a product of the past of Muslim India, Pakistan was not so much a product of that past as the product of one of the most "event-making" figures, in modern history. Thus, Jinnah's presence was indispensable, in the emergence of Pakistan.

Given the Waliullah Mujahidin, the Aligarh and the Khilafat legacy on the Muslim side and that of the Prarthana Samaj, Arya Samaj, Tilak, Malaviya and Gandhi on the other side, the demand for Pakistan is, of course, understandable as a culminating point of the "natural evolution" of the separatist tendency among Muslims on the one hand and of the process of alienation from the Congress on the other. But certainly not its realization without the presence of "an event-making man."

The historical situation during the 1937-47 decade presented two major alternative paths of development for Muslim politics: (1) going along with the Congress credo, if not a merger of the League into it or the acceptance of a satellite status; and (ii) striking out an independent line.

These alternative paths were presented on seven different occasions. (1937, 1939, 1940, 1942, 1945 and 1946). But on no occasion did Jinnah waver, though each time he chose for himself and for Muslim India the path towards establishing a Muslim identity on a constitutional plane - the path since 1940 of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state. This he did whatever the toils and labours, whatever the trials and tribulations, whatever the circumstances and consequences.

It is true that Jinnah had accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan initially, but his acceptance though sincere at the time, was primarily motivated by the fact that the Plan contained the seeds of Pakistan, providing for a somewhat limited Muslim religio-political identity in a confederal India, with the prospects of opting out for a sovereign Pakistan after a decade, if the proposed arrangement did not work to Muslim satisfaction.

It may be argued that the fateful decision to continue the boycott of the Constituent Assembly after getting the Muslim League entrenched in the Interim Government in October 1946 was solely Jinnah's and this decision led directly to the British government's declarations of December 6, 1946, and of February 20, 1947, which paved the way for partition.

In several other crucial decisions during the 1937-47 decade as well, Jinnah alone mattered. He alone determined the course Muslim India and Muslim politics would take. Hence Jinnah's criticality in the making of Pakistan.
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