Jinnah and Kashmir

The Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah thanked the National Conference leadership for the right royal reception given to him but at the same time said that it was not a reception for his person, but to the All India Muslim League, the party of ten crore Muslims of India of which he was President. This annoyed the Hindu leader so much that he left the stage in distress. According to Mr. Justice Yusuf Saraf, author of “Kashmiris Fight for Freedom” the Quaid-e-Azam and his wife seemed to have had visited Kashmir for the first time before 1929. Though this visit was private in nature, yet as a great Muslim leader he felt concerned at the appalling conditions of the Kashmiris at that time too.

The second visit of the Quaid-e-Azam was in 1936 during which he hinted to his first visit, saying that he had visited Kashmir ten years earlier too. In 1936 the Quaid-e-Azam addressed a meeting held in connection with Milad-un-Nabi, the birthday of the Holy Prophet (SAW) at the Mujahid Manzil, Srinagar. The Muslim Conference (at that point of time was led by Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas and Sheikh Abdullah) in welcome address to Jinnah appreciated his role as lover of Hindu-Muslim unity. Mr. Jinnah reciprocated the sentiments and said that the Muslims were in majority in Kashmir but it was their duty to ensure that the minority community that is, the Hindus of Kashmir would get justice and fair play at the hands of the majority community of Kashmir.

Mr.Jinnah, who was once proclaimed as ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity, had been disillusioned by that time and in his speech regretted that some of the leaders of the majority community in British India had not been able to give such an assurance to the Muslim minority. That showed that the Quaid-e-Azam was not satisfied with the concept of Hindu-Muslim unity in British India.

The Muslim Conference, which represented the Muslims of the State 1936, was converted into National Conference in 1939 as its leaders had come under the influence of Nehru. Chaudhry Ghulam Abbas, who had joined hand with Sheikh Abdullah in 1939 to found National Conference, realized his mistake within three years. He returned to the Muslim Conference, which had been revived by 14 other leaders from Jammu and Kashmir. Soon many others joined the revived Muslim Conference and once again it became a force to reckon with.

The main and the last visit of the Quaid-e-Azam to the State of Jammu and Kashmir took place in 1944. During this visit he attended a reception by the National Conference headed by Sheikh Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah had thought that with the help of Dogra administration and the active and crafty Hindus he would suppress the pro-Muslim League elements in the State and assure Mr. Jinnah that the Kashmiris, Hindus as well as Muslims, were believers in One Nation Theory of the Congress. A Hindu nationalist Jialal Kilam presented the address of welcome to the Quaid-e-Azam. The Quaid-e-Azam thanked the National Conference leadership for the right royal reception given to him but at the same time said that it was not a reception for his person, but to the All India Muslim League, the party of ten crore Muslims of India of which he was President. This annoyed the Hindu leader so much that he left the stage in distress.

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The Quaid on the Role of Women in Society

Quaid-e-Azam with lady workers in Bombay

Muslim women of the Indian subcontinent observed strict purdah or seclusion well into the twentieth century. They spent their lives confined to the four wall of their homes. Reformers had advocated their education and a better treatment, but no one had asked for emancipation Nazir Ahmed had persuasively argued in his novel in favour of educating Muslim Women, but within their homes. Altaf Hussain Hali had used the powerful vehicle of his poetry to criticize the treatment meted out to women. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the most important Muslim reformer of the 19th century, had argued the Muslim women’s education must wait till the Muslim men had been given modern education.

It was not till the launching of the movement of Anjuman-e-Khuddam-e Ka ‘abah in 1913, that Muslim women began to get involved in any kind of public activity, although it seems to have been restricted to raising funds. It was the Khilafat movement and the imprisonment of the Ali brothers in 1917, which brought their mother, Bi Amman, out. She addressed large gatherings from behind purdah, which she continued to observe. However, Bi Amman and her daughter-in-law Amjadi Begum’s contribution, significant though it was, did not bring out Muslim women in any substantial numbers.

It was the Quaid-i-Azam who broke away from the accepted and traditional view of the role of Muslim women in society, and brought about a radical transformation in it. The Quaid was responding to a change that was sweeping the world, and had gained momentum in the post-First World War period. The Suffragette momentum in the post-First World War period. The Suffragette movement and the women’s struggle for emancipation, was an important element of the social and political changes taking place in the west. In the Indian sub-continent its expression could be seen in the sudden outburst of women’s magazine that began to published from different parts of India, in the decade before the outbreak of Great War.

The Quaid and the Making of Pakistan

How critical was Quaid-i-Azam’s role in the making of Pakistan? Surprisingly though, it was most succinctly and brilliantly summed up in rather unsuspecting quarters – in H.V. Hodson (d. 2000)’s The Great Divide (1969), perhaps the most authoritative British account of the imperial retreat from the subcontinent. He says:

Of all the personalities in the last act of the great drama of India’s rebirth 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 denouncement. 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 the demand, were creations of that decade alone, ad supremely the creations of one man.

Of relevance here is how Alfred Broachard evaluated the role of Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) in the making of the modern Turkey:

Without Napoleon, without de Gaulle, there would still be a France.
Without Washington, there would certainly be the United States.
Without Lenin, it is certain that there would be the Soviet Union; but
without Ataturk, it is certain that there would have been no Turkey.

Turkey had, of course, had a territorial, political, cultural and ethnic existence in history for over five centuries before Ataturk transformed it into modern Turkey in 1923. In contract, Pakistan fell even below the category of middle nineteenth-century “Italy” which the Austrian Chancellor, Matternich (1809-48), had most disparagingly characterized as a mere a “geographical expression”. Pakistan was not even such an expression barely fifteen years before its emergence. There was a “nation” called Turkey for several centuries, but there was none called Pakistan before 1947. Hence if Ataturk’s presence in the early 1920s was critical to have making of modern Turkey, how much more critical should have been Jinnah’s presence in the 1940s in the emergence of Pakistan, especially since she was bereft of any historical prototype hand parentage? Hence Leonard Mosley and a host of other contemporary observers and historians (including Penderal Moon, Ian Stephens, John Terraine, Margaret Bourke-White, Frank Moraes, and D.F. Karaka) rate Jinnah as being the critical variable in its emergence to a point that they characterize Pakistan as a “one-man achievement”.

Quaid-e-Azam and Democracy

• Democracy is in the blood of Muslamans who look upon complete equality of man. I give you an example. Very often when I go to a mosque, my chauffeur stands side by side with me. Muslamans believe in fraternity, equality and liberty. (Speech at Kingsway Hall, London. 14.12.1946) 

• There are no people in the world who are more democratic even in their religion than the Muslamans. (All India Muslim League Session, Lucknow, 1916)

• It is my belief that our salvation lies in following the golden rules of conduct set for us by our great law giver the Prophet of Islam (Peace Be Upon Him). Let us lay the foundation of our democracy on the basis of the truly Islamic ideals and principles. Our Almighty has taught us that our decisions in the affairs of the state shall be guided by discussions and consultations. (Sibi, 14.02.1948)