HISTORY ON THE LINE

Jinnah and the Demise

of a Hindu Politician?
by Mridu Rai

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INTRODUCTION
Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister of India and a senior leader in the
Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), left for a nine-day
‘pilgrimage’ to Pakistan on 30 January 2006. But he did not visit the
mausoleum of Pakistan’s founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah – the man
still revered in the country he created as the Quaid-e-Azam, the ‘great
leader’. This was despite the fact that Jaswant Singh had announced with
some fanfare his determination to do so in a news conference held in Delhi
a few days before his departure.1 Instead, he was allegedly taken ill while
in Pakistan and was forced to drop the memorial from his itinerary.
While that was the official explanation, a salient fact to bear in mind is
that another famous visit only a few months earlier by an even more senior
member of Jaswant Singh’s party had turned Jinnah’s coolly elegant grave-
site in Karachi into a political hotspot. In June 2005, Lal Krishna Advani,
a former deputy prime minister and at that time president of the BJP and
leader of the opposition in the Indian parliament, had included a halt at the
monument in Karachi to lay a wreath there. He too had been on a personal
visit to Pakistan, to the city where he was brought up, and which he left
for India only in the weeks after partition and independence. While Advani’s
visitation was remarkable as the first by a prominent Indian political
leader to the mausoleum, it was the BJP leader’s words recasting Jinnah into
a ‘secularist’ that made it memorably controversial. Writing in the visitors’
book, Advani suggested:

There are many people who leave an irreversible stamp on history. But
there are few who actually create history . . . Jinnah was one such rare
individual. In his early years, leading luminary of [the] freedom struggle
Sarojini Naidu described Jinnah as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim
unity. His address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11,
1947 is really a classic and forceful espousal of a secular state in which
every citizen would be free to follow his own religion . . . My respectful
homage to this great man.

History Workshop Journal Issue 62 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbl007

! The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
 Jinnah and the Demise of a Hindu Politician 233

This reappraisal of Jinnah in Karachi was not particularly original.

A by now well-established revisionist historiography (discussed below) has
already done that. What took many by surprise, and created a torrent
of media comment, was that these words should have emanated from
L. K. Advani, long identified as a hard-liner within the Hindu right-wing
party. Even before he had returned to India, most of his colleagues in the
BJP, many of whom had until recently been unable to utter his name
without adding honorifics of the most deferential sort,2 were now either
condemning him openly or squeamishly keeping their distance. Soon after

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his home-coming, holding firm to the views he had expressed in Pakistan,
Advani resigned as president of the party but was subsequently ‘persuaded’
to reconsider and to agree to a more measured transition, eventually
stepping down in December 2005 as the BJP celebrated the twenty-fifth
anniversary of its founding.
To all appearances, Lal Krishna Advani seemed to have been dealt a fatal
political blow. If so, was it self-inflicted or had he, in fact, been done in by
members of the broader political right, known collectively as the Sangh
Parivar?3 What role did Jinnah play in Advani’s undoing and in the
whirlwind of controversy that seemed to have swept up politicians,
journalists and academics during the months after the visit to Jinnah’s
grave?

JINNAH IN THE EDUCATION OF THE INDIAN PUBLIC

It must be remembered that it was not just members of the Hindu right-wing
parties and their avowed supporters but also a large number of Indians
outside that circle who were outraged by Advani’s remarks. Indeed, since
the partition of 1947 in which British India was divided into two, with the
creation of the Muslim majority nation of Pakistan, there has been a long
legacy of politically ‘educating’ the Indian public into disparaging Jinnah.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah was born in 1876, became Pakistan’s first
governor-general on 14 August 1947 and died in 1948. But his
contemporaries were never exactly sure who he was. To his opponents he
was a megalomaniacal, arrogant and self-serving politician. But to his
admirers he was the Quaid-e-Azam, a man of elegance, vast intellect and
high-minded determination who promoted valiantly the cause of India’s
Muslims. To the end of his life, Jinnah’s reputation remained as mutable
as his personality was enigmatic. In his early career he was famously
celebrated, even by figures who later criticized him, for being the
‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim’ unity, as Advani reminded us in Karachi.
Educated as a westernized liberal Indian on whose shoulders religion sat
lightly, by the late 1930s he metamorphosed radically into a politician
who would deploy the Islamic card in anti-colonial Indian politics.
By 1947 adulation and condemnation were divided broadly along
national lines, with Pakistanis celebrating Jinnah as a national champion
234 History Workshop Journal

and Indians singling him out to bear the sole responsibility for the
vivisection of the motherland.4 For most Indians Jinnah belongs not to
the story of their ‘struggle for freedom’ from British rule but to another
illegitimate and deviant history that led to partition and Pakistan. To use
Sunil Khilnani’s apt words, in Indian minds, Jinnah remains unassimilated
as ‘a perpetual interloper’.5 The emergence of an organized movement of
anti-colonial resistance in India is frequently traced to the Indian National
Congress, established in December 1885. Most Muslims, however, who
formed a quarter of India’s population, remained aloof from it. Indeed, the

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reformer Syed Ahmed Khan (1817–98) had warned that political activism
by a community lagging educationally and economically behind the Hindu
majority would mean its eventual obliteration. In projecting Muslims and
Hindus as two nations, Khan did not oppose the idea of an Indian nation
as much as he sought to trump the majoritarianism he saw embedded in the
nationalism of the Hindu-dominated Congress. This, he believed, threatened
to treat Muslims as a perpetual ‘minority’.
Imperial systems of control through a balance between communities also
lent support to the idea that Muslim interests needed separate representa-
tion. In 1906 some Muslim leaders, with colonial encouragement, demanded
separate electorates and later that year established the All India Muslim
League. While regional, linguistic, class and sectarian divergences militated
against a unitary conception of the Muslim community, this construction of
the political category of ‘Indian Muslim’ encouraged emphasis on religious
identity to make demands from the colonial state.
This was the backdrop to Jinnah’s revival of the two-nation theory in the
late 1930s. In elections held in 1937 to create fully Indian ministries in the
eleven provinces of British India, the Congress had won majorities in eight
and the League in none. Beginning his political career in the Congress,
Jinnah had little personal interest in the politics of religion. But the League’s
electoral debacle sent him in search of some way to unite the interests of
Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces, where separate electorates had
ensured the League’s only successes, with those in provinces where they
formed majorities but where cross-communal regional parties held sway.
Religion provided a common thread, and claiming that Muslim India
constituted a ‘nation’ offered a viable strategy to argue for equal
representation with ‘Hindu India’ in any central government institutions.
At no point did Jinnah view ‘Pakistan’ so defined as incompatible with
a federal or confederal state structure encompassing a united India. In the
end the rejection by Congress of the British Cabinet Mission’s proposals
of 1946, which protected Muslim interests through powerful provinces that
could discipline the centre, extinguished the last hopes for an undivided
independent India. The British transferred power to Pakistan on 14 August
1947 and to India a day later.
However, this account involves a revisionist perspective that is still largely
confined to relatively small numbers of the reading public in institutions
 Jinnah and the Demise of a Hindu Politician 235

of higher learning in South Asia and abroad. Insofar as the ‘masses’ of

Indians are concerned their understanding of history and the anti-colonial
struggle comes from other sources.
Since the endeavour of the then BJP-led government, begun in 2000,
to ‘saffronize’ school text-books (that is to infuse them with lessons more
compatible with the ideology of political Hinduism, saffron being the colour
associated with Hindu nationalism), a great deal of attention has been
directed towards the discipline of history. It is the arena in which battles
have been fought for the minds of Indians. What is often forgotten

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is that ‘secular nationalist’ historians themselves had earlier produced
less-than-balanced historiographies as far as the Muslim League and Jinnah
are concerned. Bipan Chandra is the author of Modern India,6 one of the
textbooks the BJP wanted to replace. An influential work that got not only
batches of English-reading high-schoolers through their board examinations
but probably also large numbers of candidates through the entrance
examinations for the powerful Indian civil services, it is worth examining
how it treats Jinnah and his politics.
The world sketched by Chandra is inhabited by a variety of heroes and
rogues ranged against each other. Among the latter, as might be expected,
the British colonial state looms large. And among the former, the Congress
is most prominent. Remarkably, every localized protest (of peasants,
of workers or of tribal groups for instance) is mustered into a single
sequence that projects the Congress as their chief inspiration and impresario
whether or not these rebellions had anything to do with it. Besides the
imperial government, other villains consisted of ‘communalist’ Indians.
Communalism was conjured as the pejorative opposite of secularism and
equated with separatism so that the roots of partition can already be drawn
back to the late nineteenth century in the thinking of Syed Ahmed Khan.
In explaining the ‘growth of communalism’ among Indian Muslims,
Chandra regards as critical the absence of a Muslim middle class equipped
with modern western education, in contrast with the Hindus. In a
community dominated by reactionary landed elites, the Muslim ‘masses’
were seen as putty in the hands of their leaders, mostly loyal to the British,
who deployed religious separatism to advance their own narrow interests.7
There is a mild sense of discomfort displayed in regard to Syed Ahmed Khan
in that Chandra cannot deny that as late as 1883 even he had spoken
of an Indian nation in the singular. It was only after the formation of the
Congress that his stance shifted and that he declared that Hindus and
Muslims formed two nations in India. Bipan Chandra reconciles this
transition not by explaining the changing political context that Syed Ahmed
was responding to, but by suggesting an inexplicable irrationality that
seems to have gripped even otherwise reasonable Muslims. Portrayed as
a misguided fear of the Congress, Syed Ahmed’s views are described as
‘of course . . . without any basis in reality’.8 In this rendering, Jinnah is linked
seamlessly to an unproblematized Syed Ahmed. And if partition and
236 History Workshop Journal

Pakistan are already pre-figured in this story, then Jinnah is also already
excised from the history of Indians and their anti-colonial struggle.
According to Chandra, it was the Muslim League’s electoral defeat in
1937 that led the party with Jinnah at its helm to propound ‘the unscientific
and unhistorical theory that Hindus and Muslims were two separate
nations which could never live together’ and that brought forth the
bloodbath of 1947.9
The difference between Chandra’s book and the ‘saffronized’ account
produced under the auspices of the BJP is that he condemns both Hindu

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and Muslim communalists. However, this does not make the reading of
Muslim politics outlined above any less problematic. Contemporary India,10
a textbook produced for teenagers in the ninth school grade, presents the
Hindu right’s reading of the anti-colonial struggle. What is striking is the
absence of any mention of Hindu ‘communalists’. Furthermore, Sir Syed
Ahmed Khan is introduced in a section titled ‘Emergence of Muslim League’
[sic],11 which is then described as the chief instigator of the violent partition,
despite the fact that Syed Ahmed had been dead a full eight years
before the party’s formation. Jinnah is marked early as a self-centredly
ambitious and anti-national politician in the discussion of the Nagpur
session of the Congress in 1920: it is said he left the party because he was
unable to tolerate his ‘losing ground with the emergence of Gandhi in
the Indian politics’ [sic].12 This treatment is strangely reminiscent of the
portrayal in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film ‘Gandhi’ in which a churlish,
monocled, Jinnah is ever resentful of and constantly pitted against
the saintly eponymous protagonist. Conveniently omitted in the textbook
is that Jinnah had quit the Congress that year in protest against
the ‘dangerous’ melding of religion with politics when Gandhi chose to
align anti-colonial protest with a Muslim demand for the defence of the
Ottoman sultan against the post First-World-War dismemberment of his
empire. From this skewed portrayal it is hardly unexpected that the
narrative moves inexorably to place the full blame of partition on Jinnah.
Thus we are told that:

The Congress, which never wanted the country’s division on communal

lines, had to accept this plan because Jinnah had made it clear that
he will not accept anything short of independent Pakistan for the
Muslims . . . The bitterness created by the Muslim League produced
dangerous results. The common people were subjected to senseless
brutalities. Nearly five lakh [500,000] people died and millions lost their
homes and hearths. Gandhi and other leaders, who had always fought for
the Hindu-Muslim unity, were the most disillusioned persons. They did
try their best to control the situation, but with little success . . . It was
indeed a difficult moment for the Indians. They had never imagined that
they would attain independence amidst unprecedented tragedies, coupled
with the country’s partition on communal lines.13
 Jinnah and the Demise of a Hindu Politician 237

Noteworthy in this telling is that partition was ‘a difficult moment for

Indians’ – Pakistanis presumably were only the perpetrators of ‘senseless
brutalities’. At any rate, this interpretation of Jinnah’s legacy is a far cry
from Advani’s amendment of June 2005 and it is scarcely surprising that this
about turn should have astonished so many in India.

THE BJP AND ITS POLITICS

Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948 by a Hindu hard-liner,

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Nathuram Godse, was a dramatic reminder of the existence of a Hindu
nationalism in place since the Hindu Mahasabha’s foundation in 1915.
Though obscured by the Congress in the anti-colonial movement, the
two shared many members and ideals. Hindu nationalism, inspired by
V. D. Savarkar’s idea of ‘Hindutva’ (Hinduness) defining the core of
the Indian nation, acquired a militant edge with the founding, in 1925, of the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS was and remains a formally
apolitical group with a paramilitary aspect which propounds aggressively
anti-Muslim ideas. Driven into the shadows after Gandhi’s assassination,
by the 1980s the Hindu right reorganized itself sufficiently for the Bharatiya
Janata Party to lead a national coalition government from 1998 to 2004.
This recuperation was enabled partly by the tendency of Congress,
particularly in the 1980s, to buttress its electoral base by whipping up
fears that national unity was threatened by religious minorities (the Sikhs
in Punjab and Kashmiri Muslims). Such espousal of a majoritarian
nationalism made ideological room for the BJP. To expand beyond its
core base – upper caste, middle and lower class, urban and semi-urban,
from the Hindi-speaking north – the BJP’s rhetoric downplayed class and
caste difference and emphasized Hindu religious unity. Muslims provided
convenient targets against which to mobilize. With the insurgency in
Kashmir ‘confirming’ their ‘inherent disloyalty’, from 1990 the BJP also
made a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya – allegedly built over a temple
marking the birthplace of the Hindu deity Ram – symbolic of all the
majority’s woes. Though Hindu activists destroyed the Ayodhya mosque in
December 1992, the campaign to build a temple on the site remains central
to the Sangh Parivar’s programme.
The political scientist Amrita Basu has highlighted a critical dialectical
tension within the BJP in its search to reconcile two often contradictory
trends: one pushing it to act as a militant social movement and the other to
function as a moderate political party.14 The first aspect has led it to focus
on an uncompromising ideology of Hindutva. In contrast, as a political
party seeking electoral success the BJP has found itself forced to broaden its
agenda beyond the single issue of seeking empowerment through Hindutva.
As Basu further contends, the BJP’s ‘cultivation of the apparently moderate
Atal Behari Vajpayee’ as its prime ministerial candidate at the same time
as it also put forward Advani as his more militant second in command
238 History Workshop Journal

(as minister of home affairs and then also deputy prime minister) was
‘symptomatic of its double speak’.15 Although Basu’s survey ends in 2000,
it is clear that the ‘alternating cycles’ of ‘militant social movement and
moderate political party’ that she sees as characterizing the BJP’s history are
still salient and seem to have reasserted themselves after the party’s defeat
in national elections in May 2004.
Indeed, since then the Hindu right seems to have become embroiled in
a frenzy of ‘cannibalizing’ itself, unveiling a variety of different power
struggles not only among the younger generation of the BJP but also

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between the party on the one hand and its allies, the RSS and the VHP, on
the other. One of the lowest points was reached when K. Sudarshan, the
chief of the RSS, suggested in April 2005 that it was time for Vajpayee and
Advani to step down and make room for younger leaders, letting loose the
ambitions of a number of party members eager for a more prominent role.
Part of the BJP’s difficulty stems from the confusion over how to explain
their electoral trouncing. While the RSS and the VHP suggest this was the
result of the party leadership having abandoned the old Hindutva issues that
had built its constituency, such as the rebuilding of the Ayodhya temple,
others seem to blame it on the party having gone too far in that direction
and urge a more pragmatic position. However, as Amrita Basu has argued,
whenever the BJP has sought to espouse a less exclusionary and more
centrist political agenda, it has had to contend with the RSS, which has
generally been ‘intolerant of political pluralism’.16 Yet not only had the 2002
pogroms against Muslims in the BJP-ruled state of Gujarat in western India
alienated large numbers, the party’s ‘India Shining’ election slogan had
failed resoundingly with poorer voters who felt that economic reforms
had brought them no gains, benefiting only the middle and upper classes.
These were all indications that it was time for a change of tack.
Furthermore, beginning with the BJP’s own efforts in January 2004 to
discuss a wide array of divisive issues, there has been a growing détente
between India and Pakistan. By February 2005, the two governments
took the unprecedented decision to begin a bus service (finally started in
April of that year) across the cease-fire line that has divided Kashmir since
1947. And in March 2005, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf,
reviled not too long ago as the architect of the near-war of Kargil in 1999
and accused of fostering ‘cross-border’ terrorism, was not only invited by
the Indian government to watch the cricket test series being played by the
two usually fractious neighbours, but he and large numbers of Pakistani
fans were received by a warm host population.
This is the broader context within which we must place Advani’s remarks
about Jinnah. Looking for a way not only to revive the electoral fortunes of
the BJP but also to present himself as a viable prime ministerial candidate,
Advani may have aimed through his visit to Pakistan to reinvent himself
as the new moderate face of the Hindu right.17 In which case, however,
the gambit appears to have been less than successful. A grave error was his
 Jinnah and the Demise of a Hindu Politician 239

failure to take his party members into his confidence which, given the
divisions within the Hindu right, unleashed those forces inclined to oppose
him in the BJP, the RSS and the VHP. Even more fatally, perhaps,
he appears to have misread the current thawing of relations between India
and Pakistan as a sign that Mohammed Ali Jinnah could now be safely
reappraised to suit his political ambition. Given the wide condemnation
heaped on Advani, it is clear that cricket matches, border crossings and
warmer receptions of the Pakistani president notwithstanding, Indians
fed for fifty-nine years on a historiography that has held Jinnah responsible

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for the traumatic partition of 1947 are not yet ready to burnish his
reputation. That will have to await a more thoroughgoing revisiting of
nationalist historiographies, whether of the Hindu or Congress ilk, and
cannot be brought forth through a few lines penned in a visitors’ book.

Mridu Rai is assistant professor of modern south Asian history at Yale

University and is the author of Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam,
Rights, and the History of Kashmir, 2004.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Jaswant Singh had announced that his visit, on which he would be accompanied by
a delegation of eighty-six pilgrims was ‘purely for religious purposes’, to visit a variety of
Hindu, Muslim and Sikh shrines in Pakistan and that it had no ‘political’ purpose. He had
added in justification of his decision to visit the Jinnah mausoleum: ‘He is the Quaid-e-Azam
and it is my duty to go there. It is my personal visit, and it would be against the tenets of
hospitality to decline a visit to the mausoleum’. He further let it be known that he was currently
engaged in writing a political account of the Quaid in which he was concerned to correct the
historical record. The visit to Pakistan would help him to do so, although, of course, this visit
must clearly be understood to be one undertaken really ‘for religious purposes’.
2 A more extreme instance of this was the characterization of Advani in 2003 by
M. Venkiah Naidu, a second-rung leader of the BJP, as ‘loh purush’ (the iron man).
3 The BJP, renamed from the Bharatiya Jana Singh in 1980, has been long tied to the
Rashtirya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or the National Volunteer Union, a militant
Hindu organization established in 1925 and considered the ideological core of the right-wing
Hindu movement that also includes the religious organization known as the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) or the World Hindu Council founded in 1964. Together the RSS and its
affiliates are known as the Sangh Parivar (the ‘family’ of organizations).
4 Had there been any among the approximately forty-million Muslims left behind in
India after partition who might have admired Jinnah, they would in all likelihood have been
forced to mute such approval. See Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim Be an Indian?’,
Comparative Studies in Society and History 41: 4, October 1999, pp. 608–29.
5 Sunil Khilnani, ‘The Ides of August’, Outlook, 22 August 2005.
6 Bipan Chandra, Modern India, New Delhi (National Council of Educational Research
and Training, first published 1971), eleventh edition 1986.
7 Chandra, Modern India, pp. 249–56.
8 Chandra, Modern India, p. 250.
9 Chandra, Modern India, p. 296.
10 Hari Om, Savita Sinha, Supta Das and Neerja Rashmi, Contemporary India: Textbook
in Social Sciences for Class IX, New Delhi (National Council of Educational Research and
Training), 2002.
11 Om and others, Contemporary India, pp. 26–7.
12 Om and others, Contemporary India, p. 36.
13 Om and others, Contemporary India, p. 57.
240 History Workshop Journal

14 Amrita Basu, ‘The Dialectics of Hindu Nationalism’, in The Success of India’s

Democracy, ed. Atul Kohli, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 163–89.
15 Basu, ‘Dialectics of Hindu Nationalism’, p. 180.
16 Basu, ‘Dialectics of Hindu Nationalism’, p. 181.
17 In an interview he gave to the newsmagazine India Today, Advani more than hinted
that he nurtures prime ministerial ambitions, even after his fiasco in Pakistan and his
resignation as party president: India Today, 16 Jan. 2006, p. 46.

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