Jinnah Declassified
Most of the academics, politically disposed individuals and the journalists who operate from New-Delhi usually take short cuts to make both ends meet. The historians and the sociologists act along the path of least political resistance to hide the truth without realising that if a person hides his past he has no future. It is the same with a state or a nation. The political class started in 1947 with the promise of creating a castles society but ended up with providing the casts and sub-casts constitutional guarantees. Now every person in India has a cast certificate, a certificate of hope – often a source of disappointment. Same is the case with the historians. In the race for writing the past history, they jump from boulder to boulder to avoid writing about those episodes which are politically forbidden. The basic assumption that we can write the political history of a sub-continent is a juvenile pipe dream. Continents and sub- continents display the magnificence of their civilizational and cultural histories on their own. Our cultural history is a very big cloud of satellite cultures dancing in harmony, enriching each other’s refrain and ethos. Writing about Khyber, the Punjab and Panipat does not cover the history of India. Next from where can the Hindu scholarship borrow the guts, humility and honesty to speak about the truth? For example they brush away the contribution made by Clive in sending the pretence of Moghul power to; using the Marxist lingo, lumber room of history. No Clive meant no end to the bickering of the legatees of feudal lords and no political consolidation of India. No political consolidation meant no freedom struggle. No freedom struggle meant no Ghandi becoming Father of the Nation and no Rabri Devi becoming the Chief Minister of Bihar!
The one upmanship of writing correct history has made us emotionally the prisoners of the story of freedom struggle. That is why the graciousness and decency with which we should interpret our recent history is missing in our political narrative. In 1947 we had a choice to construct the political narrative on hard though painful facts, more so because the price was already extracted by the situation in terms of mass casualties and migrations. But we make a fetish of everything even of the foolish and laughable assertions. The careerist individuals and intellectuals instead of encouraging the political class to take the risk of approaching our needs for truthful interpretation of freedom struggle chose to be guided by a cocktail political ideology. The result is before our own eyes. A handful of people, who have trapped themselves in a web of deceit, are blackmailing a country of the size of India- really a humiliating scenario.
As I look back and scan the historical horizon, I can’t get away from the conviction that it was Clive, who sowed the seeds for deliverance of the Indian masses, and that too in Bengal, when he recorded victory in the battle of Plassey. This yielded the fruits in 1947. Ghandi carried the harvest home while Jinnah carried the fodder to his new home to celebrate the creation of a new state and lighted the bonfire. Jinnah not only carried the fodder but also the land lords and their terrorist armies, ring leaders and rapists (confirm from the UN) to Pakistan. He also carried the future dictators and demagogues, cons and convicts, hustlers and hecklers and low lives and bulk of political nuisance, away from India. It was a good riddance. Jinnah incidentally lifted the intolerable burden off the shoulders of the Indian peasantry, liberated the ordinary Muslim population, who decided to live in India free from their tormentors. The Muslim population in India are a very hardworking and creative people. They have already contributed in many ways towards enriching our economy and civilisation. But the redeeming feature of their social interaction is that they polish our manners. Very simple! Minorities in all countries play a vital social role in balancing the warring factions amongst the majority communities. They teach us the virtue of restraint and humility. They provide the judicial systems the courage to stay course and do justice. They are the most sacred human assets and deserve respect and compassion. But the most important thing is that they think. The majorities don’t think. Their leaders think for them. Minorities cannot afford such a luxury. So the minorities serve as the brains of a society. Why aren’t the Kashmiri Muslims a happier lot now, now that the Pandits are out? Even one Pandit in a village housing say, one thousand souls served as an unpaid shrink and a counsellor for the entire village. But Post 1947 how did India treat the minority Muslim population, which rightly decided to stay back at places where their ancestors were buried? The Indian Constitution placed them under check, ensuring that they are chained to the pole with a double lock! It rewarded them the unsolicited Personal Law. It means that they were herded together, and the keys to the locks were handed over to the clergy. The clergy naturally got empowered and started exploiting them in many ways. And when they started discussing real and perceived dangers to Ummah- emanating from Israel, the youth started getting ideas of jihad and sacrifices. Near home Kashmir was always topmost on the list of topics of the clergy’s weekly addresses, all over India. The consequence of brain washing the youth means that when some of them start flexing their muscles on the streets, the civil authorities take over. So the clergy and the state together make a powerful and seductive combination to keep in check a people who, perhaps need not to roam free! The Indian Muslims deserve to be delivered from the clutches of the clergy. They don’t require the crutches of the state or the recommendations of a Sacchar Committee to move forward and succeed in life.
I would like to draw the attention of those who have studied the works of Marx and Engels seriously, to the essay drafted by Engels titled, ‘The origin of Family, Private property and State’. I had read it when I was a student. Engels argues that the basic building block of the society is the family. The family is the fundamental economic unit that brought stability at one point of time in human pre-history. The family, in turn weaved the human tapestry called the society. When the families produced surpluses, the idea of private property emerged. And in order to protect the private property the institution of the state came into existence. The secret of unrest amongst the Muslim population all over the world has the same origin. The institution of family is very weak amongst all societies of the Muslim world except those of the ruling classes and the Houses of Culture. The men approach their women folk with a primitive and abusive mind set. The absence of control of the women over their fecundity renders them useless within a very short span of time. They usually live on sufferance. They produce children with alarming frequency only at the cost of their health. Having become physically weak they are rendered dispensable. The talaq is the dreaded word amongst the female population and once served with the notice; their off- springs are forced on to the streets where they mature early to the detriment of the society at large. In the Muslim matrimonial market more girls than boys of marriageable age are available. For every male there are about two females available for satisfying carnal desires. Thus conditions for invoking the divine right of divorce by the male population are ripe, in the Muslim societies. By allowing the personal law to Muslims, the parting gifts Jinnah gave to the Indian Muslims inadvertently (weakening of feudalism) were promptly taken away from them by the Indian Constitution. The Indian Muslims never deserved the treatment they received from the elected Hindu ruling classes.
Jinnah did not play only the role of a political scavenger of free India. He single handedly gave the nascent Indian State at least 200 years of head start by depriving the institution of feudalism, in the Indo-Gangetic plane of its organisational and human support system. He achieved what no communist revolution could have achieved. He carried the institution of feudalism to its grave in India. On the other hand, with fresh arrivals of cut throat forces from India he enhanced the power of feudalism in Pakistan. The empowered and entrenched institution of feudalism is what makes the civilian governments irrelevant in Pakistan. These governments only serve as femme-de-chamber(s) of the GHQ Rawalpindi. One has only to compare the life span of peasantry in Pakistan, which is 36 years only with the life span of the Indian peasantry which is 59 years to understand the living conditions of peasantry in Pakistan. And if the population of Pakistan is still increasing one can only imagine with what efficiency the women folk have been trapped in a procreating matrix. To have a grasp of what Jinnah accomplished for the Indians, one has to go through the pre-partition land records of the landlords to understand the power and awe feudalism imposed upon the Indian landless peasantry. The elected Hindu rulers of India were left with completing the mopping up operations only, which they failed to accomplish. We are an incredibly incompetent people! Evidence? Yes, we have tons of it. When the Congress failed to deliver on the promise of land reforms, the services of Vinobha Bhave were commissioned to pull wool over the eyes of the gullible masses. This saint moved from village to village asking from the people to donate whatever land they could part with, for distribution amongst the landless peasantry. The people promised him land but very few did actually donate the land by following up their promises by presenting the land papers to the authorities.
But the greatest gift that Jinnah gave to the Indians was that he offered the Indian National Congress a walk over, in the capital. No Pakistan meant no modern India. A united India, in all probability would have by now metamorphosed into an akhand pugnacious Pakistan! The Hindu scholarship who genuflect in the mosque of secularism five times a day do not possess enough common sense to understand that it was clear victory of communalism over Brahmanical theatrics of threats and brinkmanship and last minute retreats, which delivered the baby called modern India.
The bonfire lit by Jinnah in 1947 is still burning in Pakistan. In the light of this fire Indian historians became enlightened and started weaving stories of the past. Now a peculiar situation has been imposed on the academic turf. With every change of regime at the centre, the clamour for writing the correct history becomes shriller. If one party writes the fictional history the other one writes the absurd folk tales. But no intellectual or academic poses the fundamental question: Why write the history at all? What is the need? Unless we fix the contours and the reference planes of the matter under investigation, we cannot write an objective history. Posing a question and understanding the question is more important than solving the problem. Every genuine problem, and that is my conviction, hides the solution just skin deep on its outer shell.
Peroration
In 1996 I got an opportunity to get even with the self-appointed guardians of political morality and civility and continuously exposed the hollowness and low pragmatism of their arguments. Both the national new papers, The Times of India and The Hindustan times respected my rejoinders and published the letters frequently. (I shall have to compile all those incisive letters to editors, to save them for study of the interested parties.) Many writers, amongst them Prof. C P Bhambri –JNU left the field in October 1996. Prafulla Bidwai vacated the field some time later when East Timor received the gift of referendum from the UN. Dr Balveer Arora, the then Director of School of Social Studies JNU became very cautious after I showed him the mirror, post taking part in a seminar at Jammu in the year 2000. I also cultivated some fans if I may allow myself the luxury of saying so. Amongst them was the noble H D Shourie of the common cause fame. He wrote to me twice, requesting me to join his organisation which I could not accept because of my other engagements. The late M V Kamath also respected my analysis on issues which were current at that point of time and frequently wrote back to me. The indomitable Khushwant Singh replied on a twenty five paisa post card to appreciate my write up. I still treasure it.
Before I conclude, I want to relate how a visual observation made me to recollect a very important lesson, life had taught me. I was recently travelling from Kapsherda to Najafgarh, New-Delhi and as soon as the vehicle crossed the Najafgarh drain, I exclaimed. “What a waste!” But the next moment I was filled with joy, “what an opportunity of creating millions of jobs in rural India!” The vast campus of Chawlla camp, I know has great potential for rain water harvesting. I made a mental calculation. If one inch (25mm) of rain falls on an area of one square kilometre of land we can harvest 90% of 2.5 lac litres of the rainfall. But that requires a technique which I have already tested in Udhampur. My harvesting tank of 30,000 litre capacity (it overflows five times a year) supplies approximately 1.5 lac litres of rain water annually to the ground which in turn keeps the nearby hand pump healthy. But who will listen? We Indians are really a blessed people. We measure our successes by the yards we lose!
Let us pray for a bountiful monsoon. Let us conserve every drop of water as it falls from the heavens. The secret of survival is encrypted in a dew drop perilously perched on a leaf of grass; a drop of water, a drop of tear. Pain is the only surplus we humans create.The rest is all false and transient.
