Muhammad Ali Jinnah - Revision history

Jyoti: /* A lean phase */

2022-02-16T19:55:57Z

‎A lean phase

Jyoti: /* Patriotism towards India */

2021-11-30T19:28:30Z

‎Patriotism towards India

Jyoti at 19:27, 30 November 2021

2021-11-30T19:27:43Z

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Jyoti at 16:48, 3 November 2017

2017-11-03T16:48:20Z

Pdewan at 16:03, 30 June 2015

2015-06-30T16:03:27Z

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[[Category:India |J ]]
[[Category:Politics |J ]]
[[Category:Pakistan |J ]]

=A lean phase=
[http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com//Article.aspx?eid=31808&articlexml=How-Jinnah-lost-his-love-and-political-relevance-28062015017018 ''The Times of India''], Jun 28 2015

'' Excerpted from `Midnight's Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India's Partition and Asia' with permission from Penguin India ''

Before he rose to forge Pakistan, the Muslim League leader suffered a humiliating fall from grace, writes Nisid Hajari in a new book

In the summer of 1916, the man who would go on to found Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, ran up against one of India's most stubborn communal prejudices. His good friend Sir Dinshaw Petit had invited him to escape Bombay's suffocating heat and spend several weeks in cool Darjeeling. Sir Dinshaw was a Parsi, and heir to a textile fortune. More importantly , he had a 16-year-old daughter -a sinuous beauty named Rattanbai, or “Ruttie.“ Jinnah would have been hardpressed to ignore her presence. She wore gossamer-thin saris that clung to her body and had a ready , flirtatious laugh. One prim memsahib described her as “a complete minx.“
==Ruttie==
Like many Indians, Jinnah had been married young to someone of his parents' choosing, a 14-year-old Gujarati village girl named Emibai. A year later she had died while he was away studying in London. He told friends that he hadn't kissed a woman since then (although, hearing that particular tale, the irrepressible poetess Sarojini Naidu trilled, “Liar, liar, liar!“). Jinnah left no record of what transpired between him and Ruttie amid the emerald tea plantations of Darjeeling, but clearly a romance blossomed.

When they returned to Bombay at the end of the summer, Jinnah asked Sir Dinshaw how he felt about intermarriage.The Parsi didn't realize what his Muslim friend was angling at. A capital idea, Petit declared -just the thing to help break down the foolish barriers that divided Indians from one another. Jinnah's next question horrified him, though. The nearly 40-year-old Muslim marrying his teenage daughter? The idea was “absurd!“ Sir Dinshaw not only refused but took out a restraining order against Jinnah.

Jinnah was not to be discouraged, however, either personally or politically .He and Ruttie continued to correspond secretly . Like many of the youth in her circle she was enthralled by the romance of the nationalist movement, and that winter she eagerly followed the news coming out of the graceful Mughal city of Lucknow, capital of the United Provinces, where Jinnah had helped arrange for the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress to hold their annual sessions simultaneously. For the first time the two parties agreed on a common set of demands to make of the British -what became known as the “Lucknow Pact.“ Jinnah won for Muslims a guaranteed percentage of seats in any future legislature, among other safeguards that would ensure they were not perpetually outvoted by the Hindu majority .

The Lucknow Pact raised Jinnah's political stock sky-high; he seemed a shoo-in to become president not just of the League, but perhaps even the much larger Congress one day . A few months later, soon after Ruttie had turned 18, she and Jinnah scandalized Bombay's Parsi community by eloping. They quickly became one of the city's most glamorous couples, cruising down Marine Drive in Jinnah's convertible at sunset each night, her hair loose in the wind.

Then Jinnah threw it all away . Just as his political career was reaching its zenith, the spotlight shifted to another Gujarati lawyer, born just 30 miles from Jinnah's ancestral village. In 1915 a 45-yearold Mahatma Gandhi had returned to India from South Africa, where he had lived for the past two decades, and where his efforts to organize South Africa's Indian immigrant community had made him a celebrity .

Gandhi dubbed his strategy satyag raha -literally , “soul force“ -and he now proposed replicating his methods in India. Jinnah balked. He did not challenge the principle behind satyagraha -the idea that Indians should peacefully refuse to cooperate with their British overlords.“I say I am fully convinced of non-cooper ation,“ Jinnah declared at a contentious Congress meeting in September 1920. But he did not believe that the Indian masses were educated or disciplined enough to ensure their protests remained nonviolent. He thought Congress leaders needed to prepare their followers first. “Will you not give me time for this?“ he asked the crowd at the meeting, plaintively .

Not all of Jinnah's motivations were so high-minded, of course. He was unquestionably a snob: later, when tens of thousands of Muslims turned out at ral lies to see him, he would recoil from shaking hands with his own supporters. He also found Gandhi's appeal to the largely Hindu masses dangerously crude. At his evening prayer meetings, the Mahatma would frame his political arguments using parables from Hindu fables; he described his vision for independent India as a “Ram Rajya“ -a mythical state of ideal government under the god Ram. All the chanting and meditating that accompanied Gandhi's sermons seemed to Jinnah like theatrics.

What is almost never acknowledged, though, is that Jinnah worried less about Hindus than about the danger of inflaming religious passions among Muslims.At the time mullahs across the subcontinent were threatening to launch a jihad if the British, who had defeated the Ottomans in World War I, deposed the Turkish Sultan -the caliph, or leader, of the world's Sunnis. Led by a pair of fiery brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat Ali, this “Khilafat“ movement had attracted an unsavory mob of supporters. The acerbic Bengali writer Nirad C. Chaudhuri remembers Khilafat volunteers as “recruited from the lowest Muslim riffraff...brandishing their whips at people.“

Jinnah had no sympathy for these rough-edged Muslims, or for their fanatic cause. He feared that their rage would inevitably turn from the British to Hindus. Gandhi, on the other hand, threw his support behind the Khilafat movement: in turn Muslim votes gave him the slight majority in Congress he needed to launch his satyagraha. Years later Gandhi recalled Jinnah telling him that he had “ruined politics in India by dragging up a lot of unwholesome elements in Indian life and giving them political prominence, that it was a crime to mix up politics and religion the way he had done.“

Nowadays most Indian accounts put down Jinnah's opposition to Gandhi to jealousy . At a follow-up Congress meeting in December 1920, they often note, Jinnah drew jeers by referring to “Mister“ Gandhi in his speech, rather than the more respectful “Mahatma.“ In fact, although he did slip once or twice more, Jinnah did switch to using “Mahatma.“ What he absolutely refused to do was refer to Khilafat leader Mohammed Ali as “Maulana,“ a term reserved for distinguished Islamic scholars. Jinnah was not about to encourage what he saw as religious demagoguery . “If you will not allow me the liberty to ... speak of a man in the language which I think is right, I say you are denying me the liberty which you are asking for,“ he vainly protested. The crowd's howls chased him off the stage.

The humiliating scene marked the beginning of Jinnah's long slide into irrelevance as a national political figure.Under Gandhi's influence a new, less august crowd dominated Congress meetings -middle-class and lower-middle-class men and women, clad in saris and kurtas and sitting on the ground cross-legged rather than in chairs. Jinnah still got upset when his bearer laid out the wrong cufflinks for him. He no longer fit in.

Jinnah did not disappear from the political scene, but as Gandhi's Congress grew larger and larger, the League leader was pushed further and further to the margins. He became what he had never wanted to be -a purely Muslim politician, reduced to petitioning for concessions for his community . By the end of the 1920s, the League had begun to break up into factions, and Jinnah's influence had become negligible.

This was not the illustrious nationalist hero with whom the impressionable Ruttie had fallen in love. After giving birth to a daughter, Dina, in August 1919, Ruttie had plunged into a half-baked mysticism, taking up crystals and seances. She may have begun using drugs like opium to combat a painful intestinal ailment. The differences in the couple's ages and temperaments became too obvious to ignore.“She drove me mad,“ Jinnah told one friend. “She was a child and I should never have married her.“ In early 1928, Ruttie moved into a suite at Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel, leaving Jinnah home with eight-year-old Dina. That spring, visiting Paris with her mother, Ruttie fell into an unexplained coma and almost died.

While she recovered, their relationship did not. Two months later, on February 19, 1929, Ruttie fell unconscious in her room at the Taj Hotel. She died the next day , on her 29th birthday .

Most accounts say only that the circumstances of Ruttie's demise were “mysterious.“ But her daughter Dina put it more bluntly: “My mother committed suicide,“ she told Jinnah's first biographer. The embarrassed author left that nugget out of his hagiography . Still, even at the time rumors about the death were rife. Jinnah never wanted to be reminded of his private tragedy , which had become so humiliatingly public. He packed away Ruttie's jades and silks and volumes of Oscar Wilde in boxes and rarely mentioned her again.

There was nothing left for Jinnah in India. In its two decades of existence, the Muslim League had accumulated fewer than 2,000 members, most of whom did not pay their dues. Creditors tried to seize what little furniture remained at League headquarters to sell at auction. Parts of the factionalized party did not even recognize Jinnah's leadership.

In 1931 Jinnah moved to London with Dina and his spinster sister Fatima. He refused to answer questions about when-or if--he would return to India. “I seem,“ he told an Indian journalist over lunch at Simpson's, with startling candor, “to have reached a dead end.“

@@ Line 18: / Line 18: @@
 In the summer of 1916, the man who would go on to found Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, ran up against one of India's most stubborn communal prejudices. His good friend Sir Dinshaw Petit had invited him to escape Bombay's suffocating heat and spend several weeks in cool Darjeeling. Sir Dinshaw was a Parsi, and heir to a textile fortune. More importantly , he had a 16-year-old daughter -a sinuous beauty named Rattanbai, or “Ruttie.“ Jinnah would have been hardpressed to ignore her presence. She wore gossamer-thin saris that clung to her body and had a ready , flirtatious laugh. One prim memsahib described her as “a complete minx.“
 ==Ruttie==
 [[File: jinnah.jpg|Graphic courtesy: [http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com//Article.aspx?eid=31808&articlexml=How-Jinnah-lost-his-love-and-political-relevance-28062015017018 ''The Times of India'']|frame|500px]]
@@ Line 53: / Line 54: @@
 In 1931 Jinnah moved to London with Dina and his spinster sister Fatima. He refused to answer questions about when-or if--he would return to India. “I seem,“ he told an Indian journalist over lunch at Simpson's, with startling candor, “to have reached a dead end.“
 =Patriotism towards India =

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 =Patriotism towards India =
 ==Sudheendra Kulkarni’s argument==
 [https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/was-jinnah-an-indian-patriot-of-course-he-was/articleshow/87488672.cms  Sudheendra Kulkarni, Nov 2, 2021: ''The Times of India'']
@@ Line 113: / Line 155: @@
 The writer served as an aide to former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and is the founder of the Forum for a New South Asia
-==When Jinnah agreed to a united India==
+[[Category:India|J MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH
-[https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/when-jinnah-agreed-to-a-united-india/articleshow/85509567.cms  Saurabh Banerjee, August 22, 2021: ''The Times of India'']
+MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH]]
+[[Category:Pakistan|J MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH
-As tributes go, Stanley Wolpert’s praise for Mohammad Ali Jinnah was gushing. ‘Few individuals,’ wrote Wolpert in his biography of Jinnah, ‘significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.’ Except, in June 1946, Jinnah agreed to a plan which would neither have modified the map, nor created a nation-state.
+MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH]]
+[[Category:Politics|J MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH
-The Muslim League had largely been an elitist party but all that changed in 1940. The other change that year was Jinnah’s increasingly shrill pitch for the creation of Pakistan. On March 25, 1940, at the end of the Lahore session of the League, Jinnah gave a press conference. ‘The declaration of our goal,’ he said, ‘which we have definitely laid down, of the division of India, is in my opinion a landmark in the future history of the Mussalmans of India…. I thoroughly believe that the idea of one united India is a dream.’
+MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH]]
-−
-Later that year, he told the Delhi Muslim Students’ Federation: ‘The Hindus must give up their dream of a Hindu raj and agree to divide India into Hindu homeland and Muslim homeland. Today we are prepared to take only one-fourth of India and leave three-fourth to them. Pakistan was our goal today, for which the Muslims of India will live for and if necessary die for. It is not a counter for bargaining.’
-−
-But in 1946, the same Jinnah was willing to accept a united India — minus Pakistan. How did that happen?
-−
-The War had ended. The last great imperialist, Winston Churchill, had been swept out of office in a Labour landslide. It was clear that Britain would have to leave India. So, Clement Attlee, then the British PM, cleared a three-member Cabinet Mission to visit India and try and hammer out a solution. Maybe it was already too late, but this would be the last attempt at an orderly withdrawal.
-Secretary of State for India, Lord Freddie Pethick-Lawrence, was the nominal head of this mission. But the heavyweight was Sir Stafford Cripps, whose earlier mission to find a solution in 1942 had come to nothing. This time round Cripps was determined to go down in history as the person who had finally found the Answer to the ‘India Question’. To balance out these two public-school socialists, Attlee picked as the third member, the First Lord of the Admiralty, AV Alexander, a working-class Labour leader and a Chelsea supporter who loved beer and poetry.
-−
-The mission left Britain on March 19, 1946. This would be Cripps’ third visit to India. For Pethick-Lawrence, it would be the second. For years, he had written a weekly column for Annie Beasant’s ‘New India’. His wife, a suffragette, was a member of the India Conciliation Group, set up on Gandhi’s advice after the Second Round Table Conference. Cripps’ stepmother, too, was a member of this group. To the optimist, it might have seemed a solution was in the offing.
-−
-For Britain one thing was very clear. India should remain united. Because to divide India would be to divide its armed forces. How would one do that, without a very weak Pakistani army which would not be able to defend its western frontier?
-−
-By April 10, the mission had drawn up its plans. There would be two schemes. Scheme B would be the choice of the last resort, if there was absolutely no way of getting Indian players to accept Scheme A.
-−
-Broadly, Scheme A was a plan for a loose federation of Hindu-majority, Muslim-majority and princely states. It would be a three-tier system of government. At the top would be a small central ‘union’ government, which would look after communications, defence and foreign affairs. There would be equal representation of Hindus and Muslims at the centre. At the bottom would be the individual provinces. In the middle would be a grouping of provinces with a large degree of autonomy and power to secede from the union in the future. One group was to comprise Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and the North-West Frontier Province. Another, Bengal and Assam. And the third was the rest of India.
-Scheme B was to divide India into ‘Hindustan’ and a truncated Pakistan, a plan which Britain wanted to avoid at all cost.
-−
-The mission spent about three and a half months in India. Pethick-Lawrence managed to faint in the summer heat when the mercury touched 46 degrees Celsius, and then apologised for his ‘terrible weakness’. Cripps came down with colitis and spent some days in hospital. Alexander struck up a friendship with viceroy and governor general, the one-eyed Archibald Wavell, and bonded over poetry and piano. Hectic meetings took place in the summer heat and Wavell suspected Pethick-Lawrence and Cripps were being soft on Congress. In fact, he was appalled when Gandhi asked for water during a meeting, Pethick-Lawrence himself got up to fetch water, and when he was taking some time to return, Cripps went out to get water for Gandhi.
-−
-And then in May, they all escaped to Simla where Cripps, Pethick-Lawrence, Alexander and Wavell met the Indian politicians separately in batches. Gandhi, too, reached Simla in a special train. The stage was set for hard negotiations.
-−
-But there was far too much animosity between the League and the Congress. At the opening session, Jinnah refused to shake hands with Abdul Kalam Azad, calling him a ‘stooge’ of the Hindus. By May 12, Pethick-Lawrence declared the Simla session closed. Little progress had been made.
-−
-But the mission issued a statement. They declared the creation of a constituent assembly of elected representatives from 11 provinces who would frame a new constitution. They also outlined Scheme A, which explicitly opposed the creation of Pakistan, and made it clear that Pakistan, if created, would be a truncated version of Punjab and Bengal. The ball was now in the court of Jinnah and Congress.
-−
-On June 6, 1946, Jinnah agreed to Scheme A. This was his best bet, even though it would lead to speculation that Pakistan had, after all, been a bargaining chip for him, never mind what he had told students in November 1940. While this would not give him Pakistan now, it would not leave him with a ‘moth-eaten’ state to inherit. Besides, there was always the provision to leave the union in the future. He couldn’t have known that he would be dead in two years’ time.
-−
-Initially, Gandhi seemed willing to go along with this scheme. It would, he said, ‘convert this land of sorrow into one without sorrow and suffering’. But then Congress changed tack and refused to play ball. What did it have to lose? Jinnah could get his truncated lands, and India would be a strong, united country, with a powerful Centre, have its own constitution, its own secular philosophy.
-After that both sides hardened their stance. On August 16, Jinnah gave his call for Direct Action. One riot led to another, and then by mid-August 1947, two countries were born.
-−
-Wolpert’s superman, MA Jinnah, a Khoja Shia by birth, a London lawyer in Saville Row suits puffing away at his Craven A cigarettes, a man who had seduced the young daughter of his Parsi businessman friend and then married her, a man who built his politics around Islam but loved his ham sandwiches, a man who once talked of Hindu-Muslim unity, thus ended up being the father of a Sunni nation-state.
-−
-Sources: Jinnah: His Successes, Failures And Role In History by Ishtiaq Ahmed, Keeping The Jewel In The Crown by Walter Reid, Liberty Or Death by Patrick French
-−
-Saurabh Banerjee is Associate Editor, The Times of India.
-−
 =See also=

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:48, 3 November 2017
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	In 1931 Jinnah moved to London with Dina and his spinster sister Fatima. He refused to answer questions about when-or if--he would return to India. “I seem,“ he told an Indian journalist over lunch at Simpson's, with startling candor, “to have reached a dead end.“		In 1931 Jinnah moved to London with Dina and his spinster sister Fatima. He refused to answer questions about when-or if--he would return to India. “I seem,“ he told an Indian journalist over lunch at Simpson's, with startling candor, “to have reached a dead end.“
		+
		+	=See also=
		+	[[Dina Wadia]]