Salil Tripathi on Jinnah

The seeds of the British Raj were planted in three separate coastal settlements- Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. Each grew in territory and became a Presidency with its own Army. It was only after the Mutiny of 1857 that an Indian Army was created. The East India Company was wound up and direct British rule was instituted. This meant that the Viceroy, a political appointee, outranked the Governors of the Presidencies. Thus the Raj was becoming more unitary. The question that arose after the First World War, when anti-Imperialism became the ruling ideology across Asia, was whether the British would hand over power to the Provinces, which may be weakly confederated, or whether the successor State or States would be unitary in nature with a strong Center.

Because of the untimely death of Fazli Husain, who might have been content to rule Punjab as part of loose Indian Federation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who had no powerbase of his own, played a decisive role in creating Pakistan-  a Muslim majority country which came under Army domination- whereas Gandhi, Nehru etc, created India as a Unitary country with a strong center where the Army played no part in politics.

How did Jinnah succeed and was it wise for him to do so? The answer is that Jinnah mobilized Indian Muslims against 'Hindu domination'. What did this mean? Where Muslims were in the majority, they could not be dominated. Only if they were in a minority could this happen. A strong Center could ameliorate the conditions of minorities. But Jinnah could not accept a strong Center because of- you guessed it- Hindu domination. Yet, without a Hindu dominated Center, what use was he? The only reason he had political currency was that the very Tories who had passed the 1935 Act did not want a strong Center- thus keeping residuary powers in the hands of the Viceroy- and so, twisted the arms of Muslim Premiers to project Jinnah as Gandhi's counterpart. 

Gandhi had been dragged into the Second Round Table Conference by Hindu Liberals who wanted a strong center so as to get tariff and exchange rate control to benefit the Industrial sector. But he looked a fool there because the Hindu Liberals could not deliver. Instead, the British 'die-hard' Tories used the Muslims and Dalits and the Princes to turn Gandhi into the big bad wolf who wanted to gobble everything up.

Jinnah had been sidelined earlier but when he re-entered Indian politics it was to take the lead on the vexed question of what the Center would look like and how powerful it would be. But, Jinnah had no home-base of his own. He couldn't rule the roost in a Province. Thus weakening the Center meant leaving himself in the wilderness. Perhaps, if Gandhi hadn't listened to Rajaji in 1944, and hadn't offered Jinnah a post-war referendum re. Pakistan, Jinnah's salience would have diminished. Partition could have been avoided. But, in that case Gandhi would have been merely the leader of a party- a Hindu one- while Jinnah too would have been merely the head of a political combine. Thus, if either man was to be the 'Father of a Country'- not only was Partition necessary, but both had to die quickly afterwards before their abject failure was discovered. The fact is neither was particularly Hindu or Muslim. Only against an Imperial backdrop could they keep up any such pretense. In other word, Jinnah, like Gandhi, was weakest at precisely his moment of victory. If he hadn't died he might have been killed as Liaquat and Gandhi were killed. 

This is not to say either was particularly evil or stupid. By this time, minorities in Muslim areas found themselves subject to attack and forcible conversion. There was an asymmetric aspect to this. For many Muslims, a duty of an Islamic state is to bring about conversion. This was not necessarily the case for Hindus. Thus, a separate state for Muslims was bound, sooner or later, to either expel or forcibly convert non-Muslims. This meant that Partition involved massive ethnic cleansing. Refugees found it in their interest to dispossess the minority across the border so as to make room for themselves.

Jinnah may have hoped that Hindus would quarrel among themselves and that non-Muslim India would be a weak collection of States some of which would retain a Muslim identity. However, the threat he and his Party posed to non-Muslims meant that non-Muslims of the sub-continent put aside their differences to form a strong unitary state. In subsequent decades, Pakistan helped India by attacking it- thus prompting a patriotic upsurge- and then getting defeated and humiliated. Over the last thirty years, Pakistan has gotten poorer than not just India but also Bangladesh- where its Army had conducted a genocide before being defeated and rendered an object of derision.

Jinnah played a role in creating a unitary Pakistan which is dominated by the Army. Those who are linked to the power elite in Pakistan have reason to praise him. He is the founder of their feast. They have done well because of him.

Why would any Indian want to praise Jinnah? The answer is stupidity, deracination, or a profession of virtue signaling.


Consider Salil Tripathi, a Human Rights campaigner and journalist living in New York who writes in Live Mint-

When Narendra Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to an electoral majority in 2014, Indians could still assert that, however flawed, their republic aimed to remain secular, unlike Pakistan, which had chosen to be a theocracy and acted as one.

Pakistan was considered a rogue state by 2014. Obama had sent in troops to kill Osama whom the Pakistanis were sheltering in the garrison town of Abbotabad.

Its per capita Income had fallen well below India. Thus Indians weren't comparing themselves to Pakistan any more than they were comparing themselves to Myanmar or Southern Sudan.

 The word 'secular', in India, had come to mean 'anti-BJP'. But it ceased to mean anything at all after the BJP took power in 1998 and ruled the country successfully for five years before returning to office under Modi a decade later. The fact is the BJP has become the default National party. Indian Secularism is whatever it says it should be.

Sixty-seven years after independence, a younger generation of Indians, impatient for change and growth, sick of corruption and exhausted by what many saw as pious platitudes of secularism, experimented with a seductive leader’s call for development, even if the agenda did not conceal his party’s older ideal, promising “equality" for all and “appeasement to none".

Has Tripathi really forgotten that Vajpayee came to power in 1998? One branch of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was with the BJP, as they have remained, while the other owns the Congress Party- whose fortunes have declined.

What was odd about 2014 is that Modi was the only P.M candidate. Rahul refused to step up to the plate. The result was a walk over. It was a case of Modi or nobody.

Today, the consequences of that vote are visible: The nationalism of minorities is being questioned; attacks on them have increased; lynch mobs have targeted and killed Muslims and Dalits; and several court judgements have upheld majoritarian beliefs.

When was this not the case? Ethnic cleansing of Muslims occurred in 1947-48. They were constantly being harassed by the Custodian of Evacuee (later, 'Enemy') Property and forced to emigrate. Within India, the group with whom they had most friction was the Dalits and Adivasis who found a champion in the BJP. This is what is meant by 'Hindu consolidation'. It is one thing to say Modi, or Trump, is anti-Muslim. You can't also say they are anti-Jewish. That would be crazy. In India, either you are pro Dalit, or you are pro-Muslim. You can pretend to be both, but nobody believes you.

India has upended its refugee policy, making it easier for non-Muslims from the neighbourhood to seek asylum,

as has always been the case. The difference is that Indian Muslims have not been stripped of citizenship- which is what happened to those who had taken refuge across the border in 1948 and who wanted to come back.

putting in place a law to fast-track the citizenship requests of only those who are not Muslim.

India did try to shelter a Muslim- Dr. Taslima Nasrin- but she had to flee after Muslim organizations put a price on her head. It is not the case that India has ever offered citizenship to Muslim economic migrants.

As the late Pakistani poet Fahmida Riaz, mocked India once, “tum bilkul ham jaise nikle, ab tak kahan chhupe the bhai?"—in Shabana Mir’s translation, “turned out you were just like us, where were you hiding all this time, buddy?"

Fahmida was born in 1946. Thus she did not have personal memories of people from her ancestral Meerut having to take refuge across the border. Still, she must have heard about the plight of the Muhajirs when she was in London. Her parents knew Hindus were like Muslims. They killed you and took your property if your people killed their people and took their property.

If Pakistan’s founding father M.A. Jinnah, seen as Partition’s chief villain in India, were to witness this state of affairs, he would have said, “I told you so." He had warned the subcontinent’s Muslims not to trust Hindus—don’t get fooled by Gandhi’s pieties and Nehru’s charms; in the end, the Hindus will want to subjugate us, he said. A growing number of Indians now seem to want to prove him right.

On which planet has Tripathi been living? The fact is Indian Muslims could see for themselves that Congress was a Hindu party which subjugated them from 1937 onward. So they voted overwhelmingly for the Muslim League in 1946 just as Hindus voted overwhelmingly for Congress. Partition and ethnic cleansing followed. Muslims lost reserved seats and special status for Urdu and so forth- though that latter was brought back in some States. But it would be folly to say that Muslims were equal in India. Their share of Government jobs fell. Their socio-economic status declined. An I.P.S officer who studied Communal Riots showed that Muslims were the biggest losers from these increasingly politically instrumentalized occurrences. Suddenly, the wealthy Hindus realized something their grandfathers had known- India makes a profit on Muslims because they are hardworking and smart. They must be protected and allowed to come up economically because this means bigger Corporate profits! Ordinary Indians, want good quality Muslim candidates to get jobs in the Police, Army and Civil Service. Why? They are hard working and capable. They generate a big surplus for Society. Why cut off our own nose to spite our face? Improve Governance, improve last mile delivery, and the country gains stable, 'endogenous', growth. Modi signaled that this what he was doing as C.M in Gujarat. Suddenly, he became the blue eyed boy of the Corporates. It is not what anybody would have predicted. We thought Rahul would become Prime Minister and lead a troop of handsome young dynasts, all with Post Graduate qualifications, from Western Universities, to victory in 2014. The country would be ruled by Wharton MBAs and ex-Goldman Sachs Merchant Bankers. Instead we had Modi- a 'chai wallah'- outdoing Nehru in International Diplomacy. Who saw that coming?

The peculiarity of hindsight is that it depends on the point from which you look back at Pakistan’s and India’s trajectories. In the early 1970s and till the late 1990s, as Pakistan itself broke up into two and generals and mullahs controlled its politics, India could afford to be smug.

Tripathi is being foolish. India is a big country. It does not care about Pakistan- a failed State which is getting poorer and more violent decade after decade. It is wholly preoccupied with 'roti, kapada, makan' (bread, cloth, housing) or, even more fundamentally, 'bijli, pani, sadak' (electricity, water, roads). Modi's first speech from Red Fort was expected to be a Nationalistic rant. Instead the guy talked about ending open defecation! Suddenly, people like Tripathi looked utterly deracinated. They were worried about looking good compared to Pakistan- whose per capita Income has fallen below Bangladesh. Clearly, such people had no salience in India. New York was the place for them.

In 1992, the destruction of the Babri Masjid changed that, and the consequences of India’s 2014 election are there for us to see.

For whom to see? Tripathi in New York? Who cares what he sees or doesn't see?

Some Pakistanis may feel triumphant,

Coz becoming poorer than Bangladesh is a sign your country is winning!

but the virtue of Pakistani lawyer Yasser Latif Hamdani’s new biography, Jinnah: A Life, is that it takes a sober tone.

As opposed to what- a drunken one? Hamdani is a young man, on the rise. As a lawyer, he appreciates and highlights Jinnah's legalistic approach. Sadly, this failed immediately. J.N. Mandal fled to India as did other Hindus close to Jinnah. By contrast, Muslims loyal to Nehru were protected though some of their relatives did have to emigrate.

In clear, if not sparkling, prose, Hamdani, an admirer of Jinnah, offers a nuanced perspective of the man who began as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity and ended up being instrumental in dividing India along religious lines.

Jinnah and Liaquat owned property in India. They sought votes from Muslims who would end up on the wrong side of the Pakistani border. Thus, Jinnah was a disaster for Indian Muslims. But it would be wrong to blame only him for a type of Partition which hurt minorities most while enabling majorities to rule the roost. The fact is, Congress could have been a National, not Hindu, party on two occasions when Britain was weak. The first was in 1922 when Britain was militarily overstretched and had to concede Irish and Egyptian independence and defeat in Turkey. Muslims were 100 per cent loyal to the Congress-Khilafat platform. Then, Gandhi surrendered on a unilateral basis. Muslims were left in the lurch.
The second time was when anger against the Simon Commission had united Muslims, like Jinnah, and Hindus, like the Nehrus. But this time the deal was mismanaged. Jinnah was called away to be with his dying wife. His junior, Chaghla, sold the pass. It was a lawyerly trick and showed Jinnah the Hindus were untrustworthy. Once again, Gandhian 'Satyagraha' turned out to be a curse. The Hindu Liberals gave Gandhi an excuse to do a deal to get his people out of jail. But this entailed Gandhi attending the Second Round Table Conference on his own. He made a miserable showing. The Hindu Liberals could do nothing once the Tories won the elections.  It was then that it became apparent that the Muslim majority provinces (Sindh being separated from Bombay and NWFP being upgraded by Hoare, to please the Muslims, at this time) could go their own way by refusing to pool power at the center. There was a workaround for this- Economists could have explained how a strong center would ensure cheap money for Regional Premiers, but Gandhi was no economist. Nor was he liked by the Minorities who formed a united front against him. Most ludicrous was this toothless bania's demand for control over the Armed forces! From the time of Kitchener to Ayub Khan or Musharraf, the Army has seen itself as separate- more particularly because of its role at the North West Frontier. Jinnah's failure was to foresee that the Army would sideline the 'barristocrats' and Civil Servants. That was Pakistan's tragedy just as it is the reason for Egypt's economy's failure to thrive.

The book adds to the growing body of literature around Jinnah, building on the work of Stanley Wolpert, regarded as the most important biography till Ayesha Jalal’s detailed and absorbing biography, and the indifferent book by former BJP minister Jaswant Singh, which gained notoriety for all the wrong reasons.

Jinnah does not matter, just as Pakistan does not matter, save as a pathological case, because Pakistan is not doing well. It is going down the toilet. If it were growing rapidly and accumulating foreign exchange reserves plenty of people would want to read books about Jinnah as 'the founder of the Pakistani economic miracle'. Nobody wants to read about some stupid lawyer who overplayed his hand and ended up presiding over a country doomed to revert to tribalism and religious fanaticism.

Projecting Pakistani nationalism as if it was one man’s fantasy, no matter how powerful, is misleading.

Projecting it as other than a disaster for its own people is misleading. Americans now know that Pakistan was sheltering Osama while pretending to be an ally in 'the War against Terror'. It knows Pakistan shared nuclear secrets with North Korea. Furthermore, Pakistan is now irrecoverably in hock to the Chinese yet is begging for money from the West. It is a fantasy to consider this a stable country or a suitable partner in any type of worthwhile effort.

Wolpert did that with his 1984 biography, Jinnah Of Pakistan, where he said: “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Jinnah did all three."

This is true enough. Without Jinnah, the economic argument for pooling sovereignty at the Center would have been persuasive for Regional Satraps. They would gain cheap money for infrastructure projects while having a free hand within their own domain. A bit of 'minority protection' from the Center is a good thing because it gives you push-back against your own radical fringe. After all, minorities are useful. They make money for the 'stationary bandit'.

As Jalal argued in The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, The Muslim League And The Demand For Pakistan (1985), this is a misleading view. She meticulously built the case that Jinnah never wanted a theocracy.

There was no need for any such meticulous case building. Jinnah, it was obvious to everyone, was not learned in Islamic lore. He was an Anglicized Lawyer. What gave him salience was the skill of his Lieutenants and the massive vote share they managed to gain. Jinnah and Jinnah alone proved that Congress was not a National Party. It was a Hindu party with some Muslim 'show boys'. Liaquat, it is true, ran circles around Patel when the latter was in charge of the Home Portfolio while the former had control of Finance. One consequence is that Muslim Civil Servants and Army officers became wholehearted supporters of Pakistan. Indeed, for the first two decades of its existence the West Wing did better than India economically speaking. Still, the fact remains, it could have done even better in a Federation. Sadly, Congress did not have anybody who could make this case. The fact is, Hindus themselves were afraid that Gandhian idiocy would wreck the economy. Nehru, far from being a Socialist fanatic, was initially cautious in his approach to the Economy. It was 'Rightists' from the Corporate world who succumbed to the lure of American 'free money' to waste on gargantuan projects which had a lamentable crowding out effect.

As a shrewd tactician, he wanted assurances of Muslim rights, to secure a loose federal structure that would keep the subcontinent together.

The problem is, he could not credibly deliver assurances of non-Muslim rights, nor of mutually beneficial cooperation at the Center. Thus, India was better off cutting off its Muslim fringe because sooner or later there would be ethnic cleansing there and neither the fuedals nor the barristocrats would be able to do anything about it. During the Second Round Table Conference, Kashmir was invaded by warlike tribes. The Maharajah sought the help of the British Army- which was given. But this conflict had a religious dimension. Would a Federal Army really be able to replace the 'British Umpire' in this respect?

But Wolpert was not entirely wrong—powerful individuals do shape the destinies of nations, but the context matters. Focusing on what Jinnah made of Pakistan is one thing; more interesting is the question that examines the context that made Jinnah.

It was the same context as made everybody else around at that time.

Jalal brings us closer to that question. In 2009, Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence unexpectedly sold many copies after Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, decided to ban the book (a court overturned the ban) and Singh was expelled from the party. Singh’s book was tedious and didn’t tell us much that was new; it was unusual simply because it was sympathetic to Jinnah.

Why keep harping on Jaswant's book? Nobody cared then and nobody cares about it now. The fact is the older, senile, BJP generation was constantly saying foolish things of one sort or the other because they didn't understand that the whole World had turned against Pakistan and Islamic terror. Modi was prescient in pushing back on this.

Still, it was believed that Rahul Gandhi would step up to the plate and the sympathy factor would likely give him a good majority in 2014. Modi was actually on quite a sticky wicket in 2007. But that was long ago.

India may be divided today in identifying the real heroes of its freedom struggle but it is still Jinnah who gets most of the blame.

Indian Muslims have an interest in vilifying Jinnah because his politics hurt them. But nobody else greatly cares.

He is called stubborn and difficult, intransigent even; his apparent dietary hypocrisies are recounted to question if he was a “good Muslim"; his preference for well-cut suits is mocked, and his falling in love with, and marriage to, a Parsi woman young enough to be his daughter is considered scandalous.

His marriage was a black mark against him. Fortunately, the lady died young and Jinnah, aided by his very capable sister, was able to re-invent himself as a sherwani wearing Muslim leader.

In Jinnah: A Life, Hamdani offers a dispassionate account of Pakistan’s founding father, which reveals the remarkable man he was,without deifying him (as many do in Pakistan), and provides arguments that make it harder to vilify him easily (as many do in India). Hamdani shows how Jinnah began his career as a leader of the Congress

This is the crux of the problem. Arguably, Congress had no Muslim leaders. It had 'show boys'. Jinnah had been a 'show boy'- as he realized with chagrin. He had been tricked. Congress dismissed Jinnah's claims but Jinnah prevailed at the ballot box. Congress Muslims were indeed 'show boys'. With the exception of some Leftists or very capable figures like Rafi Ahmed Kidwai, the Muslim Congresswallah tended to be a pliant tool of his patron or else, like Azad, a guy who was good at working out compromises between Congress factions.

and also became a member of the Muslim League. He receives Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi when he returns from South Africa to India in 1915, and speaks at the public felicitation for the fellow Gujarati. Hamdani discounts the more dramatized accounts of that event (did the two have a falling out there which altered history?) and reminds us that Gandhi and Jinnah both considered Gopal Krishna Gokhale their mentor.

Jinnah was also close to Tilak. He gained national prominence by brokering the Pact which allowed Hindu-Muslim unity on a common anti-Imperialist platform. Had India become independent in the Nineteen Twenties, he would have served at least one term as Governor General or Premier of Bombay Presidency or some such thing. This was because, at that time, Indian politics had a Pan-Asian dimension. Anti-Imperialism meant Hindu-Muslim relations were a 'positive sum' game. But that opportunity was missed- largely because Gandhi made unilateral decisions regarding his patented 'Satyagraha'.

Hamdani compiles evidence of Jinnah’s early speeches and actions to show he was unwilling to make religion the basis for defining nationhood—he baulked at Gandhi embracing the Khilafat Movement, and, even in 1943, did not want a theocracy.

Jinnah was viewed as either an Ismaili or a Shia. Like the Aga Khan, his support for Khilafat was considered disingenuous. Since when have Shias considered themselves subjects of a Hanafi Caliph?

Why does Tripathi keep babbling about theocracy? It is not relevant to India or Pakistan. Iran or Saudi can have theocracy. We can't. All you can have is Religious window-dressing.

Hamdani shows how circumstances, including the growing distrust and communalization among Muslims and Hindus, led him to act to secure the rights of the few he felt closer to, over the rights of those with whom he had once thought he would share his destiny. Indians find it easy to believe Jinnah led Muslims astray. It also allows Indians to ignore what made Muslims in pre-Partition India insecure.

Jinnah wasn't a fool. He knew that as Lord Landsdowne had said, 'Cow Protection' was Congress's first successful 'mass contact' platform. Still, he was as much an anti-Imperialist as Azad, and was prepared to let the Congress-League pact stand even though, in Bihar, well organized rioting had forced Muslims to give up cow slaughter. Gandhi, in Champaran, seems to have been unaware of what was really going on.

Bihari Muslims were prepared to give up cow slaughter, which many of the 'Ashraf' disliked in any case, in return for support for Khilafat- i.e. anti-Imperialism across Asia and Africa. The fact is, the Middle East was being held down by Indian troops. For the first time in history, Indian military might could decide the fate of the Islamic heartland. Some Indian Revolutionaries- like Amba Prasad Sufi- were doing propaganda in Iran and Iraq against the British and Russian forces. Metropolitan Hindus of an Anglicized background may think rural Biharis or U.P bhaiyyas are ignorant. Yet, it is people from that type of background who travelled the world and embraced revolutionary ideas. Look at the trajectory of Rahul Sankirtyayan or Acharya Kosambi. The latter, from Goa, was a Professor at Harvard and then Leningrad. The former, born in an obscure U.P village, did much more to spread progressive ideas by writing in Hindi than any of our vaunted Ivy League elite.

It is a different India now, closer to the kind Jinnah warned about, where some are questioning the values Gandhi represented, and some, including the BJP parliamentarian Pragya Singh Thakur even admiring Gandhi’s assassin, and the ruling party not doing much about it. Curiously, in 2005, BJP stalwart Lal Krishna Advani called Jinnah an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity and even placed a wreath at his mausoleum in Karachi.

India must accept that Gandhi failed. Pretending otherwise is sheer magical thinking. Pragya Singh Thakur was falsely labelled a terrorist- or so the voters who returned her to Parliament believe. As for Godse, Ambedkar- writing to his wife- admitted that that lunatic had helped the country.

Secular-minded Indians often like to cite Jinnah’s speech to Pakistan’s constituent assembly on 11 August 1947 to offer a more nuanced interpretation of his communal outlook. He said: “You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state." Liberal words, almost Nehruvian, that jar with the familiar image of Jinnah.

I don't understand why 'secular-minded' Indians would want to cite this speech unless it is to show Jinnah as a fool or a hypocrite. Ethnic cleansing in Pakistan was drastic. Even Jinnah's personal friends and one Cabinet colleague of his had to flee to India.

So what was the point of carving out Pakistan if it wanted to be liberal and secular? Jinnah resented the Pakistan he got—moth-eaten, as he described it, without Junagadh, Hyderabad or Kashmir, without Calcutta, its two wings separated by nearly 2,000km—united by faith, even as many co-religionists remained in India, and divided by languages, a point Jinnah brushed aside as if of no consequence. In March 1948, he visited Dacca, as Dhaka was then known, and spoke at the race course, warning against subversion, refusing to let Bengali be an official language. That sowed the seeds of the language movement, that culminated in Bangladesh’s liberation war of 1971.

This is bizarre. The fact is the East Wing had a bigger population and a better developed political class. A democratic Pakistan would have had a Bengali Prime Minister. Since Bengalis are good at languages, they would have no difficulty speaking Urdu in Karachi while administering their own Province in the mother tongue. The fact is the people of the sub-continent like having a degree of fluency in the lingua franca- which is Urdu/Hindustani. This was not the deal breaker. Rather the genocide and the war came about because Bhutto would not accept Mujib as Prime Minister. He let the Army disgrace itself so he could rule the West Wing as he saw fit. But the Army had its revenge. He was hanged.

Jinnah could not have foreseen it. but these contradictions make him a fascinating man—a secularist who turned communal; the architect of a religious state who spoke in a liberal tone days before the country’s independence; and who stymied regional aspirations because he feared they would end up dividing the country (as they did, eventually).

Jinnah was a lawyer who turned out to be good a mass politics. But, it was the lawyerly part of him which caused him to overplay his hand. There was a certain naivete about him. He thought a deal was always possible. In commercial circles, in a City like Mumbai, this may be true. Gujeratis, more particularly of mercantile sects, know how to 'adjust' because business is a positive sum game. In the long run, Relationships matter more than Transactions. But, in War and Diplomacy, this is not the case. Jinnah created a new country but let it drift into an unwinnable war. India could do a deal with a business-man like Nawaz Sharif. Pakistan gains disproportionately from economic cooperation. But the Army has its own agenda. Thus India is better off ignoring its chaotic neighbor. By contrast, Indian businessmen have been investing in Bangladesh for a long time. You now see Bangladeshi businesses setting up in India because wages are lower. A day may come when Bengal is re-united. The Hindus may decide that the Muslims of the East run things better. Curzon's Partition will be reversed because the East Bengali has shown that one can rise up through hard work and, what's more, help others to do the same.

Hamdani’s book cannot provide an answer to several questions: what ultimately convinced Jinnah to demand a separate nation?

The legal logic behind this became apparent at the Second Round Table Conference. Why should the Provinces pool sovereignty at the Center? What is the pay-off for them to do so? Jinnah originally thought this was a bargaining chip. Give us a bigger Bengal and Punjab and keep reservations in UP etc in return for our allowing the Center to function. But non Muslims in Bengal and Punjab realized that they faced an existential threat. Jinnah, fool that he was, had openly spoken of 'an exchange of population'. So they wanted and got Partition. After that, the game was over. Still, it must be said, hard work enabled a lot of Pakistanis to come up. But, even so, there were some stupid economic policies which held them back. India is not alone in having cretinous economists.

Was it because he believed Gandhi’s influence had waned and he could not trust those around Gandhi?

Gandhi had not been able to stop the Kanpur riots. After the failure of the Round table Conference, Congress- after the ban on it was lifted- was openly Hindu supremacist. The hope was that the Socialists would prevail and thus 'communalism' would be replaced by 'Communism'. But, the Communists were cretins.

Was it vanity and ego?

Which politician is not vain? Which great barrister has no ego? The simplest explanation is best. Jinnah had a brief which he argued with great tenacity though the result was that his client was ruined. With hindsight, the Muslim community would have been better off with pooled sovereignty at the Center so as to have cheaper access to capital markets and so as to be able to 'force project' in the anti-Imperialist aspect of the Pan-Islamic cause. The problem is that Gandhi had gone to the Second Round Table Conference alone. He could not make any type of plausible case. Back home, Congress leaders in jail were getting cut off from their proper interlocutors. They firmly believed they represented the whole country because they were sharing jail cells with Muslims and Dalits and Christians and so forth. But, equally, they were becoming pessimistic about ever seeing the back of the Brits. Thus they had little incentive to compromise on the shibboleths for which they had spent long years in prison.

As we learn more about some of the leading lights of the Congress leadership of that era, it is worth exploring the depth of their commitment to Gandhian tolerance and non-violence.

Gandhi himself approved of military action against the Pakistani invaders of Kashmir. Furthermore, though he said he knew which Congressmen had conducted pogroms of innocent Muslims, he didn't even suspend their Party membership, let alone try to get them prosecuted. If this was tolerance- what was intolerance? If this was non-violence, War was preferable.

The other point about non-violence is that, in practice, it means 'money'. It is one thing to non-violently go to jail. It is another thing to lose money because your property is seized and auctioned off. Nehru says that the threat of confiscation made Congressmen eager to give up their principles and come out of jail. 

Within a year of independence, a priority for Vallabhbhai Patel and Kanaiyalal Munshi was to rebuild the Somnath Temple, and Rajendra Prasad, as president, decided to go to its consecration, against Nehru’s advice, blurring the lines between state and faith.

 Patel and Munshi were Gujerati Hindus for whom building this temple was a priority. The rest of Hindu India agreed. Nehru was welcome to resign if he didn't like it. But he had himself been consecrated by ancient Saivite rites just before the handover of power. It wasn't Hinduism he objected to. It was Gujerati Hindus gaining a cherished goal which filled him with dismay.

Why does Tripathi not mention the Directive Principle in the Constitution of India regarding Cow Protection? The fact is the Indian State is obliged, according to its Constitution, to cater to the religious sensibilities of the majority community. Thus, there was no 'line' between 'State' and 'faith'. Only non-Muslims fleeing Pakistan were given citizenship as a matter of right. Muslims who had fled, had their citizenship revoked even if they wanted to return. There was a terrible ethnic cleansing of Muslims in many parts of India. Nobody was prosecuted for this. Jinnah was alive at the time. He did not feel vindicated. His 'hostage' theory had failed.

Had Jinnah been alive at the time, he would have felt vindicated, foreseeing what would become of India.

Tripathi thinks Jinnah would not get on with fellow Gujerati Modi. I think the reverse is the case. One can always make a mutually beneficial deal with a sensible fellow. Jinnah's tragedy arose from the fact that in the Twenties and Thirties, sensible fellows tended to get disintermediated. He himself got back into mass politics on a silly 'Islam in danger' platform. This consolidated the Hindu vote and harmed the Left as well as Mandal & Ambedkar, two leading Dalit politicians. Jinnah ended up strengthening Nehru's dynasty. His own daughter married a Parsi-Christian and remained in India. His sister was sidelined after his death. Her biography of her brother was censored and not released till 1987. Still, she showed great courage in running against Ayub Khan in 1965, but was defeated. It may be the popular support she drew caused the Pakistani Army to adopt an 'irredentist' agenda so as to keep its hold in power. In other words, Jinnah and his sister ended up turning Pakistan into a poor and chaotic country whose one great service to its bigger neighbor is giving its Prime Ministers big electoral wins, just when they need it, for punishing Pakistani military stupidity and adventurism.