MJ Akbar’s Twin Biography Of Gandhi And Jinnah Busts A Few Myths

Recently London’s The Daily Telegraph spoke about how biographer Andrew Lownie had spent his life’s savings to fight a legal battle in order to lay his hands on Edwina and Lord Mountbatten’s private diaries and correspondence. He told the newspaper that “historians have a responsibility to tell the truth”. Narrating Lownie’s determined quest, the newspaper asked rhetorically, “How far will you go to get at the truth?” Well, there are no limits actually, and this fact needs far greater assertion in the context of modern Indian history, because of a variety of reasons, including deification of some key individuals, self-censorship by scholars and discouragement of detached scholarship by Leftist and Nehruvian academics.

The gaping holes in our understanding of events leading to India’s independence and thereafter can be attributed to this phenomenon. M.J. Akbar’s treatise, Gandhi’s Hinduism – The Struggle Against Jinnah’s Islam, falls in a genre of history-writing that seeks to break away from these shackles, liberate both historian and reader from this stranglehold, and pursue an unb­ridled search for truth. As a res­ult, the main actors appear on the stage with their human frailties and you get to see them like that, warts and all.     

It is indeed a kind of twin bio­graphy of Gandhi and Jinnah—two intertwined lives—which shape the destiny of two nations initially and another one (Bangladesh) later. The journey of these two men of Gujarati origin—with diametrically opposite temperaments as well as views, be it on religion, politics, eccentricities, ambitions or world-view—which eventually culminate in the birth of two nations, is a fascinating tale with a tragic denouement for the hapless millions who became victims of the communal and geographical divide. Akbar weaves a narrative that is loaded with nuggets of information that throws up new information or offers deeper meaning to the historical facts known thus far.

Those familiar with Akbar’s works—India: The Seize Within; Nehru:The Making of India; Kashmir: Behind the Vale; Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan etc, can see the evolution of the journalist-chronicler to a historian of great significance. That is what happens when a raconteur par excellence brings academic rigour to the table.  

Akbar draws the contrast between the two men and says that for Gandhi, “equality of faith” was fundamental to his vision of a united India and religion was “an intensely personal and eternal truth whose virtues could be used to improve, if not cleanse, public life”. For Jinnah, “religion was a political invention to suit for­mi­­dable objectives, whose ritual requirements he observed very occasionally, and very hesitantly, to advance a public persona”. One presumes this is euphemistic long hand for Jinnah not doing namaz five times a day and not adhering to religious dietary restrictions.  

Summing up Jinnah’s personality, the author says, “Unwilling or unable to play second or perhaps third fiddle to Gandhi, (Jinnah) first distanced himself from, and then left, the Congress. Instead he turned his energies towards the Muslim League”. In the words of M.C. Chagla, whom the aut­hor quotes, Jinnah was the complete antithesis of Gandhi. “Jinnah’s besetting fault was his obsessive egoism. He had to be a leader, and the prime mover in whatever cause he worked. With the emergence of Gandhiji in Indian politics, Jinnah felt that his importance would gradually diminish…. While Gandhiji believed in religion, in abstract moral values, in non-violence, Jinnah only believed in hard practical politics. Even sartorially, it was impossible for Jinnah to subscribe to Gandhiji’s views. He could not possibly give up his faultlessly tailored suits and his high collars for the simple khadi which Gandhiji wanted”.      

I would cite a couple of examples of the importance of the pursuit of truth, which helps us understand historical events better. The first of these relates to the “election” of the Congress president in 1946, which was pivotal to India’s post-independence destiny. British rule was coming to an end and independent India was to have its own government. In that scenario, the president of the Congress would be the natural choice for prime ministership.   

Gandhi had chosen Nehru as his heir and had, as the author says, given “a string of unpersuasive justifications” for his decision. However, in April, 1946 when the election process began, to Gandhi’s utter dismay, 12 of the 15 provincial congress committees chose Sardar Patel. The other three voted for none. As a result, Nehru did not get a single vote.

Yet, Gandhi manoeuvred to get Patel to step aside and ensured Nehru’s “election” as party president. Why? Because Jawaharlal had told Gandhi that he would not play second fiddle to anyone. This was certainly not a very popular decision because in later years, Rajendra Prasad and Maulana Azad, among others, lamented the fact that Gandhi had sacrificed his trusted lieutenant for the sake of the “glamorous Nehru”.

This truth about the extraordinary sacrifice of Sardar Patel, whereby he let go the opportunity to be independent India’s first prime minister, has been kept away from the public for decades. Instead, Nehru has been eulogised as a great democrat, although his prime ministership stood on such shaky, undemocratic foundations!

The second example also deals with Nehru and the manner in which he virtually sabotaged the Cabinet Mission Plan for a united and federal India as against Partition and the carving out of an Islamic state, which Mohammed Ali Jinnah was insistent upon. Though the Congress & Jinnah’s Muslim League agreed to the proposal and Jinnah was getting ready to be independent India’s first Defence Minister, Nehru threw a spanner in the works. The high drama that culminated in the tragedy of Partition and human suffering comes through in graphic detail in the Chapter titled ‘Nehru’s Historic Blunder’.

Jinnah would certainly be restless in his grave when he hears the woeful cries of the Ismailis (the Shia sub-sect his family belonged to) and the majority of the Shias (primarily, Ithna Ashariyas, the sect which he embraced), who are targeted by fan­atical sections of the Sunni majority in Pakistan. Shia mosques are regularly bombed and the minority Ismailis, Ahmadiyas and Hazaras are sitting ducks for Sunni terror groups. Some years ago, 43 Ismailis in a bus were gunned down by an outfit that claimed to be the Pakistani version of the Taliban. Jinnah wanted an Islamic state, but what he got was a Sunni-Islamic state which looks upon people belonging to his branch of Islam as infidels fit for the slaughterhouse. So much for Jinnah’s theocratic state!

There could not have been more dissimilar individuals than Gandhi and Jinnah and as they become the main protagonists in an epic human drama, the end was cataclysmic—millions of lives were sucked into the vortex of violence.

What can the future hold for Jinnah’s Pakistan? Pundits are predicting an imploding Pakistan, because, as the emergence of Bangladesh has shown, just religion cannot be the glue that holds a nation together. India is aware of this for millennia and that is why democracy is both a civilisational and constitutional commitment. So long as the secular, democratic constitution, written for the most diverse society in the world, remains intact and provides every part of this multi-hued nation the right to argue and shout, as India’s founding fathers had willed, no force on earth can tear it asunder. Therefore, every succeeding generation of Indians has the responsibility not only to strengthen India’s unity and integrity, but to prove Jinnah wrong, again and again.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Yogi And The Commissar")