THE POLITICS of LOVE: More than Jinnah, it was Nehru's close links with the Mountbattens which resulted in India's partition.
Pakistan is a reality, let’s accept it !!!
As a kid I used to always dream about a unified Indo- Pak cricket team. Jagaval Srinath and Wasim Akram opening the bowling. Wistful thinking it was !!! The Partition is a fact. It cannot be undone, because, the creation of both the countries as two separate and sovereign nations is an irreversible reality of history. No matter how much RSS cries about the concept of “Akhand Bharat” the reality is that India was never one till Britishers ruled and thousands princely states with equally princely egos came under one roof. The recent outbursts against L K Advani’s speech is totally uncalled for - that too at a time when both the countries are trying to reach somewhere on the Line of Control. It is a historical fact that Mohammed Ali Jinnah for most part of his political career worked as an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. Jinnah's endeavours to bring about the political union of Hindus and Muslims earned him the title of "the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity," an epithet coined by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. It was largely through his efforts that the Congress and the Muslim League began to hold their annual sessions jointly, to facilitate mutual consultation and participation. To say that Jinnah’s hunger for power made this participation turn into partition would also be partially wrong. The decision to divide India was taken by Lord Mountbatten and it is an open secret that Nehru was “close” to their family. It is not religion but politics which divided India. Jinnah was just there at the other side of the fence so he got the flak and also grabbed the chance to become the head of Pakistan. But after he became the head of Pakistan, he never espoused an Islamic state. Mohammed Ali Jinnah's speech in Pakistan's Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1947 proves that fact. To quote Jinnah…
“I cannot overemphasise it too much. We shall begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and Muslim community,… will vanish. Indeed, if you ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain its freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free people long ago.
Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free, you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places 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.…You will find that in course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State."
Did Advani say that Jinnah was secular or not is not what counts. What counts is peace. What counts is harmony. What counts are people.
1 comment:
Yep, all true.
One irrefutable fact: India was built into a single slave through "divide and rule" tactics. The "nation" stayed together, barring that much-touted divide along wots today the LoC.
No surprise that politicians on both sides of the fence took up where Canning left off, furthered the idea till it assumed reality and importance.
No surprise that Jinnah, Patel have bitten the dust... "the evil that men do lives after them" can well be extended to "the evil of a lifetime are attributed to its men".
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