Wages of Poor Scholarship

For a second time during the last four years Jinnah virus has struck the Bharatiya Janta Party.  Greatly impressed by the  success of  Mohammed Ali Jinnah in carving out  the Islamic State of  Pakistan by ensuring division of  India, almost single-handedly, some BJP leaders are bending backwards in praising Jinnah as a great ‘secular' leader.  Overwhelmed by ‘Jinnah virus' and trying to outdo his senior colleague, L K Advani, in his latest book Jaswant Singh (a prominent BJP leader and former Foreign Affairs Minister in NDA government), has showered encomiums on Jinnah, while criticisng the murky role of  Nehru and Gandhi in accepting partition of the country as a fait accompli.  While this belated claim to wisdom by Jaswant Singh about greatness of  the founder of Pakistan further bewildered the average middle class Hindu, the BJP was left with no option but to expel Jaswant Singh from the party due to his deliberate deviation from the ideology of  BJP.  

In June 2005 the then President of BJP, L.K. Advani, had praised Mohammed Ali Jinnah, as a secular leader during his visit to Pakistan, without verifying the facts. That controversial statement bestowing the halo of a "secular leader" on Jinnah was greatly resented by the Hindu masses.  Ultimately it led to large scale criticism of Advani's wrong perception and he had to step down from the office of BJP  President.

Advani's misadventure about Jinnah's secular status was based on Pakistan's Qaid-e Azam's address to the Constituent Assembly on August 11, 1946, in which he had declared that  "you are free to go to your mosques, or any other place of worship  ......  you may belong to any religion, caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state. You will find that in the course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense  .....  but in the political sense as citizens of the State".      Apparently that statement was enough to make Advani conclude that  Jinnah was indeed a secular democrat.  The veteran leader did not care to check  up the reasons which could have prompted  Jinnah  to make that most-unlike-Jinnah statement in the Constituent Assembly of  Pakistan on August 11, 1947. Perhaps he relied too much on the advice and assessment of his aide, Sudheendra Kulkarni, yet another admirer of Jinnah, who had accompanied him. Advani just could not figure out that what Jinnah had pronounced on August 11, 1947, was nothing but mere posturing done on the advice of  Lord  Ismay who was the Chief of Staff of  the then Governor General of India, Lord Mountbatten.  

The inside story of Jinnah's August 11, 1947, statement has been narrated by a distinguished Punjabi scholar, Dr. Kripal Singh,  on page 740 of his book, Select Documents on Partition of India -1947 (India and Pakistan), published in 1990. As revealed by Dr. Kripal Singh, the advice to make such a statement was given by Lord Ismay to Jinnah, under specific instructions of Lord Mountbatten in order to douse the raging fire of communal violence across Pakistan at that time. It was a belated attempt to assure the Hindus and the Sikhs living in Pakistan about their safety, expressly made on the suggestion of Lord Mountbatten, the then Governor General of India. The sole aim of the August 11, 1947, statement was to check the spiraling communal violence in Pakistan which had already generated a violent reaction in East Punjab (India). 

Last update : 24-08-2009 20:20

Keywords : Jinnah Virus Distracts and Debilitates BJP, Ram Kumar Ohri

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