As if there's not enough strife and tribulations, the Don Quixotes of our land are busy tilting at the unmoving, rusted windmills of Jinnah's secularism. Advani and now Jaswant Singh have unleashed an ideological quake that tore the ground of Jinnah's communal apartheid, the very same Jinnah who declared "I will have India divided or see it destroyed." Regardless of all the intellectual harlotry to put a "secular mantle" on his venom, there is little doubt that Jinnah initiated "Direct action" on August 16, 1946 and unleashed rivers of blood in Noakhali. "We have a pistol and are in a position to use it," he threatened. And use it he did, to carve the land like a butcher. He got his Pakistan by terror, and it's time India faced the truth and stop bleating like sheep. For no amount of secular whitewashing or Jinnah apologists from the peace brigade, can paint his red hands, white. Nor can all the huffing and puffing by intellectuals erase the misery of six million displaced people in those violent days of partition.
Jinnah is as secular as the Pakistani army or the Taliban, nothing more, nothing less. He refused to even honor the last wishes of his daughter who wanted to be cremated and forced his parsi wife to convert to Islam. He felt no qualms in rousing the bestial lust of his followers to rape and loot the same land that had nourished him to become a successful lawyer. "We are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of value and proportions, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and tradition, aptitudes and ambitions, in short we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all canons of International Law we are a nation" he said to Mahatma Gandhi. If this is not a basis for the two nation theory, an intolerant creed that bred partition, then pigs could fly. And here we are, wasting a lot of national ink to offer a pedestal of "secularism" to his doctrine of hatred, exclusiveness and Jihad. Instead of demonizing the wrong doer we are shifting the blame game to Nehru who in spite of all his faults never indulged in terror, mayhem and murder. In fact, the Cabinet Mission Plan which he refused to endorse and for which he is being blamed for being inflexible as set up by the Machiavellian British was a recipe for the eventual break up of India into several nations. Since Jinnah was so inflexible, partition was chosen versus break up into several pieces. The wily Mountbatten had the weak nation checkmated and this was one situation where Nehru had little choice.
In our eagerness to give the enemy more than his due, we may manufacture an alibi for his secularism. We may even respond meekly to a belligerent Islam. But let us NEVER forget the death of a million of our innocent countrymen whose blood cries out for justice. In the hazy mists of a murky, diabolic policy of the wily British, Jinnah's "don't mess with me" ferocity unleashed an orgy of violence on an impoverished, meek and tolerant people causing deaths and destruction all around. And for all those deaths, Jinnah alone is responsible.
Instead of responding to terror with peace, peace and more peace, the ivory tower debate should now shift to healing our wounded psyche and taking a hard look as to why we don't look in the rear view mirror and see the peaceful road we have taken filled with giant pot holes of failure. Maybe, then we will be able to break the muscles of terror.
By giving space to Jinnah's "secularism", we have learnt nothing from History nor have we acquired any common sense.
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Dr. Koenraad Elst
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