Slate.com has an interview with historian Ramachandra Guha, on the occasion of India's seventieth independence day.
Among the many piles of rubbish spread out by Guha there, sprinkled perhaps with one or two gems of insight, one particular garbage heap to note is where Guha says:
The Messiah and The Promised Land
Among the many piles of rubbish spread out by Guha there, sprinkled perhaps with one or two gems of insight, one particular garbage heap to note is where Guha says:
Second is that partition made Pakistan, unlike India, a frontline state in the Cold War. History and geography have dealt Pakistan a bad deal because it became a frontline state in the Cold War. It had to choose sides against the Soviets, which from the 1950s led to the rise of the military in Pakistan, which undermined the democratic possibilities.The first, and sometimes it seems like the last, native-born American who saw Pakistan for what it was and is, was Margaret Bourke-White. (There are plenty of first-generation immigrants who understand Pakistan in all its grotesque horror.) To her everlasting credit, she saw what Pakistan was and would be, right at its birth. Seventy years of history and a lifetime as a historian haven't given Ramachandra Guha half as much insight. This passage from her is worth repeating (via here). Pakistan didn't have to be a frontline state in the Cold War. It was a deliberate choice, right from the point of its founding.
The Messiah and The Promised Land
Margaret
Bourke-White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine
during the WW II years. In September 1947, White went to Pakistan. She
met Jinnah and wrote about what she found and heard in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India,Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. The following are the excerpts:
Pakistan
was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy
fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the
influx of minor government officials. There was only one major
government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for
Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government
House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam
moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on
what his critics called his "triple crown": he had made himself
Governor-General; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League
-- now Pakistan's only political party; and he was president of the
country's lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly.
"We never expected to get it so soon," Miss Fatima said when I called. "We never expected to get it in our lifetimes."
If
Fatima's reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother's was a fever
of ecstasy. Jinnah's deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His
whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing
through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his
achievement in creating the world's largest Islamic nation.
"Oh, it's not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!"
The
note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much
thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed
to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost
during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan
for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution
did he intend to draw up?
"Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion."
I ventured to suggest that the term "democracy" was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?
"Democracy
is not just a new thing we are learning," said Jinnah. "It is in our
blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the
poor."
This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.
"Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century."
This
mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has
other relics of the Middle Ages besides "social justice" -- the remnants
of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do
about that? .. "The land belongs to the God," says the Koran. This would
need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer,
would be just the person to correlate the "true Islamic principles" one
heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation's laws. But all he
would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because "the
soil is perfectly fertile for democracy."
What
plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he
hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?
"America
needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America," was Jinnah's reply.
"Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed" -- he revolved
his long forefinger in bony circles -- "the frontier on which the future
position of the world revolves." He leaned toward me, dropping his
voice to a confidential note. "Russia," confided Mr. Jinnah, "is not so
very far away."
This
had a familiar ring. In Jinnah's mind this brave new nation had no
other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble
of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered
whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored
buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America's
military interest in other parts of the world. "America is now
awakened," he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was
now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested
in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. "If Russia walks in here," he
concluded, "the whole world is menaced."
In
the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam's thesis echoed by
government officials throughout Pakistan. "Surely America will build up
our army," they would say to me. "Surely America will give us loans to
keep Russia from walking in." But when I asked whether there were any
signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though
sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. "No, Russia has shown
no signs of being interested in Pakistan."
This
hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one
wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism
or to bolster Pakistan's own uncertain position as a new political
entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more
significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation
drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious
fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.
Jinnah's
most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had
been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique
was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....
No
one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have
foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of
him as a "savior of Islam." In those days any talk of religion brought a
cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious
rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began
sweeping the country he was hailed as "the embodied symbol of
Hindu-Muslim unity." The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of
Jinnah's closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great
unifier in the fight for independence. "Perchance it is written in the
book of the future," ran one of her tributes, "that he, in some terrible
crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality" as the
hero of "the Indian liberation."
In
the "terrible crisis," Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality,
not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of
discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a
united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No
one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the
mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi's civil disobedience program.
Nehru says that Jinnah "disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who
filled the Congress" and was not at home with the new spirit rising
among the common people under Gandhi's magnetic leadership. Others say
it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi's program. One
thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress
leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.
In
any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it
had dragged through an anemic thirty years' existence, and took to the
religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims
the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu
domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part,
an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and
Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The
British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to
disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a
popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then
another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of
Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now
had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who
resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his
powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free
downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area,
free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.
The
trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah
carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of
the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal
material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible,
a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The
drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive
for power. ......
Less
than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah's Olympian
assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made
public. "The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold" was the answer given to
inquiries.
Only
those closest to him knew that the "cold" was accompanied by paralyzing
inability to make even the smallest decisions, by sullen silences
striped with outbursts of irritation, by a spiritual numbness concealing
something close to panic underneath. I knew it only because I spent
most of this trying period at Government House, attempting to take a new
portrait of Jinnah for a Life cover.
The
Quaid-i-Azam was still revered as a messiah and deliverer by most of
his people. But the "Great Leader" himself could not fail to know that
all was not well in his new creation, the nation; the nation that his
critics referred to as the "House that Jinnah built." The separation
from the main body of India had been in many ways an unrealistic one.
Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world's jute supply; the processing
mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of
India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it
produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries
were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron
foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still
choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its
outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was
threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring
in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed.
With
his burning devotion to his separate Islamic nation, Jinnah had taken
all these formidable obstacles in his stride. But the blow that finally
broke his spirit struck at the very name of Pakistan. While the literal
meaning of the name is "Land of the Pure," the word is a compound of
initial letters of the Muslim majority provinces which Jinnah had
expected to incorporate: P for the Punjab, A for the Afghans' area on
the Northwest Frontier, S for Sind, -tan for Baluchistan. But the K was
missing.
Kashmir,
India's largest princely state, despite its 77 per cent Muslim
population, had not fallen into the arms of Pakistan by the sheer weight
of religious majority. Kashmir had acceded to India, and although it
was now the scene of an undeclared war between the two nations, the
fitting of the K into Pakistan was left in doubt. With the beginning of
this torturing anxiety over Kashmir, the Quaid-i-Azam's siege of bad
colds began, and then his dismaying withdrawal into himself. ....
Later,
reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due
to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan's territorial and
economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr.
Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was
adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no bigot,
he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain
from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he
had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and
now that his new nation had been achieved the bigots were in the
position of authority. The leaders of orthodoxy and a few "old families"
had the final word and, to perpetuate their power, were seeing to it
that the people were held in the deadening grip of religious
superstition.
---
PS: Re-reading the above, I'm reminded of this, too.
---
PS: Re-reading the above, I'm reminded of this, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment