Jinnah has surfaced in Indian political discourse several times in the past, especially at the time of elections. To the votaries of Hindutva, Jinnah has always stood as the man who must be blamed for the partition of the country along communal lines 75 years ago.
By Adrija Roychowdhury
As the Uttar Pradesh election rhetoric gets shriller, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, is back in the news.
Last week, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath tweeted: “They are worshippers of Jinnah, we are worshippers of Sardar Patel. Pakistan is dear to them, we sacrifice our lives for Maa Bharati”.
This came a day after senior BJP leader Rajnath Singh cautioned that the name of Jinnah must not be raised in the context of state politics.
“I do not know why Pakistan’s founder Jinnah’s name is often invoked during elections. Those who want to politicize this… in UP’s politics, Jinnah’s name should not be invoked. Instead, we should talk of farmers’ sugarcane,” he had said at a voter interaction in Modinagar, Ghaziabad district.
Jinnah has surfaced in Indian political discourse several times in the past, especially at the time of elections. To the votaries of Hindutva, Jinnah has always stood as the man who must be blamed for the partition of the country along communal lines 75 years ago.
In their speeches, BJP leaders have often attacked their political opponents calling them “supporters” of Jinnah. Last year, BJP national president J P Nadda accused Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav of preferring Jinnah over Patel, the nation’s first home minister and the leader who is credited with uniting India politically after independence.
While the references to “Jinnah” have often been used as political code for alleged “Muslim appeasement” by the BJP’s opponents and a dog whistle for polarisation along communal lines, the founder of Pakistan who died in 1948 has also caused controversy within the BJP, and led to setbacks for leaders such as former Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani.
L K Advani (2005)
In June 2005, Advani paid an emotional visit to Karachi, his place of birth in undivided India. At Jinnah’s mausoleum in the city, Advani, who was then 78, praised the founder of Pakistan, calling him a “great man”.
Advani’s visit to the mausoleum was the most high-profile by an Indian leader until then, and given his position as Deputy Prime Minister until just a year ago and the man who made the biggest contribution to the BJP’s adoption of Hindutva as its political identity, it was covered extensively in the media.
Advani wrote in the register at the mausoleum: “There are many people who leave an inerasable stamp on history, but there are very few who actually create history. Quaid-e-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah was one such rare individual.
“In his early years, Sarojini Naidu, a leading luminary of India’s freedom struggle, described Mr Jinnah as an ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. His address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, is really a classic, a forceful espousal of a secular state in which, while every citizen would be free to practise his own religion, the state shall make no distinction between one citizen and another on grounds of faith. My respectful homage to this great man,” added Advani.
Advani’s warm comments on Jinnah were ironic given that in 1947, he had been named as an accused in a murder conspiracy case against Jinnah. News reports of the time recorded that throughout his visit in Pakistan, Advani was asked to comment on the case, which he laughed away.
But his comments came as a rude shock to the BJP, which was still to recover from the unexpected defeat in the Lok Sabha elections of 2004. The RSS was explicit in disagreeing with Advani’s praise of Jinnah.
While Advani refused to withdraw his statements, he offered to resign as party president after his return to India. However, he withdrew his resignation a few days later, even though his relationship with the RSS remained strained.
Less than seven months after he withdrew his resignation though, Advani stepped down from the post, and Rajnath Singh became BJP president.
Jaswant Singh (2009)
Jinnah became a point of controversy for the saffron party once again in 2009 after Jaswant Singh’s book, ‘Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence’, appeared. Singh had been a very important member of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s government, and earlier served as India’s minister for finance, external affairs, and defence.
Jaswant Singh provided an alternative reading of the Quaid-e-Azam, which was different from the mainstream political narrative in India. He mentioned Jinnah as being as “ambassador for Hindu-Muslim unity”, even though, like Advani, he cited someone else for this description.
Jaswant also presented Jinnah as more of a pragmatic politician than a religious radical. In a television interview given before the book’s release, he claimed that “Jinnah was demonized by India while it was actually India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s belief in a centralized polity that led to partition.”
Soon after the book was released, Singh was expelled from the BJP. The party president at the time, Rajnath Singh, stated that “the party fully dissociates itself from the contents of the book”.
The RSS had already distanced itself from the book even before its release. There were incidents of some Hindu radicals burning copies of the book, and it was banned in Gujarat, where Narendra Modi was Chief Minister at the time.
Aligarh Muslim University (2018)
In May 2018, the BJP MP from Aligarh, Satish Gautam, wrote a letter to AMU Vice-Chancellor Tariq Mansoor objecting to the display of Jinnah’s portrait in the university’s student union office. Violence broke out on campus as students objected to the protests held by the right wing group Hindu Yuva Vahini demanding the removal of Jinnah’s portrait.
Later, AMU spokesperson Shafey Kidwai said the portrait had been hanging in the university’s students’ union office for decades. Jinnah, he noted, was a founding member of the university court, and was granted lifetime membership of the student union. As per the university’s tradition, portraits of all lifetime members are placed on the walls of the student union office by rotation.
“He was granted membership before the demand of Pakistan had been raised by the Muslim League,” Kidwai said, adding that no national leader had raised an objection to his portrait in the university including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Dr Rajendra Prasad.
The controversy over Jinnah’s portrait resurfaced in the run-up to the Bihar Assembly elections of 2020. The BJP attacked the Congress for fielding former AMU student Maskoor Usmani as its candidate from Jale in Madhubani, calling the latter a “Jinnah supporter”.
“Congress and Mahagathbandhan have to clarify if they too support Jinnah,” BJP leader and Union minister Giriraj Singh had said. The Congress defended Usmani’s candidature, stating that he had nothing to do with Jinnah’s ideology.
Akhilesh Yadav (2021)
In October 2021, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav triggered controversy after he took Jinnah’s name in the same breath as that of Patel, Gandhi, and Nehru as fighters for India’s independence.
“Sardar Patel, Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and (Muhammad Ali) Jinnah studied in the same institute. They became barristers and fought for India’s freedom,” Akhilesh said at a public rally in UP’s Hardoi.
The BJP was quick to attack Akhilesh. “The Samajwadi Party chief yesterday compared Jinnah to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. This is shameful. It’s the Talibani mentality that believes in dividing. Sardar Patel united the country,” said Chief Minister Adityanath, according to news agency ANI.
BJP spokesperson Rakesh Tripathi said: “The country considers Muhammad Ali Jinnah as the villain of the partition. Calling Jinnah the hero of freedom is the politics of Muslim appeasement.”
Reacting to the criticisms from the BJP, Akhilesh advised his detractors to read the history books on Jinnah again.
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Courtesy: Indian Express
