Jinnah Vs Gandhi

Jinnah Vs Gandhi

Roderick Matthews

Hachette India, 2012

Who was responsible for partition of India in 1947 is a question answered in innumerable ways.  There is a veritable partition industry flourishing in the sub-continent in which historians, academicians, scholars and even politicians have heavily invested.

A comparative assessment of two the towering personalities who shaped the history of the sub-continent had been made, in passing,  by many.  A book entirely devoted to such an assessment is rare indeed!  There is a lot that is familiar, especially in the evaluation of Jinnah, in this book too. Jinnah’s long association with the Congress, his antipathy towards mixing religion with politics, his slow movement towards advocating Muslim rights, their separateness and finally towards claiming a separate homeland for them have been recalled in this book too.  Similarly, the emergence of Gandhi as the undisputed leader of the Congress has also been chartered.  What is new in this book is the critical assessment of their respective politics and their attitudes towards Indian nationhood.

The Mahatma’s politics of morality has been much eulogised.  Gandhi’s technique of Satyagraha, his reliance on non-violence to achieve political goals and his insistence on  adoption of right means to achieve desired ends have been dwelt upon and analysed by many. One aspect of Gandhian politics which had made some scholars uneasy is his mixture of politics with religion.  The answer to this relationship between politics and religion in the Gandhian scheme is contained in  this book and it comes not from Matthews but from Prof. Anthony Parel.  Matthews quotes Prof. Parel’s assessment of Gandhi in his introduction to the centenary issue of “Hindu Swaraj” published in 2009 and it needs to be quoted in some detail.

“The reason why the Indian masses acclaimed Gandhi as an avatar and a saint is because Gandhi was directly placing himself in a tradition of Hindu / Buddhist philosophy. All the ramified discussion surrounding him is reducible to his understanding of the four ‘canonical aims’ of life in the ancient Indian tradition: dharma (worship, spiritual duty), artha (the pursuit of power and worldly things), kama (sensual pleasure) and moksha (release, salvation, transcendence). For Gandhi, politics was artha as a means towards moksha.  Release, or self-realisation, was both a political-nationalist cause and a personal-spiritual pilgrimage.  This is the link.  Gandhi’s original contribution to Indian philosophy was in the way he insisted that the route to moksha was not through dharma – right practice, duty, obedience to religious precepts – but through artha – the pursuit of worldly power.  The view that artha is not necessarily a form of degradation but could act as a dignified means to the end of moksha explains why Gandhi remained so uncontaminated by his political environment.  He did not wish to indulge in politics for its own sake.  For him, artha was to remain just artha; it was not to develop slyly into kama.  The reacceptance of artha is  a revolution, the greatest single development in Indian political thought since the Buddha.”

“Gandhi was  also a renunciate pilgrim, hoping to become worthy of moksha through self-sacrifice and abnegation.  His hope for India, then the world, was that others could share the revelation that artha was only one among the elements of life, that kama should be kept in check, and that dharma was not a matter of petty detail but of purity of heart.  These elements made up his spiritual and political practice; all the rest of noise.”  Brilliant!  It was this intricate relationship between moksha (broadly national independence) and artha ( through the instrument of politics) which confounded observers  and led them to discern the mixture of politics and religion in Gandhi’s practice of politics.

What about Jinnah?  What were the contours of his political thought and his political practice?  If it was the link between Politics and Religion  in Gandhi which was the problem area, the abrupt break from nationalist aims and decent into ‘communal’ politics of Jinnah has invited criticism and even ridicule.  Was there any way of understanding the politics of Jinnah?  The author says one way of understanding Jinnah was that his end had always remained protection of the Muslim community, an end he aimed to achieve without too great regard to means.  He never abandoned his aim after 1909.  He only changed his tactics, but not his objective.  Initially he placed his faith in electoral safeguards and weighted representation and at last in separatism.  He was comfortable with the British in achieving  his basic aim of protecting Muslims and later on, as the British were leaving India, Jinnah sincerely believed that it could be done only in a loosely devolved federal India, not the unitary and centralised India that Congress had in mind.

Even at the beginning of his political carrier when  he joined Congress, Jinnah’s aim and commitment remained the same.  He joined Congress because he saw it as a repository of liberal values which leaders such as Dadabhai Naoroji and G.K. Gokhale practiced.  Liberalism offered him the best guarantee to build a tolerant, diverse and modern country where Muslim rights would be protected.  With the advent of Gandhian Congress, he saw the liberal Congress withering away and replaced by a overarching, dominant Hindu version, which he disliked.  Events in post-Independence India and Pakistan have disproved his assumptions.  Congress ruled India has largely upheld – with all its failures – liberal values whereas Pakistan slipped into ill liberalism and  intolerance.