Written by: Dr. Dushka H. Saiyid
Posted on: August 14, 2020 | 
Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Muhammad Ali Jinnah was born into a middle-class merchant Gujrati family in December 1876. A brilliant barrister, he cut an imposing figure with his tall good looks, impeccable attire and an enigmatic reserve. However, his passion for politics, constitutionalism and the rule of law developed as he witnessed the Parliamentary debates in Westminster.
After Jinnah returned to India from London in 1896, his rise both as a lawyer and in the field of politics was meteoric. He started his political career as an idealistic young nationalist member of the Congress, who was inspired by the likes Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the founders of the Congress and the first Indian to be elected to the British Parliament in 1892, and mentored by Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta. They were the moderate section of the Congress whose aim was self-rule for India, but who believed in working for reforms within the existing government institutions.
A delegation of Muslim conservative notables presented a memorandum to Viceroy Minto in October 1906, asking for preferential treatment and separate electorates for Muslims, and a couple of months later founded the Muslim League in Dacca. Jinnah was neither a part of this delegation, and nor did he join the Muslim League till 1913.
Naoroji presided over the Congress session in Calcutta in December 1906, and Jinnah acted as his secretary and helped draft his speech, which called for unity of all creeds and condemned the division of Bengal. The meeting was attended by 1500 Hindus, Parsis, Christians and Muslims. Jinnah was to echo the same theme of national unity at every meeting in the coming decade.
(L to R) Pherozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji
The Congress was split at its meeting in Surat in 1907 between the moderates, and the group led by Tilak. The latter had no confidence in reforms, wanted to boycott British goods, rely on swadeshi (indigenously produced goods) and wanted total independence from Britain. Tilak’s mass appeal and reliance on Hindu religious symbols had alienated the minorities. The Congress remained divided for the next nine years. In some ways, Tilak was a precursor of Gandhi, with a similar kind of populism and a shift away from the secularism of the Parsi leaders and Gokhale.
Jinnah was a beneficiary of the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, which provided for more seats for Muslims in the Imperial Council to which he was elected in 1910. When Jinnah joined the Muslim League, he said that it should not “…imply even the shadow of disloyalty to the larger national cause to which his life was dedicated.” Gokhale told Sarojni Naidu in Poona, before he died, that Jinnah “has true stuff in him, and that freedom from all sectarian prejudice which will make him the best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity.” When Gokhale and Pherozeshah Mehta died in 1915, while Dadabhoy remained in London, Jinnah found himself alone in Congress but for Annie Besant’s support.
Jinnah brought the Congress and the Muslim League to hold their meetings contemporaneously, against the wishes of hard-liners, so delegates were able to attend the annual sessions of both parties 1915 onwards. It was another attempt at Hindu-Muslim unity. Despite resistance at the 1915 session of the Muslim League, by orthodox members, Jinnah successfully got an approval on New Year’s Day of 1916 to appoint a special committee, which would formulate a single platform of reforms in consultation with other “political organizations… in the name of United India.” His indefatigable efforts for the Muslim League and the Congress to work together seemed to be bearing fruit.
Jinnah was re-elected to the Central Legislative Council for a second term from Bombay’s Muslim seat in 1916. He was able to convince AC Mazumdar, the Congress President, to accept the Lucknow Pact of 1916. This Pact, the high point of Hindu-Muslim unity, gave Muslims better representation than their population warranted, but more importantly, if any legislation affected a community, it couldn’t be passed unless three-fourths of that community voted for it. Although, both the Congress and the Muslim League passed the resolution, it was never implemented.
Viceroy Chelmsford called a War Conference on April 27, 1918, and Gandhi supported the recruitment drive of Indian soldiers without any reservations, while his pacifism took a back seat. Jinnah, on the other hand, refused to support the recruitment, saying in a telegram to the Viceroy: “…a subject race cannot fight for others with the heart and energy with which a free race can fight for the freedom of itself and others. If India is to make great sacrifices in the defence of the Empire, it must be a partner in the Empire and not as a dependency….” Both Tilak and Annie Besant supported Jinnah’s position.
(L to R) Annie Besant and Gopal Krishna Gokhale
The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms introduced dyarchy to India, which devolved political power by successive stages to India, and were passed as Government of India Act of December, 1919. However, it came a few months too late because tempers were roused by the recent killings. Instead of restoring civil liberties after the War, the government had passed the repressive Rowlatt Acts in March 1919. Gandhi had called for civil disobedience by his followers against the Acts, and incidences of violence and disorder had spread all over India, culminating in the senseless shooting of a crowd in Jalianwala Bagh by a British Brigadier on April 13, resulting in 400 dead.
Emergency meetings of both the Congress and the Muslim League were called in September of 1919 in Calcutta. Both at the Congress meeting in Calcutta, and next month at the Home Rule League meeting in Bombay, Gandhi pushed hard for his agenda of non-cooperation. In Calcutta, his position was strengthened by the trainloads of Khilafatists brought from across India. When Jinnah argued for “Attainment of self-government within the British Commonwealth…by constitutional methods”, he got support from only one-third of the participants. At the Home Rule League meeting Gandhi declared that anyone who did not agree with the majority decision was free to resign, and Jinnah was quick to send in his resignation. When Gandhi wrote to Jinnah asking him to return to the Home Rule League, Jinnah responded, “…your extreme programme has for the moment struck the imagination mostly of the inexperienced youth and the ignorant and the illiterate. All this means is complete disorganization and chaos”. This summed up Jinnah’s views of Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement. At the next annual session of the Congress and the Muslim League in Nagpur in December 1920, Jinnah was not allowed to speak by the howling mob, they were not willing to listen to any view opposing Gandhi’s, and nor did Gandhi make any attempt to calm down the crowd. Jinnah left the Congress pandal, and neither did he go to the Muslim League meeting, as that too was dominated by the Khilafatists.
(L to R) The Brothers Shaukat Ali and Muhammad Ali
Gandhi’s support of the Khilafat movement had paid off and got him popular support of Muslims, although the Caliphate was an anachronistic and moribund institution, which Ataturk abolished in October 1924. However, Jinnah did not entertain politics of expediency to win cheap popular support amongst the Muslims of India, and that too for the preservation of an autocratic and dynastic institution.
By mid-1922 Jinnah was trying to organize a new moderate party from which he would have excluded Gandhi. He invited Motilal Nehru and Jayakar to join the party, but they declined, leaving the Quaid isolated in the Congress. Jinnah was re-elected to the Legislative Council from Bombay as a Muslim independent candidate on November 14, 1923, the same seat from which he had resigned after the passing of the Rowlatt Acts.
Jinnah and Gandhi
In India’s newly elected National Assembly, which met for the first time in New Delhi on 31 Jan 1924, Jinnah managed to get the cooperation of 23 independents and 42 Swarajists, who were led by Motilal Nehru, to cooperate on a common agenda of reforms against 36 official appointees. Thus was born a Nationalist party in the Assembly, committed to responsible government and dominion status for India. While Jinnah criticized Gandhi’s boycott of the Councils and the Khilafat movement as being ineffective, Gandhi declared Council entry as inconsistent with non-cooperation. Motilal Nehru succumbed to Gandhi’s pressure and threw out all legislative enactments. Jinnah and his group continued to vote on each piece of legislation on its merit.
The Quaid had devised the Delhi Muslim Proposals, as they came to be known, in 1927, which both the Muslim League and the Congress had accepted. Under these ingenious proposals, the Quaid had got even the conservative Muslims to agree to abandon the demand for separate electorates, which would have given Muslims the right to vote for only Muslim candidates. Under Jinnah’s scheme, a minimal number of Muslim candidates would have to be elected, but they would have to appeal to the whole electorate of their constituency. Similarly, a minimum number of Hindus would have to be elected in the Muslim majority provinces. The appeal to the joint electorates meant that the communal rhetoric would be toned down. It was clear to the Quaid by February 1928, that the Congress was abandoning the constitutional compromise because of the Mahasabha.
While the Quaid was in London, the Congress appointed the Nehru Commission to draw up a nationalist constitution. No Muslim was a member of the Commission, and it gave no safeguards to Muslims, including separate electorates. When the All-India National Convention met in December 1928, the Muslim League delegation led by the Quaid decided to revive the demand for separate electorates, but were met with resistance by both Jayakar and the Mahasabha.
(L to R) Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Mahatma Gandhi
On New Year’s Day of 1929, the Quaid entered the All Parties Muslim Conference presided over by the Agha Khan in Delhi. The Agha Khan wrote about Jinnah: “Mr. Jinnah had attended the Congress party’s meeting in Calcutta shortly before, and had come to the conclusion that for him there was no future in Congress or in any camp-allegedly on an all-India basis-which was, in fact, Hindu dominated. We had, at last, won him over to our view.”
The Quaid’s attempts at the joint struggle of the Congress and the Muslim League through constitutional means had been wrecked on the Gandhian rocks of populism.
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