Who divided India?

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SHauKeeN GaBRu

Chardi Kala
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</td><td width="10"></td></tr></tbody></table>Who divided India?
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5"></td></tr></tbody></table>Historian Stanley Wolpert's new book -- Shameful Flight -- revisits Partition, and lays the blame for one of the most horrific episodes of the 20th century squarely on the shoulders of a Briton, finds Arthur J Pais.

Admiral Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas 'Dickie' Mountbatten, the favourite cousin of British King George VI, was famous for his charm. His sycophants in England called it irresistible.

His admirers in the British government even thought of him as a statesman who could charm discontented nationalist leaders of the British Empire, and tease out of them agreements that seemed impossible for other British diplomats to obtain.
So Mountbatten was sent to a deeply restive, increasingly riotous and ceaselessly rebellious India in March 1947 as Britain's viceroy, to hammer agreements that could allow the British to withdraw from the subcontinent with dignity -- leaving the country unified.
'Mountbatten viewed the prospect of ruling India during the Raj's sunset year as challenging as a hard-fought polo game, as he put it the King -- 'The last Chukka in India -- 12 goals down,' writes historian Stanley Wolpert in his riveting, disturbing and provocative book, Shameful Flight: The Last Years of the British Empire in India. "It was a task for only a person of deep insights into India," says Wolpert -- considered by many to be one of the best historians writing on the subcontinent -- in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. "The mission needed a person of great diplomatic skills and [one] who absolutely lacked arrogance."



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The British wanted to leave India by 1948 but Mountbatten cut the time by half
November 29, 2006
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</td></tr></tbody></table> What Wolpert would discover some 55 years after the Partition of India -- and the concomitant fleeing of more than 10 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs from one side to another -- was so horrifying that the 79-year-old historian might have had a hard time believing it. Mountbatten was not only totally inept at dealing with fractious Indian political parties, Wolpert writes, he hastened the process of Independence. The British government wanted to leave India by 1948 but Mountbatten cut the time by half to mid-August 1947 because he was impatient to get back to England and build his naval career.
Much of it had to do with vindicating his father's reputation.
First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy Prince Louis of Battenberg was forced to resign from the fleet during World War I because of his German origin. The family changed the last name to Mountbatten to avoid further vilification. His then 14-year-old son resolved to join the navy and remain in it until he became First Sea Lord.
"So Mountbatten resolved to make fast work of his India job," Wolpert says. "The British cabinet gave him a longer time, but he never had any intention of using it."
Cloak and dagger
Worse, Mountbatten kept the Partition maps of Punjab and Bengal -- with the Muslim areas of the two provinces going to the newly created Pakistan -- secret, until it was opportune for him to make the announcement.
'Mountbatten had resolved to wait until India's Independence Day festivities were all over,' Wolpert writes, 'the flashbulb photos all shot and transmitted worldwide, Dickie's medal-strewn white uniform viewed with admiration by millions, from Buckingham and Windsor palaces to the White House. What a glorious charade of British imperial largesse and power 'peacefully' transferred.'
Image: At the conference in New Delhi where Lord Louis Mountbatten disclosed Britain's Partition plan for India. (Left to right) Jawaharlal Nehru, Mountbatten's adviser Lord Ismay, Mountbatten and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images


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</td></tr></tbody></table><!--img src="http://im.rediff.com/news/pix/twin.gif" hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0--> Wolpert puts quite a bit of blame for Partition at many Indian leaders, including Nehru
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5">
</td></tr></tbody></table> In his book published by Oxford University Press -- and which reads in parts like fine detective fiction -- Wolpert has directed quite a bit of blame for Partition at many Indian leaders, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Independent India's first prime minister. One of the reasons for the Labour government in Britain, which had come to power soon after World War II, to grant hasty independence to India was because there was hardly any trust between the Labour and Indian leaders, Wolpert argues.
"There were many Left-leaning Labour leaders who thought their proposals for a gradual transfer of full power to India were not appreciated by Indian leaders," Wolpert says.
"They felt Indian leaders were not being grateful, not appreciating the efforts Labour was putting in to end the colonial rule, unlike the Tories led by (Winston) Churchill."
Many of Wolpert's finger pointing is bound to cause debate and controversy. Already, Professor Ainslee Embree of Columbia University has called the book 'engrossing, but very controversial.'
Dilip Basu, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, while calling the book 'a delightful read,' added: 'It will be of great interest to anyone curious about whatever happened to the great British Empire and those who often wonder why Indians and Pakistanis endlessly fight with each other.'
Image: Jawaharlal Nehru speaks to Lady Edwina Mountbatten during a display given by the New Delhi Glider Club. On the right, Lady Pamela, daughter of Nehru's guest.
Photograph: AFP/Getty Images


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</td></tr></tbody></table> <!--img src="http://im.rediff.com/news/pix/twin.gif" hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0--> 'Mountbatten was the worst viceroy of India, he was the centerpiece of this tragedy'
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5">
</td></tr></tbody></table> The central villain in the book is undoubtedly the arrogant and unrealistic Mountbatten. "Partition maps revealing the butchered boundary lines drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe," Wolpert says, "through the Sikh heartland of Punjab and the east of Calcutta in Bengal, were kept under lock and key on Mountbatten's orders."
Radcliffe, a barrister, had never set foot on Indian soil before 1947. "He was to accomplish, in a month, work that should have taken at least a year," Wolpert points out. "He was so afraid of what he had done -- worried that Sikhs, Hindus or Muslims would kill him -- (that) he left India hastily."
Wolpert says had the governors of Punjab and Bengal known about the way the two provinces were being partitioned, "they could have, with their early knowledge, saved countless lives by dispatching troops and trains to what would soon become the lines of fire and blood.
"The rapid departure of the British from the region was the catalyst for over half a century of violence, a legacy that lives on today," the historian says, discussing why Partition still holds interest for him.
"The Indian leaders as well as their counterparts in England failed to appreciate how bad and how weak a viceroy Mountbatten was," Wolpert continues. "In many ways, he was the worst viceroy of India, he was the centerpiece of this tragedy."





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</td></tr></tbody></table> <!--img src="http://im.rediff.com/news/pix/twin.gif" hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0--> Churchill called the time limit a 'guillotine'
November 29, 2006
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</td></tr></tbody></table> Shameful flight The failure of the British government to see the larger picture and Mountbatten's preoccupation with his career created explosive conditions made worse by the warring Indian leaders, he says.
"I still wonder how it was possible for the leaders of Great Britain, barely two years after defeating, with American support, the armies of Hitler and Mussolini, to withdraw 14,000 British officers in such unseemly haste from India," he adds.
Churchill, who was bitterly opposed to an independent India, cautioned against the sudden departure. He thought the original 14-month schedule was too hasty. His opposition 'could be counted as one of history's supremely ironic moments,' writes Wolpert.
'How can one suppose that the thousand year-gulf that yawns between Muslim and Hindu would be bridged in 14 months?' Churchill asked. He called the time limit a 'guillotine,' adding that the hasty exit could bring a terrible name to Britain. The 'shameful flight' could result in chaos and carnage. 'Would it not be a world crime,' he asked, 'that would stain our good name for ever?'
He warned it would be a 'shameful flight, by a premature hurried scuttle.'
Image: Washington, DC. October 13, 1949: Jawaharlal Nehru arrives in the US.

Photograph: Staff/AFP/Getty Images




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</td></tr></tbody></table> <!--img src="http://im.rediff.com/news/pix/twin.gif" hspace=0 vspace=0 border=0--> Wolpert sees parallels between the aftermath of 9/11 and what happened in India in 1947
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5">
</td></tr></tbody></table> Even the eventual founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who would not give up his demand for an independent Muslim State, was worried over the way the Partition was being rushed. Wolpert, professor of history emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, dedicates his newest book 'To the memory of the millions of defenseless Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh victims of the British India's Partition.'
"For half a decade, I have pondered the question of the tragedy of Partition, and I have dealt with it in some form or the other in many of my books," Wolpert says. "I have also been trying to understand the role of the major people involved in Partition."
Wolpert had been thinking of a book exclusively focusing on Partition for many years but, but because of his other assignments, could begin working on it only about six years ago.
"I am glad I waited for," he said from his Los Angeles home on a Sunday afternoon. "After half a century of studying and teaching Indian history and writing 20 books on the subcontinent, I finally got an opportunity to reflect on one of the most momentous events in history."
He sees parallels between the aftermath of 9/11 and what happened in India in 1947. He sees the "same kind of madness, the same kind of arrogance (as in Mountbatten's decisions) in going to war against Iraq."
Petty politics
The infighting between the Indian leaders added to the tension and problems.
Some of them changed their minds too quickly. Jinnah, who complained the British were prepared to give him only a moth-eaten Pakistan -- meaning a country with the partitioned states of Punjab and Bengal -- at one point suddenly told the British he was not averse to the idea of an independent Bengal ruled by a fellow Muslim League leader.
Image: Karachi, Pakistan. September 18, 1947: Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan during an interview.

Photograph: Bert Brandt/AFP/Getty Images


Gandhi sent word to Jinnah that he would not object to Jinnah being the leader of free India instead of Nehru
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5">
</td></tr></tbody></table> Nehru gets a lot of blame for going with Mountbatten's desire for not just partitioning the country hastily but also for agreeing to divide Punjab and Bengal. Gandhi had refused for seven years, since Jinnah proposed a separate Muslim nation, to support a 'vivisection of the Mother,' arguing 'Muslims can never cut themselves away from their Hindu or Christian brethren. We are all children of the same Mother.'
He was so serious about saving India that he sent word, a few months before Partition, to Jinnah through Mountbatten that he would not object to Jinnah being the leader of free and united India instead of Nehru. But Jinnah -- who always mistrusted the Mahatma, calling him 'wily Gandhi' -- had no use for such overtures.
Nehru is also faulted for not listening to Gandhi in getting Jinnah to mediate in the escalating violence in undivided Kashmir. Gandhi even wondered if holding a plebiscite in Kashmir could end the looming violence there.
Why did Nehru listen so much to Mountbatten?
Image: Lord Mountbatten preparing on the final stages of India's Partition.

Photograph: Rediff Archives'

Those who forget history...
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5">
</td></tr></tbody></table> Nehru had talked about Mountbatten's fatal charm," Wolpert says. "Of course, he was flattering Mountbatten when he said that. But Nehru unfortunately came too much under the influence of Mountbatten, exacerbated by Nehru's education in England. Nehru was charmed by the English upper world, he thought he could trust and work with Mountbatten. "Mountbatten's royal blood appealed as much to the rulers of princely states in India," Wolpert continues, "as his radical views and social charms did to Nehru. His charm was so much Nehru was blinded by it."
Asked if Nehru's relationship with Mountbatten's wife Edwina played a role, the historian says, "It helped him cloud the danger of what Mountbatten was doing."
Wolpert doesn't fight the idea that Partition looked inevitable by 1947, and he understands why Nehru, seeing the way Hindus had been killed in Bengal and Punjab, agreed to the partition of the two provinces.
"But the real solution to any massacre is not to make more violence by drawing a line blindly through a province," the historian points out.
Image: Lord Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru and Lady Mountbatten share a light moment preparing for the final stages of freedom for India.


Years later, Mountbatten would whisper now and then how he had botched up the Independence process
November 29, 2006
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="5"><tbody><tr><td height="5">
</td></tr></tbody></table> Years after Partition, Mountbatten would whisper now and then how he had botched up the Independence process. Nehru 'finally awakened,' and admitted in a letter to the Nawab of Bhopal, a friend, 'Partition came and we accepted it because we thought that perhaps that way, however painful it was, we might have some peace.
'And yet, the consequences of that Partition have been so terrible that one is inclined to think that anything else would have been preferable,' Nehru added.
At the end of his six-year research and writing, Wolpert was looking for a picture for the book's dust jacket. He had gone through hundreds of pictures of Partition. And he had also seen pictures offering glimpses of thousands of people who perished in the tragedy -- some estimates believe over a million were killed.
"Suddenly, I came across an image that encapsulated the tragedy," he says. It is a picture by the well-known photographer Margaret Bourke-White, showing mostly bare-footed refugees going to places they felt would be safe from the communal carnage.
The image of a Sikh man in the same photograph carrying a woman on his shoulders also spoke volumes, Wolpert says. "The picture brought to our attention the fact that these poor, barefoot people with no possessions had to make the perilous journey because of the idiocy and arrogance of those who had a duty to protect them."
Image: Partition woes: People on their way to India leaving behind their homes and land in Pakistan.
 
Gandhi was responsible for dividing India. He made no restrictions whatsoever when Pakistan was created, but i guess India, the flawed democracy will never admit that their "Gandhi pyare desh ke sitare" was responsible for the divide and slaughter of over a million people.
 

lover_boy1315

Kise da Yaar Na Vichhde
GANDHI NEHRU JINNA GANDHI NEHRU JINNAHH GANDHI NEHRU JINNAH GANDHI NEHRU JINNAH:kuto jee te karda hai saalyaan nu maar deyaan bt o te pehlaan hi bhajj challe oopar. :t :t :kill :kj :hit :2g :2g :punch :saw :bomb
 

sbajwa

Member
Muslims and Islam can never live with non-Muslims and non-islamic people and thus they divided India.

No wonder whereever the Muslims are in critical numbers (10-20%) around the world there are the problems. Muslims have never and never will believe in "live and let live". So it is our Dharam (duty) to fight them and get rid of them.
 

lumber121

New member
Muslims and Islam can never live with non-Muslims and non-islamic people and thus they divided India.

No wonder whereever the Muslims are in critical numbers (10-20%) around the world there are the problems. Muslims have never and never will believe in "live and let live". So it is our Dharam (duty) to fight them and get rid of them.
..i m muslim punjabi.. ooper site da na parho unitedpunjab te galaan vichoreyan aleeyn kerde ho....
manu daso jithe iss tarha deeyan galaan howan uthe main kiss taraha reh sakdaan....
 

Angel_Eyes

Done Deal !
Muslims and Islam can never live with non-Muslims and non-islamic people and thus they divided India.

No wonder whereever the Muslims are in critical numbers (10-20%) around the world there are the problems. Muslims have never and never will believe in "live and let live". So it is our Dharam (duty) to fight them and get rid of them.

no our dharm only teaches us to live peacefully and dont use "tegh"/weapons unless someone hurting u wrongfully......and dont blame it on all muslims for what some phonetics do, eda ta saanu vi blame karde aa hinduaa nu maran layi te hinduaa nu saanu maran layi, par na ta saare sikh eda de hann te na saare hindu, People religion is a big part of life but please follow humanity before any religion.
 

Angel_Eyes

Done Deal !
..i m muslim punjabi.. ooper site da na parho unitedpunjab te galaan vichoreyan aleeyn kerde ho....
manu daso jithe iss tarha deeyan galaan howan uthe main kiss taraha reh sakdaan....

lumber saab eda nahi hai, its different views opinions people carry and we cant get into each others heads to change their thinking, we r united punjab and shall always be. Punjabis all over the world share the same language, same culture so nothing makes us diff. Tuhada welcome hai site te and please feel free to browse and stay. Eda da kuj nahi hai aithe. Myself, i m sikh to everycore of myself, but respect every religion, and trust me eh gall galat hai ki muslims kise naal nahi reh sakde, and blah blah, i am living with a muslim and we live very happyily and peacefully. so nothing like that te tusi eda na feel karo
 

deep

Prime VIP
Muslims and Islam can never live with non-Muslims and non-islamic people and thus they divided India.

No wonder whereever the Muslims are in critical numbers (10-20%) around the world there are the problems. Muslims have never and never will believe in "live and let live". So it is our Dharam (duty) to fight them and get rid of them.
bajwa sahib main sirf enna hi kahanga ke if you cann't respect other religion that doesn't mean that you have rights to say ill of other religions.......

bai ji kadde v panje unglan ik braber nahin hundiyan
so you cann't blame the whole religion .........
 

Ramta

Member
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.


Thanks
 

Da Tiwana

Inspector Sa'ab ;)
well main taan ehi kahunga ke jinnah fer vi syana si yaar.
ohnu pata si ke hindu majority india ch muslims da araam naal rehna aukha ho jana.
we all know what they did with baabri masjid. and what all these guys r doing with sikhism now a days.
its not that i hate hindus or am against them, but je kitte hindu muslim kathe hunde taan babri masjid warge incidents bohat pehlan te bohat wadde padhar te hone si.
still if i hurt anyones feelings am sorry.. :D
 
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