M N Roy's concluding paragraph on Jinnah

M N Roy was a leading intellectual, political philosopher and activist from India.  This is how he saw Jinnah in an article written days after Jinnah's demise.

But few mortal men  can escape being prisoners of their creation. Pakistan was Jinnah’s creation, and he had to hold the baby. There was no competent nurse; at least that must have been his feeling. It would have been superhuman to act otherwise, and Jinnah was not an angel. But he was not the devil of the drama, as he was made out to be. He is no more with us. Let justice be done to his memory.
      Jinnah did not survive his triumph. He had been a sick man  for the last year of his life;  and grave anxiety  must have been the cause of the sickness. The establishment of the “largest Muslim State” meant leaving many millions of Muslims in the lurch. Having been fighters for Pakistan, the millions of Muslims left in the Indian Union are in the most difficult position. Most of them feel betrayed. Jinnah was fully conscious of that tragedy, which must have haunted his last days.   Indeed, the homeland for Indian Muslims was a Utopia; any territorial division was bound to leave many millions of them out, in a very delicate position of being regarded as aliens, suspected of disloyalty to the land they must live in. An intelligent man like Jinnah must have foreseen this tragic consequence of what he demanded. Therefore, I for one do not believe that he really wanted partition of the country. Like a gambler, over-confident of his wits, he staked high, believing that other party would compromise on his terms. That would have been for the best of all concerned. But the latter having taken up the attitude of all or nothing, Jinnah was driven to the bitter end –of gaining a victory he himself dreaded and which he did not survive.

Is Pakistan like 16th Century England?

Is Pakistan like 16th Century England. I endeavoured to answer this question in my latest article in Daily Times. I think there is hope still for Pakistan because our social and material conditions are very similar to Europe during reformation, especially England. There have been monumental changes made that will take their effect in good time.

The coming elections will be decisive in the sense that they would determine whether Pakistanis are willing to allow democracy to work or not. In the opinion of this writer, it is very important for democracy, Pakistan and Pakistan People’s Party itself that the PPP loses the next election — which it seems poised to do — so that people get to vote out an unpopular government and the PPP goes back to the drawing board to reinvent itself as a true people’s party. Such a defeat will be a reminder to whoever is in the saddle next that there is no mightier sword than the sword of public opinion that the people have forged in this country primarily through their own effort and their faith in democracy.

Photographs of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution

Partition of Punjab II : Jinnah's so called Islamic pronouncements

Continuing from last week, we come to Jinnah’s so-called Islamic pronouncements, which matter, at best, is an incidental tangent from the main issue but since it was raised by Mr Shakil Chaudhry in his article (Daily Times, July 26, 2012) , it needs to be addressed. 

The claim that Jinnah was secular needs to be understood before it can be argued for or against. The claim that Jinnah was secular does not necessarily pre-suppose that all utterances of Jinnah the politician were consistently secular, especially when put against secularism as we understand it today. That Jinnah used the Islamic idiom on occasion is a fact and not necessarily an inconvenient fact for those who argue for Jinnah’s secular vision. Substance not form trumps rhetoric.

Partition of Punjab I

To my mind, it is an extraordinary waste of important public space to engage in tit for tat kind of back and forth comments through columns in national newspapers. I did not want to respond to Ishtiaq Ahmed’s rebuttal article last week (Daily Times, July 22, 2012) through this space and therefore, responded to it through a blog in some detail. Unfortunately, my blog elicited a response in the comments section by one Mr Shakil Chaudhry, who wrote an article in this newspaper. Be that as it may, I am forced to write a three-part response and the readers will just have to bear with me.

Everyone has the right to his own opinion and I would like the counterparties to realise that I too have the right to my opinion about Ishtiaq Ahmed’s work. Nevertheless, I still think that his recent book is a drastic improvement upon his earlier work. It is precisely for this reason the book needs to be highlighted. Coming as it is from a certain one-sided point of view, the content of the book shows that the violence in Punjab was caused by the insistence of Congress to partition Punjab at the insistence of the Sikhs.

Did Jinnah want a secular state?

By Yasser Latif Hamdani


 Taimoor Ashraf made a number of patently inaccurate claims, based on a flawed and utterly misdirected rendering of facts about Jinnah, partition and the making of Pakistan. The gist of his convoluted piece was this: Jinnah might have been secular, but did he want a secular Pakistan? 

Mr Ashraf claims that Jinnah was not secular because the August 11, 1947 speech was made as a consequence of terrible sadness on his part because of the communal bloodletting. By August 11, 1947, there were communal disturbances, but the communal bloodbath, largely, happened in late August and September. Then he claims that Jinnah was not secular because he was a pluralist. So in other words being ‘secular’ and ‘pluralist’ are mutually exclusive? There are no qualms with the fact that Jinnah’s secularism was more of the British variety than the strict French laicism of Kemal Ataturk. Does that mean Jinnah would have approved of ‘priests with a divine mission’? That incidentally is one of the more famous Jinnah quotes: “Pakistan shall not be a theocracy to be run by priests with a divine mission.”

Was Jinnah democratic ? II

By Yasser Latif Hamdani

The dismissal of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) government has long been cited as an example of an early streak of authoritarianism in Pakistan’s history. It is said much of Pakistan’s later crisis of democracy has its roots in this decision. This sound bite has been used by many critics of Jinnah as being one grave example of lack of statesmanship at a critical juncture. I have a different view and I will endeavour to explain why.

Jinnah as a lawyer

From http://mylaw.net

This is a wonderful two part series by an Indian law network website on the life and career of Mahomed Ali Jinnah.
Part 1: "No man is more adroit in presenting his case"
Part 2: "A brilliant advocate, man of unimpeachable integrity"

Mohammad Ali Jinnah evokes strong responses in South Asia, and has been cast in a multitude of roles depending on which side of the political line he is viewed from - a master negotiator, a charismatic leader, a cunning politician, a secular liberal, and a conservative reactionary. Few, however, see him as a lawyer, his primary professional training that helped launch his career in public life and shaped both, his political career, and his ideological vision.

Lawyers of course, overwhelmingly dominate the galaxy of political leaders in colonial India. This was partly structural. Professional and middle classes have always played a significant role in republican movements. In British India, law, unlike medicine or engineering, was the only profession that could be practiced without being employed by the colonial government. Jinnah is unique in being amongst the handful of lawyers who became equally successful in both their fields.

Timur Kuran's column in the New York Times

Book Recommendation: The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East


(On Long Divergence- How Islamic Law held back the middle east an excellent book which I recommend wholeheartedly-YLH)

By Timur Kuran

To start with the underutilization of female labor in the Middle East, we need to distinguish between pre-industrial and modern times. It is only in the past century or two that the abilities of Middle Eastern women have been underutilized by global standards of the day.

Until industrialization, women were restricted players in economic life everywhere. In western Europe, as in the Middle East, high birthrates kept women focused on childrearing and household chores, limiting their participation in commerce and finance. They did control assets, of course, including real estate. Although no systematic comparative study exists, there are grounds for believing that Middle Eastern women controlled more assets, not less, than Western women. Most critically, whereas Middle Eastern women received around one-third of all estates, in substantial parts of the West women did not share at all in inheritance settlements.