The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Jinnah and Savarkar

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Wednesday, Jun 08, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Jinnah and Savarkar

Jyotirmaya Sharma

Describing Mohammad Ali Jinnah as a secularist partakes of the very same terminology and semantics that theSangh Parivarideologues choose to define their own brand of secularism.

L.K. Advani's statement about Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's espousal of secularism hangs precariously on a single quote, taken from Jinnah's Presidential speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, delivered on August 11, 1947.

In the speech, Jinnah said: "You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in the state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state ... you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state."

Jinnah's early discomfort with Islamic orthodoxy is a well-documented fact, and so is his lack of acceptability among the Muslim masses.

But the spiralling demand for Pakistan between 1940 and 1947 had transformed Jinnah as a staunch advocate of Pakistan and a communalist. It also changed the fortunes of the Muslim League for the better.

While the ire of the sangh parivar against Mr. Advani is understandable, it has more to do with Mr. Advani's apology for the demolition of the Babri Masjid than his remarks on Jinnah.

Describing Jinnah as a secularist partakes of the very same ideological terminology and semantics that the Sangh Parivar ideologues chose to define their own brand of secularism. To understand this, one needs to turn to the writings and speeches of V.D. Savarkar.

In his core text, Hindutva, Savarkar was expressing similar sentiments when he argued that "at some future time the word Hindu may come to indicate a citizen of Hindusthan and nothing else; that day can only rise when all cultural and religious bigotry has disbanded its forces pledged to aggressive egoism, and religions cease to be `isms' and become merely the common fund of eternal principles that lie at the root of all that are common foundation on which the Human State majestically and firmly rests."

Despite "reasonable" digressions like these, Savarkar argues relentlessly for a Hindu Rashtra, and very much in the same vein as Jinnah seeks to make a distinction between Hindutva or Hinduness, Hindu religion and Hinduism.

The future and foundations of India had to be Hindu, argued Savarkar, and these foundations were non-negotiable. Once that is achieved, then, the effort would be to develop "a sense of attachment to the greater whole, whereby Hindus, Mohammedans, Parsis, Christians and Jews would feel as Indians first and every other thing afterwards." He repeated the same sentiment in the Calcutta session of the Hindu Mahasabha in 1939, while discussing the rights of the non-Hindu minorities.

It is the very stuff of revisionist history of the kind politicians favour that propels Savarkar into being projected by the Sangh Parivar as a nationalist, despite arguing in 1937, three years before Jinnah formally mooted the two-nation theory, that Hindus and Muslims were "two antagonistic nations living side by side in India". A similar fate has befallen Jinnah, once hailed by Gokhale as the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity." Both sought foundations for their putative states on the basis of a single race, ethnicity and cultural unity. While Jinnah realised his goal of a Muslim state, Savarkar's dream of a Hindu Rashtra remains a pipe dream.

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