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In the 1920s Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had been back in India for just about five years, Jinnah, on the other hand, had been politically active for fifteen. Gandhi having worked actively in South Africa for twentyone years, upon return to India, very soon gained political primacy by taking politics out of the comfortable debating chambers of the cities and into the heart of India: in that dusty, neglected, always derided rural India.

Issues that dominated the political scene then circled around: Swaraj; freedom; self-rule;—but how? In one leap or through slow, gradual devolution of power? The other was Hindu-Muslim unity, for if it was a free and an undivided India that was sought, then beyond any question Hindu-Muslim unity was of central importance. This worthy objective, though, was not so easily achieved, not till an independent self-governing India offered to all Indians, all communities, all faiths, freedom not just from the British regime but also from the real or imaginary fears of majoritarian domination. In the path of this unity stood many centuries of unhappy, accumulated experiences, a residue of the shadows and overhangs of history. Discernibly the British Empire was now in decline, and seeing that the Muslims yearned for the glories of their lost past; they sought freedom from the British Raj but not in its place the possibility of a Hindu dominated India. The Hindus, on the other hand, after many centuries of subjugation saw real freedom dawning, finally, and they saw that they could well soon be, at last, both the arbiters and the masters of their own destiny: ‘Door hato, Door hato e dunia walon, Hindustan hamara hai ’, Pradeep had so boldly distilled the principal emotion of those times. But whose Hindustan was it to be? Almost all discussions, negotiations, and talks then circled around these objectives: how to reconcile conflicting interests, mutual fears, rational or imaginary? How, in other words, to share sovereignty as justly and equitably as possible, principally between the Hindus and the Muslims, and of course the Sikhs and others, too, and also simultaneously, find a just answer to the complexity of the princely states of India, which were almost six hundred in number. Collectively they comprised a major slice of the pre-1947 Indian body- politic—two-fifths of the area and one-third of the population of the country. Questions also got voiced: Where does paramountacy go when the British, also, finally go? All these we need to dwell upon, but focused principally on Jinnah’s endeavours in this great turmoil of India.

However, before that what was happening in a post First World War Great Britain? The end of that war to end all wars, had also ended the period of the ascendancy of British imperial power; the flower of their youth had been robbed of them; the new age of American hegemony had arrived. Besides, the Treaty of Sevres 1922, had redefined the political geography not just of Arabia but the geo-politics of the entire world, paradoxically it resulted in a ‘peace that ended all peace’. 1 For what peace remained now? Or what peace could possibly remain in the circumstances? New countries were getting created by breaking up the existing, arbitrarily, at times almost whimsically, simply by drawing lines on paper and on sand. In India, we should have read those times (also the lines) more carefully, there was then, sadly, not sufficient awareness of the portents of these developments. The Spanish Civil War and the aftermath of the Great October Revolution sweeping through not just the established order of Russia but blowing away many European crowns and monarchies; this attracted Jawaharlal Nehru more, not the deliberate fracturing of the Arabian Peninsula and Mesopotamia. A great pity, for he ought to have paid more heed to our neighbours. However, it was the European struggles that attracted him more; for after all we were the true anglophiles of those times, we aped them best amongst all the ruled, even as we struggled against their rule. We went always to Europe not to those great cities, the great centres of civilisation, our historical and cultural kin: Baghdad, Istanbul/Ankara, Cairo, Teheran.

Excerpted from Page 151-153 of ‘Jinnah: India-Partition Independence’ by Jaswant Singh