Last week, The Hindu carried an excerpt from a book by Assistant Professor Venkat Dhulipala of a US university provocatively titled Creating a New Medina. The excerpt suffered on account of atrocious writing but it prompted me to read up on Professor Venkat’s other works on the issue as well as suffering through recordings of some of his talks. He is hopelessly obsessed with refuting Pakistani-US historian Dr Ayesha Jalal’s seminal work on Jinnah that is now close to 30 years old. In the process, all objectivity and fair-mindedness seems to have gone out the window. Consider his basic argument: Jinnah was irreversibly committed to a separate Pakistan because he said so. Now I do not take a firm position on how or what Jinnah would have settled for post-1940 but it is clear that he was ready to accept something less or at least something different from the Pakistan he got. Let us consider the underlying absurdity of Professor Venkat’s argument. If indeed Pakistan was a bargaining counter, according to Professor Venkat, Jinnah should have said, “Look, here I am asking for Pakistan but in fact I am not. I will settle for much less.”
The answer to the Jinnah puzzle lies as much in the pre-1940 period as it does in the post-1940 period. It stretches back to the Nehru Report where Jinnah’s original proposals, which contained an agreement on the basis of joint electorates, were rejected by Congress under pressure from the Hindu Mahasabha. To understand Jinnah better, one has to read the proceedings of the Roundtable Conference where Jinnah was a party of one pitted against one and all with his vision for a federal and democratic India at once cognizant of its diversity and non-sectarian in its approach, a vision that ran counter not just to the princely states that poisoned the British government against him but also to the Muslims of Punjab who forwarded the notorious Punjab thesis, and the Congress, which refused to accept the ground reality that it did not represent all Indians. To understand how the break with Congress came finally, you have to investigate how Congress, with its simple majority through a limited electorate in the United Provinces (UP), decided to exclude its election ally, the Muslim League, which had won the largest number of Muslim seats in UP, from its government. Every attempt at Hindu-Muslim unity, every appeal for a united Indian national front that Jinnah forwarded to Gandhi and Nehru was arrogantly rebuffed.
Congress since the ascendancy of Gandhi had — its tokenism of having a few Muslim maulanas in its ranks notwithstanding — become a largely caste Hindu party. The myth of Mahatma Gandhi, the great non-violent icon, is certainly greater than the man Gandhiji was. Gandhi’s vision for India was essentially anti-modern, a religious vision drawing its basis from ancient India. To understand how Gandhi wanted to model India, one must read Dr Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, now available in an annotated edition with an introduction by Arundhati Roy. Gandhi’s vision was of a Hindu society with varna and avarna castes and outcasts. Those who want to read more on Gandhi’s vision vis-à-vis a caste-based organisation of Indian society should read his 1921 article in Navajivan (a Gujurati journal) where he described in no uncertain terms the western European ethos as essentially alien and fundamentally destructive to Hindu society, which was to be based on caste and caste alone. It was a vision that greatly vexed Jinnah and Ambedkar respectively as representatives of the Muslims (the outcastes) and untouchables (the avarna castes).

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