UPSC GK: Understanding AMU and Jinnah Issue – Part II (HISTORY)

A BJP MP wrote to Aligarh Muslim University last month, demanding to know why a portrait of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah was hanging on the wall of the students’ union office. AMU explained that Jinnah was a founder member of the university court who had been given life membership of the union 80 years ago, and that his portrait had been there for decades. However, protests and clashes on campus followed.

SALIL MISRA, historian of Modern India and Pro-Vice Chancellor of Ambedkar University Delhi, explains to The Indian Express the historical context of Jinnah’s politics, and why it continues to retain relevance for certain groups in India.

Why does Jinnah provoke anger even 70 years after Independence?

The mainstream Indian nationalism that started developing from the end of the 19th century was civic and territorial. It was based on the idea that all Indians, irrespective of their language, religion and culture, were part of the single Indian nation. This idea of Indian nationalism was, of course, very uneven in its spread. It did not reach all groups, communities and regions at the same time. But it did become the template for mainstream Indian nationalism, and was espoused by Naoroji, Gandhi, Tagore and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others. Jinnah’s major intervention in Indian politics from the 1940s onward represented an emphatic and categorical denial of this idea of the single Indian nation. He led a massive political movement around the idea that the Indian people were not one, but two nations — Hindu and Muslim — that could not live together. In a climate in which territorial Indian nationalism had become the most popular way to imagine the Indian nation, the politics and ideology of Jinnah, particularly after 1940, provoked offence and animosity.

Indian society lives in the shadow of Partition even today. The search for the “real culprits” behind the division of India continues. And prima facie, Jinnah seems to fit the bill. The decades since the 1980s have seen a particularly aggressive form of Hindu communalism masquerading as “nationalism”, which has debunked the inclusive and plural idea of Indian nationalism as “pseudo secularism”. This brand of majoritarian politics has created its own heroes and villains for the “historical wrongs” done to Indian society. In this version of history, Jinnah emerges as the main villain, for reasons that are obvious.

But was Jinnah the unquestioned leader of Indian Muslims?

Certainly not, until at least 1937. He was only one of several, and a large number of important Muslim leaders were with the Congress. There were hardly any takers for Jinnah among the Muslims of Punjab, Bengal and Sind. However, after taking over the leadership of the Muslim League in 1937, Jinnah launched a powerful political campaign to dub the Congress as a purely Hindu body, and to preach political separation between Hindus and Muslims. He projected a Congress-Muslim divide as a Hindu-Muslim divide, and argued that a Congress government would be a “Hindu Raj”, and that Muslims would be persecuted in Hindu-dominated independent India. He also began argued that India was basically unsuited to modern democracy. His tireless campaign proved to be successful, and it can be said that by 1940, Jinnah was indeed the most influential political leader among Indian Muslims.

So what is it that led him to abandon the Congress idea of Hindu-Muslim unity and demand a separate Muslim nation?

Jinnah began his political career in the Congress, and was a votary of united territorial Indian nationalism. He disapproved when the Muslim League was formed in 1906, frowning at its pro-British and elitist orientation. It was only in 1913 that he joined the League, when its politics began to turn against the British. It is possible that he was persuaded by Congress colleagues in order to bring the League closer to the Congress. Jinnah was instrumental in effecting a pact between the Congress and the League in 1916.

Jinnah, at this time, was a believer in the old moderate type of politics. He left the Congress in 1920 after it began, under Gandhi’s influence, to change into a mass organisation with a radical programme that included non-cooperation and civil disobedience against the British. He began to work on organising a separate political platform of Indian Muslims which, in the 1930s, developed in an exclusively separatist and communal direction. By the end of the decade, this platform had adopted an extreme communalist position and begun to demand complete political separation between Hindus and Muslims.

Was Jinnah the first to propound the two-nation theory?

Some vague ideas of political separation had begun to develop since the late 19th century. In the early 20th century, with the growth of active Hindu and Muslims communalisms, these ideas began to gather momentum. In 1930, Sir Muhammad Iqbal said at the Muslim League session in Allahabad that all Muslims of North-West India could be organised into a separate polity. In 1937, V D Savarkar declared from the platform of the Hindu Mahasabha that Hindus constituted a nation in themselves. This was nothing but a variant of the two-nation theory.

The two-nation theory should be understood as the product of the steady communalisation of Indian politics and society since the late 19th century. The British played a particularly negative role in this process, by creating institutional structures that kept the two religious communities separate from each other. They did this through a model of democratic politics in which voters, constituencies and candidates were all divided along religious lines. Hindus and Muslims were grouped as separate voters and constituencies. This provided great incentive to organisations claiming to champion separate Muslim and Hindu interests.

In recent times, Jinnah has been reassessed as a constitutionalist by, among others, L K Advani and Jaswant Singh, essentially on the basis of his first speech to the Pakistan Constitutent Assembly. How valid is this reassessment?

One should not read too much into a single statement made by Jinnah after Pakistan had been granted by the British. To assign prime causative value to a single isolated statement, to the exclusion of the wider context, does not make for a valid historical explanation. From 1940 onward, Jinnah had launched a powerful communal movement among Indian Muslims, and it was obviously not possible for him to retreat from that. The extreme communalism he had unleashed was the genie trapped in the bottle of history. His address to the Constituent Assembly reflects at best a feeble desire to put the genie back after it had served its purpose.

Many leaders and intellectuals have used this statement to exonerate Jinnah of the charge of spreading communalism, and to “fix” the responsibility for Partition on other actors, mainly Nehru and Gandhi. This has been a handy tool in the politics of Congress-bashing.

Credit: Indian Express Explained (http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/aligarh-muslim-university-muhammad-ali-jinnah-portrait-row-5167253/)

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UPSC GK: Understanding AMU and Jinnah Issue (HISTORY)

A portrait on a wall in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) is at the centre of a massive row. Displaying the Muslim League leader and founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the portrait has hung there since the late 1930s, comfortably sharing space with other stalwarts of Indian history like Mahatma Gandhi, CV Raman and C. Rajagopalachari among others. Earlier this week, however, the portrait’s presence was questioned by BJP MP from Aligarh, Satish Gautam.

In defence of the portrait, AMU spokesperson Shafey Kidwai said Jinnah was accorded life membership of the AMU students’ union in 1938, during undivided India, and that traditionally all life members’ portraits are placed on the walls of the AMU students’ union hall.

Jinnah’s portrait at AMU, however, is also a reminder of the multi-dimensional nature of Indian history. The campus of AMU had been buzzing with political activity ever since it was established in 1875 as the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College by social reformer Syed Ahmad Khan. From being a bastion of staunch supporters of western education and British rule, to transforming into a space bustling with slogans of the nationalist movement, to turning into a university that strongly supported the Muslim League and its demand for a separate nation for Muslims, is noted to have changed political colour in keeping with the changing atmosphere of the time.

Jinnah’s portrait inside its campus today needs to be looked at keeping in mind the multi-coloured richness of AMU’s history.

AMU and the nationalist movement

Since its inception in 1875, the educational centre that went on to become AMU had played an instrumental role in providing intellectual and political leadership to important sections of the Muslim community. During its initial days, the AMU held a strongly pro-British policy. Its founder, Syed Ahmad Khan, was of the firm belief that a western mode of education was the only way to uplift Indian society and rejuvenate the Muslim community. Consequently, the college premises served the purpose of grooming students in British mores and habits, along with cultivating in them a European educational spirit.

But things changed rapidly with the advent of the twentieth century. The agitation against the Nagri resolution in 1900 and then the students’ strike of 1907 were just some of the events that bore testimony to a change in the political atmosphere at MAO college. “This most ‘benighted’ and conservative of institutions suddenly exploded into political activity confronting the British with the most serious Muslim movement of dissidence they had faced since the 1857 revolt,” writes historian Mushirul Hasan in his work “Nationalist and separatist trends in Aligarh, 1915-47.”

Encouraged by the change of character in the university life, Gandhi and his Khilafatist allies turned to them for support for the Non-cooperation Movement of 1920. When Gandhi visited Aligarh to address the university crowd, he is known to have been warmly received by the students’ union. Similar welcome was also accorded to Jawaharlal Nehru when he addressed a meeting at Stratchy Hall of the University in 1933. The students’ newsletter, ‘Aligarh Magazine’, frequently published articles invoking a united nationalist spirit. Addressing the university in 1930, the vice-president of the students’ union spoke of AMU’s role in the freedom movement in the following words: “Turn ourselves into the biggest, the most disciplined, the most educated and the most united army that India possesses, to fight against the evils that have made India the laughing stock of the world and let nobody say that Aligarh lagged behind anybody in India’s battle of freedom.”

AMU and Jinnah

It is only from the late 1930s that we see a sudden shift in loyalty towards Jinnah. This change in attitude was rather surprising to many contemporaries. Previously, for a long time, Jinnah’s relationship with the university was quite tenuous. His attitude towards the alumni ranged from being indifferent to hostile. But there are several reasons that contributed to AMU suddenly welcoming Jinnah with open arms.

Mushirul Hasan believes that there are three major reasons behind this switch in political character of the university. First, by now the Muslim intelligentsia, feeling rather alienated by the Congress and also quite alarmed by the growth in Hindu-Muslim frictions, were keen on developing a solidified Muslim consciousness. Second, Jinnah filled up the space for a much needed uniting figure among the Muslims who were hitherto segregated along regional lines. Third, this was also the time when the Islamic community at large throughout the world gained a new-found communal consciousness on account of the Khilafat issue. Jinnah’s call at this juncture was just the need of the hour for what the students’ union of AMU saw as necessary for the larger interests of their community.

Lastly, Jinnah himself made every effort in gaining a stronger foothold on the university. “He sedulously cultivated Vice-Chancellor Ziauddin, maintained regular contacts with the League and the AIMSF organisers, offered generous funds to the Muslim University City League, and made frequent trips to Aligarh, which were observed as ‘Jinnah week’ in the University and formed an important event in Jinnah’s political itinerary,” writes Hasan. But, of course, there were many in the university who fervently voiced their protest against the League’s political activities. Eminent among them were names like Rashid Ahmad Siddiqi and Mohammad Habib.

When the Partition took place, the AMU found itself in a state of crisis. “The number of students began to fall heavily, and despite the arrival of refugees from Pakistan, the fall in numbers continued,” writes academic Shamin Akhtar. “Thus, Aligarh’s response to the Pakistan movement needs to be viewed in an all-India perspective, and its reasons must be located in the convergence of a wide range of factors which made the resolution of communal differences increasingly difficult,” writes Hasan. Over time, the university has retained its reputation as one of the finest educational and cultural centers of the country. Its association with Jinnah was one among the many twists and turns that history has accorded to any and every institute of relevance within the subcontinent.

Credit: Indian Express Research (http://indianexpress.com/article/research/muhammad-ali-jinnah-aligarh-muslim-university-hindu-yuva-vahini-amu-a-love-hate-relationship-5163066/)

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