The enigma of Sonia Gandhi

Sunday, September 20, 2009 Aakar Patel No leader in the world is like Sonia Gandhi. She is a European leading a major Asian power. A Roman Catholic, and perhaps a practising one though she makes no display of her faith, in a nation that is dominant Hindu and Muslim. She has the sort of power in her country that few leaders in the west have. And though they do not seem keen to own her, not since Mussolini and perhaps not even since the Caesars has an Italian individual been this powerful. Sonia isn't properly educated, but is seen by India's middle-class as quite sophisticated. There isn't any evidence to show that she's well- read either, but her manner is refined, even reginal. She met her husband Rajiv Gandhi at Cambridge, though she wasn't at the university. She was taking English language lessons at a school, having come there from her home in Italy. Rajiv was attending Trinity, and said in a famous interview that he had 'flunked out' without a degree. Their son Rahul attended Trinity, and passed. Sonia was 19 when she met Rajiv and 22 when they married. He was only a couple of years older, and so it must have been a partnership of equals, particularly because Rajiv was relaxed and not chauvinistic. Within months of their meeting, Indira Gandhi became prime minister of India. Sonia's English isn't particularly good. This was noticeable last week when she inaugurated an institute raised by the software firm Infosys, in the southern city of Mysore. She meant to tell the audience that she was happy to get away from Delhi, and all the trouble that her job in politics brought her, but what came out was gibberish. She isn't good at Hindi either, though she has improved her control over it since she began speaking it publicly a decade ago. Certainly she speaks it better than Europeans who have been in India for much longer, like Mark Tully, or people who have dug into our culture more, like the author William Dalrymple. Most of the time she speaks precisely and unambiguously, like a European and unlike Indian politicians. When she talks as a leader, she uses the modest 'hum' referring to the collective, rather than herself. She is always deferential to the prime minister in public, and you can see that she's also quite fond of the old man (he's 77), which is unusual given that they share power. Sonia has been around power for a long time, over 40 years, so it must be second nature to her. Her mother-in-law was murdered in 1984, when Sonia was 38. She was the wife to India's prime minister, and it came to light that for many years after her marriage she had not taken Indian citizenship but retained her Italian passport (which she later gave up). She was widowed at 45 when Rajiv was murdered in 1991. She has raised her children well. They are independent and do not lean on their family identity beyond a point. And they are quite charming. Both are handsome and that's not surprising given how attractive their father was. Rahul is unexcitable and persistent rather than charismatic, and that is a very good thing for India. Priyanka is charismatic, and will come under pressure to join politics because crowds love her. For eight years or so after her husband died, Sonia only played the widow. She took no part in electoral politics, when the Congress under Narasimha Rao ruled between 1991 (when Rajiv died) and 1996. She also sat out the next couple of years while the party was restive under its new head, an old-style back-room leader called Sitaram Kesri. As the party began to wilt under the BJP's disciplined expansion and the rise of the peasants in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, she accepted the pleas to come and lead the Congress. Most leaders accepted her status as dowager empress. How did she adjust to the brutality of India's politics? How did she calibrate her strategies? It would make for a fascinating biography which is unlikely to be written. Unlikely by an Indian, in any case. Two attempts were made to delegitimise Sonia when the Congress was weak. The first by the ambitious Sharad Pawar, leader of the Congress in Maharashtra, a state with 100 million people whose capital is Bombay. He revolted in 1999, saying a foreigner should not head the Congress. Few joined him, and he has become a minor player now. Sonia showed pragmatism by later allying with Pawar's party, an act that kept Thackeray out of power. The second attempt was made after the Congress won in 2004. BJP leaders, led by Sushma Swaraj, said they would not allow Sonia to take office. The first election Sonia campaigned for, in 1998, was a disaster, and the Congress registered its worst performance. The next, the following year, was even poorer, and the Congress won only 114 seats out of 545. Sonia was now Congress president. Then, in the third one, against expectations, she triumphed and Atal Behari Vajpayee's government fell after the 'India Shining' campaign. Sonia could have easily become prime minister, winning from two Lok Sabha seats (one against Swaraj). The constitution was on her side. But she stepped aside in a moment of drama, broadcast live, which changed the way Indians looked at her. She said that she did not seek power and would not become prime minister. She remained Congress president, but Manmohan formed the government. For us the notion of Tyag, of self-sacrifice, is big in the Hindu faith, which reveres the one who renounces the world. Now the Congress is again India's most powerful party and has a clutch of modern young leaders. Sonia has become its unquestioned leader. She has revived the Congress from depths that neither Nehru nor Indira saw, and it is unlikely that her easy-going husband would have done as well as she has. Her behaviour since she anointed Manmohan has been exemplary. There has been little evidence that Manmohan has not been allowed to drive policy where he has control, such as over economics and foreign affairs. She has shielded him from the nonsense that comes to all who are in politics in the third world: the corruption, the venality and the arbitrariness. Manmohan is wise enough to let all of that pass while he tries to get on with his job. But it takes an exceptional person to absorb the nastiness voluntarily. Sonia was pragmatic again in Gujarat after being convinced that a strong secular attack on Narendra Modi would backfire. However, her strategy of ignoring the butchering of Muslims has not worked yet. She gave charge to Shankarsinh Vaghela, a former BJP man who defected but he failed. Given the sort of liberal person she appears to be she must have been repelled by her own actions, but she put party above herself. When the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, a state of 75 million people whose capital is Hyderabad, died in a helicopter crash a few weeks ago, Sonia showed a bit of steel. The chief minister's son, in his late 30s, was backed to become leader even though he had no political experience. Sonia blocked this because the son does not get good press. It will be difficult to keep the son out in future, but for now she has enforced discipline in a party which has not had it for a long time. She could do it in this case because she could point out to them that her own son could have become minister this time but chose not to. Sonia's preference appears to be to work with people who are modern, like her. S M Krishna, India's foreign minister, is a Fulbright scholar and his deputy Shashi Tharoor worked at the UN. This promotion of such elites is good for us. Sonia Gandhi is 63, and has led the world's biggest political party, and one of its oldest, for 11 years. At her age, her mother-in-law had just come back to power and would spend another four years in office. India is fortunate to have someone like her: we could have got Imelda Marcos. Today the most powerful man in Pakistan is not from the majority sect. The most powerful person in India isn't even Indian. We're bigoted in many ways and the world keeps reminding us of that. But in many ways also we are above pettiness and we should not forget that. The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar@hillroadmedia.com

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Jinnah, Jaswant and the BJP: An analysis by Aakar Patel and Ghazi Salahuddin

Jinnah, Jaswant and the BJP

Sunday, August 23, 2009 Aakar Patel Jaswant Singh has not been expelled from the BJP for his book on Jinnah. He could not have been, because it does not say anything untrue. Very quickly, this is what his book says: 1) In 1940, Jinnah's Muslim League proposed that Muslims should have self-government 2) Between 1940 and 1946, Jinnah gained electoral support and was open for negotiations. However, he was snubbed by Congress leaders whose actions were either illogical (Gandhi) or tactless (Nehru). They wanted to rule India as a unit; Jinnah wanted a federation 3) On March 8, 1947, as killings began in Punjab, on both sides, Vallabhbhai Patel and Nehru accepted Partition in a resolution they passed in Gandhi's and Azad's absence 4) Congress could have done more to prevent Partition 5) Jinnah was modern and secular and would have been appalled by how Pakistan turned out None of this is wrong, or new. Much of it is taught in history books. Does Jaswant say Partition was a good thing? No. Does he blame Patel for it? No. If there is one man Jaswant holds most responsible for Partition, it is in fact Jinnah and his "continued rigidity, his fixed stand on an ever-increasing charter of demands for the Muslims, an ever-larger share of power for them in Independent India (page 504)." Patel is mentioned in the book in six places (pages 13, 289, 418, 459, 461 and 488). Not in one place has Jaswant said an unkind word about him, though he has been honest in reporting fact. So when BJP President Rajnath Singh is angry with Jaswant's views on Patel, he must be hallucinating. But he is not. And that is because Jaswant's punishment is not for his book at all. It is about the elections that the BJP lost under Rajnath's presidency, Advani's candidacy and Arun Jaitley's management. It was the second general election in a row that the party had lost. The only change that came about after the first defeat was that Atal Behari Vajpayee retired from active politics. After the defeat this year, Jaswant Singh told the BJP's Core Group at a meeting on June 10 that leaders should be held accountable if the party was to progress. They should not be rewarded for failure, he said, by hanging on to their party posts. Advani initially made a show of retiring (he is 82 and unlikely to lead another campaign). But none of the three men left. Rajnath Singh remains the BJP's president, Advani is leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha and Jaitley leader in the Rajya Sabha. They must deal with dissent and the Jinnah issue was handy. The book was released on the same day, August 17, as the BJP's three-day meeting to introspect the election defeat began. And so it is Jaswant Singh who must go instead. A minor royal from Rajasthan in western India, Jaswant won the election from Darjeeling in eastern India. Why Darjeeling? Because it has a large population of martial Gurkhas. They would vote for Jaswant because he fought nine years with the Central India Horse, including the wars of 1962 and 1965. For a soldier, raised on black and white certitude, Jaswant Singh has written a remarkable book. It is free of prejudice and the BJP should have been proud that one of their own wrote it. Instead they have punished him. Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne. But if it is so obvious that Jaswant Singh is right and Rajnath Singh is wrong, then how will Rajnath get away with it? He will because he is confident that nobody will actually read Jaswant's book. This includes the media which carried headlines like 'Jaswant blames Patel, Nehru for Partition'. In India we like the idea of controversy, the details bore us. But what this episode has done is made Jinnah more accessible. It has thrown up things that we did not know about the man. Asked in an interview whether he thought Jinnah was a great man, Jaswant said: "Oh yes, because he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he stood against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him... Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. Why don't we recognise that? Why don't we see, and try to understand, why he called him that." Indians are not used to this sort of language about him because for us Jinnah is the man who broke up our nation. Jaswant discovered that Jinnah has an attractive personality. He does not come across as a normal Indian. This is because, for most of his life, Jinnah does not carry the prejudice of faith that we are burdened with. Secondly, his manner of dress and conversation is European and correct. This is also unusual. Europeans themselves might not find this characteristic remarkable, and this explains why Attenborough's Jinnah is such a cardboard figure. But for us the man stands out. The men around him in his early days, mainly South Bombay Gujaratis (Hindus and Parsis), were very fond of Jinnah and their memoirs of him, many written after 1940, have warmth and respect. Jaswant says that Jinnah was a tough negotiator and should have been negotiated with. Instead the Congress tried to win him over because they thought his cause was futile. Gandhi, especially, made the mistake of going to him without accepting that he represented only Congress. Indians are not taught the sequence of Partition in school. One reason is that the Congress's role in the freedom movement is inviolate. Nothing bad can be said about Gandhi in particular. The other reason is that the two-nation theory is still applicable in India which has 150 million Muslim citizens. Pakistan, which is now almost entirely Muslim, does not have to live with religious tension. Partition made Pakistan quite pure ethnically. But to Indians, Partition is easier explained away as something one man did, rather than say 'Muslims think they are a separate nation' because that is a formula for perpetual violence. For Jaswant Singh the original sin is not Partition; it is the Morley Minto reforms of 1909. The concession of separate electorates to Muslims once, he believes, is what has made this problem a recurring one for India. No democracy in the world has separate electorates. Muslims, writes Jaswant, were willingly Indian as long as they ruled India. By the end of the Simla conference in 1945, Jinnah wanted as many reserved seats for Muslims as there were for all other communities put together though Muslims were a quarter of the population. Jinnah rejected one-third representation that the Wavell plan gave Muslims. He said this was because "all other minorities" had the "same goal as Congress". Jinnah's Muslim nation did not include Christians because "ethnically and culturally they are very closely knitted to Hindu society (page 346)". The Congress was not, and is not, a religious body. It had no response to the cold logic of community that Jinnah presented to them as his argument. And then 1946 brought to Jinnah the sweeping electoral victories that settled the matter because the League campaigned on Partition. Would Partition not have happened had Nehru not been so tactless after the Cabinet Mission plan? It would have. The Congress alone struggled against the British (it is why the party still has presence on the ground politically). The League abstained, waiting for the struggle to end so that they could achieve their aim of Pakistan. Exhausted and frustrated, having spent most of the 1940s in jail while the League gained strength on the ground, the Congress leadership gave in. But Indians are not taught that, because that would reveal weakness in figures like Gandhi, Nehru and Patel. And so one man was demonised. Patel is a hero to the BJP, but Jaswant points out that Patel banned the RSS after Gandhi's murder. Jaswant Singh is one of the BJP's founding members when the party was set up 30 years ago. He has served as India's finance minister and foreign minister. It is extraordinary that he should have been executed without even a hearing (he was expelled over the phone). But this has given him the opportunity to take his case to the media. In the coming weeks, we shall hear a lot more about Jinnah the man in India, and that's a good thing. The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar @hillroadmedia.com A voyage round Jinnah Sunday, August 23, 2009 Ghazi Salahuddin In some ways, August, like T S Eliot's April, is our cruellest month, "mixing memory and desire". It does breed, against the backdrop of ritualistic celebrations, some sombre thoughts about what we have made of our freedom and how we had envisioned this freedom in the early days of Pakistan's existence. As another poet said, "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts". One of our regrets, to be sure, is that in the past sixty-two years, some of our fundamental issues have not been resolved. Many of us have tirelessly invoked the Quaid's speech on August 11, 1947 to argue that this was an obvious prescription for a modern, democratic and almost secular dispensation. Meanwhile, the religious elements, the likes of Jamaat-i-Islami, have usurped what they claim is the ideology of Pakistan. But what was their stance before and at the time of the creation of Pakistan? The truth of the matter is that we have not been able to come to terms, objectively, with the history of our freedom struggle and the role that Jinnah and other leaders of that time had played. We have not resolved the crisis of our identity. Hence, we must be grateful for the controversy that has been created in India over the publication, on Monday, of Jaswant Singh's laudatory biography of Jinnah. Almost immediately, the former foreign minister of India and a major leader of right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was expelled from his party and was highly censured for praising a leader who has generally been demonised in India. Not only that, his book – "Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence" – was banned in the state of Gujarat, where BJP wields power. The reason given was that it had "defamatory references" to Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first home minister and a political icon in Gujarat. Now, BJP is an ideology-driven party, like our religious outfits, and these parties tend to suppress free thinking and views that challenge the official line. While discussions that portray the urgency of breaking news have continued on the electronic media as well as in newspapers in both India and Pakistan, there is little evidence that we, in Pakistan, are willing and capable of exploring that critical phase in our history and go beyond our 'zindabad' platitudes. At the same time, we do have a reason to celebrate the vindication of our Founder in an analysis by a Hindu nationalist leader. But what does it all mean in the context of the creation of Pakistan and its national sense of direction? It does not make much sense that our view of Jinnah should be same as that of an Indian leader who has manifestly been opposed to the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan. Jaswant looks at Jinnah as a great leader because, as he told Karan Thapar in a television interview, "he created something out of nothing and single-handedly he stood up against the might of the Congress party and against the British who didn't really like him". Yes, Jaswant recognises the fact that Jinnah fought for the interests of Muslims of India but his view is that for most of his political career, he was a nationalist and worked for Hindu-Muslim unity. His image as a secular leader is what endears Jinnah to many Indians. If you remember, L K Advani, of the same BJP, had submitted his resignation in June 2005, at the end of his six-day visit to Pakistan where he had praised Jinnah and this had created a huge controversy in India. He had described Jinnah as one of the "very few who actually create history". Incidentally, Advani was born in Sindh and had migrated to India. Irrespective of how we interpret the Hindu-Muslim conflict in the freedom movement, the great communal carnage that took place at the time of the partition and the unprecedented migration that resulted from it is something that we are yet not able to fully comprehend. Should that momentous dislocation, attended by heart-rending tragedies, call for some serious deliberations in the two countries in how they should evolve domestically and in their bilateral relations? After all, the leaders of the Congress and the Muslim League were not expecting and were not ready for this surge in primitive passions. So, was this the reason that Jinnah made that speech on August 11, 1947, that actually seemed to be a repudiation of many of his earlier assertions? Indeed, many issues are raised by that speech that we need to bear in mind on the basis of historical research and intellectual honesty. That Jinnah was an exceptional leader in history is beyond question. In fact, there can be nothing more deferential than the first sentence of Stanley Wolpert's preface to that great biography: "Jinnah of Pakistan". This is it: "Few individuals significantly alter the course of history. Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three". Read it again and it would lift your spirits. Yet, how do you contend with his speech as the newly elected president of the Constituent Assembly in Karachi on August 11, 1947? This must have been the most glorious moment in his career. Pakistan was now a reality. But perhaps he was looking at the unfolding developments and considering the justification for Pakistan's survival. Be that it may, the speech makes great sense to at least the liberal elements in Pakistan and it has become more relevant now that the religious extremists have flourished and have caused so much trouble. Even before the eruption of the Jaswant controversy, August 11 this year underlined the Gojra incident in which religious fanatics had brutally attacked a Christian community. I do not have the space to quote the salient passages from that speech. The gist of it, as I see it, was: "You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state". Alas, the leaders who came after Jinnah, with the connivance of the ruling establishment, have subverted this basic principle of a modern state and we can see that all citizens are not equal in the eyes of the law because of so many discriminatory laws. As I have said, we should welcome the controversy that is sparked by Jaswant Singh's book. But not just to gloat over this appreciation of the Father of our nation and the biased reactions of Hindu communalists. Here is an incentive for us to find our own Jinnah and save our country from those of his detractors who are averse to rational thinking and who do not want to understand the historic forces that have shaped our times. The writer is a staff member. Email: ghazi_salahuddin@hotmail.com

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Aakar Patel: Let's sing Iqbal's Tarana-e-Hind-o-Pak to fight religous extremism in our society. Indo-Persian sufi heritage versus Taliban's sharia.

Mr Zardari, tear down this wall
Sunday, March 08, 2009
Aakar Patel



Allama Iqbal imagined Pakistan as a utopia in northwest India where Punjabis would do ijtihad and read Nietzsche. The Quaid-e-Azam ordered a Pakistan where religion would cease to be a matter for the state. But both men saw something magnificently dormant in the character of India’s Muslims, which would flower in isolation.

Iqbal returned from Europe in 1908 ashamed by the fall of Islam. He thought its return to glory could come through expelling the polluting influence of Indian culture. Iqbal understood our culture. In 1904, he wrote the song that still defines our culture best (Tarana-e-Hindi), and he translated Gayatri Mantra, the talismanic chant of the Upanishad, from Sanskrit. But Europe taught him that our culture was unable to compete. Muslims needed to break out. In 1910, he wrote Tarana-e-Milli.

Jinnah didn’t understand our culture much, but he thought that Muslims were a separate nation from Hindus, and could become modern once they were separated from India’s archaic culture. Both the poet and the lawyer thought that the solution to progress was to stop being Indian.

Iqbal died in 1938, Jinnah died in 1948. It would be illuminating to see their reaction as they flipped through a current issue of Nawa-i-Waqt (would have to be translated for Jinnah), the guardian of the ideology of Pakistan.

The Pakistan of Iqbal won against the Pakistan of Jinnah. Jinnah’s imaginary Pakistan was sent into the night with a pat on the head by Liaquat and the peerless Shabbir Usmani chanting their Qarardad-e-Maqasid, 60 years ago this month.

Now full-dress Sharia is upon Swat and the Punjabi’s head is cocked towards the frontier in curiosity. The world holds its breath.

The danger of Talibanisation to Punjab does not come from the Pakhtun and his gun. Pakistan is 60 per cent Punjabi. Pakhtuns are only 15 per cent of its population and 20 per cent of its army. The danger to Pakistan comes from its inability to resist the pure ideas of the Pakhtun, of whom the Punjabi especially is enamoured. Talibanisation is happening in the mind. There is no resistance to it for two reasons: one is the lyrical call of Sharia which Muslims are drawn to in their quest for utopia. This will not change.

The second is the deliberate amputation of its own culture by the Pakistani state. This can change. Those who think Pakistan can resist the Taliban intellectually should look at the sequence on culture that unfolded after 1947.

Jinnah, one could say, stifled the voice of culture by giving Urdu a monopoly in 1948. Those who followed him beheaded it by banning freedom of religion (Liaquat in 1949), Indian cinema (Ayub in 1965), alcohol (Bhutto in 1977) and immorality (Zia in 1979). Under Nawaz Sharif in 1992, Pakistan banned the economy citing Riba, but the deranged state saved itself by lying, acting on the instinct of self-preservation, which by now was in short supply. The jihad in Kashmir under Benazir and then Musharraf completed the project of India as foreign and enemy and Indian culture as ‘kufr’, in the Pakistani mind.

But what is the culture of Pakistan? Do Pakistanis own a tradition of music and dance that is separate from India’s?

Mehdi Hasan and Ghulam Ali (who told me this on a flight to Bombay from Ahmedabad) enjoy performing in India because Pakistan’s middle-class is mostly illiterate about raag and taal. But this is our inheritance from the Sam Ved and from Amir Khusro. Why should it be disowned by Pakistanis?

High culture is rooted in tradition, and that is the first thing the religious state attacks. There is no culture of north Indian classical dance, Kathak, in Pakistan. Dance in general is absent (though apparently it is quite popular with Mehsud men, presumably grooving to the rhythm of pop-popping Kalashnikovs) because physical expression tends to be sensual and therefore deemed un-Islamic.


Culture is expression: the expending, the release of emotion that is drawn out through the desire for expression. Through words, through movement, through emotion, through music. Its expression is unique to cultures and in north India and Pakistan we have our unique culture: Indo-Persian (with stress on Indo).

Culture does not directly resist extremism; it only makes extremism difficult to penetrate by diverting the mind. The only way to fight extremism is through reason, but South Asians are not particularly good at reason because we don’t understand its vocabulary. Culture softens us, not in a bad way, and makes us less suicidal, which is a state where pristine religion leads us through its demand of purity.

We have no capacity to soften religion through reason because of our dependence on the great jurists of the 8th and 9th centuries. Iqbal spoke of the possibility of ijtihad, but how much ijtihad can happen in Pakistan, and for that matter in India, in defiance of Imam Azam?

The BBC carried a report last month titled ‘Can Pakistan’s Sufi tradition resist the Taliban?’ No, it can’t. Sufism can no more fight the Taliban than Mickey Mouse. Sufism is flight. It is escape. Those of us who have watched the ecstasy unfold at Nizamuddin Awliya and Baba Shah Jamal and a million heretical shrines in India, Hindu and Muslim, know that most of us can only be weekend Sufis. Sufism’s message of wahdat ul-wajood leads us away from doctrine, and that is an intellectual journey.

Sufism cannot fight because it makes no demands, and it has no daily ritual. It also respects Sharia, and can live besides it quite comfortably. The great Chishti Sufis of Delhi were namazis.

But the Talib cannot live beside Sufism. He will bomb the shrine of Rahman Baba. And now he has brought his war to Lahore’s Liberty Chowk. The message will come through to Punjab as it did in Swat: peace through Sharia.

How will Pakistanis resist the Talib’s hypnotic call? The problem in Pakistan is not that the Sri Lankan team got attacked; terrorism is truly global and affects us all. The problem is that Pakistanis are the only people in the world still unconvinced about who did it. Even intellectuals who are published in its newspapers convinced themselves through a convoluted or paranoid logic that ‘Muslims cannot do this’.

What should be said instead is: this is not us. And it really isn’t.

We have one of the world’s richest cultures of literature, music and dance. Pakistanis need to embrace it; it lies across the border. Bollywood is not just a film industry; it is the dispenser of Indo-Persian culture, and its voice; it is not in Bombay by accident. Shahrukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor would spend more time in Lahore’s courts defending themselves against fahashi, as did Manto, than on sets shooting. This difference in environment is not limited to cinema.

Pakistan can legitimately claim to have produced better classical poetry than India. But why? Independent Pakistan’s great poets, Faiz and Faraz, sang of protest, because they had much to protest about. Independent India’s great poets, Gulzar and Javed Akhtar, Shailendra and Anand Bakshi sing of love, because they operate in the natural cultural environment of South Asia. Pakistan’s poets do not. But its being across the border doesn’t mean that what’s produced in Bollywood is not Pakistani culture. It was before 1965.

Musharraf opened up Pakistan’s media, Zardari should open up India’s media to Pakistan. Not the news channels, the entertainment ones. He should leave in place the ban on India’s news channels (for that matter, being deprived of their news channels for a while would benefit Indians also). And he should open the borders more generally.

Pakistan should not wait for this to be reciprocal. After the savage attacks in Bombay, India will not immediately let Pakistanis freely onto its soil. But Pakistan should open itself up to India’s people, culture, tourists (they will come in droves) and trade. This does not mean surrender. Pakistan should remain a strong, sovereign Muslim nation.

But it must let loose its secret weapon on the Taliban. And that is our culture, our Indo-Persian heritage. We built it. We own it; we should own up to it.

Forget Tarana-e-Milli. Let’s sing Tarana-e-Hind-o-Pak. Allama Iqbal would approve, and so, I suspect, would Jinnah.


The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar. patel@ gmail.com

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Also read:

Taliban attack the tomb of Rahman Baba in Peshawar...

Can Sufi Islam counter the Taleban?

Attack on Rehman Baba is attack on Pashtun identity

William Dalrymple on Rahman Baba tomb's attack: Wahhabi radicals are determined to destroy a gentler, kinder Islam

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The Gujaratis of Pakistan - By Aakar Patel

The Gujaratis of Pakistan

Sunday, February 08, 2009
Aakar Patel

Pakistan has fewer Gujaratis than it should, and that is to its detriment. Even so, the Gujaratis of Pakistan are its best citizens. None of the people on the list that follows are big in the field of literature, since Gujaratis are not particularly interested in that. This is because the trading instinct of Gujaratis tilts them towards the culture of Jains, whose texts are not in Sanskrit.

The Gujarati qualities are pragmatism and industry. Their courage is different from the courage of North India, which is martial. A Gujarati is brave with his gamble. The language of the stock market and the betting industry in India is Gujarati and is centred in Bombay. Unlike north Indians -- Punjabis in particular -- Gujaratis are a high-trust society. In Surat, the only major city of Gujarat to escape religious violence, the bond comes from trading between Hindus and Muslims.

Unusually among Indian castes, even the peasantry in Gujarat does not put too much premium on martial honour.

The Patels worship Krishna in his Ranchhod form. Ranchhod means 'he who fled from battle'. It refers to Krishna's retreat from Mathura under attack from Jarasandh's general Kalyavan, and then his flight, running away when he was challenged. This act of wisdom saved him and Gujaratis recognise it though it's not godlike behaviour.

Pragmatism, getting on with it, is what defines Gujaratis of all religions. It is what their identity is about. This is not to say that they are not susceptible to emotion. Gujarati Muslims helped partition India, but without understanding what they were getting into.

Aga Khan III, leader of the Ismaili Khojas (Jinnah's community), helped found the Muslim League in 1906, and the Syedna of the Bohra community gave his blessings to Pakistan, though only barely. The Dawoodi Bohras are an amazing Gujarati community. They are deeply religious but are not inclined to pan-national Islam. They are very good businessmen and very good citizens.

For some reason the Syedna encourages his flock to trade and discourages them from taking jobs under Hindus, writing in a book that this was akin to slavery. Even so, India and Pakistan are much better off because of the Bohras of Gujarat, Bombay and Karachi.

The Memons gave full tilt support to separatism, helping Jinnah win 40 out of 40 reserved Muslim seats for Bombay in the 1945-46 elections. But Pakistan rewarded them with nationalisation and the Nishtar Park bombing. The Gujaratis did not understand the destination when they set off on their religious journey with Jinnah.

Pakistan's attack on language, one of Jinnah's staggering mistakes, has decapitated Gujarati in Karachi. By ordering the monopoly of Urdu, a language he could barely speak and couldn't read, Jinnah began the process of cultural erosion that made religion supreme in Pakistan. His hair would have stood on end if Jinnah had been able to actually communicate with his constituents in Urdu. But all of these men would have been comfortable talking to each other in their mother tongue, and with their shared values.

Abdul Sattar Edhi

Like Gandhi, Edhi is from Kathiawar and probably speaks Gujarati in the sing-song dialect that south Gujaratis from Surat find funny. Born in Bantva, a village that has produced many great men, Edhi is representative of an individualism that Gujaratis are familiar with. His act of giving dignity to the dead is in particular a Gujarati trait. In Gujarati cities, cremation is free for everyone, and the wood for pyres is donated anonymously by merchants.

The world recognises the quality of Edhi. He has won the Magsaysay award, and the Nobel prize for peace ought to be his by right. Given the loopy Nobel nominations of the past (Kissinger, Al Gore) and the omissions (Gandhi, Biko), it may not really matter if this great man doesn't get it. Edhi is called the Mother Teresa of Pakistan. But unlike her he does not inject religion into his charity.

M A Jinnah

Quaid-e-Azam was a constitutionalist before he was anything else. He should have been valued in the subcontinent for that alone, but we are a people who perennially clamour for identity. After Partition, he would have been comfortable neither in India's anarchic democracy nor in Pakistan's anarchic theocracy. He liked order and he had values.

He was a man of refined European taste who would have disliked Bollywood, and would have been unable to access Faiz and Manto. He spoke Gujarati well and I translated an interview of his from the archives of the Gujarati magazine Visami Sadi (20th century). He told his interviewer in 1916 that the quality a man should be admired for was independence.

It is said the Labour Party denied him a ticket because he was "too much of a toff". He was a superb advocate, possibly the best of his time, as his defence of Bhagat Singh showed. He was deeply secular for most of his life, a truly great man and the greatest Gujarati of Pakistan.

Javed Miandad

Who is Pakistan's best Gujarati cricketer? We have the brothers from Junagadh, Mushtaq and Hanif Mohmmad and of course Danish Kaneria, the Gujarati whose name his own countrymen cannot say property (it is Dinesh -- Lord of the Day). And then we have Javed Miandad, Pakistan's greatest cricketer of any community. Less popular than Imran because he is dark and speaks Urdu nasally like a Gujarati, Miandad is nonetheless the man that people would want to bat for their lives.

His heroism is not from his machismo but from his refusal to be defeated. He broke the hearts of Indians with his last-ball six off Chetan Sharma in Sharjah, but he truly let his Indian fans down by arranging his son's marriage to Dawood Ibrahim's daughter.

Maj-Gen A O Mitha

Aboobaker Osman Mitha had a Hindu wife. His fellow officers would have been wary of him for this fact given the Pakistan army's indoctrination, and he would probably have been more comfortable in the Indian army.

He would certainly have been uneasy with the one Muslim equals 10 Hindus bombast of his army, especially after 93,000 Pakistanis surrendered in Dhaka. Mitha, a Memon from South Bombay, was one of the few intellectual officers in the army who grasped immediately what the problem in East Pakistan was. Lt-Gen Niazi's memoir, The Betrayal of East Pakistan, has a telling paragraph, a message that Mitha sent to the GHQ on reaching Dhaka:

"This operation has now developed into a civil war. No long-distance moves, no rail moves possible. No ferries of boats available. In fact, movement has become the chief obstacle for conducting operations or restoring economy and will remain so for some time…"

Pakistan was partitioned through civil war, not India's perfidy. Mitha's book, Unlikely Beginnings, is the best written by a Pakistani soldier. Bhutto, always one to do the wrong thing, sacked him, a fatal mistake.

Ahmad Dawood

The Memons are converts from the caste of Luhanas and they speak a mix of Kutchchi and Gujarati. Among India's Sunnis they are the peerless merchants, superior to the Chiniotis of Punjab, the Malabaris of Kerala and even the neo-mercantile Gujaratis, like the Sunni Bohras of Rander.

Ahmad Dawood left Bombay and moved to Karachi with Jinnah. He set up mills in Burewala, Lawrencepur and Karachi. The Dawood family's businesses also span insurance, chemicals and paper.

Bhutto skewered the Memons with Mubashir Hasan's half-baked economic ideas, taking over businesses that the government had no competence to manage. Dawood Petroleum was nationalised in 1974, as was Habib Bank. There is no chance that the Pakistan state would have been able to run any business as well as the Memons, and many of them migrated to Europe in that period, their second flight after 1947. But resilience is one of their qualities and the Memons still dominate large parts of Pakistani industry (ARY is owned by a Memon).

Ardeshir Cowasjee

The story is that when the Parsis landed in Gujarat, fleeing the Arabs under Caliph Abu Bakr (RA), they were sent a glass brimful of milk by the Rana of Sanjan. This indicated that there was no room in his land for more people. The Parsis added sugar to the milk and sent it back.

It is indisputable that the Parsis, the greatest community of Bombay, have sweetened India. The people of Bombay believe that Parsis lose their marbles after 60. All interviews and profiles of Cowasjee mention the man's eccentricity. Despite his grouchiness, and constant predictions of doom, Cowasjee is an optimist. Someone who has written as many decades on the issues he has would surely have stopped if he did not believe change were possible.

As a journalist, Cowasjee is methodical as Parsis are. He reported Zardari's illiteracy ("may Gaad give us strut to save Pakistan") or dyslexia at the Mazar-e-Quaid. Every paper in Pakistan – journalism is the laziest profession on the subcontinent -- bought the state's version and ran him down till he demonstrated that he did not write things he had not verified. He represents the best of Gujarat and the best of Pakistan. (The News)

The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@ gmail.com
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Holbrooke’s entry will lead to India-Pakistan dialogue on Kashmir

Holbrooke’s entry will lead to dialogue

Sunday, February 01, 2009
by Aakar Patel

India must engage Pakistan on the issue of Jammu and Kashmir before it is forced to. It must settle on a solutions process that is approved by both democracies, and by the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.

Last week, India averted Barack Obama’s focus on the issue by using its muscle. America’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke was initially meant to also deal with ‘related matters’. This was apparently a euphemism for Jammu and Kashmir. However, according to the Washington Post, India forced President Obama to delete the words ‘related matters’ from Holbrooke’s brief before the official announcement.

This showed India’s clout extending seamlessly from a Republican administration to a Democratic one. But it also showed how alarmed India is at the prospect that someone would inspect a problem that is clearly worrying the world. A week before that, India sulked at Britain’s foreign minister David Miliband, who wrote in an article that Jammu and Kashmir needed to be resolved because it gave jihadis an excuse for terror. The Hindu reported that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee were upset by the tone Miliband used in a meeting he had with them, where he was forthright. As the younger man, they expected him to show deference.

India rejects the argument that terrorism against India is fuelled by the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. To an extent this is true. There are groups in Pakistan that seek more than the liberation of Jammu and Kashmir. The Lashkar-e-Taiba says it wants to conquer the Red Fort. There are also Muslim groups in India that are doing terrorism for other reasons, like the killings in Gujarat. And there are groups in Pakistan, and Lashkar is one of them, that are part of the global jihad that has Caliphate aims that are not based on specific grievances.

But what the world is concerned with is that extremism in Pakistan has surged, in part because of India’s reluctance to resolve the Jammu and Kashmir dispute. This must be addressed by India sooner or later, because extremism in Pakistan is no longer just its internal matter. Having just held an election that India sees as very successful, this might be seen as the right time.

India has two fears on Jammu and Kashmir. The first is the fear of loss of territory. The second is the fear of the unravelling of its secular structure, where the two-nation theory is eternally in application, and never ‘settled’. India has a complicated view of the issue, and its legal and constitutional positions on Jammu and Kashmir are separate from its most powerful argument.

India’s legal view: the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir Hari Singh acceded to India on October 26, 1947. This accession is legal and Prime Minister Nehru’s subsequent moving of the United Nations Security Council to vacate Pakistani intrusion does not supersede it. India also points out that action under the resolutions of the Security Council was sequential. The UN had sought Pakistan’s retreat from the disputed territory first, something that Pakistan had not done.

India’s constitutional position: India’s constitution came into force in 1950, by when it was acknowledged that Jammu and Kashmir would need special status. This was given to it through Article 370 a couple of years later. Through this India agreed that except for defence, communications and foreign affairs, all central legislation would require the assent of the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly. There was also mention that the head of the Jammu state would be referred to as the Sadr-e-Riyasat.

Temporary in nature, this law was greatly eroded over the years, as India tried to absorb the state into its democracy. Compromises that India made with the National Conference and Sheikh Abdullah did not penetrate into the state’s population, however, and the simmer remained. Instead of autonomy, India ruled with a heavy fist. Sheikh Abdullah was jailed and the chief ministers of the state came to be seen as nominees of New Delhi.

After the eruption of the Azadi movement in the late 80s, India unleashed its army, first on the separatists and then, as Pakistan got involved, on the jihadis. After a few years, in the mid-90s, New Delhi again brought up the self-rule solution, saying the “sky was the limit” on autonomy.

Only in the last decade has India stopped fiddling with the elections in Jammu and Kashmir. The army was used to boost turnout in neither of the last two elections, according to independent observers. India’s most powerful argument, though it has not articulated it clearly, has been that it offered the people of Jammu and Kashmir democracy under a first-rate constitution.

That Kashmiris, if they voted, would have the government of their choice ruling them. That if azadi was sought by the people of Jammu and Kashmir, it would have to be defined in light of this reality. This could, of course, only apply if India did hold elections that were widely participative. The Indian state believes it did this with last year’s elections, which damaged the claim of the Hurriyat that it was sole representative of the Muslims of the state.

Even if the issue of azadi was separated from dal-roti issues through the last elections, India believes there has been trust built between the Jammu and Kashmir electorate and India through the vote.

Pakistan’s fear on Jammu and Kashmir is that its nationhood is unresolved, both through geography and the existence of a Muslim-majority state in the Indian union. It needs Jammu and Kashmir, or even just the valley, to ‘complete’ the national project. There is also a secular fear that Pakistan cannot let its water resources be under India’s control even if the Indus Waters Treaty appears to have held so far.

Pakistan’s legal position is that the United Nations Security Council asked for a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir and that it should be enforced. Gen Musharraf gave India an ‘out’ from this, by saying he would discuss the issue outside of the ambit of the plebiscite. Pakistan’s worry, not without merit, is that in the absence of an interlocutor, India just does not get serious in talking solutions. That is why the Pakistani media is keen on Holbrooke playing referee even though America is not seen as being on Pakistan’s side.

Pakistan’s problem has been convincing the world what it will do with Jammu and Kashmir’s non-Muslims, against whom its constitution is discriminating. Jammu and Kashmir’s problem is that it is not really a homogenous state. Few states in India are, but Jammu and Kashmir in particular is not. The Hindus of Jammu are very different in their inclination from the Muslims of the Valley. The Shias do not have the same enthusiasm for azadi after their experience in the Northern Areas.

The Buddhists of Ladakh are also removed from the movement. The Hurriyat did its cause a great disservice by making their movement Islamic. The Hurriyat’s leadership comes out of Mirwaiz Omar Farooq and the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Syed Geelani. Their support to jihad and the kicking-out of Pandits from the Valley undermined their cause globally.

If the separatists had been able to articulate their demand as universal rather than Islamic, they would have had much more sympathy from Indians, and from around the world.

But the separatists have a trump card: their right to demand freedom, and they have the history of the Indian state’s brutality to point at in justification of this demand. No solution between India and Pakistan on the matter can really result in a full settlement of the issue till this matter is resolved. In that sense, the problem can actually be seen as between India and the Muslims of the Kashmir valley.

Once Holbrooke understands the motivation of the Pakistani military leadership, and the limitations of its civilian leadership, he will be led inevitably to thinking about Jammu and Kashmir.

America will not intervene directly because India will not let it. However, there is no doubt that Holbrooke will encourage India to take the matter up bilaterally. India should do this before it is pressured into doing it.

The problem of Kashmir may well be insoluble. But the dialogue on it should be open and free, and incidents of terror should not be used to shut it down. (The News)

The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar. patel@gmail.com
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The end of the Kashmir jihad: Elections in Kashmir... By Aakar Patel

The end of the Kashmir jihad
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
By Aakar Patel

On Jan 12, 2002, President Pervez Musharraf banned Laskhar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. He promised that “no organisation would be allowed to carry out terrorism on the pretext of Kashmir.”

On Sept 17, 2002, Jammu and Kashmir went to vote. In the two months before polling, 570 people died, including 327 militants.

The average vote was 44 percent. The lowest turnout, 7.8 percent, was in Sopore, home to the Jamaat-e-Islami’s Syed Geelani; the highest, 78 percent, was 10 times that, in Kargil, a stronghold of Shias, always more wary about Jihad. US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill acknowledged a dip in infiltration across the Line of Control and called the turnout “remarkable.”

On Nov 2, 2002, Mufti Mohammad Saeed and the Congress Party formed the government, agreeing to split the six-year term between the two parties with Mufti Saeed as chief minister for the first three years and Ghulam Nabi Azad the last three. They focussed on governance, not identity, for almost the whole of their terms. But then, in the manner of the subcontinent, identity appeared.

Amarnath, 90 kilometres from Srinagar, is where Hindus pray to a giant ice stalagmite, which they believe is a representation of Shiva’s phallus. The Amarnath shrine was discovered by a Muslim shepherd in the 19th century, and pilgrims walk 42 kilometres from Pahalgam in the Hindu month of Sravan (July-August) to worship there.

On May 26, 2008, the Jammu and Kashmir government agreed to give 100 acres of land to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Trust, for the setting up of tents for pilgrims. In Srinagar, this was immediately shown as evidence of how Kashmir would slowly be taken over by India. (The Indian Constitution’s Article 370 gives Jammu and Kashmir separate status from the rest of the Union and Indians cannot buy land in that state.)

Kashmiri Muslims came to the streets to oppose the transfer; Jammu’s Hindus came to the streets to defend it. Hindu groups, including the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, blocked the road to the Valley from Jammu, threatening an economic blockade and alarming the country. The government cancelled the land transfer, but Mufti Saeed withdrew support from the Congress government, which resigned on July 7, 2008.

On Oct 19, the Election Commission of India announced Kashmir’s elections would be held from November 17 in seven phases till December 24. Few believed the elections would be successful.

The communist Yusuf Tarigami said “elections were no solution to the Kashmir problem.” The secular Yasin Malik said his group, the JKLF, would campaign actively for a boycott and that the elections would fail just as they had in the past. “To boycott the elections was every Kashmiri’s right,” he said. Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson Omar said his party, the National Conference, would contest but he worried that “turnout would be low.” Hurriyat spokesman Abdul Ghani Bhat said elections were a non-issue and, “whether or not they were held, would cause the Hurriyat no consternation.” The Jamaat’s Geelani said that the “so-called elections were no solution.” The JKDFP’s Shabbir Shah promised a “total boycott.” Mirwaiz Umar Farooq asked people to stay away from the elections “or face social boycott.”

On Nov 17, Bandipora, Leh, Kargil and Poonch polled 69 percent; on Nov 23, Ganderbal and Rajouri polled 68 percent; on Nov 30, Kupwara polled 68 percent; on Dec 7, Baramulla, Udhampur, Budgam and Reasi polled 59 percent; on Dec 13, Pulwama, Shopian and Kathua polled 58 percent; on Dec 17 Anantnag, Doda, Kishtwar, Kulgam and Ramban polled 66 percent; on Dec 24 Jammu, Srinagar and Samba polled 55 percent.

Why did this happen?

In 2003, there were 3,401 incidents of violence in Kashmir. In 2005 this fell to 1,415 incidents. In 2007 this fell to less than 900. Infiltration across the Line of Control also plummeted.

Without the leverage of the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s and Jaish-e-Muhammad’s guns, the Hurriyat showed it had little influence. In a democracy, there is no substitute to rallying people, other than through daily contact on daily issues. Leadership on one grand, emotional issue cannot be sustained.

Musharraf ended Pakistan’s jihad; Kashmiris have put a moratorium on identity issues. Kashmiris have damaged the credibility of the Hurriyat Conference, and made it irrelevant for the next six years.

The Mirwaiz is conservative, as religious leaders must be. But along with worrying about Bida’a, in the manner of all South Asian maulvis, he fought a political battle—but without ever fighting an election. He has lost. After the results were announced on Sunday, Dec 28, he said this was a “lesson for separatists.”

Who were the winners?

Thirty-eight-year-old Omar Abdullah will become chief minister. He is secular (married to a Hindu), intelligent and experienced. Exactly the kind of man the state needs. His grandfather, Sheikh Abdullah, and Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather, Nehru, had a friendship that fell apart and Nehru jailed the Sheikh for a dozen years. This was after Nehru fought against Hari Singh before Independence to have Sheikh Abdullah released. Now, these two young men, who are also close friends, are at the doorstep of history.

The BJP was rewarded for its opportunism in inflaming Jammu and won 11 seats, 10 more than last time. But it has polarised Jammu from Kashmir in its recklessness. It says the issue is of discrimination against Jammu, not Hindu versus Muslim, but this is untrue. Where it has the opportunity to use bigotry—in Gujarat, and elsewhere—it does so without qualm.

The BJP talks tough to Indians, but in December 1999, Vajpayee surrendered to the Jaish-e-Muhammad after the Kandahar hijacking and released Masood Azhar and Omar Saeed Sheikh. This act of myopia under pressure from a few dozen middle-class families led to more terrorism in India, including the attack on Parliament in December 2001. It also led to the attacks on Musharraf, whose death might have led to a different story in Kashmir, and to the savage murder of The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl.

The Congress calmed tempers even at the cost of being hurt by angry Hindus in Jammu and elsewhere in India—and it is down three seats to 17. Under Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh, it remains the party that puts nation above self.

What about the separatists? They are fighting the wrong people.

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s father was killed by the Hizbul Mujahideen in May 1990. Sajjad Lone’s father, Abdul Ghani Lone, was killed by the Lashkar-e-Taiba in May 2002.

I met Abdul Ghani Lone in his Srinagar house, and while showing me out he pointed at the Indian army soldiers protecting him and referred to them as “these butchers.” But I wondered who they were protecting him from.

Mufti Mohammad Saeed’s daughter Rubaiyya was kidnapped by militants in December 1989, when he was India’s home minister. The V P Singh government released five prisoners to get Saeed’s daughter back.

These people are the victims of militancy, but they became its champions. As it now fades away, they will become irrelevant, unless they separate their message from violence.

Yasin Malik’s young face bears testimony to the brutality of the Indian state, whose guest he has been for much of his adult life. He says elections are not the solution to the Jammu and Kashmir issue.

But India has no strategy beyond offering secular democracy and the recurring right to vote, which it has been begging Kashmiris to take—and which they have finally taken, at least for now.

Yasin Malik talks about Gandhian protest, but Gandhi did not fight for a theocratic state. In a truly Azad Kashmir, Yasin Malik will be stamped out by Mirwaiz, Geelani and the Kashmiri population that will get down to the mischief of Hudood, Riba, Zina. Pakistan thinks it inherited it from Zia, but that actually came from the Muslim League and Liaquat’s 1949 Objectives Resolution.

Having predicted that Kashmirs would boycott the election, Indian liberals are now urging the government to act to resolve the Kashmir issue with some sort of geographical solution. They are wrong.

Elections are the solution. Secular democracy is the only goal. It is what Jinnah wanted. Kashmiris already have that. (The News)

The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@ gmail.com
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Our leaders and their writing - by Aakar Patel

Monday, December 29, 2008 (The News)

India’s early leaders wrote a lot. Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches number some 20 volumes. Nehru’s Selected Works, still being edited, have reached volume 39 and the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote almost every day, sprawl over 100 volumes, possibly unmatched anywhere in the world.

These are books meant to be dipped into, not consumed front to back — except for Ambedkar’s, whose collected works do not include letters he wrote, and whom every Indian child must be taught, along with Gandhi.

He had clarity on Pakistan as early as 1940, and Partition, though inevitable, might have been less painful if his Thoughts On Pakistan had been more widely read and understood. Jinnah wrote no book, but his letters have been edited by Z H Zaidi. For some reason Zaidi also includes correspondence to Jinnah, and most of it is banal. This is irritating because the Jinnah Papers volumes are very expensive.

Each volume of Gandhi’s collected works can be bought for as little as Rs25 (free online), while each volume of Jinnah’s is between Rs2,500 and Rs4,750. It is surprising the Pakistan government does not subsidise the publications of its founder, as India does the publications of its early leaders.

Pakistanis who trawl through the Jinnah Papers will not find much illumination: Jinnah wrote little about his view of Islam, or its history or Pakistan’s future or form of government. His letters are about everyday life: motor car repairs, travel plans, statements of accounts, granting of appointments, telling people not to name their companies after him, accepting or declining invitations, a series of very brief exchanges with Liaquat, a rejection of Bombay Bar Association’s decision to honour his 50 years at the Bar in 1947, saying that the vote was carried narrowly.

One woman, Mrs K L Rallia Ram of 5, Masson Road, Lahore, wrote to Jinnah every other day in 1946 and 1947, alerting him to the conspiracies she was convinced Hindus, Sikhs, Communists and the RSS were plotting against him. She attached newspaper clippings in support of her theories. Zaidi has included many letters by her in the volumes.

While there is abhorrence for Jinnah in India, Iqbal’s is a grey figure. He is reviled for the idea of Pakistan, but the educated North Indian loves the width and beauty of his writing.

Manmohan Singh began reintroducing Iqbal to India through couplets that he delivered in Parliament’s Central Hall in the middle of his budget speeches of 1991-1996, through which he liberalised India’s economy.

I was familiar with the basic lines of Tarana-i-Hind but had not registered its most stirring couplet: Yunan-o-Misr-o-Roma sab mitt gaye jahan se, ab tak magar hai baqi naam-o-nishan hamara, till Manmohan Singh recited it in his Punjabi lilt. Iqbal is to be read like Ambedkar is to be read: front to back, and carefully.

His great work is the Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, and it is one of the world’s undiscovered classics. His understanding of east and west is majestic, perhaps unmatched in all India. And his defence of religion in the opening lecture is the best I have ever read, and would be an excellent response to recent books by the rationalists Dawkins and Hitchens.

Naipaul’s dismissal of Iqbal, though it is comprehensive, does not appear to have incorporated the reforming side to him. Muslims of course love the middle-period Iqbal of Shikwa and Bang-e-Dara and Javidnama but not the author of the Reconstruction lectures, or the young unifier of India, before he went to Europe.

I have spent many hours talking about Iqbal with my late friend Dr Rafique Zakaria, who said he had a book of Iqbal’s bawdy verse somewhere but could never find it. It is no surprise that the great scholar Annemarie Schimmel chose Iqbal as her muse in India. The man that Pakistan’s Muslims, and perhaps India’s, needed alive after 1947 was not Jinnah, who died in 1948, but Iqbal, who died in 1938.

The formulation of the current Islamist intellectual Tariq Ramadan (Hassan al-Banna’s grandson) that Muslim states retain their Hudood laws but suspend their execution would have found favour with, and is possibly lifted from, Iqbal, through his sixth lecture. This is actually something that the Pakistan state has lapsed into doing, though without reasoning it through.

The other Islamist of course was Maudoodi, who had a very nimble mind. Al-Jihad fi al-Islam was written when he was only 24. It was interesting to go through the work of the modern Islamists, al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb and see how much they had lifted from him, especially Qutb. And how much brighter he was than them (strange to be proud of the fact that ‘our’ fundo is better than ‘their’ fundo!).

His political extension of the concept of Tawheed, and his construction of a religious state around it and also its top-down implementation was the work of a very intelligent and creative mind, but one with limited understanding of civilisation’s universality.

The writings of Hindu reformers Vivekanand and, in particular, Gandhi, softened the religion and made it flexible enough for Nehru and Ambedkar to legislate their reforms. Gandhi and Vivekanand were effective because they modernised the faith from the inside, unlike Ambedkar who fought it from outside and was ineffective outside his community.

The true Hindu intellectual was Radhakrishnan, India’s second president. His writing was like Iqbal’s: deeply immersed in the culture and the religion, but with the perspective of a trained European scholar.

The RSS’s writers were more passionate than intellectual, in part because of the audience they were addressing. The writing of RSS ideologues Golwalkar and Upadhyay is mostly moderate, and written in the emotional style of the Indian religious discourse. Hindutva, Savarkar’s classic, is simple, but overly emotional. Though his message on inter-caste marriage was pragmatic, and derived in scholarly fashion, he succumbed to caste when he insisted on his children’s marriage to fellow Chitpavan Brahmins.

Savarkar’s inclination towards the 19th century Italian reunifiers Mazzini and Garibaldi makes one think of what his thoughts would be on nationalism as it has now evolved in Europe.

Today India has no intellectuals in politics other than Manmohan Singh and Arif Mohammed Khan, a very fine mind. Except in Bengal, where caste is in decline, democracy has removed the layer of nominated, as opposed to elected, politicians, who have traditionally carried intellect to Delhi.

Few autobiographies have been written by Indian politicians in recent years, and no good ones other than one by Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was born in 1941 in Lahore’s famous Laxmi Mansion, home to Manto after 1948.

Political biographies in Pakistan peaked in the 90s when Bhutto’s supporters (Mubashir Hasan, Rafi Raza, Iqbal Akhund) and opponents (K M Arif, Sherbaz Mazari, Akbar Bugti, G M Syed) published their memoirs after Zia’s death. While a lot of Pakistani autobiography, like Indian autobiography, is self-aggrandising and dishonest, this period’s writing was possibly the most direct, and certainly the most entertaining. Mubashir Hasan wrote about his ministerial tenure in great detail but let his fellow liberals down by not revealing what he did, or even thought of, during Bhutto’s passing of the inhumane Second Amendment. He does not mention it at all, even in passing.

Bhutto comes across as deranged. The contours of his character revealed through his treatment of that fascinating character J A Rahim in Hasan’s and Raza’s books; his treatment at the hands of Akbar Bugti in Mazari’s book; and his behaviour just before his hanging in Gen Arif’s book are astonishing.

Zia wrote no book, but Ayub Khan wrote one and shouldn’t have. It starts off wrongly — by leaning on religion — and it paints a picture of him that collapsed the year he was booted out. He is seen positively today by very few excluding, presumably, Samuel Huntington (who likened Ayub to the Greek lawgiver Solon) and the economist Shahid Javed Burki.

Altaf Gauhar also wrote on Ayub, and his writing was dishonest — but Rafique Zakaria told me a story about Gauhar’s superb understanding of secularism and Islam, which made me see Gauhar in a different way.

Musharraf will be seen 20 years later in a better light than he now is, but he damaged his cause with his second-rate autobiography, actually written by Humayun Gauhar. Politicians have stopped writing in Pakistan and India. On the evidence of Ardeshir Cowasjee’s reporting, Asif Zardari cannot even spell, leave alone write. It will be strange if the only picture of him as a man comes out from newspaper columns.

The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@gmail.com
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The distant gleam of greatness - by Aakar Patel

Sunday, December 21, 2008 (The News)

Nehru is the touchstone leader for the secular Indian. Gandhi was religious, bringing him closer to the common man, and he looked wrong. The secular Indian may be devout through the observance of ritual but is put off, as Nehru was, with Gandhi's religiosity, and anti-modern appearance.

Both Gandhi and Nehru were British-educated, setting them apart from Ambedkar, who went to Columbia University, and returned with an American's clarity. Nehru was agnostic -- though recently there was published a photograph of him in old age entering the Ganga wearing a janoi, the Brahmin's thread -- and anglicised. He despised the RSS, the other touchstone for the secular Indian.

Indians know him through caricature: the Chacha Nehru of Children's Day, the man betrayed by China and, since 1991, the man clueless about the economy. Australia's ambassador Walter Crocker observed him for six years and wrote about him in a book as no Indian would -- and perhaps could.

India's newspaper editors dismissed the account, called A Contemporary's Estimate, as sensationalist, because they were unable to grasp leaders as real men. The book has just been reprinted. The man who emerges from Crocker's first-rate portrait is complete, and attractive, though flawed.

Crocker says Nehru was spectacular with the public, unequalled even by Gandhi, even though when Crocker first encountered Nehru in 1945 in Bengal, he was in a crowd pushing and slapping people away. Unlike most Indians, Nehru had an interest in nature and was able to identify plants. He kept animals at home including pandas, but his house in Delhi itself was not private.

An office ran day and night on the ground floor in shifts. He came out at 8.30 am and anyone could walk up to him at that time. Scores of people would live on the footpath opposite his gate, cooking and cleaning and sleeping there. Though they irritated Nehru, the police were forbidden from driving them away.

He was quick to temper, as a society woman chatting during a concert recital learnt. What Nehru would have thought of mobile phones going off in the audience would not be hard to imagine. He understood music and liked the violinist Yehudi Menhuin.

He made many speeches, too many, often three in a day, and was careless with his time. Foreign delegations, even those of students, would secure appointments while bureaucrats and ministers would wait for days. He was a poor administrator in a nation that has always needed firm administration. He was moralistic when it came to Europe and constantly lectured it on what it had done wrong.

Intellectually, Crocker rates Nehru very highly, and compares him not unfavourably to Rajagopalachari -- "the sharpest mind in Indian public life" -- though Nehru did not have the originality of Gandhi. Crocker says he once took a scientist, a Nobel laureate, to Nehru, who picked out a careless remark, and, politely, demolished it.

Nehru's personality was attractive; what about his policy? His great failure was his military defeat to China in 1962, and China marked the end of the period of Nehru's reverence in India. But he was attacked in print and in parliament only at the end of his career, from mid-1959 to his death in 1964.

Nehru hid India's border dispute with China till September 1959. Once he revealed it, the hysteria in India gave him little space to compromise. His subsequent Forward Policy brought war. Even today, Indians who wish to see a map of how their country looks in physical control, must consult maps made outside India, because the real map distresses us.

Despite his failures, Nehru's personality and his secularism have aged well, even if we think the wheels have come off his policies. One reason is his ability to create state institutions of unsurpassable quality. Nehru's legacy is secure because of these institutions.

Under him India created the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Space Research Organisation, the Indian Institutes of Management, which are at the vanguard of India Shining. In the arts, he set up the National School of Drama, the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the Sahitya Akademi, the Film and Television Institute. He commissioned Charles and Ray Eames to produce a report that led to the National Institute of Design.

All five IITs set up before 1994 were set up under Nehru; none under Indira or Rajiv. Manmohan Singh, who is Nehruvian in his orientation, has added six more. Institutions came up in the Nehru era that have not come up since in the public sector. They remain unmatched by any other poor nation; and not a few rich ones.

We like leaders from the past so that we can deify them. Their angularities do not show from the distance. Up close we are put off by their weaknesses. Manmohan Singh, the leader who has most improved our lives, we think of as weak, because he depends on Sonia Gandhi, and ineffective, because he does not mirror our rage against Pakistan.

But he has actually been our most effective leader.

Vajpayee was moderate, but unhinged on some issues including his childlike passion for acquiring an atomic bomb. He is seen as a statesman on the basis of his oratory, which in the subcontinental fashion is high on emotion. And he is seen as a man of refinement because of his poetry, which is actually banal. Our inspection of leaders who are around us is poor and based on their raw appeal.

Thackeray, whose appeal really comes from his oratory, is seen as strong because he can say fierce things. But he has not a single successful policy to his name, other than the renaming of things that other people built.

His Shiv Sena does not govern even its home state of Maharashtra let alone India, but reading Thackeray's published utterances you would think him a man of influence.

Mayawati, who governs 200 million people in Uttar Pradesh, puts us off because we find her ugly, and because of her caste we find her uncultured. Her appeal to her community and her considerable political craft is dismissed.

Crocker notes that Nehru insisted that Muslims be allowed to retain all their customs, including polygamy, which he did not like (Nehru had polygamy banned for Hindus). All his life, Nehru was interested in Muslim welfare.

His tentative speculation, published in the Modern Review, on the Ahmedi question, called for the subsuming of sectarian identity in favour of something larger. It invited attack from the great Iqbal, who delivered himself of a harangue against the Ahmedis. It says something of Nehru's standing among Muslims that Iqbal found it necessary to respond theologically, dismissing Ibn Arabi ('psychologically unsound') along the way.

Like Gandhi's, Nehru's image with Muslims has worn well, and rightly.

Jinnah's image as a Muslim leader, rather than the constitutionalist he was, has also worn well. After Advani visited Pakistan and praised Jinnah, India's Urdu newspapers went into rapture.

Close examination of Jinnah would put Indian Muslims and Pakistanis off. Jinnah's faith, Ismaili Shia, put him at the heretical end of the Allah Hafiz Muslim's scale. Because of this Liaqat had Jinnah buried with a Deobandi (Shabbir Usmani) leading his funeral prayer.

Jinnah did not care, as his championing of Zafrulla Khan shows, and perhaps did not even know, about the strength of the Indian Muslim's feeling toward the Ahmedi. Jinnah was secular and offered constitutionalism to his followers, who actually wanted identity. Jinnah was a Gujarati South Bombay Muslim, a breed that is unique and whose contours are instantly recognisable to residents of this city. His tastes were refined and elegant and did not reflect the Indian Muslim's love of the shiny and loud.

But Jinnah also disappoints the intellectual.

He wrote no book, or anything else of significance. At 40, his favourite book was Dumas's Count of Monte Cristo, and his daughter Dina says he was greatly influenced by HC Armstrong's second-rate biography of Ataturk.

Leaders look better to us from afar because we do not study them or look on them dispassionately. It is easier for us to buy the myth and deify the leader, or dismiss him in full.

Muslims hate George W Bush because of the war on terror. But Bush showed great faith in Muslims. His cabinet believed Americans would be greeted in Iraq as liberators. Why did they believe this? They assumed Iraqis would anticipate the democracy project unfolding, as indeed it has. A suppressed Shia majority has been empowered through democracy in Iraq. Bush showed great optimism on Islam.

He refused to buy the formula that Muslims could not be democratic, and gambled on them. He showed the westerner's character in laughing off the shoes thrown at him, while Muslims rejoiced in the thought that they had avenged the humiliation of invasion. But Iraq's Shia leadership has accepted Bush's wisdom.

We hate him now but how will he be seen from the distance? We do not yet know. In that sense, Bush's legacy will actually be written by Arabs.



The writer is a former newspaper editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@gmail.com
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