Jinnah would admit to the same, if during a low point of his own in the ‘30s: the Muslims were ‘led by either the flunkeys of the British government or the camp followers of the Congress…I felt so disappointed and so depressed, that I decided to settle down in London.’ So it was that the Quaid bought a house on West Heath Road, set up his law chambers on King’s Bench Walk, and drowned himself in practice.
Wrote Chaudhri Muhammad Ali (years after he was forced, unjustly, to resign as prime minister), ‘Too proud to cooperate with the victor, too sullen to adjust themselves to the new circumstances, too embittered to think objectively, too involved emotionally with the past to plan for the future, Muslim society in the decades following the events of 1857 presented a picture of desolation and decay.’
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‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s,’ goes Blake’s Jerusalem, ‘I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’īut creating a country, it turns out, is a tall order: to raise a fallen people, and then free them. He refused, in fact, to accept the terms of the new India at all, and when he broke with it in Lahore, it was for good. How he faced that tide, however, is what made the future Quaid special: he refused to be coopted like the Ali brothers, and he refused to be emasculated like Azad. As has been said elsewhere, it is the present that forces men back into their past. And when it did, neither Jinnah’s mastery over the courtroom nor his skill in the assembly could shield him from the roar of Hindu mass politics. Because while Jinnah was a darling of non-Muslim moderates – Naoroji and Mehta and Gokhale – all three of his heroes were dead by the time Gandhi mania swept Congress in the late 1910s. Though some saw this magic for what it was – a shot in the arm for ancient hatreds – most didn’t. ‘For God’s sake, Mahatma,’ said freedom fighter C.R. Nor was Jinnah the only casualty so was the idea of India. Yet where Western thought – sickened by the blood and gore of its own world wars – saw in Gandhi a global shaman with a healing touch, Jinnah was seen as a cold scold by contrast.įreedom remembers the reverse: Jinnah, the pro-unity liberal, nudged offstage by a Gandhi flooding the land with hocus-pocus a classic case of modernism versus revivalism, of reason versus fever. Such a reply also lay at the heart of freedom: of the largest Muslim mass in the world, escaping the rage of a very different majority. ‘My reply to Mr Gandhi is, “I do not want to be ruled by you.”’ Not that the founder was swayed: after all, freedom had no price. We are just opening our eyes…You are yet a sick man you are still an invalid you have yet to go through the convalescent period before you can become perfectly healthy.’īut was a return to health ever possible? To his enemies, Jinnah was asking for the ashes – if a poor stretch of land covering India’s Muslim areas did indeed separate, it would just as soon wither and die. ‘We have seen the worst days…we are just awake.
In the years leading up to Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was hewing to his favourite theme: resurrection. ISLAMABAD – ‘We come under the category of the fallen.’
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