“I think you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State of Pakistan”. These are the words that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the creator of Pakistan had said, much to the dismay of a lot of people till today, in his presidential address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947. It is these words out of the many undocumented ones that this lawyer/ leader had uttered in his public life, which has become the bone of contention for those who want to dig it and live fighting with whatever they yield from it.

Though Jinnah had been laid to rest on 9/11 way back in 1948, just about a year after creating a state, a nation and a lot many problems in his part of the world, it is his views and his thoughts, which strictly contradict his actions that are rousing rubbles even half a century after his death.

Firstly to start off with, Jinnah was a staunch supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity at the outset of his political life, even going to the extent of vigorously opposing the Khilafat Movement and Gandhi’s support for it. Then after a short lived sabbatical from active politics, he was persuaded to revive the Muslim league in India working upon which he went further to formulate a two nation theory and demand a separate state for Muslims.

Jinnah took many secrets to his grave, and among them is the reason behind the transformation of this Indian nationalist leader of Islamic origin to this Islamic nationalist of Indian origin in just about a couple of decades. Indians, I feel, are good in the business of blame- game, for eg. When a train derails, the opposition blames the government…when a draught occurs, we blame the rain god…..when terrorists strike, we blame a neighboring country….when we lose a cricket match, we blame the pitch curator….so it is really foolish to think that we can remain by not blaming anyone for a tragedy of the magnitude of partition. The history books have found whom to demonize and whom to point fingers towards as the sole person responsible for partition and all the riots and losses that followed it. However, the water isn’t as blue as it is painted to be.

It has a lot many layers of colors which need to be unearthed. I seriously believe that by bringing out this topic from the dead time and again, firstly Advani and now his ex-party colleague Jaswant Singh, are trying to get rid of that guilt which has accumulated over repeated reading of these one-sided history books. However, the reactions they received from pro-hindutva parties, which I find a lot similar to Pakistan as a state…as both are created on the same plane of thought…trying to create something new…by destroying the already existing one….in the name of religion, and hence, the extreme reaction from the party to Advani’s and Singh’s comments, that we saw.

Now one question which comes to my mind is, do we call Advani and K S Sudarshan (RSS) “nationalist hindus” or “hindu nationalists”?? So it will be really unfair to ask Jinnah or any other muslim for that matter the most common question, “Indian first or muslim first”?? However, I do feel that Jinnah was deeply committed to his identity as an Indian as well as the Islamic side of his being. At no time was he unmindful of the one while espousing the cause of the other. In the end I would like to say that, it is really not important to debate and fight over jinnah’s secular credentials because what he has done can’t be undone even if we prove that he was a staunch secular.

It is a reality that India and Pakistan are two separate nations today. It can’t be changed, unless in the third world war, one takes over the other, which is only as likely as Trinidad and Tobago getting a permanent security council seat in the UN, with no offence to their sovereignty. The questions that we need to ask ourselves are, how secular are we? Are we following the secular character which has been highlighted time and again in our constitution? Are we making our country a better place to live in for world’s second largest Muslim population? Or Are we in the process of creating many more Jinnahs amongst us?