MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH

In his younger days Jinnah was considered one of the greatest of the Indian Politicians in the Congress Party and all of India. Even though he was a Muslim, his leadership and political philosophy was appreciated by educated and politically active Indians of all faiths and casts. He was also so considered by the English Viceroy and his staff and noted by the politicians in England as a man who could bring Indians together without regard for religious or socio-economic status. He underwent a number of personal tragedies and changed radically until he was not only a sectarian Muslim leader but threatened and facilitated Islamic terrorism against all the other religions. Jinnah's flip flop on this point led to one of the great massacres and tragedies in human history" The Nightingale of India

OSS

A 'kirpan' is a type of knife—a weapon—which all male Sikhs are religiously obligated to have in his possession and on his body at all times. Singh was a Sikh Maharaja (King) of an area that had about an equal number of Muslims and Sikhs. The Sikh's had a long history of living under Muslim domination and wanted no part of any more. Patiala was within the Punjab and Jinnah was insisting that the Punjab should be a Province of the new Pakistan because the Punjab was majority Muslim. However, there were many Sikhs, as well as some Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians and virtually none of these wanted to be a part of Pakistan. Further, a significant portion of the Muslim Punjab population also preferred to join India for many reasons, not the least of which was that they had become used to a democracy where they had complete freedom of religion and civil rights as well, and with the exception of Turkey none of the Muslim countries were democratic. Based on the history, actions, inactions, and statements of the Muslim League which did not democratically elect its leaders, Pakistan would not likely be a democracy that guaranteed civil rights—especially religious rights—to their citizens (and they were right). So the majority of the people of the Punjab were opposed to becoming a part of Pakistan. The Sikhs were passionate opponents of being a part of Pakistan as they knew their Muslim neighbors one of whose major reasons for wanting a Muslim state was that everyone could then be forced to be Muslim or be expelled or ethnically cleansed.

In the early part of Jinnah's career he was totally stable and regarded as one of the leading politicians in all of India. However, after some terrible personal tragedies he was changed and was no longer very influential. In his later years he reemerged as the Leader of the Muslim League which in itself was different as he had always represented Indians without regard to religion. He also had become very rigid, egotistical, and aloof and exhibited a number of unbalanced behaviors that led Mountbatten to conclude that Jinnah had become a psychopath in his elder years. In negotiations he was very aggressive, unbending and was not interested in any compromise in negotiations which made them unfruitful and often useless. He was then 70." 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Two months earlier, Jinnah and the Muslim League had, behind the scenes, orchestrated and abetted vicious, murderous, terrorist attacks on Sikhs by Muslim tribesman brought into the Punjab for the purpose." Master Tara Singh

1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Jinnah was a modern Islamist who saw the role of females in a modern context. He, like the Indian Hindu leaders were in a sense products of the West and Western government and education. He would be very surprised that in his Pakistan men can murder their female relatives who they believe have dishonored the family, or that women would not be educated in the Madrassas, or that authorities could sentence a female relative of a man deemed guilty of seduction to be gang raped, but that is what happens in modern Pakistan. Jinnah and many of the early leaders believed that their new government could modernize Islam but the control and influence went the other way. Pakistan became a religiously dominated autocracy rather than the democracy that Jinnah foresaw.

Singh turned him down. Note that even before Pakistan was a country, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had hopes of grabbing much of India as the British partitioned it, and have been trying to do so ever since the inception of Pakistan

Jinnah had whipped up his followers to violence so that Muslims were attacking Sikh and Hindu neighborhoods, burning them and murdering many occupants in different parts of India to intimidate the Indian Governmental Ruling Congress Party, The British Colonial Indian officials and the politicians in London to create a Muslim state—Pakistan—with all the territory that they demanded. Many Muslims were in turn killed in retaliatory attacks. The American diplomats and most English politicians tried to persuade Jinnah to compromise on the division of land and resources. Jinnah saw no reason at the time for compromise. However the internecine violence became so brutal and extensive that even Jinnah was shocked. The British would not be intimidated nor would the Indian Congress party and Jinnah was forced to compromise. Even with that, there were over 2 million Indians killed by the time the partition was complete. Jinnah and most other leaders were not willing to die themselves, but they were able to convince enough of their coreligionists to die.

The Punjab had been partitioned into a Pakistani part and an Indian part. The latter was a major province of the new state. But in the political process of drawing the boundaries, Jinnah and other Muslim leaders had used fanatic Muslim terrorists to massacre Sikhs and Hindus to ethnically cleanse areas and intimidate the ruling Indian Congress Party and the British government to obtain more area and resources for the Muslim state. However, at this point he had to govern, and there were still many Sikhs and Hindus as well as Christians and Buddhists in the new Muslim state. Jinnah's new state needed all the help it could get from the U. S. and others, and Jinnah started sounding like a passionate democrat. On paper religious freedom was guaranteed in Pakistan. However Pakistan became one of the most dangerous countries in the world for non-Muslims. Most historians agree that the Muslim terrorism in the short run had worked, as it would have been unlikely that India would have been partitioned in the absence of violence. However, it set in motion a cultural pattern of religious hate, bigotry, intolerance, violence and murder which would plague Pakistan thereafter. The politicians throughout the country's history have tried to use the Muslim religious, fundamentalist, extremists for their purposes only to find that the fanatics were out of control and the entire Pakistani population has lived in fear, lest an extremist decide that what they did or say was inimical to Islam and assassinate him or her. They have assassinated even the highest levels of politicians—President, Governors of Provinces, National Legislatures as well as Journalists, writers and academics. But the average Pakistani citizen has always been at risk of brutal murder with hundreds killed every year in an atmosphere of total impunity for the murderers. They have even murdered married women who had been raped on the grounds that they were adulterers and were therefore stoned.

Half of Pakistan was undone when the corrupt and incompetent government neglected half of Pakistan which then revolted and became the independent nation of Bangladesh. The reminder of Pakistan has been in a constant state of civil war between the Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists who oppose a democratic state and the majority of Pakistan which does. The result is a Pakistan Government which is very weak, and a military that is strong enough to intimidate the civilian government, but not willing to take on the terrorists who kill Pakistanis almost every day.

The "enemies" were many of the Muslim and Hindu Maharajas of the independent Indian states who were afraid of losing their kingly powers under an Indian democracy, some of the wealthy businessmen and large landowners, many of the Bureaucrats of the Indian Civil Service who feared politicization, and many leaders of the smaller religious minorities, Buddhists, Christians, Baha'is, Zoroastrians, and others. And most of all, there were English Conservative politicians including Winston Churchill who did not want to see the British Empire diminished. They often played on the religious fears of Indians—never far from the surface. Jinnah strongly opposed this until he wanted the Partition of independent India into 2 countries—Muslim and Hindu. Then he not only plaid to these religious fears, but stoked then to a feverish pitch and did nothing to stop Muslim religious violence and in some cases even supplied private Muslim groups with arms, ammunition, transport, and intelligence to put pressure on the Congress Party leadership and the British to get more land and other resources for Pakistan.

This is one of the great statements of political leadership ever produced. However, successive leaders of Pakistan saw themselves in this mold, but the people did not follow them and Pakistan degenerated into a succession of dictatorships after Jinnah died.

“Mussalman” was another name for a Muslim. Jinnah was arguing for a separate Muslim state within India. 7 years later he got is wish and Pakistan was born. However many Muslims chose to remain in India even though it was a majority Hindu state. Jinnah was right for many Muslims and wrong for many others who have integrated into Indian society and there is some intermarriage in India, which has 120 million Muslims, almost as many as Pakistan with 160 million.