Jinnah is hailed as the main culprit behind India’s partition at Independence. The present emotional and financial baggage of a hostile border with Pakistan and the intermittent communal conflicts in India can all be attributed to this one man, who staked India’s freedom with his own whims and political goals, and leveraged the independence to get what he wanted.
Now, echoes from the past are reverberating through the students union at Aligarh Muslim University. Violence broke out on the campus last week, as the row over Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s portrait in the students’ union office triggered a right-wing protest and clashes between students and protesters.
Some BJP functionaries find it a convenient tool to further polarise society in order to win the 2019 Lok Sabha election. At the same time, the demand for the removal of Jinnah’s portrait sounds reasonable to many secular Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, who hold him principally responsible for Partition.
But one cannot deny that Jinnah single-handedly may have been responsible for partitioning India. As soon as the light of independence got brighter, he realised that with Congress having popular favour, and Gandhi and Nehru at the helm of affairs, he would be left with no political brownie points. So, he used the two-nation theory to extort Pakistan from India’s independence.
Image Credit: thewire
Jinnah, who prided himself on being the sole spokesman of all the Muslims of India, advocated the establishment of a separate Muslim state composed of those areas — the Muslim majority provinces — where Muslims did not need protection. This was the most illogical strategy if Jinnah and the Muslim League really had the interests of all Indian Muslims at heart.
And it is an insult to the nation to have his portrait in an esteemed university. Not now, but his portrait should have been removed from AMU in 1940, when he propagated the idea of Pakistan for the first time. And this issue is not about vested political interest, but about national honour and historical dignity.
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