The Hayat Hypothesis: Imperial Crisis, Muslim Modernism, Jinnah’s Charisma, and the Birth of Pakistan

ABSTRACT

This essay is written as an overview of Sikandar Hayat's (1946-) longtime scholarship on the creation of Pakistan with Mohammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948) as the focal leader. It seeks to bring out the main argument and analyses of Hayat's books on the subject. The main thrust of the essay, consistent with an exposition of Hayat's works, is that the creation of Pakistan was a complex process and that both Jinnah's critics, who often deny him agency, and his uncritical admirers, who exaggerate it out of all proportion, seem to miss the larger historical context and lessons to be derived from Jinnah's life and times. Hayat employs an analytical approach that, among other things, articulates a framework for understanding charismatic leadership in non-Eurocentric environments, restores valid agency to Jinnah, and never loses sight of the context and larger historical forces he, and the All-India Muslim League, had to contend with. As Pakistan marks 75 years of its independent existence, debates and discourses about its creation continue, and Hayat's contributions to that discourse need to be examined and understood outside his own country

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Notes

1 For the definitive history of the Muslim League see Rafique Afzal, A History of the All-India Muslim League 1906–1947. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2013.

2 A wide variety of authors have taken up Jinnah’s life and legacy. Probably the most popular biographical account is by Stanley Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1984. The most academically influential account is by Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The most politically controversial (in India) biography is by Jaswant Singh, Jinnah: India, Partition, Independence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010 – this book cost Singh his political career in India but was generally well-received in Pakistan. A deeply personal biographical account is by Sheela Reedy, Mr. and Mrs. Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2017. A powerful corrective to the demonisation of Jinnah as a collaborator with the British and an anti-nationalist is Ajeet Reddy, Secular and Nationalist Jinnah. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2017. An early journalistic biography of Jinnah that remains in print even after its first publication in the 1950s is by Hector Bolitho, Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1955. And for a critical academic study of Jinnah’s tenure as Pakistan’s first governor-general see Farooq Ahmed Dar, Jinnah’s Pakistan: Formation and Challenges of a State. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Of course, Jinnah’s own papers and correspondence have been compiled by Z. H. Zaidi, ed., Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Papers, Vols. I–XII. Islamabad: National Archives of Pakistan, 2005.

3 Sikandar Hayat served at the Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, and retired as Professor Meritorious of History in 2006. He went on to serve as Member, Directing Staff (2006–2011) at the Administrative Staff College, now known as the National School of Public Policy, which is responsible for the training of senior officers due to be promoted from Joint Secretary to Additional Secretary. Since 2011, Hayat has worked at the Forman Christian College University and headed its History and Social Sciences programmes, and his books remain in print and in demand in Pakistan.

4 Sikandar Hayat, Aspects of the Pakistan Movement. Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1998. This study encompasses the beginnings of the Pakistan movement and places the emergence of Muslim nationalism in the context of the crisis of the last three decades of the British Raj. It is particularly focused on the mobilisation strategy used by the AIML and explains the failure of the traditional leadership in offering a more cohesive and territorial dispensation for South Asian Muslims in view of an expected decolonisation.

5 Sikandar Hayat, The Charismatic Leader: Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Creation of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008. This biographical study places Jinnah within the Weberian framework of a charismatic leader, drawing upon Weber’s second perspective, which emphasises the importance of rationality and sobriety that combines ‘passion and perspective’. Ibid., p. 19. The Charismatic Leader elaborates upon the Muslim crisis in South Asia and the response of the AIML and Jinnah.

6 Sikandar Hayat, A Leadership Odyssey: Muslim Separatism and the Achievement of the Separate State of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2021. This work reconstructs the careers and contributions of leading Muslim modernists in India by focusing on Syed Ahmed Khan, the Aga Khan, Syed Ameer Ali, Maulana Mohamed Ali, Allama Muhammad Iqbal, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

7 Syed Ahmed Khan saw his role as one that required him to help “bridge the gulf between the Muslims and the British” and rejected the notion that the Muslims were primarily responsible for the 1857–1858 upheaval. Ibid., p. 56.

8 Syed Ahmed Khan made the case that salvation for South Asian Islam lay in giving up its archaic orientation and facing the modern world with a readiness to adapt. Ibid., 57.

9 For a fine study of the All-India Muslim Education Conference see Abdul Rashid Khan, The All-India Muslim Education Conference. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2001. This conference, founded in 1886, was meant to encourage Muslims to opt for modern education. It also served as an apolitical forum for Muslim elites from all over India. In fact, it was at a session of the Muslim Education Conference, at Dhaka, in 1906, that the Muslim leaders gathered decided to form the All-India Muslim League, indicating at once acceptance of Syed Ahmed Khan’s legacy of modernism while acknowledging that the Muslims now had no choice but to participate actively in politics.

10 In many of his views Syed Ahmed Khan was comparable to Shakib Arsalan, Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed, trans. Nadeem M. Qureshi. London: Austin Macauley, 2021. This is a celebrated long essay by one of the Arab world’s foremost thinkers. It has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1930 – a testament to its eloquence and appeal. That its message remains relevant to a Muslim world struggling to make peace with modernity is, sadly, a monument to the secular failure of generations of Muslim statesmen since.

11 Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., p. 93.

12 Ibid., p. 236.

13 The spearhead of this awakening was the salariat, “a section of the urban middle class, those with educational qualifications and aspirations for jobs in the state apparatus, the civil bureaucracy and the military”. Hamza Alavi, ‘Nationhood and Nationalities in Pakistan’. Economic and Political Weekly, July 8, 1989, 1527. Hayat does not disagree with the contention that the educated Muslims with a westernisation experience rallied to the cause of Pakistan. At the same time, these Muslims were a very small part of the overall political mobilisation that led to the creation of Pakistan. Arguably, the salariat component of the Congress was larger and stronger than that of the Muslim League.

14 This was in the context of the collapse of the Cabinet Mission Plan and the resort to Direct Action. As Jinnah put it: “Today we have said good-bye to constitutions and constitutional methods. Throughout the painful negotiations, the two parties with whom we bargained held a pistol at us; one with power and machine-guns behind it, and the other with non-cooperation and threat to launch mass civil disobedience. This situation must be met. We also have a pistol. We have taken this decision with full responsibility and all the deliberations possible for a human being, and we mean it.” Cited in Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., p. 297.

15 Hayat, A Leadership Odyssey, op. cit., p. 58.

16 For a fine account of Curzon’s viceroyalty and the 1905 Partition of Bengal see Dhara Anjaria, Curzon’s India: Networks of Colonial Governance, 1899–1905. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2014, esp., pp. 192–232. Anjaria makes the case that the Curzon administration “marked a political watershed for Indian Muslims, because it gave them – and the rest of India – a glimpse of the advantages affirmative and special legislation could accrue for them” as indicated by the shoring up of the Muslim landlord class via the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1900 and the Partition of Bengal in 1905. Ibid., p. 201.

17 For a comprehensive analysis and recounting of British Indian constitutional development see Courtenay Ilbert, The Government of India: Being a Digest of Statute Law Relating Thereto. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907; Panchanandas Mukherji, ed., Indian Constitutional Documents, 1773–1915. Calcutta: Thacker Spink & Co., 1916; H. N. Mitra, ed., The Government of India Act, 1919, Rules Thereunder and Government Reports. Calcutta: N. N. Mitter, Annual Register Office, 1921; and The Government of India Act, 1935 (As Amended up to 15th August 1943). New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1943.

18 Riaz Ahmed, ed., The Works of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Vol. III, (1916–1917). Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1998, pp. 450–501.

19 Constitutional documents can be accessed online at the fine resource provided by The Constitution of India: https://www.constitutionofindia.net/historical_constitutions/the_congress_league_scheme_1916__inc___aiml__1st%20January%201916 (accessed 20 August 2022).

20 For a fascinating and insightful study of the South Asian Muslim connection with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire see M. Naeem Qureshi, Ottoman Turkey, Ataturk, and Muslim South Asia: Perspectives, Perceptions, and Responses. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2014, esp. pp. 47–142.

21 The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of March 1919, commonly referred to as the Rowlatt Act, extended the wartime emergency powers of the government. The passage of the Act, generally opposed by Indians, led to the protests in Amritsar that ended in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of hundreds of peaceful protestors. The Act itself was counterproductive and unenforceable owing to the scale of Indian resentment and agitation against it.

22 The Khilafat Movement aimed at preserving the Ottoman Caliphate after the First World War. The Hijrat movement sought to imitate the flight from Mecca to Medina by encouraging South Asian Muslims to emigrate to Afghanistan or another part of the Muslim world as the British had turned the region into the Domain of War (Dar ul Harb) for the Muslims. The Hijrat Movement ended in tragedy as Afghanistan refused to accept the migrants and the whole scheme of relocation was poorly conceived and executed. In August 1920, some 18,000 Indian Muslims, responding to the call of religious leaders, attempted to migrate to Afghanistan: “But the Afghan authorities declined to admit these intending emigrants and they were turned back with hundreds dying on the road-side due to the difficulties of the journey.” Waheed-uz-Zaman, Towards Pakistan. Lahore: Publishers United, 1989, p. 35.

23 Indeed, when H. C. Armstrong’s extremely unflattering biography of Ataturk (Grey Wolf) came out in 1932, Jinnah read it “with much interest and talked about it for days with much passion” – much to the annoyance of his daughter. The unflattering personal portait of the Turkish leader aside, Jinnah greatly admired what Ataturk had accomplished – he had saved a Muslim nation from the clutches of non-Muslim rule and turned them onto the path of modernisation. That is exactly what Jinnah himself aspired to do. Qureshi, Ottoman Turkey, Ataturk, and Muslim South Asia, op. cit., p. 189.

24 For an authoritative study of these movements see M. Naeem Qureshi’s Pan-Islam in British India: The Politics of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2009, esp. pp. 1–58, and pp. 173–238.

25 A mob in the United Provinces destroyed a police station, killing 22 police personnel.

26 Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., p. 45.

27 Ibid., p. 123.

28 The provincial political leaders, often drawn from the landlord class, were keen to safeguard their clout at the local level and either had no use for all-India politics or, where applicable, were willing to outsource management of such matters to the AIML or Congress or the British. The ulema were unable to detect the opportunity that the decline of the British Raj created in terms of restoring sovereign power. They had a binary hatred of the British (and modernist Muslims), and were, paradoxically, willing to work as junior partners of the Congress. Hayat, Aspects of the Pakistan Movement, op. cit., pp. 154–157.

29 “But logic or sense have little to do with communal feeling, and today the whole problem resolves itself in the removal from the minds of each other of a baseless fear of the other and giving a feeling of security to all communities … The clumsy and objectionable methods of separate electorates and reservation of seats do not give this security. They only keep up an armed truce.” Committee Appointed by the All Parties’ Conference: The Nehru Report: An Anti-Separatist Manifesto. New Delhi: Institute of Applied Research, 1975, p. 28.

30 Hayat, Aspects of the Pakistan Movement, op. cit., pp. 60–61.

31 For a rigorous study of the different course pursued in the NWFP see Sayed Wiqar Ali Shah, Ethnicity, Islam and Nationalism: Muslim Politics in the North-West Frontier Province (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), 1937–1947. Islamabad: National Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 2015. While noting that the Quit India movement launched against the British by the Congress did not find much traction in the NWFP, it did allow the AIML to form a government in the province in May 1943. While this did not translate into overt support for the Pakistan demand, it nonetheless gave the AIML a new opening. Ibid., 115.

32 Sir Muhammad Iqbal’s 1930 Presidential Address to the 25th Session of the All-India Muslim League, Allahabad, 29 December 1930, in Speeches, Writings, and Statements of Iqbal, compiled and edited by Latif Ahmed Sherwani (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 1977), pp. 3–26, available online: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00islamlinks/txt_iqbal_1930.html (accessed 19 August 2022).

33 Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., pp. 198–202 – revisits the reactions to the Lahore Resolution – from Gandhi’s emotive labelling of the proposal as one for the ‘vivisection’ of India to the RSS’s demands that the Muslims were free to live in their own state provided they left India.

34 Ambedkar’s analysis, in particular merits special mention:

How to meet this problem [that of the Pakistan demand] must exercise the minds of all concerned. There are the simple-minded Hindu Maha Sabha patriots who believe that the Hindus have only to make up their minds to wipe the Musalmans and they will be brought to their senses. On the other hand, there are the Congress Hindu Nationalists whose policy is to tolerate and appease the Musalmans by political and other concessions, because they believe that they cannot reach their cherished goal of independence unless the Musalmans back their demand. The Hindu Maha Sabha plan is no way to unity. On the contrary, it is a sure block to progress. The slogan of the Hindu Maha Sabha President – Hindustan for Hindus – is not merely arrogant but is arrant nonsense. The question, however, is: is the Congress way the right way? It seems to me that the Congress has failed to realize two things. The first thing which the Congress has failed to realize is that there is a difference between appeasement and settlement, and that the difference is an essential one. Appeasement means buying off the aggressor by conniving at his acts of murder, rape, arson and loot against innocent persons who happen for the moment to be the victims of his displeasure. On the other hand, settlement means laying down the bounds which neither party to it can transgress. Appeasement sets no limits to the demands and aspirations of the aggressor. Settlement does. The second thing the Congress has failed to realize is that the policy of concession has increased Muslim aggressiveness, and what is worse, Muslims interpret these concessions as a sign of defeatism on the part of the Hindus and the absence of the will to resist. This policy of appeasement will involve the Hindus in the same fearful situation in which the Allies found themselves as a result of the policy of appeasement which they adopted towards Hitler. This is another malaise, no less acute than the malaise of social stagnation. Appeasement will surely aggravate it. The only remedy for it is a settlement. If Pakistan is a settlement, it is a proposition worth consideration. As a settlement it will do away with this constant need of appeasement and ought to be welcomed by all those who prefer the peace and tranquility of a settlement to the insecurity due to the growing political appetite shown by the Muslims in their dealings with the Hindus.

B. R. Ambedkar, Pakistan or the Partition of India. New Delhi: Online Archive Edition from www.ambedkar.org, 1945, pp. 132–133. http://www.ambedkar.org/pakistan/pakistan.pdf (accessed 20 July 2022).

35 Hayat reconstructs British opposition to Muslim separatist demands voiced by Jinnah in 1939 and makes it clear that there was no question of the AIML presenting the Lahore Resolution in order to curry favour with the colonial Raj. British officialdom, from the viceroy down, made it clear to Jinnah that they were committed to a united India and found the idea of Pakistan ‘distasteful’. Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., pp. 190–191.

36 Ibid., p. 189.

37 Rafique Afzal meticulously reconstructs the reorganisation processes that the AIML underwent between 1937 and 1946, from finances, to membership, and party structure and branches. This leaves little doubt that the AIML that entered the electoral contest of 1945–1946 was a very different entity from that which had contested the 1937 elections. Afzal, op. cit., pp. 287–494.

38 Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., pp. 225–267, analyzes this mobilisation strategy, and shows that it was a deliberate plan combined with energetic follow through that saw the AIML grow into a national movement.

39 For example, the Majlis-i-Ahrar was an opponent of the Muslim League and part of the All-India Azad Muslim Conference. See Samina Awan, Majlis-i-Ahrar-i-Islam: A Socio-Political Study. Karachi: Oxford University Press. Also see Qasim Zaman, Islam in Pakistan: A History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, esp., pp. 135–163, for an enlightening discussion on perspectives on Muslim/Islamic/Divine sovereignty, the modernist appropriation of such concepts, and how the ulema conceived of these ideas.

40 But this acceptance was not widely shared in Congress. Party leaders were “conscious of the implications inherent in the Cabinet Mission Plan as it contained the seeds of Pakistan. They were in a state of confusion: they were neither ready to accept it nor to reject it in its entirety and they did not want the League to take the lead in the decision-making process in the final years of the British Raj. They also could not afford to annoy the Labour government which … had now put forth a plan which could have helped Congress to preserve its dream of maintaining Indian unity.” Gandhi himself seemed to be having second thoughts and indicated in Harijan that “The Cabinet Mission’s statement is not an award” and that its recommendations were open to modification by the Constituent Assembly. Muhammad Iqbal Chawla, Wavell and the Dying Days of the Raj: Britain’s Penultimate Viceroy in India. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 125.

41 Rabia Umar Ali, Empire in Retreat: The Story of India’s Partition. Karachi: Oxford University, 2012, p. 77.

42 For a deeply researched account of Pakistan’s Year Zero and the challenges Jinnah faced see, Dar, op. cit., esp. pp. 11–98.

43 In a blistering and academically grounded essay, Asad Rahim Khan dismantles arguments that deny Jinnah agency and constructs an argument that runs parallel to some of Hayat’s grand framework:

We start, though one never should, with an alternative universe: imagine if Gandhi didn’t really want freedom for India. Go further afield: imagine if Churchill didn’t want to win the war. Or if that avatar of modern evil, Adolf Hitler, was lukewarm about racial supremacy. Now imagine if all of the above was conventional wisdom in real life. It doesn’t work, because it’s just not true – we have endless data that tells us otherwise, as well as the express words and deeds of these men, bent on doing the exact opposite. Yet that same sense of obviousness isn’t always extended to Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Mountains of evidence are ignored, dozens of speeches forgotten, alternative universes imagined out of thin air. But some universes merit deflating more than others – like the one where Jinnah never wanted Pakistan or Partition; where he never wanted, right to the end, a separate country at all. Per this version, Jinnah was a poker player; with Pakistan no more than a bargaining chip – all he wanted was a better deal for everyone in an undivided India.

Asad Rahim Khan, ‘Belief, not bargains: Did Jinnah really want Pakistan?’, Dawn, August 14, 2022. https://www.dawn.com/news/1704480/belief-not-bargains-did-jinnah-really-want-pakistan (accessed 19 August 2022).

44 Hayat, The Charismatic Leader, op. cit., p. 342.

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Ilhan Niaz

Ilhan Niaz is Professor of History, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.