"Will Pakistan survive its founder? While one cannot be very certain in this respect, either way, it is an irresistible feeling that anxiety on that account must have been haunting Mohammad Ali Jinnah ever since he won the victory which he most probably, did not expect, or might not even have wanted ... Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the most maligned and misunderstood man. That experience made him bitter and it was very largely out of spitefulness that he pursued an object, the attainment of which placed him in the most difficult position. Jinnah was not an idealist in the sense of being a visionary; he was a practical man possessed of great shrewdness as well as of more than average intelligence. Such a man could not be blind to the difficulty which was to follow his highly problematical success. During the latter part of his career, politics was a gamble for him; having played a game of poker with high stakes, he could not pull out. He had to go to the bitter end, so to say. Bitter, because he must have been frightened by the spectre of success when it came within the reach of possibility. But then it was too late to retreat. It was a case of a man getting inextricably entangled in power-politics without having begun with the lust for political power. Few would agree; yet, that is a fact which will win the recognition of impartial and dispassionate historians ... Jinnah was temperamentally not a professional politician. He began as a liberal for whom politics was holiday pastime. Being a man of outstanding merit, he could not remain a back-bencher. Unfortunately, his coming to the front rank of politics synchronised with the desecularisation of nationalism, which doubtful development introduced communalism in politics. The responsibility for that fateful turn in the

political life of the country must be judged by history. But since then, politics became a game of wits for Jinnah. Successful in that game, thanks to his own cleverness, he won the opprobrium of being a henchman of imperialism. The fact, however, is that, if distrust and hatred of the British were the hall-mark of patriotism, Jinnah was always as staunch a patriot as any other Indian. The more that fact was willfully ignored by his opponents and he was maligned and misrepresented deliberately, the more was Jinnah naturally embittered (emphasis added) and spitefulness became the motive of his politics. But even then his ambition was not to gain political power, but avenge the wrong which he believed had been done to him ... But he was not the devil of the drama, as he was made out of be. He is no more with us. Let justice be done to his memory ... The homeland for the Indian Muslims was a Utopia; any territorial division was bound  to leave many millions of them out, in a very delicate position of being regraded as aliens, suspected of  disloyalty to the land they must live in. An intelligent man like Jinnah must have foreseen this tragic consequence of what he demanded. Therefore, I for one

do not believe that he really wanted partition of the country (emphasis added). Like a gambler, over- confident of his wits, he staked high, believing that the other party would compromise on his terms. That would have been for the best of all concerned. But the latter having taken up the attitude of all or nothing, Jinnah was driven to the bitter end - of gaining a victory he himself

dreaded and which he did not survive".

(Courtesy: The Radiance Viewsweekly, 8-14, June 1997)

(Source: The Independent India, 19 September, 1948)