The events of 1947 signified the defeat of the political goals of (Gandhi and Nehru but) they both recovered from their defeat; Gandhi through his martyrdom, and Nehru through his long stewardship of the new nation state and his commitment to the ideals of secular democracy ... Jinnah too was one of the defeated men of 1947 and that his death a year later came too soon for him to shape his recovery ...
Jinnah's political career may be divided into two parts, each ending in defeat. The first covers the years 1904-1934, and takes us back to the time when he was a prominent nationalist who was also concerned about the problems of the Muslims arising from their general backwardness. The second period begins with the adoption of the goal of independent Muslim states in the subcontinent by the Muslim League in 1940 and ends in 1948 with Jinnah's death.
.. Leaders like Badruddin Tyabji, the third president of the Indian National Congress, saw no necessary conflict between specific Muslim interests and the broader national goals.
Jinnah started his political career following Tyabji's vision of the future. His active association with the Congress began in 1904, two years before the founding of the Muslim League. When the League put forward the demand for separate electorates, he did not approve the idea. Although he won election to the Viceroy's Legislative Council from a Muslim constituency in Bombay in 1910, he opposed the extension of reservation to local level bodies. It was another three years before he joined the League, but once he did so, he quickly emerged as one of its principal leaders.
In his presidential address to the League in 1916, Jinnah spoke of 'affairs' of our common secular existence and of 'the new appeals of territorial patriotism and nationality'. He aspired to be, in his own oft-quoted phrase, the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity. His efforts to build bridges across the cleavage of religious identities had their most notable success in 1916 in the form of the Lucknow Pact that he worked out together with Motilal Nehru ... The Pact, called the "highpoint of Indian nationalist unity", was however, never implemented. This failure presaged a characteristic pattern in Jinnah's political career: his victories were never total, but always truncated. ...
(Gandhi and Jinnah) first met in 1915 but the confrontation between them began in 1919, when Jinnah expressed alarm at Gandhi's strategy of non-cooperation and cautioned him, in the context of the Khilafat agitation, against mixing politics and religion ...
(Confrontation with Gandhi) unexpected by Jinnah put paid his ambition of becoming a successor to Gokhale. He was a checkmated if not defeated man at 44 but by no means finished. He retained his position as a prominent leader of the Muslims, whom he continued to tell that they were Indians first and only then Muslims, and that 'swaraj was an interchangeable term with Hindu-Muslim unity . In 1930 he attended the Round Table Conference in London and acted as the spokesman for the Muslim delegates. Sensing a feeling of alienation, he stayed back in London, but his self-chosen exile did not last long. He was persuaded to return home and to Indian politics in 1934.
At Jinnha's invitation, Muhammad Iqbal had presided over the annual session of the Muslim League in 1930, and mooted the idea of 'a Muslim India within India' ... When the fully articulated idea and name of Pakistan were proposed in 1933, he ignored these also. In 1936 he appealed to his followers to follow the path of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation and cooperation with the Congress. A year later Iqbal wrote urging him to recognize the importance of religion in the making of politics in India. There is no record of a reply from Jinnah.
The resolution calling for the establishment of independent Muslim majority states in India adopted by the Muslim League in 1940 ... did not come from the chair (Jinnah was the president), but was moved by A.K. Fazlul Haq, the Bengali leader, Jinnah was no longer his own master; he had been appropriated by a political upsurge among the Muslims, as their spokesman he was articulating their aspirations, rather than telling them as he used to, what these should be. In any event, when Pakistan finally came into being ... Jinnah himself described it as 'moth-eaten and truncated' It is indeed arguable that 1947 was not the year of Jinnah's final victory, for a second and more important reason. Addressing Muslim legislators in April 1946 he said explicitly that what they were aiming at was not a theocratic state. He elaborated this principle in his presidential address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly at its inaugural session on 11 August 1947 ...
.So distressed was the Pakistani leadership, including Liaqat Ali Khan, with Jinnah's speech that they insisted that he read from a written text ... two days later on the eve of the birth of the new nation. In other speeches that followed, appropriate references to the principles of Islam were included. The ideological defeat was a more serious blow than the loss of territory for 1947 to be hailed as the year of Jinnah's triumph.
Other problems, including Kashmir, but above all his terminal illness, robbed Jinnah's alleged year of victory of public or personal sense of satisfaction ... When Sri Prakasa, the Indian High Commissioner, told him that (his house in Bombay) would have to be taken over by the Government of India, he replied: 'Tell Jawaharlal not to break my heart. I have built it brick by brick ... I look forward to going back there'. He never did.
