Parallel lives but on opposite paths: Jinnah and his feminine antonym Begum Qudsia
Parallel Lives (Bioi parallëloi) is an impressive collection of comparative biographies of celebrated Greek and Roman soldiers, legislators, orators, and statesmen written by the Greek author Plutarch. By comparing a great Roman with an illustrious Greek, Plutarch intended to provide ideal patterns of behaviour and to encourage mutual understanding between Greeks and Romans. Likewise, an incisive historical investigation can unearth some reverse parallel lives too. The lives of Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul, the sole Muslim lady member of the Constituent Assembly of India, reflects such a reverse parallel.
Jinnah started his public life as the highly praised ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity and a great liberal secularist and agonizingly metamorphosed into a reckless Commander-in-Chief of Muslim communalism and separatism. Whereas Begum Qudsia Aizaz Rasul who opened her political innings as a prominent Muslim League leader with a feudal background eventually evolved to a secular and progressive leader of the Indian National Congress. Jinnah, in his early years, opposed the Muslim League’s demand for a separate electorate for Indian Muslims. But in the late 1930s he became the Apostle of a separate nation for Muslims. Begum Aizaz Rasul, who campaigned for the Pakistan Movement and was elected to the Constituent Assembly on the Muslim League ticket, eventually played a critical role in putting an end to the flawed system of separate electorate in independent India. The feminine protagonist, even though she is much less known while compared to her masculine counterpart, has a better message for the audience at the coda of this tragicomedy.
Romeo-turned-Macbeth
Jinnah was an ardent bardolator who aspired to play Romeo's role in the Globe Theatre. But in real life he became a Macbeth as Kiran Doshi reimagined him in his 2015 historical fiction Jinnah Often Came to Our House. A well-educated barrister-debonair who loathed Islamic orthodoxy, driven by his hubris and ambition, Jinnah almost single-handedly changed the history of the Indian subcontinent by doing everything that he had opposed for most of his political career until the fateful 1937 Indian provincial elections. He incited communal tensions between Hindus and Muslims, and thus, became the poster boy for the British policy of ‘Divide & Rule’.
After the Partition and the bloodbath, Jinnah reverted back to his inclusive liberal secular rhetoric. In the famed 11 August 1947 speech in the Pakistan Constituent Assembly which expressed fierce opposition to the idea of an Islamic State as advocated by figures like Abul Ala Maududi, he declared: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State … you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State”. By making this volte face, he again practised Macbeth's mantra of “Fair is foul and foul is fair”.
Stanley Wolpert bewildered by the 11 August 1947 speech in his Jinnah of Pakistan wrote that the cyclone of events probably disoriented Jinnah and he was arguing the opposition’s brief, pleading for a united India – on the eve of Pakistan! It was too late and the later history of Pakistan ruthlessly betrayed the 11 August 1947 ex cathedra. Fatima Jinnah, heir to Jinnah’s secular legacy, was humiliated by the military junta and the 1965 presidential election was stolen from her. Like Macbeth, the Jinnah drama too ended up in a tragedy.
Unbecoming of Jinnah
Jinnah joined the Indian National Congress in 1904. As a Rolls Royce lawyer of the Bombay Bar, he contributed a whopping donation of Rs 1000 per month to the Congress in 1914. By this time, he joined the All-India Muslim League with a specific purpose of wresting it from the old guard aristocratic British cronies like Aga Khan and his mission was a huge success. Jinnah was at this time entirely unsympathetic to Muslim exceptionalism.
While welcoming Mahatma Gandhi who was coming from South Africa in 1915, Jinnah praised the Hindu-Muslim unity during Gandhi's South African struggle: “two sister communities stood in absolute union and it had its moral and political effect”. Addressing the Bombay Muslim Students’ Union in the same year, he exhorted the Muslim youth telling them that their chief object should always be cooperation, unity, and goodwill, not only among the different sections of Muslims but also between Muslims and other communities of the country. He soon became the ‘Muslim Gokhale’, a voice of reason and constitutional method.
Jinnah was the chief architect of the Lucknow Pact between the INC and the AIML. The pact effectively addressed the contentious issue of adequate representation for Hindus and Muslims in legislative bodies.
Jinnah became a darling of the nationalist circles and the Bombay Chronicle wrote on 23 October 1916: “Men like Jinnah are not only the trusty exponents of public opinion but true builders of the future constitution of India”. The tragedy is that the same Jinnah became a votary of communal politics and the two-Nation theory in the late 1930s.
Jinnah’s political career turned astonishingly Janus-faced after that. He was always a secular liberal nationalist at heart, but sacrificed these credentials on the altar of Machiavellian politics.
“Now more than ever, we need Jinnah’s pre-1937 politics in both India and Pakistan. A pro-minority consociational equipoise is now needed more than ever, given the steady descent of both countries into cesspool of majoritarian tyranny, constitutional politics aimed at giving a voice to all sections and classes at the centre is a noble objective,” Yasser Latif Hamdani wrote in his Jinnah: A Life (2020). Sadly, he let go of these ideals entirely when they came in the way of his ambitions.
From Pakistan Movement to secular India
Journeying in the other direction was Begum Aizaz Rasul whose personal profiles was in sharp contrast to that of Jinnah.
Jinnah hailed from a middle-class family whose lineage traces back to Hindu Rajputs of Sahiwal in Punjab, converted to Islam in the 18th century.
Begum Qudsia was born to the royal family of Malerkotla in Punjab having a long history of Islamic tradition.
“An adroit politician she was able to harness her environment and would go on to challenge patriarchy and champion secular and liberal ideas at a time when bigotry and communal passions ran high. Although elected to the Constituent Assembly as a representative of the Muslim League, she was vocal against having separate electorates, one of the principal causes her party advocated. On her way to charting a successful career in public service, Qudsia broke many norms including the purdah,” wrote Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali in their The Fifteen: The Lives and Times of the Women in India’s Constituent Assembly (2024).
On 22 November 1949, Begum Aizaz Rasul stated in the Constituent Assembly: “I look forward to the day when individuals will cease to regard themselves as members of religious minorities. But this can only be done if and when the majority also cease to be conscious of their majority and members of communities, big or small, sincerely and simultaneously begin to consider themselves and one another as full and equal citizens of a Secular State.”
In March 1940 at Lahore, Jinnah who had then became a staunch communalist, exhorted the Muslims to prepare for final confrontation and to come forward as the servants of Islam. Qudsia enthusiastically supported the idea of a separate Muslim nation. She said: “Every child in every Muslim home is being brought up in the spirit of Pakistan and women will make their share of sacrifice if bloodshed comes.”
But soon, she realized the danger of the Pakistan idea. After the Partition, she opted for secular India over theocratic Pakistan. She opposed the idea of separate electorate for minorities in the Constituent Assembly and called it a self-destructive weapon that perpetuates communalism and separatism. Begum Qudsia advised Indian Muslims to throw themselves entirely upon the goodwill of the majority community and pave the way for a secular democratic state. In 1950, she joined the Congress and served in many prestigious posts until her death in 2001.
The South Asian trio -- India, Pakistan and Bangladesh -- have a useful lesson to learn from the antonymous parallel lives of Jinnah and Qudsia -- parochial communalism delivers short-term results but will soon become a Frankenstein’s monster as in the case of Jinnah; but pragmatic secularism gives durable benefits as the Begum realised after the bloody Partition.
(Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala. Views are personal. Email: faisal.chelengara10@gmail.com)
