Muhammad Ali Jinnah

And Gandhi had envisioned a very different type of India.

By the way, I don't know if you know this, but the guy who started Pakistan, his name was Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

This is a guy who was Western educated, secular guy, liked a nice round of scotch.

He was not some kind of an Islamic fanatic at all.

But the Muslims came to him and said, you know, we Muslims are not going to be safe in Hindu India.

And so this guy realized, guess what? If I go to the British and I represent that the Muslims won't be safe, they might give me my own country and I will then become the president of that place.

So even though Jinnah himself was a little bit more like an Ataturk, he exploited the fears of the Muslims to push the British into partitioning the country.

And that was the beginning of Pakistan.

Well,

are you on the Israeli side? Are you on the Palestinian side? Or are you on Jinnah's side?

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Now, if there was ever a single act to define colonial stupidity and short-sightedness, it was the Radcliffe Line.

On August 14, 1947, Pakistan was officially formed, with Muhammad Ali Jinnah sworn in as its first Governor General.

This included what we see today as Pakistan, but also an eastern section completely cut off called East Pakistan, which is today Bangladesh.

India had its turn, with Jarrah al-Alneru assuming power as the nation's first Prime Minister.

On 7th May 2018 for "The Wire," Sharjeel wrote an op-ed.

It was called "It's Time We Absolve Jinnah." And the bo- bottom tagline was, "Partition harmed the Indian Muslims most, but to put, but to put the blame on Jinnah or the Muslim League is not necessarily a correct historical reading." So what he said was, "Jinnah ki toh koi galti nahi thi." Um, and, and you know, I want to read the bit that fascinated me the most.

It's called Minority Rights.

I want to read this paragraph bit here.

Muslims and Hindus were two such vertical divisions among others, as there were other horizontal caste divisions.

We were and are still not a nation in the academic sense of Benedict Anderson's imagined communities.

Jinnah argued that we would not-- we would be able to become a nation only if we would make the minority community feel secure, and a party which argues on behalf of the minority was a communal party." Wah! Logic dekho.

"Congress twisted the meaning of communal and made it into a contemptuous term.

An even more dangerous situation arose in Rajputana, which is roughly what we call Rajasthan today.

The Maharaja of Jodhpur was being courted by Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Jinnah wanted Hindu majority states to join Pakistan to undermine the very theory on which Pakistan was built.

He handed Maharaja of Jodhpur a blank sheet of paper with his signature at the bottom and said, write your own terms.

That is how desperate Muhammad Ali Jinnah was.

Sardar Patel and VP Menon intervened very quickly with their own counter diplomacy.

They offered Jodhpur concrete things that Jinnah could never deliver.

This was Lord Wavell.

It was Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru representing, well, Nehru representing the Hindus, Muhammad Ali Jinnah representing the Muslims, and Mahatma Gandhi running backwards and forwards between the three of them trying to get them all to agree to something.

They didn't.

He was terribly frustrated and upset by the whole thing.

It is not now.

Jinnah recognized it in 1947.

That is why, if you go back into the history of India-Pakistan wars, the first lot who came into Kashmir, the raiders, were basically Pashtuns.

The rest of Pashtuns were pushed by Jinnah into Kashmir for booty and things like that, whatever, right? So that the focus was away from this area and it went into Kashmir.

Then after the nation settled in whatever fashion they did, say 15-20 years later, the next big war between India and Pakistan happens in 1965.

In 1965, Ayub Khan repeated the same thing.