Last week, The Hindu carried an excerpt from a book by Assistant Professor Venkat Dhulipala of a US university provocatively titled Creating a New Medina. The excerpt suffered on account of atrocious writing but it prompted me to read up on Professor Venkat’s other works on the issue as well as suffering through recordings of some of his talks. He is hopelessly obsessed with refuting Pakistani-US historian Dr Ayesha Jalal’s seminal work on Jinnah that is now close to 30 years old. In the process, all objectivity and fair-mindedness seems to have gone out the window. Consider his basic argument: Jinnah was irreversibly committed to a separate Pakistan because he said so. Now I do not take a firm position on how or what Jinnah would have settled for post-1940 but it is clear that he was ready to accept something less or at least something different from the Pakistan he got. Let us consider the underlying absurdity of Professor Venkat’s argument. If indeed Pakistan was a bargaining counter, according to Professor Venkat, Jinnah should have said, “Look, here I am asking for Pakistan but in fact I am not. I will settle for much less.”The answer to the Jinnah puzzle lies as much in the pre-1940 period as it does in the post-1940 period. It stretches back to the Nehru Report where Jinnah’s original proposals, which contained an agreement on the basis of joint electorates, were rejected by Congress under pressure from the Hindu Mahasabha. To understand Jinnah better, one has to read the proceedings of the Roundtable Conference where Jinnah was a party of one pitted against one and all with his vision for a federal and democratic India at once cognizant of its diversity and non-sectarian in its approach, a vision that ran counter not just to the princely states that poisoned the British government against him but also to the Muslims of Punjab who forwarded the notorious Punjab thesis, and the Congress, which refused to accept the ground reality that it did not represent all Indians. To understand how the break with Congress came finally, you have to investigate how Congress, with its simple majority through a limited electorate in the United Provinces (UP), decided to exclude its election ally, the Muslim League, which had won the largest number of Muslim seats in UP, from its government. Every attempt at Hindu-Muslim unity, every appeal for a united Indian national front that Jinnah forwarded to Gandhi and Nehru was arrogantly rebuffed. Congress since the ascendancy of Gandhi had — its tokenism of having a few Muslim maulanas in its ranks notwithstanding — become a largely caste Hindu party. The myth of Mahatma Gandhi, the great non-violent icon, is certainly greater than the man Gandhiji was. Gandhi’s vision for India was essentially anti-modern, a religious vision drawing its basis from ancient India. To understand how Gandhi wanted to model India, one must read Dr Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, now available in an annotated edition with an introduction by Arundhati Roy. Gandhi’s vision was of a Hindu society with varna and avarna castes and outcasts. Those who want to read more on Gandhi’s vision vis-à-vis a caste-based organisation of Indian society should read his 1921 article in Navajivan (a Gujurati journal) where he described in no uncertain terms the western European ethos as essentially alien and fundamentally destructive to Hindu society, which was to be based on caste and caste alone. It was a vision that greatly vexed Jinnah and Ambedkar respectively as representatives of the Muslims (the outcastes) and untouchables (the avarna castes). So the Lahore Resolution was passed but the Lahore Resolution itself was vague and open to interpretation, quite deliberately. Professor Venkat fails to appreciate that even the name Pakistan was — as Jinnah pointed out — fathered upon the Muslims by the Congress press. The fact that different people had different concepts of what the Lahore Resolution means shows that the concept was a catchall and not a concrete idea. Perhaps the greatest hole in Professor Venkat’s claim that Jinnah was irrevocably committed to a sovereign Pakistan is the fact that he did accept the Cabinet Mission Plan that did not deliver on what Venkat himself claims are the definite postulates of a clear and concise demand. It envisaged one federation. It envisaged one army. It did not, despite the Muslim League’s resolution, have any real constitutional guarantee of secession 10 years later. It provided for a single constituent assembly with an overwhelming Congress majority. Professor Venkat cannot have his cake and eat it too. If the demand for Pakistan was firm and etched in stone, acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan indicated a clear and equally irrevocable departure from it, which it would have been had Congress not torpedoed the very basis of it. In its entirety, Professor Venkat’s case is a very weak one, confusing as it does the shadow for the substance. At times it is downright unscholarly and absurd. For example, in one of his talks, the good professor quotes Khaliquzzaman on pan-Islamic unity from 1949 but forgets to quote Jinnah who ruled out pan-Islamism on several occasions. On another occasion, he ascribes Gandhi’s words to Jinnah. Apparently, he also applies the face value rule vis-à-vis Jinnah’s statements very selectively. Even the title, Creating a New Medina, is completely misleading, for Professor Venkat knows there was no such promise made by Jinnah. Indeed, if anyone brought up Medina, it was Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madni and the Jamiat-e-Ulema Hind that had declared support for the Muslim League an unpardonable religious sin. I will end this article with a quote from Jinnah, the would-be proponent of a new Medina according to Professor Venkat, dated March 5, 1936, at Dayal Singh College, Lahore: “I feel myself among kindred spirits. This college does not believe in any creed and I too feel that the salvation of India lies in non-sectarian feelings. It was this creed, which I had in the past, which I have at present and which I will have in future dearest to my heart.” Could such a man be the proponent of any theocratic idea or aspiration? The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com