For You, Faisal, A Musical Note From Everyday India That No Pakistani Can Ever Dream Of!

Submitted by Rakshas 10 Anan (India), Aug 26, 2006 at 04:43

Gujarati Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was a patriot who was deeply in love with his motherland, India. During the charge of treason against Lokmanya Tilak by the British, it was Jinnah, the young lawyer assisting Bhulabhai Desai, who was seen scribbling note after note passed on to the Defence Attorney. After Tilak's death, Jinnah was so besides himself with emotion -- according to eye witnesses -- that he had to be forcibly prevented from self-immolation on the funeral pyre of the Brahmin nationalist leader, who had inspired even Mahatma Gandhi with his clarion call for Independence from colonial rule as the birthright of every Indian!

Later on, things began to sour terribly for him with the antipathy displayed towards him by Gandhi-Nehru of the Indian National Congress. After that, he was well set on a separatist course by the decade of 1930! There are elderly Hindus in Mumbai even now, who remember him with great affection as a very emotional, urbane, likeable personality. The erudite and liberal pork-eating Muslim nationalist in dapper western attire, trained as Barrister in London, where he had practiced law for many years, and married to a Parsi Zoroastrian lady from a wealthy industrialist family in Mumbai, ended up by a curious quirk of destiny as the sherwani-clad Qaid-e-Azam of jihadi Pakistan.

There's a lot of hearsay from his Hindu friends who had occasionally visited him from Mumbai after the creation of Paksitan, who described how he admitted to the biggest political mistake of his life, once he found himself cloistered in the utterly hypocritical Punjabi Muslim male domain in Pakistan. Constantly surrounded by fanatic mullahs and hate-filled jingoists, it didn't take too long for a sensitive, intelligent and genuinely cosmopolitican man like him to understand the nature of the beast that he had helped to create.

There were so many public figures in India who were also Muslim, who understood that lesson without being prompted or swayed by the political passions of that halcyonic period. They understood that their roots were in India, and what the mullahs and fanatics were saying was not the substance of their own spirit. Their very lives were woven into the fabric of openness and love that was Indian, despite all the obvious differences, and their life's experience did not give any credence to the theory of Pakistan.

Bharat Ratna, or the jewel of India, is the highest civilian award of the nation, and here's a moving vignette of a man who is a metaphor for the unity of India, as a pointer to a future of peace and harmony without rancour.

NATIONAL INTEREST

Khan Saheb in Kashi, Shekhar Gupta, http://www.indianexpress.com/story/11414.html.

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