Jinnah Riding High

Monday, Jun. 14, 1943 Time

Rose Petals & Scrambled Eggs

Mohamed Ali Jinnah was riding high (literally — on a dais mounted on a Dodge truck) when his Moslem League convened in Delhi in April. Never before in the League's hitherto pedestrian history had his followers turned out in such numbers.

There was a parade two miles long. Showers of rose petals fell on Jinnah's mat of grey hair. Police guards on the roof tops saw to it that nothing heavier than rose petals was dropped.

For three hours, under a blistering sun, Jinnah, emerging as India's No. 1 political figure during the suppression of the Congress party, shouted his battle cry of Pakistan. Behind him, huge maps indicated that Pakistan (a separate Moslem state) took in all three North Western provinces and vaulted over the huge United Provinces and Bihar to include Bengal and Assam in the northeast. This was the most ambitious claim to territories since Jinnah had first espoused Pakistan as a slogan to bargain against Hindu political domination. The directed cheers of his party and the pandal (huge tent) bright with Pakistan banners (see cut) heartened him.

Jinnah's Power. Equally heartening to Jinnah last week was the formation of a coalition Moslem League ministry in the North-West Frontier Province. This brought the governments of four of the five Pakistan provinces under Moslem League domination, after a series of involved political maneuvers in which the Congressites accused the British Raj of building up Jinnah as proof that Indians cannot unite politically.

The League faced dangers in taking over power when food shortages and spiraling inflation plagued all India. Its Pakistan program, in practice, might well mean the economic suicide of the provinces involved. It is axiomatic in India that "Hindu and Moslem interests can no more be separated than you can unscramble eggs." Nevertheless, Jinnah at last dominated the areas he threatened to withdraw from the rest of India.

Gandhi's Decline. In India's first general election (1937) Jinnah's party, roundly trounced by Gandhi's Hindu-dominated Congress party, won less than one-eighth of all the seats officially reserved for Moslem candidates in the Moslem provinces. But the Congress party, with 8,000 leaders still under arrest since last August's riotous break with the British, was in a weakened condition last week. From the Aga Khan's palace at Poona, Gandhi made his first public attempt to get back into the political stream since a 21-day fast had failed to gain him his freedom (TIME, March 15). The move had been prompted by Jinnah himself.

At the Delhi conference Jinnah had described Britain's Secretary of State for India, Leopold S. Amery, and Viceroy Lord Linlithgow as "pukka diehards still dangling the carrot of unity before donkey-like India." Jinnah had suggested that the country "unite and drive the British out," and asked Gandhi to write him a letter. The Raj, Jinnah said, would not dare to stop such a message. The Raj did dare. Jinnah commented: "The letter of Mr. Gandhi can only be construed as a move on his part to embroil the Moslem League in a clash with the British."

Joshi's Program. Monocled Jinnah, with his Bond Street clothes, his rich palace at Bombay and his Moslem belief in violence, has gained power through reviving the Moslems' vanished pride in their onetime imperial greatness and through brilliantly, if not always logically, espousing Moslem grievances against the Hindus.

Gandhi, with his mysticism, his dhoti, his self-imposed poverty, his goats, his spinning wheel, wants a united India, but he has lost power through the failure of his "Quit India" campaign and his pitiful attempts to meet India's economic ills through makeshift remedies.

No makeshift remedies were those proposed by a third Indian leader, taut, be spectacled Puran Chandra Joshi, Secretary of the Indian Communist Party. Last week his party met in Bombay, with as much fiery speechmaking as Jinnah's Moslem League had displayed. "Cultural squads" reworded ageless folk tunes into and-Japanese songs. The Bombay sweeper-women gave a specialty dance. Characteristically Indian was one Red chant set to an old devotional tune: "Do not think that revolution means thirst for blood; it means love for a higher life."

In ten months the Communists have grown from virtual oblivion (they were banned from 1934 to July 23, 1942) to challenge the Hindu Mahasabha as India's third strongest political party. Their internal program is for land division, higher wages, a breaking down of all restrictions of caste, creed and custom. Externally their policy is basically anti-imperialist, but to Joshi, trading British imperialism for Japanese slavery is foolish. The average age of party members is 27. Claimed membership: 16,000 regular party members, 400,000 peasant "supporters," 39,000 students.