From Roses in December by M. C.
Chagla
On the mistakes that occurred on the side of Gandhi, Nehru and Congress
"Of course, we on our side made many mistakes. I do not know whether we were in a hurry to take power, or whether we were genuinely convinced that it was impossible to work with the Muslim League in governing a free country. I do not think Jinnah really expected that Congress would ever concede Pakistan. To him it was more of a bargaining counter, and we had bargained properly, he would have given up the idea of Pakistan and accepted a united India. As a practical man, he realized the utter impracticability of a country, whose two wings were divided by 1,000 miles of Indian Territory, and a country, the major half of whose population in the east was of a different culture and spoke an utterly different language. We must not forget that Jinnah had no foothold in Punjab at all, while in Bengal, Suhrawardy was not happy to go along with him and continued to drag his feet for a long time.
We gave the Punjab province to him on a platter because of our wrong policy. In the Northwest frontier province also Jinnah had a formidable opponent in the form of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, better known as Frontier Gandhi.
The Last Straw
"To my mind, one of the potent causes which ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan was what happened in Uttar Pradesh. If Nehru had agreed to a coalition ministry and not insisted on the representative of the Muslim League on signing the Congress pledge, perhaps Pakistan would not have come about. Uttar Pradesh was the cultural home of the Muslims. Although they were in minority in that state, if Uttar Pradesh had not gone over to the cause of separation, Pakistan would never have become a reality."
On Secularism
"Secularism is an attitude of the mind and a quality of the heart. It is a matter of temperament, of outlook, even of feeling. A man with a secular outlook looks upon all persons as human beings pure and simple, equally estimable and precious, not only in the eye of law, but in the eye of God. You refuse to classify people according to the religious labels which you attach to them. You do not think of a man as a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian, but merely as a human being and you deal with him as a human being."
On the mistakes that occurred on the side of Gandhi, Nehru and Congress
"Of course, we on our side made many mistakes. I do not know whether we were in a hurry to take power, or whether we were genuinely convinced that it was impossible to work with the Muslim League in governing a free country. I do not think Jinnah really expected that Congress would ever concede Pakistan. To him it was more of a bargaining counter, and we had bargained properly, he would have given up the idea of Pakistan and accepted a united India. As a practical man, he realized the utter impracticability of a country, whose two wings were divided by 1,000 miles of Indian Territory, and a country, the major half of whose population in the east was of a different culture and spoke an utterly different language. We must not forget that Jinnah had no foothold in Punjab at all, while in Bengal, Suhrawardy was not happy to go along with him and continued to drag his feet for a long time.
We gave the Punjab province to him on a platter because of our wrong policy. In the Northwest frontier province also Jinnah had a formidable opponent in the form of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, better known as Frontier Gandhi.
The Last Straw
"To my mind, one of the potent causes which ultimately led to the creation of Pakistan was what happened in Uttar Pradesh. If Nehru had agreed to a coalition ministry and not insisted on the representative of the Muslim League on signing the Congress pledge, perhaps Pakistan would not have come about. Uttar Pradesh was the cultural home of the Muslims. Although they were in minority in that state, if Uttar Pradesh had not gone over to the cause of separation, Pakistan would never have become a reality."
On Secularism
"Secularism is an attitude of the mind and a quality of the heart. It is a matter of temperament, of outlook, even of feeling. A man with a secular outlook looks upon all persons as human beings pure and simple, equally estimable and precious, not only in the eye of law, but in the eye of God. You refuse to classify people according to the religious labels which you attach to them. You do not think of a man as a Hindu, a Muslim or a Christian, but merely as a human being and you deal with him as a human being."
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