Gandhi’s Hinduism — The struggle against Jinnah’s Islam; M.J. Akbar; Bloomsbury; Rs.699; 414 pp – Dilip Thakore This compelling narrative tracking events to the final run-up to independence and partition of the subcontinent has suffered a media blackout, despite being authored by media supernova M.J. Akbar, (Sunday, The Telegraph, Kolkata, Asian Age and author of several contemporary histories including Nehru: The Making of India (1998) and Tinderbox: Past & Future of Pakistan (2011). That’s probably because Akbar is in the national doghouse following his trial by frothing TRP-obsessed television news anchors on unsubstantiated sexual harassment charges, which has also cut short his political career as a junior minister of the incumbent BJP-led NDA government at the Centre. The title of Akbar’s latest oeuvre which suggests that the protagonists of this book were deeply religious personalities, is misleading. Though Gandhi was a devout Hindu, he was more a religious reformer than an orthodox practitioner of this ancient creed. His whole life was a struggle to excise the inherent inequities of the Hindu caste system, particularly the open, continuous and uninterrupted atrocities visited upon the lowest castes for millennia. Jinnah, on the other hand as Akbar recounts with numerous lifestyle examples and data was — like his Hindu alter ego Jawaharlal Nehru — a westernised sophisticate with ill-concealed disdain for religion and ritual, and at best a political Muslim. But he exerted powerful influence on his community. However, though Akbar believes that it was Jinnah’s antagonism towards Gandhi that infuriated the former and ultimately compelled him to press the demand for a separate nation for the subcontinent’s Muslims, there is sufficient evidence in this and other histories of India’s freedom struggle to suggest that Jinnah’s worst fear was to be obliged to serve under Nehru. The latter was adopted by Gandhi as his “spiritual son” and favourite right from the time the 29-year-old Jawaharlal, spoilt offspring of wealthy lawyer Motilal Nehru, succeeded his father as Congress president in 1929. To its merit, this fluent narrative also provides satisfying context and explanation for the sustained loyalty of the British to Jinnah. The plain truth obfuscated by most Indian historians, but highlighted by Akbar, is that in the early years of World War II, the British were in a blue funk following German dictator Adolf Hitler’s march through Europe and imminent invasion of Britain, and the quick conquest of the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore by Japan, Hitler’s ally. Therefore, the loyalty and support of the Indian Army, 40 percent Muslim — at the height of the “bloodiest war in history,” writes Akbar, 2.5 million Indians were fighting for Britain deployed in Europe and Asia — was vitally important for imperial Britain. It was fighting lone wars on two fronts, because until end 1941, America was not a combatant nation. As Akbar narrates in considerable detail, at this critical moment in the history of World War II, in March 1940, Jinnah offered the British viceroy Lord Linlithgow full Muslim League and community support for the…
