Adeel Hussain

This volume presents some of the speeches and letters of Nehru, Patel, Jinnah, and Iqbal. They make for rather painful reading, as they show the actors in a less than flattering light. The pieces by Iqbal and Nehru on the question of Muslims and Islam probably has Nehru coming off a little better, as Iqbal seems to be tying himself up in knots reconciling the universality of Islam with its exclusivity. The exchanges with Jinnah gives a hint of how Partition came about, as Nehru exhibits his apparently usual ploy of appearing somewhat disingenuous and refusing to acknowledge that there was even a problem, a tactic that may have made Partition more bloody that needed. The most instructive is Nehru's championing of the First Amendment, which shows that with the responsibility of running the country, came a desire to remove the inconvenience of long-drawn out consultative processes. The irony is that while it was the mentor of the rightist conservatives, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who argued against such short-cuts, it is the self-same rightists that are taking advantage of Nehru's amendments, while it is Nehru's descendents and political heirs that are inveigling against them.… (plus d'informations)