BOOK REVIEW ON DR S. HAYAT'S BOOK ON JINNAH





Certain leaders do not need a name; their attributes are enough. We do not need to be told for example that ‘The Great Helmsman’ stands for Mao Zedong, or ‘The Great Communicator’ refers to President Ronald Reagan. Similarly, the person of Mohammad Ali Jinnah has been subsumed under the sobriquet ‘Quaid-i-Azam’, also ‘The Sole Spokesman’, and now more recently ‘The Charismatic Leader’ – the title of Dr Sikandar Hayat’s perceptive analysis of Jinnah’s leadership that gave us Muslims an un-promised homeland.


Had Dr Hayat’s scholarly dissertation been yet another book on Jinnah, it would still have merited publication, for no South Asian leader of his time and of his political stature or proven eminence has received such little attention from contemporary historians. Adulation, of course; criticism, inevitably, but dispassionate analysis, rarely, which is why Dr Hayat’s book is to be welcomed.


He has written what Jinnah never had the time to do: he has written Jinnah’s political autobiography. Nehru wrote his own, Mahatma Gandhi found willing acolytes to do it for him, and Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf paid literate sycophants to shape their thoughts into words. There is not a word in Dr Hayat’s book that Mohammad Ali Jinnah would not have wanted to read.


He was, to quote the author, ‘one of the most rational leaders of India.’ This theme is expanded by the compiler of Jinnah’s papers Mr Z. H. Zaidi: ‘…what distinguished Jinnah from his great contemporaries is that he was, quite self-consciously, a modern man – one who above all valued reason, discipline, organisation and economy.’


Jinnah was ‘an ideal charismatic leader in the Weberian sense of the term, possessing both reason and passion (tempered by reason).’ A word like ‘passion’ in other biographies suggests to the reader some titillating revelation – of Nehru’s affair with Edwina Mountbatten, the wife of his Viceroy and later Governor-General of India, or of Gandhi’s questionable public experiments with celibacy. Jinnah’s passions were of a different order. His passion was fair play and justice. That is what his legal training had equipped him for. In a rare moment of candour, he revealed: “I am a very peculiarly constituted person. I am guided by cold-blooded reason, logic and judicial enquiry.’ It was these three attributes – cold-blooded reasoning, searing logic, and a forensic judicial approach to problems – that sustained him in all the years he fought for Pakistan. These three, and glowing within him, ‘an inner strength’.


What distinguishes a charismatic leader from others of a baser metal?


Dr Hayat opens his book with a masterly essay unravelling the mystery of the term ‘Charisma’. Is it the Weberian definition – ‘a personal attribute of a charismatic leader endowed with extraordinary qualities, and involves a relationship which is based on the recognition and validity of these qualities’? Or is its closer to Ann Wilmer’s more expansive attributes: ‘self-confidence or self-assurance, exceedingly high energy or vitality, self-control, powerful mind, with an unbelievable wide range of knowledge, and a keen sense of mission’?


Dr Hayat synthesises different academic perceptions about charisma before providing his own thread to follow: ‘Charisma is a function of both personality and situational factors. Personality-related factors are a necessary requirement for charisma, but they are not sufficient by themselves. There must first be a crisis or a distressful situation.’


And no-one could deny that Jinnah’s life was an unending scroll of crises and distressful situations, from the moment he ceased being the voice of Hindu-Muslim unity in 1920 to becoming the Father of a Nation twenty-seven years later. No wonder his ADC Rabbani commented with awe on the singular look of happiness on Quaid-i-Azam’s face on Independence Day, 14 August 1947.


Having defined charisma and the distinguishing features of a charismatic leader (Tibetan monks look for equivalent qualifying signs when identifying a Dalai Lama), Dr Hayat then passes the life of Jinnah through the fine mesh of this definition. Through his narration, we share Jinnah’s disappointment with the obdurate Congress Party leadership and the conniving British leadership at the 1930 Round Table Conference, which made him quit politics in disgust. Unwittingly setting a precedent for modern Pakistani politicians, he went into exile in London.


Like them, he remained in touch from a distance with local developments. He too returned home, to represent the Muslims of India, despite themselves. He knew it would be an unrewarding task, and in the end, after years of wearing the hair-shirt of thankless leadership, he was able to give some of the Muslims of India the independence they needed but did not earn, the sovereignty for which they were destined but are clearly not equipped to handle.


Dr Hayat’s book is a seamless account of Jinnah’s years of unflinching leadership, the struggle to unify Muslims under his command, and of the battles that he had to fight on every front (religious, social and ethnic), in every corner of India from easternmost Bengal to the western extreme of the Congress-sympathetic North-West Frontier Province, at every level from the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi to the poorest hamlet that had access to a voting booth. It would not be an exaggeration to say that there was no-one who did not conspire to thwart him – whether it was the rebellious Punjabi Unionist Khizar Hayat Khan or the insidious Lord Mountbatten who shared the Partition Plan sent to him confidentially by his British superiors with only his favourite Pandit Nehru, but not Jinnah.


One marvels at the tenacity and steadfastness of the Quaid. One wonders, had Jinnah served God as faithfully as he had served his cause, he may well have been venerated as a modern saint. Instead, he chose the more difficult path – that of political martyrdom, sacrificing his own life so that others after him could live in freedom. Addressing a public rally on 30 October 1947, presciently he provided his own epitaph: ‘There is no better salvation for a Muslim than the death of martyr for a righteous cause.’


Dr Sikandar Hayat’s book is a tour de force, an academic treasure-trove replete with copious and authoritative references. When reviewing such a monumental study, perhaps it is only fit that the last word should be by the author himself. ‘The charismatic leader,’ Dr Hayat writes in his concluding chapter, ‘is a creation of his followers and his power to command and authority lies in the eyes of the followers he leads. The response of his followers is the crucial test of charisma.’


The test of Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s charisma is not yet over. It takes place every day, and will continue to do so for as long as his Pakistan remains in existence.





[DAWN, Books & Authors, 17.8.08] The Charismatic Leader: Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Creation of Pakistan. By Dr Sikandar Hayat. Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2008, xxi, 371. Rs.595.