The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge South Asian Studies, Series Number 31) Reprint Edition

This is one of the most important books in the history of modern India, advancing a major new interpretation of Jinnah's role in the partition of India and Pakistan. It is standard reading in graduate seminars. Ayesha Jalal describes in The Sole Spokesman how Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the secular and Westernized leader with ambivalent political views, became the “sole spokesman” of India’s Muslims in the years leading up to 1947. Jalal challenges the existing historiography by arguing that Jinnah sought parity and not separation for Muslims in a larger all-India confederation. Jinnah’s oft-cited comment that India needed a “surgical operation,” writes Jalal, “did not mean partition, but rather a notional division of India into two groups before they joined again in a new partnership of equality.” Jinnah’s aim of safeguarding the interests of all India’s Muslims, not only those in the proposed Pakistan, remained fundamental to his goal of achieving parity. In order to achieve this aim, Jinnah casted himself as the “sole spokesman” of India’s Muslims. This, in turn, required that he keep the “Pakistan demand” as unspecific as possible in order to create the unified Muslim voice that Jinnah hoped to achieve.According to Jalal, Jinnah’s “intransigence” must be understood as a tactic employed to preserve the fragile unity of the Muslim League. For Jinnah to state his maximum demand – and to reject anything less – allowed the League to rally around a yet-undefined vision of Pakistan. This tactic forced the Congress to face the prospect of settling for a weak center, shared by the League, in the event of a unified Indian government. And it compelled British leaders, who feared a Balkanization of India, to take the League seriously or else face divisions that might undo an independence plan. In the final settlement of 1947, according to Jalal, evidence that Jinnah and the Muslim League desired parity rather than partition finds support in the League’s willingness to sacrifice the “richest plums of Pakistan” in order to achieve equal standing in a unified Indian government. In the event, the deal floundered on Congress’s refusal to join with the League on an all-India level. “This was the decisive reversal,” writes Jalal. “It was the Congress that insisted on partition. It was Jinnah who was against partition.”Jalal’s study stands as a significant revision of the view that partition and communal violence came as a result of Jinnah’s legendary “intransigence.” Much of Jalal’s study, however, relies on inference. As the author makes clear, Jinnah never stated his precise aims – indeed, he stated the opposite of what Jalal argues. Nor did Jinnah take advantage of political opportunities when Congress leaders made statements calling for the unity of India. Nevertheless, The Sole Spokesman remains a cogently argued and compelling revisionist study of the partition of India in 1947, deserving of its critical acclaim.

Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman explains the creation of Pakistan in 1947 by analyzing the intentions and political strategy of Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Jalal focuses on the unlikelihood of the formation of Pakistan. She argues that Jinnah, its enigmatic founder, never intended to found Pakistan as a separate, sovereign state, but instead used the idea of Pakistan, first articulated in the 1940 Lahore Declaration, as a negotiating tool. Jalal explains Pakistan’s creation as a result of political misunderstanding and miscalculation, and points in particular to the opaque process by which Jinnah formulated and implemented strategy. After a humiliating defeat for the Muslim League in India’s 1937 Provincial election, Jinnah deployed all means necessary to repair his weak position, both vis-a-vis rival Muslim elites and the Indian National Congress, and focused single-mindedly on establishing himself as the sole spokesman for India’s Muslims. He used the rallying cry of Pakistan simply as a tactic to convince all parties that he carried far greater influence than he did. By 1945, Jinnah had established himself as the sole spokesman for India’s Muslims, but he lost control over the idea of Pakistan, which the Muslim peoples of the subcontinent embraced to an unforeseen degree. Misunderstandings between the British, who thought Jinnah would not budge in his commitment to Pakistan, and Jinnah, who did not foresee a precipitous British exit from India in 1947, led to a final set of pre-partition mistakes in 1946-47.Jalal’s argument takes significant patience and sustained attention, but her account convinces through its careful and thorough presentation of evidence. Jalal paints Jinnah as the only Muslim leader to carefully plot a national, rather than local, strategy. The reader, however, wonders about the extent to which other Muslim leaders, deeply invested in the creation of a Pakistani state, may have possessed their own grand designs, and may have thus backed Jinnah into a corner. Jalal might have given more attention, for example, to the role of religious leaders and the ulema. The Sole Spokesman, though, succeeds in its intent to force radical reevaluation of why and how Pakistan emerged as a sovereign state from most unlikely beginnings.

In her masterly work of deceit, Ayesha Jalal would have a century of research hung by the way side.A generally well-accepted principle called Occam's Razor says that a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms. The simplest theory that fits the facts of a problem is the one that should be selected. When applied to the events in the Indian subcontinent, the picture appears like a moderate and secular congress fighting to keep India united; pitted against a brilliant political-Muslim Jinnah hell bent on breaking it. A chronic problem of Muslims with peaceful co-habitation manifesting itself into Pakistan.But Ayesha would have us believe otherwise..... Congress a Hindu party. Jinnah and his cronies paramount examples of "secular ideals" (look at the poisonous fruit of their efforts .... The nuclear rogue Pakistan...) Gandhi .. the father of Indian partition. Even Bart Simpson won't say "I didn't do it" this innocently.........

Ayesha Jalal has delivered a highly impressive piece of work. The research is impeccable and the analysis rigorous. Contrary to most historical accounts of the creation of Pakistan, Ayesha does not engage in rhetoric or political slogans. Instead, her efforts to remain unbiased clearly come across and are admirable. She is a historian par excellence and her talent for writing clearly and lucidly about complex subjects is clearly revealed in this book. A provocative piece of work which might actually get students of India/ Pakistan interested in a subject which they have always found dull.