AMU DEBACLE Flashcards
No one individual has caused as much damage to the Muslim cause in the Indian subcontinent as Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Why is it that a lawyer of his eminence – could not understand that India was going to be a democracy rather than Hindu monarchy? Did he, as a lawyer, consider the possibility of the future amendments to the constitution by a majoritarian government?
By dividing the Muslim population into two (now three, after Bangladesh), he permanently weakened their position and made them a numeric minority in India. The creation of Bangladesh proved Jinnah wrong within the first 25 years of Pakistan’s establishment.
***Given all of this, Muslims in India and the students of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) should have genuine grievances against Jinnah, and may want to discuss whether to withdraw the lifetime membership of the AMU students’ union he was granted.
***But no outsider has the right to dictate what they should do or threaten them on this account.
***Resistance by students to the removal of his portrait should not be taken as an endorsement of Jinnah’s ideology. It is merely an assertion of the democratic right to take their own decisions.
AMU does not subscribe to the two-nation theory
AMU does not subscribe to the regressive ideology of nations being formed on the basis of religion. If nations are really made in the name of religion, why do Christian countries fight with other Christian countries, and Islamic countries with other Islamic ones?
AMU is fully committed to the unity and integrity of India. But then AMU cannot deny that Jinnah was given life membership of the university’s students’ union in 1938. Jinnah himself was a great votary of Hindu-Muslim unity during the major part of his political career, and was called the ‘greatest bridge between Hindu-Muslim solidarity’ by Sarojini Naidu.
We continue to host Dalhousie town and Victoria Memorial in India. Should our revulsion of Jinnah mean we erase historic facts?
**This is the ‘New India’, which is entirely different from the liberal and progressive India which Gandhi, Nehru and other freedom fighters had imagined.
**We now want to take the path of those who did not participate in our freedom struggle and do not have faith either in our composite culture or in the fundamental duty enshrined in the constitution – to cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom.
