The house that Jinnah
built By Tarini Unnikrishnan
NEW DELHI - Far from the madding crowd of
the Indian elections, away from the high-profile glare
of the twin core issues of Kashmir and
cross-border terrorism that more often than not divide India
and Pakistan, a beautiful old house in Mumbai's
plush Malabar Hill area patiently waits for the hammer
of history to write yet another chapter in
the relationship of the two nations.
This is the house that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the
man who painstakingly founded a brand new nation in 1947
called Pakistan, built barely 11 years earlier, when he
returned from London to Bombay (as Mumbai was known
then) to take charge of the Muslim League.
Now,
Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf wants India
to "give" Pakistan the house as an outright gift, or
perhaps "lease" it in perpetuity, as a symbol of New
Delhi's faith in the new peace initiative with
Islamabad.
The subject is said to have come up
already twice this year, the first time when Indian
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Musharraf's
delegations met in January in Islamabad. Then in March,
on the margins of a one-day international cricket match
between India and Pakistan in Lahore, the matter was
raised with the visiting Indian National Security
Advisor, Brajesh Mishra, by his Pakistani host and
counterpart, secretary of the National Security Council,
Tariq Aziz.
In January, in drafting the
most important document between the two nations ever, a
promissory note that would ultimately take into account
the core concerns of both nations - Islamabad would
promise to end violence and hostility in Kashmir in
exchange for talks on the "disputed" state - Pakistani
officials interwove a plea for the Jinnah property.
It would, they said, be like the icing on the
cake. The house that Jinnah built in Mumbai, the
two-and-a-half acre property in which he spent the
happiest years of his life with his Parsi wife Ruttie
and their only daughter Dina, a house which overlooks
the Arabian Sea - on the other side was Karachi, the
city to which Jinnah would permanently emigrate after
1947 - should be "given" to Pakistan as the residence of
Pakistan's consul-general.
"Its not only a
house made of brick and mortar," one Pakistani diplomat
said. "It's a slice of our history. And it belongs to
us."
Clearly, Jinnah's home has immense
historical significance. It was here that the
Qaid-e-Azam, Pakistan's dearly-remembered founding
father, held talks with Mahatma Gandhi, India's own
iconic leader and statesman, in September 1944, perhaps
over the fate of their still-undivided nation.
Ironically, the man in the loincloth (Gandhi) would
resist the bifurcation of India until the day it
happened, in 1947, while the man in the monocle wouldn't
stop fighting for separation. But both were destined to
die soon, within nine months of each other, in January
and September 1948, respectively.
It was here,
too, that Jinnah held talks with two other key Indian
leaders, ideologically disparate but united in their
vision of a free India, namely Subhas Chandra Bose and
Jawaharlal Nehru. Bose thought little of allying with
the Germans and the Japanese if they could throw out the
British from India. Nehru, on the other hand, believed
Lord Mountbatten would play by the English code of
"fairness" when he presided over the breakup of the
sub-continent. All three leaders met in Jinnah's house
on August 15, 1946, exactly a year before their various
trysts with destiny.
It wasn't as if over the
years, the Pakistani side said, New Delhi had never
promised to hand over the property or that the subject
did not command political consensus in India. Indeed,
when Vajpayee visited Pakistan in his earlier
reincarnation as foreign minister in 1978, he had
pointed out that the Jinnah house would be "returned"
once the British consul-general evacuated the property
(that happened in 1982). In 1981, foreign minister P V
Narasimha Rao of the Congress also told the Lok Sabha,
India's lower house of parliament, that India had
promised to do right by Pakistan, and so the Jinnah
house would go back to the Pakistani people.
Unfortunately, though, nothing has come of it so far.
To a nation that still sets much sentimental
store on the past, the Pakistanis indicated, to
a people still largely governed by emotion, that the
return of the 70-year-old property in 2004 would be the
biggest confidence-building measure yet between the two
sides. Almost like coming home.
The
Indians responded with a deafening silence. On the eve of the
January summit, perhaps anticipating such a request, New
Delhi announced that the property, now commandeered by
its Foreign Office, would house a new South Asian
cultural center.
By March, when Tariq Aziz was
to make a second request for the property with Brajesh
Mishra, New Delhi had formalized its own request. Let
Pakistan reopen the Indian consulate in Karachi that had
been shut since rioters broke into it in 1994. India's
high commissioner to Pakistan, Shiv Shanker Menon, even
travelled to Karachi in early February to take a look at
the vandalized property and sent back photos of the
same.
An unwritten quid pro quo has come into
play: Pakistan would reopen India's Karachi consulate if
New Delhi gave the Jinnah house to Islamabad. Pakistani
diplomats said they would now take this "link" to the
senior official for the six-item composite dialogue that
will take place in July between the two sides.
By July, the two foreign secretaries will have
already met and begun a revivified discussion on Kashmir
- the first time since 1998. A month later in August,
the two foreign ministers are due to get together to
politically underwrite the discussions of their
bureaucracies. If the talks go well, Pakistani diplomats
say, there is no reason why India would willfully refuse
Islamabad something it so desperately wanted.
"We've been waiting since the partition of India
and the creation of Pakistan 57 years ago for India to
give it to us," one diplomat said, adding, "we'll wait
another three months to discuss it again. We hope New
Delhi will at last listen to this cry from our heart."
As the heat and dust of the Indian
election takes its toll across the countryside, everything
else moves backstage. But once the hurly-burly's done
by mid-May, both nations will again have the opportunity
to lay the past to rest. If Jinnah's solitary manor
helps them do that, it will have played the last chapter
in their tumultuous history.
Tarini
Unnikrishnan is based in New Delhi, India, and has
been writing on foreign affairs for the past 10
years.
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