Bombay was closest to Jinnah's heart

Karachi may have been the city whereMohammed Ali Jinnah was born and where he lies interred under an imposing moundof white marble. And London may have been the great metropolis where he acquiredhis sartorial cut and legal thrust. But it would be safe to say that it wasBombay that was closest to his heart. When Sri Prakasa, India���s first highcommissioner to the brand new state of Pakistan, was dispatched by JawaharlalNehru to ask the Qaid-e-Azam what was to be done with his Malabar Hill mansion,Jinnah is said to have replied with a rare tremor in his otherwise imperiousvoice, ���You do not know how I love Bombay. I still lookforward to going back to it one day. Tell Jawahar not to break my heart. I havebuilt that house brick by brick.������Of course, he neverreturned. Nor did the thousands of families who were replanted far away in anunaccustomed earth. Like soil clinging to roots, they carried their old habitsand thinking with them, as was evident in the cosmpolitan accent ofJinnah���s much-toasted Constituent Assembly speech: ���You are free togo to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques.������ Jinnahscholar Faisal Devji told TOI that the Qaid���s vision for Pakistan wasindisputably shaped by his years in Bombay. ���He saw this city as themodern India,������ said Devji. ���Bombay���smulti-ethnic, multi-religious character was what he wanted of Pakistan. InKarachi, he constantly made all these very Bombay references to the Parsis andthe YMCA and things like that.������Another historian, thelate Rafiq Zakaria, wrote in The Man Who Divided India, that as a boy in Mumbai(he was sent to Gokuldas School and then Anjum-i-Islam), Jinnah was ���notserious about his work and spent a great deal of time wandering the affluent andelegant areas of south Bombay where the British had built some magnificentGothic buildings.��� The image of an errant schoolboy dawdling on a beach isa charming detour in the biography of a man feared for his almost inhumandevotion to discipline.The Bombay-Jinnah connection is exhumed andparaded with a touching frequency every time a fresh claim is pressed on JinnahHouse or a Hindutva helmsman chooses to sing hosannas unto him. South Mumbai isstrewn with physical markers, large and little, each providing an insight into adifferent aspect of his years here. Cresting them is his beloved house on thehill, which was the venue for the doomed September 1944 Gandhi-Jinnah talks. Theshuttered villa lies in a political deep freeze that no climate change can hopeto thaw (Give Pakistan Jinnah House for a consulate and next they���lldemand the Taj, said Bal Thackeray).Less famous is the chair-lined,mosaic-floored Jinnah Hall on Lamington Road, built by public subscription afterJinnah opposed a meeting to felicitate the Bombay governor Lord Willingdon (itwas here that eminent lawyers such as J R Gagrat met during the Emergency). Thehall is significant for it memorialised a public demonstration, something towhich Jinnah the arch constitutionalist was unbendingly averse. Eventhe most trenchant critic will concede that Jinnah was a formidable lawyer witha mind like a knife, capable of arguments that gave no quarter. The Bombay HighCourt has a plaque commemorating his brilliant defence of Lokmanya Tilak when hewas charged with sedition (Jinnah defended Tilak twice, the second timesuccessfully).The last and most intimate link of all is that theQaid���s grandson, Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing, lives in Mumbai, and thathis wife Ruttie is buried at the Khoja cemetery in Mazagaon. She died at 29.���Though they had been separated for some time, her death cameas a great shock to him,������ writes Zakaria. ���It issaid that the only time he was seen to break down and cry was at Ruttie���sfuneral as her body was being lowered into thegrave.������QnA: Does Jaswant Singh's expulsion show that BJP is highly conservative about its party principles? Is the lack of young blood in BJP the biggest edge Congress has over them?