JINNAH made his political debut at the all-India level, as a delegate to the Calcutta (1906) Congress (INC) and Private Secretary to its President, Dadabhoy Naoroji (1825-1917), in December 1906. This was the year of the Simla deputation and of the founding of the All India Muslim League (AIML) at Dhaka. It is understandable that in the absence of a political organization of Muslims he should have started out with the Congress; but why should he have waited for seven long years before formally joining the Muslim League? This question becomes critical in view of the fact that almost all other Muslim leaders joined the League at the time of its founding or soon after, and that there was no bar to simultaneous membership of the two bodies till about the middle 1930s.
The answer lies in the socialization process Jinnah had undergone, the sort of personal, professional and social experience that had shaped his political attitude and orientation since early 1980s. During his student days in England (1892-96), Jinnah had come, as had most Indian students, under the mesmeric spell of nineteenth century British liberalism. Indeed, one of the little known facts of his early life is that even the change in his career from training in ‘business’ to law came as a result of his ardent admiration for the British liberal leaders whose speeches he had listened to with avid attention in the parliament, during the first few months of his stay in London. “The Liberalism of Lord Morley was then in full sway. I grasped that Liberalism which became part of my life and thrilled me very much,” he told Dr K M Ashraf years later. Jinnah’s initial penchant for liberalism came to be buttressed by his close association with Naoroji, a past Congress president and the foremost Indian liberal leader in England. Naoroji’s election to the British parliament enthralled him a good deal since it signified Indians claiming equality with Britons on British soil; he worked with him in the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, to which he was elected as a ‘temporary visitor’, as were other temporary visitors to England such as Sir Pherozshah Mehta (1845-1915), Surendranath Banerjea (1848-1925), Gopal Krishana Gokhale (1856-1915), Dinshaw Edulji Wacha (1844-1936), Romesh Chandra Dutt (1848-1909), Bhpendranath Basu (1859-1924), A. Chaudhuri and H. A. Wadia. With these leading lights of the INC, he came in touch, and by them he was influenced; above all, Naoroji became the chief formative influence in his life — and his political mentor.
A second formative influence during Jinnah’s early life was the Bombay Presidency Association (BPA), its foremost political body. The BPA had hosted the first all-India moot at Bombay in 1885, following the outbreak of an epidemic in Poona, where it was originally due to meet; this meeting decided to launch the INC, and became the first Congress. From then on, the BPA worked in concert with the Congress; it also claimed among its leading lights several Congress stalwarts and past presidents — Badruddin Tyabji (1844-1906), Gokhaale Mehta, and Wacha. Jinnah, once he had carved out for himself a place at the bar, became actively involved in the BPA’s activities. Early in May 1905 it voted to send him, along with Gokhale, on a Congress deputation to England, to plead for self-government for India during the impending British elections. Both this nomination and its subsequent endorsement by the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee are indicative of his political standing in the Bombay Presidency.
A third influence was the cosmopolitan milieu and mercantile culture of Bombay. This, along with their laissez faire credo, reflected the ascendancy of liberal thought and laid emphasis on competition and the survival of the fittest. Metropolitan Bombay, whose sprawling commercial landscape the tiny Parsi community had dominated, provided, as it were, a living exemplification of the primacy of initiative, enterprise and hard work over numerical inferiority, racial prejudice and communal barriers. Additionally, the Parsis claimed a considerable share in the professions; they were pre-eminent in Bombay’s public life, and prominent in the INC at both the national and provincial levels. Jinnah himself belonged to the Khoja community (a microscopic minority (1%) within the Muslim minority community); the Khojas had also made their mark in Bombay’s business and commercial world, as had the Parsis. Given this Khoja legacy, Jinnah naturally felt attracted to the Parsis. Early in his professional career, he came in close contact with the Mehta group of lawyers, including Bahadurji; Parsis had also figured a good deal among his clientele. Jinnah had also served as head of the petitioning counsels on behalf of Mehta and his group in the case against rigging in the Bombay Corporation elections in 1907, known as the ‘Caucus’ case. He had also developed personal relations with a number of leading Parsis; this, in part, explains his later marriage to Rutten Bai, the glamorous teenage daughter of the Parsi baronet, Sir Dinshaw Petit. The attributes of initiative, competitiveness, enterprise and hard work, which he saw embodied in the Parsis of Bombay, he had inculcated in himself from the beginning. His belief in competitiveness impelled him to move an amendment to A. Chaudhuri’s resolution on Self Government at the Calcutta (1906) Congress. Jinnah objected to the application of the ‘reservation’ clause ‘for the backwardly educated class’ to Muslims, and asked for treating ‘the Muhammadan community ... in the same way as the Hindu community’, he also commended open competition between candidates for civil service posts to the Royal Commission on Public Services in India (1913). Till the end, he called upon students to equip themselves, in order to carve out a place for themselves in national life.
These beliefs seem to have prompted Jinnah, as they had prompted Tyabji two decades earlier, to join the INC. Fashioned after liberal principles and cast in their mould, the INC was at that time pledged to take Indian on the road to self-government through constitutional means.
JINNAH made his political debut at the all-India level, as a delegate to the Calcutta (1906) Congress (INC) and Private Secretary to its President, Dadabhoy Naoroji (1825-1917), in December 1906. This was the year of the Simla deputation and of the founding of the All India Muslim League (AIML) at Dhaka. It is understandable that in the absence of a political organization of Muslims he should have started out with the Congress; but why should he have waited for seven long years before formally joining the Muslim League? This question becomes critical in view of the fact that almost all other Muslim leaders joined the League at the time of its founding or soon after, and that there was no bar to simultaneous membership of the two bodies till about the middle 1930s.
