Part of Brooklyn's Coney Island Avenue Named After Pakistan Founder, Muhammed Ali Jinnah

“Hindus and Muslims can [n]ever evolve a common nationality,” Jinnah had declared in 1940. Could a journey fuelled by such hatred and divisiveness possibly have culminated in a peaceful and pluralistic destination? 

The implication that Jinnah’s struggle was in any way peaceful airbrushes from history the hundreds of thousands who paid with their lives in the course of Partition. Their deaths were not an aberration, but the direct consequence of Jinnah’s dogmatic campaign. 

Dr. Rafiq Zakaria, the Gandhian politician who was active in the Indian freedom struggle, went along to one of Jinnah’s “inspirational” rallies. All he found, as he later recalled in his singeing biography of Jinnah, was communalist “venom,” which “aggravated the hostilities between the two communities as never before.” 

How exactly was Jinnah “inspiring” people? A letter Jinnah received from the Himalayan town of Mussoorie, written by a young man called Zulfi Bhutto, gives us an idea. 

“Hindus,” it read, “are the deadliest enemies of our Koran and our Prophet.” Did Jinnah believe that preaching hate would beget love? By 1946, Jinnah was issuing calls of “India divided or India destroyed.” In 1946, Jinnah called for a Direct Action Day. Riots erupted in Calcutta, capital of the sole province then in control of Jinnah’s party, the Muslim League. Corpses lined the streets of that great multicultural city.

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