Author: Sikandar Hayat Publisher: OUP, USA (August 15, 2008) Pages: 350 pages, Hardcover Price: $22.00 ISBN-10: 0195474759 ISBN-13: 978-0195474756
Sikandar Hayat’s The Charismatic Leader: Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and the Creation of Pakistan is a major breakthrough in the historiography of the Pakistan movement. Hayat systematically and effectively applies Max Weber’s concept of ‘charismatic leadership’ to the study of Jinnah’s life, accomplishments and legacy. In doing so political science, sociology and historical narrative are blended into a coherent and persuasive whole.
Hayat begins by balancing the popular perception of charisma. To most, charisma indicates primarily an emotional and spiritual resonance akin to that attributed to demagogues, religious/ideological zealots, and militants. This, Weber’s dominant perspective on charisma, was articulated in his posthumously published Wirtschaft und Gesselschaft translated into English in 1947 as the Theory of Social and Economic Organization.
Jinnah, however, was no rabble rouser. His capacity for demagoguery, even if he had an inclination towards it, was severely limited by his insufficient command of the vernacular. For most of his political career Jinnah tried to solve problems through reasoned compromise while for his personal legal career he excelled at winning legal arguments. Jinnah, unlike his Congress counterparts: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, never pretended to be a man of the people. Studiously reserved, emanating gravitas and guided by reason, Jinnah, at first glance, does not the fit the bill.
This misconception arises from the limited circulation of Weber’s alternate perspective on charisma, especially due to the fact that it’s an idea developed in conjunction to many of his more popular ideas. Hayat contends that in some of Weber’s writings, such as his essay “Politics as Vocation”, Weber argued that a true charismatic leader was one who responded to a major crisis aided by outstanding personal qualities inclusive of rationality, sobriety and pragmatism. Such a leader did not inflict upon his people the self-annihilating climax of utopian emotionalism, such as the one Kaiser Wilhelm II inflicted on Germany during Weber’s own lifetime.
Instead, the true charismatic leader operated through a system and proposed viable solutions that eventually won him recognition from the people. The true charismatic leader was one who managed to transform collective anxiety and restlessness into durable achievements – states, institutions, laws, etc., – that routinized his charisma. This necessitated rationality, organization and a capacity to know when and how to compromise. Sadly, Weber died before he could synthesize his own views on charismatic leadership.
To his great credit, Hayat also draws upon and is influenced by Weber’s interpreters and critics with particular reference to the emergence of political leadership in colonial or post-colonial societies. For instance, David Apter’s perspective, which is that the no-man’s land between traditionalism and modernity generates additional pressures conducive to the emergence of charismatic leaders who try to bridge the gap, certainly can be applied to countries like India and Pakistan.
The Charismatic Leader goes on to analyze Jinnah’s leadership in both structural and idiosyncratic terms. Jinnah eventually emerged as the right leader in the right circumstances at the right time. It took until the late 1930s, however, for these three dimensions of Indian political reality to synchronize in a manner that created a generalized discontent amongst the Muslims and led to the recognition of Jinnah’s charismatic leadership.
In terms of personality, Hayat observes that Jinnah was a self-made man who rose in the legal profession due to his exceptional competence. Sober, responsible, ordered and successful on his own terms, Jinnah was self-assured and confident as few others could ever hope to be. He never sought honors or public office on someone else’s terms. He openly maintained a cosmopolitan lifestyle characterized by sartorial elegance and residential splendor. And, while lesser leaders didn’t know when to stop, Jinnah bowed out of the limelight when he felt himself unable to play a constructive role. Thus, while much of the rest of Muslim India plunged headfirst into a quixotic campaign to save the Ottoman Caliphate after the First World War, Jinnah, a great admirer of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, stayed aloof and reemerged with his credibility and integrity intact.
Circumstances and placement mattered a great deal as well. Jinnah’s commitment to constitutionalism and his modern outlook were rewarded by recognition by both the Congress and the All-India Muslim League (AIML). Time and again, be it the Lucknow Pact of 1916, the protests against oppressive measures enacted after the First World War, the 1919 and 1935 constitutional reforms, debates on federalism, or the piloting of legislation, Jinnah remained at or near the eye of the storm.
Jinnah’s long and intimate association with central authority and national politics in his capacity as a parliamentarian gave him a firm grasp of the mechanism as well as principles of government. Jinnah put these experiences and insights to terrific use once he realized, after the 1937 elections, that if Muslim India was to have a decent shot at regeneration, it needed a radically greater quantum of autonomy. Thus, after spending the first three decades of his political life building bridges, Jinnah, his offer to work with the Congress dismissed on the grounds of the Muslim League’s insufficient “inherent strength”, decided it was time to build walls.
Timing, though not everything, played a critical factor in Jinnah ascent to charismatic leadership. Hayat observes that it was not until the actual experience of Congress rule in the provinces (1937-39) that the Muslims in the provinces where they were in a minority realized what it would be like to live under a nominally secular but substantially Hindu rule. It took, however, the Second World War, to shake the Muslim-majority areas out of their complacency. After 1939, it was a question of “when” rather than “if” the British would leave the subcontinent and the crisis of imperial succession could no longer be ignored.
The resignation of the Congress ministries in the wake of the British failure to consult them before declaring war on India’s behalf against the Axis powers was followed by a popular agitation and the Quit India movement. Jinnah’s stock in the eyes of the British rose and taking advantage of the war years the Muslim League grew in size and strength emerging as a mass party that swept the Muslim seats in the 1946 elections.
Hayat meticulously describes how Jinnah’s mobilization strategy worked to bring diverse elements into the Muslim League fold so that by 1946 it had emerged as the sole representative party of the Indian Muslims. This strategy is related to the alternate leadership of traditional overlords, regional bosses, social elites and religious leaders that coexisted and often competed with Jinnah and the Muslim League even as it worked towards fragmenting and absorbing them into its own organization. Hayat does not lose sight of the importance of discussing the alternatives to Jinnah. Indeed, for Jinnah to succeed others had to fail in terms of perceiving the crisis and responding to it over a sustained period of time.
The creation of Pakistan and the modalities and compromises it necessitated complete the study of Jinnah’s leadership and represented the vindication of his charisma. Hayat effectively makes the case that Pakistan was not a bargaining counter and that Jinnah’s acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan was grudging and hedged with reservations. Jinnah also understood the impracticalities of the scheme but did not want to be blamed for the deal falling through. It is unlikely though that Jinnah could have expected Nehru to repudiate the long-term and grouping clauses of the Cabinet Mission Plan so soon after the Congress had agreed to it. As soon as Jinnah had a solid reason for dropping out of the Cabinet Mission Plan he did and sanctioned the resort to direct action. The communal warfare that ensued in August 1946 drove home the point that without the Muslim League’s support India would become ungovernable. A year later, Jinnah was the governor-general designate of Pakistan as the British were compelled to partition and quit.
The Charismatic Leader suffers from several such weaknesses. One of these is Hayat’s very obvious and open bias in favor of Jinnah. This is partly to be expected given that the author is not likely to invest in developing a charismatic leader hypothesis for a statesman with whom he does not empathize in the first place. It must also be noted that Hayat rests his case for Jinnah as a charismatic leader based on Weber’s less known interpretation of charisma. Had Weber lived long enough to see the rise of Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, it is plausible that he would have found the often senseless and consciously irrational behavior of these regimes to be prime examples of the false charisma usually attributed to leaders simply skilled in oratory excellence.This it turn would mean that any attempt to designate a leader as charismatic must take into consideration the outcome of their life’s work and the durability of their achievements and reputation.
It can also be taken to mean that whereas some leaders can be classified as charismatic under either of Weber’s perspectives there are those whose claim to charismatic status is validated by primarily one of these perspectives. Mao Zedong, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and Napoleon Bonaparte were charismatic leaders regardless of which of Weber’s perspectives one adopts. They all commanded unthinking adulation and also left behind systems of authority that their successors did not, or could not, shake off. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini could be classified as charismatic under Weber’s first perspective but not under the second. They led their people to defeat and failed the critical tests of rationality and restraint critical to the survival of regimes.
Jinnah’s claim to charisma would, in turn, rest primarily on the second perspective since his legacy in the form of Pakistan and its stubborn refusal, in spite of repeated failure, to give up on multi-party democracy and constitutionalism, endures. More importantly, perhaps, Jinnah has become part of the ritual of Pakistani political life and the fact is that on most subjects his views are considered authority even though the interpretation of those views may vary widely. One can hardly say the same of Hitler, Mussolini, Bonaparte or even Mao after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
Nevertheless, a more rigorous criticism of Jinnah’s failures and inconsistencies could have been made without in anyway compromising the charisma hypothesis. For instance, Jinnah’s decision to resort to direct action hyper-charged the communal atmosphere and contributed to the dramatic escalation of communal tensions in 1947-1948. Having built Jinnah up as a resolute constitutionalist and thoroughly modern individual, his tactical abandonment of constitutionalism and concomitant contribution to the religious holocaust that followed is not adequately addressed.
Flowing in part from the communal escalation, a major gloss over is Jinnah’s position on partition. Having argued that the Muslims and Hindus were two irreconcilable nations, it was monumentally inconsistent of Jinnah to insist that the Hindu-majority areas of the Punjab and Bengal be included in Pakistan.
Another is the general neglect of the role played by the Congress’s agitation politics and other mass movements in forcing the pace of constitutional change. Popular agitation coincided with and reinforced Britain’s imperial decline through two world wars and a global economic depression. If all of the subcontinent’s freedom fighters were doctrinaire constitutionalists then the pace of reform, whatever the external variables, was likely to have been much slower.
These vulnerabilities notwithstanding, there is an unfortunate danger that the The Charismatic Leader might be either dismissed as hagiography or deter non-academic readers due to its theoretical framework and exhaustive references. The former charge is almost inevitably laid against any work that treats a controversial leader in a positive light. The latter eventuality is one that most academic writers have to face.
One certainly hopes, however, that Hayat’s worthy contribution to the literature on the Pakistan movement and political leadership stirs debate and encourages others to utilize theoretical perspectives for the study of South Asian history. The Charismatic Leader is not only a much needed breath of fresh air but also a stimulating and solid treatment of Jinnah from which students, scholars and interested readers can all benefit greatly.
Ilhan Niaz is a faculty member of the Quaid-i-Azam University, Department of History and author of An Inquiry into the Culture of Power of the Subcontinent.
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