Mohammad Ali Jinnah was the original practitioner of the politics of religious polarisation, a destructive strategy of mass mobilisation that the BJP has pursued since 2014, with telling results. Jinnah foregrounded identity over other competing interests, stoked the cultural anxieties of Muslims, and fanned their fears of being crushed under Hindu majoritarian rule post-Independence. His opponents called him a fearmonger who fabricated grievances.

Yet, many decades later, the BJP has proved Jinnah right—that his fears of the inevitability of Hindu consolidation weren’t just imagined but real; that such a consolidation would ultimately lead to the establishment of a “Hindu Raj” or Hindu rule, under which religious minorities would be reduced to subservience.

Jinnah’s adoption of the politics of polarisation in its most brazen form came in the wake of the 1937 provincial election results. The Congress won a majority in six of the 11 provinces. It also emerged as the single largest party in three other provinces. Jinnah’s All-India Muslim League (AIML), by contrast, fared poorly, bagging just 108 out of 484 seats reserved for Muslims, who voted in the then separate electorates to elect representatives from their community.

Alarmingly for Jinnah, the Congress swept the United Provinces, now Uttar Pradesh, and then reneged on a tacit understanding that the party would form a coalition government with the AIML regardless of the results. On top of it, Nehru initiated a Muslim Mass Contact Programme to bolster the Congress, which threatened to challenge the AIML’s self-avowed status of being the sole voice of Muslims.

Jinnah was quick to join the battle for supremacy. He sought to counter Nehru’s emphasis on the common economic interests of the people, irrespective of their religion, by evoking fears over threats that the Congress posed to the Muslim identity. At the AIML’s Lucknow session in October 1937, Jinnah saw in the Congress’ declaration of Vande Mataram as India’s national song an example of the party’s disregard for the religious sensibilities of Muslims. He fumed, “On the very threshold of what little power and responsibility is given, the majority community have clearly shown their hand that Hindustan is for the Hindus.”

Vande Mataram, as is now widely known, advocates worshipping India as Goddess Durga, which made many perceive it as idolatrous. Jinnah glossed over the fact that the Congress, in respect for Muslim religious sentiments, had allowed the singing of only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram, which, according to Rabindranath Tagore, emphasised “only the beautiful and beneficent aspects of our motherland” and, therefore, didn’t violate the “monotheistic ideals”.

Jinnah’s politics of polarisation became sharper in his presidential address at AIML’s annual conference in Patna in December 1938. He said: “They [Muslim masses] were led to believe that the question was really an economic one and that they were fighting for dal bhaat, for the labour and the kisans. Their pure, untutored minds became easy victims of the Congress net.” It was through this ruse, Jinnah argued, that the “Congress leaders wanted them to submit unconditionally to the Hindu Raj. That game has now been fully exposed. We have got ample proofs of it.”

The proofs he was referring to were in the report of the Pirpur Committee, which the AIML had constituted under the chairmanship of the Raja of Pirpur, Syed Muhammad Mehdi, to investigate the “hardship, ill-treatment, and injustice” that Muslims were allegedly suffering under Congress governments.

After touring several provinces, the committee had collected incidents of fracas over Muslim school students being compelled to sing Vande Mataram; the insistence of Hindus on playing music in front of mosques; vigilante groups attacking those engaging in cow slaughter on the Bakrid festival and municipalities cancelling licences of slaughterhouses; attempts to ban the recitation of azaan or Muslim call to prayer over the loudspeaker; the subtle imposition of Hindi, and provocative speeches by Hindu Congress leaders. The Pirpur Committee’s long list of complaints was laced with palpable anger.

Historian Ishtiaq Ahmed, in Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History, cites several British Governors who thought the AIML’s allegations were unfounded, and more a case of making a “mountain out of a molehill”. In Patna, though, Jinnah accused the Congress of trying to crush all communities and cultures to establish the Hindu Raj. “They talk of Swaraj, but they mean only Hindu Raj. They talk of national government, but they mean only Hindu Government,” he sniped. The inevitability of the Hindu Raj became the leitmotif of Jinnah’s speeches, ultimately leading to the AIML passing a resolution in 1940 for partitioning India.

Vande Mataram and Modi government

In 2026, nearly nine decades after the AIML’s Patna conference, there can’t be any doubt that the Hindu Raj is not only a reality in most parts of India, but also, frighteningly, still a project in the making. Even the past controversy over Vande Mataram has been resuscitated, with the Modi government passing a Cabinet resolution that the poem must be sung in its entirety before the national anthem. The BJP government in West Bengal has made it mandatory for Vande Mataram to be recited in madrasas and government schools, which are currently having their summer break. Once they open, we will know to what degree India wants to regress to living in 1938.

The Pirpur report now reads like a story of the Hindu Raj foretold. Hindu vigilante groups attacking Muslim cattle traders no longer shock; cow slaughter in Gujarat can invite life imprisonment; the imposition of Hindi is real; the Uniform Civil Code in some States has swept aside even the beneficial aspects of Muslim Personal Law; azaan and the spillover of Muslim congregational prayers on roads prompt police action from Hindutva State governments, which allow religious processions, such as the Kanwar Yatra, to take over highways for weeks, with music blaring at full blast.

But even Jinnah in his conception of the Hindu Raj couldn’t have visualised that mosques would be turned into temples with tremendous ease. The Kamal Maula mosque in Dhar, Madhya Pradesh, was dedicated to Goddess Saraswati last week, a little less than seven years after the Babri Masjid was turned into the Ram Janmabhoomi temple. In case the Places of Worship Act, 1991, is declared unconstitutional, a distinct possibility in this era of Hindutva ascendancy, the usurpation of mosques would receive a fillip. And surely, even Jinnah wouldn’t have imagined that Muslims would run the risk of being disenfranchised and denied social welfare schemes, or hunted down and deported.

Jinnah was wrong in thinking the Congress would initiate the Hindu Raj. That mission was always the Hindu Right’s. Ironically, Jinnah’s politics has facilitated the BJP’s project of consolidating Hindus against Muslims, a point historian Ahmed made in an email to me. He said, “Jinnah always said that he was willing to let two crore Muslims in the Hindu majority areas to be sacrificed in order to liberate six crore Muslims from becoming part of Hindu India.”

With the creation of Pakistan, not only did India demographically become overwhelmingly Hindu, but so too did the Police and the Army, of which Muslims constituted roughly 38 percent previously. “In a united India, it wouldn’t have been possible for the BJP to do what it is doing now,” Ahmed said. Therein is the paradox of the BJP turning into reality what were earlier mere fantasies of Jinnah, the man the party loves to hate.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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