The great Mandela is no longer with us. He now belongs to the cosmos and his consciousness has joined the universal consciousness that engulfs us all. Scores of articles have been written about Mandela, and comparisons between Mandela and great men in history like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr are being made. The media has, by and large, ignored however the great respect and admiration Madiba — as Mandela was lovingly known — had for Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan, which he expressed on several occasions. The reason for this is the extraordinary way in which Pakistan has constantly let down Jinnah and his legacy. Mandela famously wrote in 1995: “Jinnah is a constant source of inspiration for all those who are fighting against racial or group discrimination.” His tribute to Quaid-e-Azam was a reminder to Pakistanis of what their country was actually founded for. Jinnah could not care less for the theocratic ambitions that Pakistanis have written into the constitution of Pakistan. His reason for the Pakistan movement was first and foremost for justice and fair play for Muslims in British India who he saw as being left behind economically and politically. Nor was it limited to the Muslims. As one of the leading politicians in South Asia, Jinnah toiled equally for Indians, especially Indians who were marginalised. The Quaid’s aim and objective in his long political career had been to first and foremost overturn the apartheid of sorts inflicted on the ‘natives’ by a British bureaucracy using the tools that the British had given India. As a young law student in the UK, Jinnah had been pained to see the racist campaign against the great Indian leader Dadabhoy Naoroji, which had played on Naoroji’s colour. Imbibing political liberalism from greats like John Morley, Jinnah had come out in support of unpopular causes right from the beginning. His earliest political experience had been in support of the Suffragette Movement and for women’s equality — a lifelong commitment, which saw him exhorting his supporters to take women as comrades in the national struggle. As one of the few Muslims who joined the Indian National Congress, Jinnah was mercilessly outspoken against racial discrimination of all kinds and spoke repeatedly of the rights of Indians and other races of the Empire to become equal partners in progress. The first notable confrontation that Jinnah had with the viceroy of India was over South Africa’s government. As Jinnah spoke of the “cruel and harsh treatment” meted out by the South African government to Mohandas Gandhi and the Indians there, the viceroy, Lord Minto, admonished him for using “harsh language”. Jinnah’s reply was classic, a reply that would set the tone of his relations with the Empire for the remainder of his career. He replied, “Well my Lord, I should feel inclined to use much harsher language” if it had not been for his presence in the council. Jinnah’s concern for South Africa may have been much older; Gandhi’s correspondence shows letters from “M A Jinnah, Barrister, Karachi” as early as 1897, as unearthed by Ramchandra Guha in his book India before Gandhi. It should shed some light on the Gandhi-Jinnah binary that Indians and Pakistanis have created as a result of the acerbic rivalry between the two nation states. Both India and Pakistan, for their own reasons, have buried Jinnah’s record as staunch crusader for Indian rights and Indian equality in the Empire in the aftermath of the bloody partition that the subcontinent underwent and the blame for which is laid — all too conveniently — at Jinnah’s door. Therefore, no one cares to mention that the only case Jinnah did without a fee was of Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s sedition case, the valiant account of which can be found in A G Noorani’s Jinnah and Tilak. Hardly anyone in India or Pakistan is aware of the massive public protest Jinnah led against Lord Willingdon in Bombay, which was significant enough for the citizens of Bombay — Hindus, Muslims, Parsis alike — to raise contributions for a memorial hall dedicated to Jinnah’s memory, which still stands in Mumbai. No mention is made of the successful boycott that Jinnah led against the Simon Commission, which had arrogantly excluded Indian participation on the issue of the future Indian constitution. It is forgotten that Jinnah was the only major Indian leader who had vociferously condemned the treatment of Bhagat Singh as an ordinary prisoner and for not getting the same benefits in prison as European prisoners. Similarly, the massive legislative contributions that Jinnah made to the statute books of India and Pakistan are ignored. Pakistan has done so to tailor Jinnah into an exclusivist Muslim leader irrevocably committed to Muslim nationalism while India has done so to punish Jinnah for what it perceives as his role in the vivisection of the country. Nelson Mandela saw past the bigotry and selective histories of India and Pakistan. He listed on several occasions Jinnah, Gandhi and Nehru as his inspirations, sidestepping the apparent improbability that has been manufactured by the two South Asian nation states. In a personal conversation, he described Jinnah as an enduring inspiration for him. Tragically, Jinnah-bashers do not take kindly to the comparison between Jinnah and Mandela, justifiably so given the selective history that the national narrative has inflicted upon them. When a renowned Pakistani columnist, Rafia Zakaria, wrote of the Jinnah-Mandela connection earlier this year, several Indian columnists and some Pakistani ones too responded in knee jerk fashion with the same old myths about Jinnah. To their chagrin, the ambulance incident where Mandela was left on the side of the road a few months ago, as Jinnah once had, only served to underscore the connection. Unlike Jinnah, Mandela was lucky to have remained at the helm of the new South Africa he created. May we find one like him to lead us from the quagmire that we find ourselves in. The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Mr Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com