Ram Jethmalani, was born September 14, 1923, in Shikharpur, Sindh (now in Pakistan)) is an eminent Indian lawyer and politician. He spoke about Sindh & Jinnah. He said that “When Jinnah qualified for the Bar, he came to Karachi to practice. Jinnah belonged to the community of Khojas who were rich merchants and he expected to have a ready-made clientele in Karachi, Sindh. He (Jinnah) went to a firm of Hindu lawyers in Hyderabad called Harichandra and Co., Old Harichandra had interviewed him and once he said that he was perfectly qualified to practice, they had to settle the terms. Jinnah wanted hundred rupees, but the old Hindu miser was unwilling to go above seventy-five. I have always said, even in public, that Jinnah was not the cause of India’s partition, but that old Hindu miser.”
Ram Jethmalani also spoke about Sindh being the cradle of Sufism, the gentlest and finest of the fine form of Islam. He said that it was synonymous with the Kashmiriyat of Kashmir. Shah Abdul Latif, one of the greatest poets, was a product of Sindh. “We had developed a great synthesis between the two communities, that as a Hindu youngster, I would get my new clothes on Eid (a Muslim festival) and Muslin youngsters would get their clothes on Deepavali ( a Hindu festival). Even when Partition had happened, and hundreds of thousands of people were getting killed in Punjab, but the Sindhi Muslim never killed a single Hindu.”
“Speaking for myself, for the sake of safety, I had brought my family to Bombay, but I had gone back to Sindh and continued my practice in the hope that things would become normal. I stayed till February 1948 and by that time a large influx of Muslims had came from Bihar and other places from India to Sindh and that was the cause of great tension because they wanted Hindu properties.
“In February, when I was arguing a case in the Magistrate’s court, my Pathan driver came in and said that the locality where I was living was in danger. I found on the way back that nobody was being hurt physically, but preparations had been made to rob all the property by new comers from India, to create fear and force Hindus to migrate. That is exactly what happened.”
He said his partner during his practice in Karachi was a secular Sindhi Muslim gentleman and a great scholar – A. K. Brohi, who later piloted the first Constitution of Pakistan. “Seeing the incidents of February 1948, Ram Jethmalani said that he could no longer bear the responsibility of my safety. Then I left and settled down in Bombay and started practice.”
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