Daily Times

It is tragic that despite Pakistan’s existence for 64 years, chequered as it may be, people feel that questioning a legal and political reality to which we are bound by law is fair game. The answer to the oft asked question, “was partition a mistake”, is that Pakistan is as big a mistake or success as any other nation state. Of course, this is not what some of our drawing room debaters want to hear. Unfortunately, some want to conflate liberalism with defeatism and self-loathing. Liberalism, in my view, has more to do with individual freedoms, equality and a general attitude to live and let live. If attitude towards partition was to be the standard for liberalism, then one would have to argue that the rabid maulanas who abused Pakistan as ‘Kafiristan’ and called Jinnah Kafir-e-Azam were the greatest liberals of them all.

Unfortunately, those who make the creation of Pakistan controversial rely on arguments favoured by the religious right-wing in the country, i.e. Pakistan was a millennial dream of Muslims to establish their exclusive hegemony in the name of Islam. This is a lie that shows itself as a lie the more our ideologues insist on it. Pakistan, like any other state on the world’s map, is an accident of history, determined by forces and events that had little to do with a poet dreaming a millennial dream about Muslims. Pakistan was not founded in the name of Islam or religion. The surest test for this is if we substitute Buddhist for Muslim in the equation, it would have made little difference. In fact, to unite a community divided horizontally and vertically into Shias, Sunnis, Deobandis, Ahmedis, Ismailis and irreligious Muslims, the demand had to be sufficiently general and devoid of religious dogma — for that would lead to the obvious question: “whose Islam”? Partition happened because the second largest communal group, numbering no less than 90 million, in India formed majorities in four provinces of British India and, on the basis of this majority, they wanted a federal constitution that gave these provinces a uniform measure of autonomy and residuary powers in a constitution with an effective but limited centre. Ultimately, the final shape of the compromise, i.e. the Cabinet Mission Plan, was rejected by the majority Congress leadership. In retrospect, this was a good idea for all concerned. It is argued by some sections amongst Indian Muslims that India’s partition was actually the partition of India’s Muslims who were divided first in two and then three. Without commenting on the explicit irony in this statement, it would have been disastrous for both India and Pakistan had India stayed together in any form. For India, it would have meant perpetual constitutional and political conflict between 60 percent Hindus and 30 percent Muslims and between Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority provinces.

The success that India has had in creating a secular democracy has been largely because it has manageable Muslim numbers, hence Nehru and Patel’s insistence on partition. Indeed, the only Muslim-majority region of Kashmir in India is one where India’s unity is tested. Similarly, the rigours of state building have forced the lower peasantry of West Punjab to fill in those professions that were, till 1947, considered Hindu vocations such as banking or commerce, which have helped — in Sumit Sarkar’s words — to create a real Muslim bourgeoisie in the subcontinent. Some in this class now decry Pakistan unable to appreciate the benefit they have gotten from partition. The searing irony of course is that certain half-educated, self-proclaimed pseudo-liberals who question today a process that had roots in history would have been employed as little more than peons in the local seth’s little ginning mill had it not been for Pakistan. Of course, had Pakistan and India reconciled with each other and not made a hatch job of the Kashmir issue, the advantages of partition would have been manifold more and both countries would have evolved towards each other instead of away from it.

Historically, whenever a country goes through a crisis, it finds its fair share of critics and defeatists. The consensus globally, well into the middle of the 19th century, about the experiment that was the US was that its separation from the mother country was a terrible mistake. While the US continued to be plagued with wars and ultimately the civil war and was largely impoverished when compared to its European cousins, Great Britain saw a phenomenal rise cementing its colonies worldwide, becoming the premier trading and commercial power of the world. At the time, I imagine, many Americans would have questioned the wisdom of separating from the British Empire, which was socially, culturally and economically far ahead of the US. Certainly, there was much to complain about. The new world that the US promised was till then far behind the old world. Britain, for example, had abolished slavery by 1833. That was 25 years before the US Supreme Court still ruled that people of African origin could not be included in the US constitution’s definition of a citizen. Yet the US did go through fire and emerged as the leader in the 20th century and, most likely, for some time in the 21st century as well. I challenge anyone today to agree with the naysayers then that the creation of the US was a mistake.

Using this analogy I tried recently to explain why I felt Pakistan was not a bad idea to self-proclaimed liberal Pakistanis. Their response usually is simplistic: the US had a secular constitution, Pakistan does not. Now there are two problems with this line of argument: one, the basic feature of a secular constitution that is most appealing is procedural and substantive equality for all citizens. What then is a secular constitution worth if it is interpreted to discriminate against another group on the basis of race? Therefore, the analogy between Pakistan’s treatment of its marginalised groups and how the US treated African-Americans in its first 70 odd years is on the dot. Second, and most importantly, Pakistan’s constitution in 1947 — the constitution that Jinnah took oath under — was fiercely secular. Under Section 298 of the then dominion constitution, “No subject of His Majesty domiciled in Pakistan shall, on grounds only of religion, place of birth, descent, colour or any of them be ineligible for office under the Crown in Pakistan.” Jinnah had moved to reaffirm this principle time and again, especially when he chose a non-Muslim to head the law ministry; a significant move given that law is said to be the main preoccupation of an Islamic state. He not only blocked all moves to Islamise the constitution but is said to have removed reference to God in oath of office. The point is that Jinnah was crystal clear in which way he wanted Pakistan to go. He felt, of course, that Islam was no impediment to a secular constitution and, in fact, employed Islamic vocabulary to convince his constituents that Islam and secular democracy were compatible.

As democracy takes hold and international pressures play their part in policy, Pakistan will have to become more inclusive and secular. In this respect, Jinnah’s reference to Catholic-Protestant conflict in his August 11 speech is instructive, primarily because it shows the evolution of Great Britain from a state that persecuted to a state that has become the mother of all democracies. It is not by mere chance that the mother of all secular democracies in substance is a protestant monarchy in form. In our case, we have the advantage of the information age, which has accelerated our evolution.

The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore. He is also a regular contributor to the Indian law website http://mylaw.net and blogs on http//globallegalforum.blogspot.com and http://pakteahouse.net. He can be reached at yasser.hamdani@gmail.com