Daily Times

In my article Republic of Pakistan; Jinnah’s Pakistan (October 30, 2017), I argued that it is about time that we became the Republic of Pakistan and gave up this obsession with the undefined concept of an “Islamic Republic” which has only confused the idea of equal citizenship in this country. In it I had relied on Pakistan’s founding father Jinnah’s explicit promise made during several of his speeches and statements explaining the future government of Pakistan.

Several disagreeable readers who wrote to me or contacted me through social media in response to that article declared that since Pakistan obviously was the result of Muslim identity politics, it has to have some kind of Islamic polity. Others took exception to my suggestion that Pakistan was not founded in the name of Islam, providing evidence in appeals made by the Muslim League and indeed Mr. Jinnah himself to Islamic culture and civilisation during the Pakistan Movement. Unfortunately these readers have missed the point completely.

I have never denied that Muslim identity politics was at the root of the creation of Pakistan and that Islam is indeed the master signifier of that identity politics. However it is not Islam as the old time religion but Islam ontologically emptied or as Dr Faisal Devji of Oxford University once wrote in his piece M A Jinnah as founder of Muslim politics as a Modern Phenomenon: “It had, in fact, to secularise Islam by making belief and practice entirely nominal, thus doing something very different from the liberal confinement of religion to private life or the communist exclusion of it.”

It must be remembered that Jinnah himself had arrived at this position from the extreme end of the liberal secular spectrum. When Muslim League was being founded, Jinnah was its biggest critic, declaring that there was no need for a separate Muslim organisation in the first place. Jinnah declared from the Congress platform in 1906 “Muhammadans can equally stand on this common platform and pray for our grievances being remedied through the programme of the National Congress.” Jinnah also thoroughly denounced the Muslim demand and the British acquiescence of the separate electorates, saying that ‘Mohammadan Community should be treated the same way as the Hindu community’ and even in the 1920s told a committee questioning him that he expected Hindu and Muslim political differences to be composed shortly and that in very near future expected the separate electorates to be given up in favour of joint electorates.

A national narrative that is mindful of the modernist Muslim identity that the Muslim League had put forward cannot ignore protection and equal rights promised to religious minorities

As a politician in the late 1920s Jinnah found himself in the no man’s land with the Punjabi Muslim politicians like Sir Fazli Hussain, Sir Muhammad Shafi, Iqbal, Sir Shafaat and even the impressive young Sir Zafrullah adamant on retaining mandatory communal representation for the Muslim community and the Congress’ right wing unwilling to provide one third reservation while introducing joint electorates that might . Jinnah was considered too conciliatory to the Hindus by Muslims in majority provinces and too much of a spokesman for Muslims by the Hindu Mahasabha and even the rising left wing of the Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru. The Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity therefore was left out in the cold. He attempted again with Rajendra Prasad to come up with a united front but to no avail. Then the failure of the Congress to include Muslim League in its UP governments despite an electoral alliance came as a cruel surprise. Jinnah realised the importance of rallying behind the League the Muslim majority provinces to forge a united bargaining agent for the Muslim minority at the centre. Pakistan demand arose out of this need. Two-Nation Theory and the demand for partition — which was originally introduced by Bhai Permanand and Lala Lajpat Rai from Punjab — was now adopted in self defence. At no point however did the Pakistan demand rule out the idea of a Muslim homeland within an overall federal union of India. This is why Jinnah accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan.

The reason why the Cabinet Mission Plan was unacceptable to Congress (with the exception of Maulana Azad who was summarily removed from his office as president the Congress because he accepted it) was because a united India under Cabinet Mission Plan would leave a possibility for a united front of Muslims, Dalits and other minorities against a Congress majority — a prospect unacceptable to both the right wing within Congress that was representative of the Caste Hindu Majority and the left wing under Nehru which wanted a strong centralised India as a socialist state. Certainly an India based on Cabinet Mission Plan would have made the one party and one family state that India emerged after partition for close to a half a century a near impossibility. Dr Ishtiaq Ahmed in his recent article (11 November 2017) has completely misread the Cambridge school and its thesis on why Congress is to blame for partition. It must be remembered that H M Seervai who was a leading jurist of India and not from the Cambridge school arrived at the very same conclusions in his book “Partition of India: Legend and Reality”. It cannot be summarily dismissed as critics of the Cambridge school have attempted feebly to do.

Coming back to the Islam, ontologically emptied and secularised to use Faisal Devji’s words, that the Muslim League employed was modernist (based largely on Aligarh school of thought), inclusionary of all sects and had very little room for theological and doctrinal disputes. This is why Jinnah refused to entertain objections by certain quarters against Ahmadis who he said very clearly were Muslims because they professed to be Muslims and that he was no one to declare otherwise. For this the Congress backed Islamists Majlis-e-Ahrar issued pamphlets like Muslim League ki marziyat-nawazi and declared that Pakistan would be Kafiristan. Anti-Ahmadi campaign in Punjab and anti-Shia campaign in Lucknow was started by Majlis-e-Ahrar to break Muslim League vote. At the same time these champions of Congress’ so called secular composite nationalism, the Majlis-e-Ahrar and Maulana Hassan Madani of JUH, attacked Jinnah for having supported a law for civil marriages between Hindus and Muslims and for having opposed Shariat law in the assembly.

While Muslim identity (inclusive then of groups like Ahmadis, Ismailis, Mahdavi sect) was the cornerstone of the Pakistan Movement, no historian of the Pakistan Movement can deny the support the Muslim League got from Dalits and Scheduled Castes in Bengal or the fact that it was because of the Christian support in the Punjab assembly that the Muslim League was able to secure the present border of West Punjab. Therefore it is about time we revisited the exclusivist narrative of Pakistan that certain Islamists as well as leftist critics of Pakistan Movement have been able to impose on it. A Pakistani narrative and identity while mindful of the modernist Muslim identity that League forwarded during the Pakistan Movement cannot ignore also the minorities of Pakistan who were promised equal rights, protection and safeguards by Jinnah and the Muslim League repeatedly through their resolutions and manifestoes.

The writer is a practising lawyer. He blogs at http://globallegalforum.blogspot.com and his twitter handle is @therealylh

Published in Daily Times, November 13^th 2017.