Daily Times

At the cost of repeating myself, it is important to state certain basic facts at the outset. Jinnah was the only politician to be called the Best Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity and once stated frankly that he was an Indian first second and last. This was how it was for most of his career till the last decade of his life in which he began to champion the demand for Pakistan. So what happened? Well he had begun to see the undercurrent of Hindu majoritarianism and tried to warn Gandhi and Nehru against it. Gandhi was unconcerned and Nehru basically saw Jinnah as an anglicised gentleman who was out of touch with the ground realities. They made a terrible miscalculation by not coming to an arrangement with Jinnah when he gave them opportunities to do just that in 1928, 1937 and 1946.

When one criticizes Gandhi or Nehru, it is not to suggest that they were intolerant Hindu bigots but rather that they failed to appreciate how divided the Indian society was and what it would mean when majoritarian trends take over. Nehru tried to hold back the tide of communal majoritarianism but his performance was patchy, especially with his government’s actions in Hyderabad in September 1948 and in Kashmir in August 1953. The truth was that the more India democratized strictly on the basis of one man one vote, the more these fissures would emerge. As Congress – far from perfect and at best soft Hindutva- lost power, the real representative trends of caste Hindu domination took over and in 2014 India had Modi-raj.

For the Muslim only President and the Muslim only Prime Minister of Pakistan to cry foul about the ideology of Hindu supremacy in India is nothing less than rank hypocrisy. Only a modern, secular democratic Pakistan based on Jinnah’s 11 August speech can fight for Kashmir and win it

Pakistan did not fare any better- in fact it turned out to be infinitely worse. Created as the result of a minority’s demand, it soon discarded Jinnah’s repeated invocations for what can only be described as a secular state and slipped into majoritarianism far worse than what Jinnah had apprehended in United India. In 1956 we became an Islamic Republic, the world’s first of its kind, and then in 1973 we added Islam as the state religion. The offices of the President and Prime Minister were closed to Non-Muslims. In essence Non-Muslims were relegated to second class status and after General Zia ulHaq took over, they effectively became third class citizens at best. One particular group, the one even our Prime Minister is too scared to name, was systematically disenfranchised and for all practical purposes is stateless. India might have been a majoritarian state and Modi may represent the worst of that majoritarianism, but even in 2019, India has not moved along that path even a fraction of the way.

So it is extraordinary that the President of Pakistan, the great dentist ArifAlvi, can give an interview to a Canadian news outlet and suggest without any sense of irony that secularity of India is being burnt. For His Excellency it is submitted that Pakistan seems to have begun to burn its own secularity in March 1949 with the Objectives’ Resolution. By the 1980s, Pakistan spread those ashes in the Indus river and for all practical purposes became a full blown theocracy. How then can President Alvi and Prime Minister Khan complain about the demise of Indian secularism? How can Islamic Republic which forecloses the right of Non-Muslim Pakistanis from becoming President or Prime Minister complain about India’s treatment of its minorities? How can you complain about Hindutva when you are yourself an Islamic Republic which denotes an exclusivist ideology that presupposes only Muslims have the right to govern Pakistan?

Prime Minister Khan tried to answer that in his national address last week. The only interpretation of his explanation possible is that in his view it is okay for Pakistan to be an Islamic Republic but not for India to be Hindu Republic because Islam is obviously better than Hinduism. At least MaulanaMaududi and other Ulema were fairer than Prime Minister Khan, when they conceded to Munir-Kayani Commission in the 1950s that they wanted an Islamic State even if India became a Hindu state based on laws of Manu and Muslims were mistreated in India. That is a consistent vision – we will persecute our minorities and you may persecute your minorities. Of course this goes against the very grain of the Lahore Resolution, which had spoken of minorities as a mutual undertaking by respective majorities in the two units. What is happening in Kashmir is nothing less than an attempt at genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslims there. Yet I think one of the reasons India, still secular and democratic on paper, can get away with it is because Pakistan is rightly viewed by the world as a bankrupt theocracy. For the Muslim only President and the Muslim only Prime Minister of Pakistan to cry foul about the ideology of Hindu supremacy in India is nothing less than rank hypocrisy. Only a modern, secular democratic Pakistan based on Jinnah’s 11 August speech can fight for Kashmir and win it. That obviously is not going to happen at least in our lifetimes and therefore we can pretty much kiss Kashmir goodbye. No world tribunal will ever take our complaints on the matter seriously. The best outcome in this scenario would be for the Indian Supreme Court to strike down Modi government’s action of 5 August. Things will then go back to as they were and Pakistan can go back to persecuting Non-Muslims in Pakistan without too big a burden on its conscience. Meanwhile India can slowly slide into the same majoritarian trap that we did decades ago. The world is never going to be a better place for the people who were unfortunate enough to be born in this subcontinent. Tragic but this is unfortunately the world we live in.

The writer is an Advocate of the High Courts of Pakistan and a member of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn in London