Of the several enduring issues that have plagued Pakistan since independence, one is the persistent failure to grasp with the notion of Quaid-e-Azam’s Pakistan. The question that constantly rattles us is what sort of Pakistan the founding father envisaged: Pakistan as an Islamic polity with sharia being the supreme law of the land or a country destined to be a secular state with Muslim majority? Invariably, this led to a dichotomy of opinions among politicians, political commentators and common Pakistanis. M A Jinnah’s 67th death anniversary on September 11 is the right time to revisit the debate.
For people on the right, Pakistan was meant to be an Islamic polity, a country destined to be ruled according to Islamic sharia. What does Pakistan mean? There is no God but Allah is still a popular political slogan. The rightists root their argument in history leading up to the founding of a new state in 1947. They point to the communal base of the All India Muslim League (AIML) – a political party responding to the needs of Indian Muslims — and the party’s invoking of Islamic slogans such as “Islam in danger” and Jinnah’s several speeches anchored in Islamic imagery. In his speech on March 23, 1940, the historic session of the Muslim League during which the resolution for the creation of Pakistan was passed, Jinnah remarked: “The Hindus and the Muslims belong to two different religious philosophies, social customs and literatures. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other.” On March 22, 1940, in strong communal language, Jinnah opposed any independence that bestowed a permanent minority status on Muslims.
Referring to the Hindus’ numerical superiority vis-à-vis the Muslims, “Three to one,” he said. “We come back to the same answer: the Hindu majority will do it; will it be with the help of the British bayonet or Mr Gandhi’s ahimsa (strategy of nonviolence)? Can we trust them anymore?” Jinnah’s reply was a clear no. Responding to Gandhi’s notion that Hindus and Muslims were brothers, Jinnah noted, “The only difference is this: brother Gandhi has three votes and I have only one vote.” Islam in danger was the league’s slogan during 45 to 46 elections in Punjab. It relied on support from pirs to issue fatwas that anyone who did not vote for the League would cease to be Muslim. Such political opponents as the Unionist Party Prime Minister Khizar Hayat Tiwana were branded as infidels and traitors to the cause of Islam. Nevertheless, liberals entertain a different worldview.
For liberals, Jinnah had envisioned a pluralist Pakistan, one where, irrespective of one’s religious position, one would be the equal citizen of Pakistan. To them, Jinnah’s western style of living and his several speeches preceding Pakistan and afterwards bear testimony to the fact that he had the idea of Pakistan as a Muslim majority state and a secular democracy. Speaking in the wake of MacDonald’s communal award in August 1932, Jinnah viewed Indo-Muslim differences through a political prism only. “Religion should not enter politics,” he said. “This is a question of minorities and it is a political issue,” Jinnah observed. Similarly, on August 11, 1947, in his presidential address to the constituent assembly of Pakistan in Karachi, Jinnah said, “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state. Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual but in the political sense as citizens of the state,” M A Jinnah continued. Whom to believe?
This article militates against taking Jinnah’s messages on face value. Leading us astray, these messages lead us to a confused Pakistan. Clarity demands revisiting Jinnah’s vision of the state of Pakistan. The issue that even after the passage of 68 years we could not decide what was Quaid-e-Azam’s concept of Pakistan is because we confuse Jinnah’s purpose and his means to achieve it. In fact, the founding father’s objective was the creation of a Muslim majority state where the community’s socio-economic and political interests could be secured. The means he adopted to realise his goal were often conflicting and contradictory. Since Muslims were a disparate lot — religious and secular, feudal and middle class professional — and welding them together required Jinnah to deliberately employ vague, ambivalent and often contradictory messages.
A pragmatist politician, Jinnah valued the end more, not the means he employed. In the end, overcoming a bewildering array of challenges in the way of his dream, Jinnah won through to a victory we call as Pakistan. Once Pakistan was carved out of the erstwhile United India, the diverse lot of people demanded the kind of Pakistan they believed Jinnah had promised to them. Then the discrepancy between early aspirations and contemporary reality were to betray everyone’s concept of Pakistan. Today’s Pakistan is neither a religious polity nor a secular state. With opposite pulls, it stands where every concerned citizen is concerned about its future projection. Where to go?
In order to arrest the suicidal trend of Pakistan veering towards religious extremism, our salvation lies in revisiting Jinnah’s concept of Pakistan, which demands us to move from a subjective reading of our history to its objective analysis. This would entail teaching Quaid-e-Azam as a genius politician informed by a sense of purpose — the creation of a country — with all the rest as means to mobilise the teeming millions of Indian Muslims to the end called Pakistan. In penultimate analysis, Jinnah did not envision a sharia state though he would have not minded the state business to be influenced by religion to the extent that religious values not collide with democratic norms.
The writer is a freelance columnist in Quetta. He can be contacted at [email protected]