Our flawed framework

The writer is a freelance columnist (amina.jilani@tribune.com.pk)

One massive failing on the part of founder-maker, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was that he either did not have the time, or lacked the inclination, to produce a draft constitution for his country. As it is, he left hardly anything in writing. To figure out his thinking as to the future of the nation he created, we mainly rely upon the collection of his speeches made in 1947-48.

The much quoted speech of August 11, 1947 is taken by many to be the basis for the constitution he hoped his constituent assembly would come up with, as are his subsequent statements assuring the world that Pakistan would not be a theocracy to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. He was a gentleman with secular leanings and it is logical to assume that he opted for a secular state.

Now, ‘secular’ in this land has come to be taken as an unacceptable word by the majority of literates who lean the other way with their self-imposed blinkers and refuse to recognise the semantics of the English language. Secularism is not a rejection of religion. It is an attempt to make religion disappear from public life. Secularism is the only way to respect all religions so that none dominates the other. It is the relegation of religion to the sphere of the personal — as Jinnah put it, religion is not the business of the state.

But his loyal lieutenants who followed betrayed his beliefs less than six months after his death when, bending before the forces of theocracy, they came up with the Objectives Resolution (OR) which made religion very much the business of the state and put all responsibility for its running upon the shoulders of the Almighty. It took over 50 years for the penny to drop and for those endowed with some nous — admittedly in the minority — to be able to voice their views that the OR is the source of a vast number of ills from which this country suffers.

Those first years of life set the scene on many fronts. A large number of politicians and administrators were far too busy settling themselves in, establishing corruption by the grabbing of evacuee properties. Oh yes, those early days were far from clean. Ideals played no part in Pakistan’s growing pains. So busy were they doing their own thing that it took them nine years to come up with a constitution.

Up to 1956 Pakistan was simply Pakistan, undefined by any adjective. It was the constitution of 1956 that declared Pakistan to be an Islamic Republic and incorporated into its preamble a version of the OR with certain additions and amendments. In 1958 it was dumped by General Ayub Khan and his junta, who produced their own constitution in 1962 reverting Pakistan to be simply ‘The Republic of Pakistan.’ It so remained for two years until in 1964 Ayub Khan also succumbed to the forces of theocracy and brought in his first amendment declaring the country to be the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. There was no looking back from then onwards, though that constitution was relegated to the trash can in 1969.

That other gentleman of secular leanings, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, gave Pakistan its third constitution in 1973, also pandering to the cohorts of the cloth. The OR was its preamble — a farewell to tolerance and freewill. Then in 1985 the 8th amendment of General Ziaul Haq rendered the framework of the constitution so flawed as to be unworkable, engendering religion-based conflict and thus ensuring competition amongst the various divines for control of the state religion.

Since then, not one of our so-called ‘leaders,’ in or out of uniform, has shown any inclination towards curbing the clerics — they bend with ease.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 19^th, 2010.