The govt vacillating over reinstating the gazetted holiday status on Iqbal's birthday speaks volumes about its calibre
KARACHI: It came as no surprise that the public holiday on Iqbal Day was recently revoked by the government. Like Jinnah, the more current purpose of his remembrance is not as one of Pakistan’s architects but because it gives this inherently lazy and incompetent nation another holiday. I am certain that Iqbal did not envisage how his thoughts and poetry that conceptualised a free homeland for the subjugated Muslim minority of the subcontinent would turn out to be the sorry story it is this day. Like Jinnah, Iqbal is lucky he is not around to see the result of the historic movement he and others helped inspire. That the government, vacillated over reinstating the gazetted holiday status on his birthday, speaks volumes about the calibre of those who lead us. Perhaps, for those of us whose parents believed in the 1940 Lahore Resolution that led to the Pakistan Movement culminating in the formation of two new nations, a bit of introspection may be in order. What was envisaged in the freedom of independence was a country based on constitutional, democratic and, essentially, secular foundations where not just the ummah but followers of all faiths would be equal and free citizens of the state. Jinnah’s now hackneyed speech, “You are free…” became un-implementable as a policy ever since the passage of the 1949 Objectives Resolution which heralded the constitutionally sanctioned bigotry and intolerance that is tearing the country apart today. Ironically, the Minar-e-Pakistan, commemorating the resolution that led to the euphoria of freedom now frequently hosts rallies of extremist parties, some of which were virulently against the very concept of the country. Seemingly, in tandem either with a willing or uncaring state, these are the only ones ‘free’ —- to create mayhem and take us into the Stone Age.
Not surprisingly, secular India, which is the end-all and be-all of our focus, is today reaching the same junction that Pakistan encountered many years ago. Was mutually assured destruction of what could have been among the most assertive and influential subcontinental nations the vision of Iqbal? I await the day when Jinnah, already rewritten and quoted out of context, is also relegated to the pages of history. Given the direction Pakistan is moving in, that should not be too far. One of Iqbal’s quotes is frighteningly prescient: “Nations are born in the hearts of poets, they prosper and die in the hands of politicians.”
Dr Mervyn Hosein
Published in The Express Tribune, November 13th, 2015.
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