It was expedient for the ruling groups to play an Islamic card rather than build a nation based on equal citizenship
LAHORE: This refers to the letter published in your esteemed daily on May 4 entitled, “Welfare or abuse?” by Malik Tariq Ali. I would go on to reinforce the fact that what Mohammad Ali Jinnah envisioned for Pakistan as a state, remains a distant dream. We continue to grope in the dark for a constitutional state based on equal rights and separation of religion from the state. However, as Mr Ali has pointed out, we have drifted, sadly, in the opposite direction.
Let us clear some of the fog surrounding Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan first. I believe Jinnah’s speech before the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, is unambiguous about what kind of ideas of state and nation-building our great leader had in mind. In a nutshell, he wanted citizenship, not religion, as the founding principle of the new state. The frequently quoted part of his speech, “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the state,” is neither understood in terms of the context nor for the selection of the expression. Contextual interpretation is extremely important for any analysis undertaken by historians to explain the intent of our great leaders. Jinnah, like many other Muslim leaders of the subcontinent who strived for the creation of a new state comprising Muslim-majority areas, was a modernist. The three streams of philosophy that influenced the Pakistan movement, unfortunately, got pushed back with the second generation of Pakistani leaders; they were constitutional struggle for the protection of minority rights, modernism and a territorial state. The unfortunate manner in which we have treated or rather discriminated against religious minorities after independence is another story, truly heartbreaking. Pakistan, as per my understanding, is a territorial state, which means that all citizens of all faiths, sects and religious pursuits are equal citizens. These are the founding ideas of Pakistan whose premise is lost on the successive ruling generations.
For a leader to be bracketed as a modernist is not a bad thing at all. A modernist does not reject the past or one’s cultural and religious heritage. A modernist essentially lives in modern times and proposes and implements solutions to contemporary problems of society on rational and practical grounds. What is wrong with such a leadership style?
It was expedient for the ruling groups to play an emotional Islamic card in politics rather than build a modern nation-state based on equal citizenship. Doing so would have required democracy and constitutionalism that our ruling classes have accepted only as conveniences and not as ideology — the ideology of Jinnah.
Sayyida Salma Tahir
Published in The Express Tribune, May 6th, 2016.
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