What all of us must appreciate is that the conditions in which Pakistan was created were varied and not homogeneous.
LONDON: This is with reference to Rasul Bakhsh Rais’s article of August 15 titled “Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan”. The first mistake we make is to reduce the creation and the thinking behind Pakistan to the personality of Jinnah. It was never Jinnah’s Ideology; Jinnah’s views on the status of Muslim’s in British India were not consistent over his lifetime. The politics of the movement that lead to the creation of Pakistan were borrowed from a host of leaders and were influenced by all of them. The Muslim League was a pragmatic political entity. Jinnah himself shunned the limelight and the cult of personality. He did not want any title, and would have been disappointed that the title of Quaid-i-Azam bestowed on him is owned by varying political and religious groups, all of them oversimplifying a political struggle into the individual, which is based on myth not reality.
What all of us must appreciate is that the conditions in which Pakistan was created were varied and not homogeneous. The expectation that today Pakistan should suddenly become ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan’ would soil the memory of all those leaders who worked towards her creation but were not shy of raising their voices, sharing their opinions and raising points of dissent. Dissent or disagreement today can lead to ones death, now that tarnishes the founding fathers and mothers’ legacy.
Nadir El-Edroos
Published in The Express Tribune, August 16th, 2011.
