Pakistan Resolution and the national narrative

It is time we reverted to the original narrative of Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah given by him while addressing members of Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947 to serve as guidelines for framing the Constitution. Enough damage has been inflicted on Quaid’s Pakistan by self-assumed guardians of its ideology, who played no role in what was purely a constitutional struggle waged by committed politicians of integrity, commitment and character. There is no role for the narrative by either Ulema, nor paid establishment nor political opportunists who are remnants of Unionists. Every institution of this state is there to serve the people as servants not as masters of their destiny.

On 22 March 1940 an open session of the All-India Muslim League (AIML) was held in Lahore, where the Quaid in his presidential address recounted recent events, including the ongoing war and while presenting the Two-Nation Theory, he told the audience about a letter written by Lala Lajpat Rai to Bengal’s prominent leader CR Das in 1924 where he stated that Hindus and Muslims are two separate nations and cannot be merged to form one nation. Lala Lajpat Rai was renowned to be versant with the Hindu mindset. Earlier, after Nawab Shahnawaz Mamdot’s welcome address, Punjab’s Premier Sir Sikandar Hayat Khan was forced to leave when the public agitated by the brutal March 19 crackdown that left scores of Khaksars dead, raised slogans against him. It was agreed that the resolution would be presented by Maulana Fazlul Haq in Urdu on March 23 and sponsored by Maulana Zafar Ali Khan from Punjab, Sardar Aurangzeb Khan from Sarhad, Abdullah Haroon from Sindh, Abdul Hameed Khan from Madras, Abdul Rauf Shah from CP, Ismail Ibrahim Chundrigar from Bombay, Nawab Ismail from Bihar and Chaudhry Khaliq-uz-Zaman from UP.

The draft of the Pakistan Resolution was prepared in Urdu on 21 March 1940 by a four-member Subjects Committee headed by the Quaid which included Nawab Ismail, Malik Barkat Ali and Sikandar Hayat at a meeting held at the residence of Nawab Shahnawaz Mamdot and translated into English, amongst others, by Maulana Zafar Ali Khan to read as “That geographically contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary that the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority as in North Western zones of India should be grouped to constitute “Independent States — in which the constituent units should be autonomous and sovereign”.

This resolution was presented for discussion in an open session held on 22 March presided by the Quaid. In the ensuing discussion Ashiq Hussain Batalvi wanted incorporation of Allama Iqbal’s specific detail of regions to be clearly elaborated to rule out any ambiguity but he was overruled by Nawab Liaquat Ali Khan, who stated that this was done intentionally because if Punjab was specially mentioned then geographical limits in the Northwest would not extend beyond Gorkhano and they hope to include Delhi and Aligarh which were important centres of Islamic cultural heritage.

The foundations for creation of Pakistan and the Muslim League were laid on 30 December 1906 at Dacca by Nawab Waqar-ul-Mulk and the Quaid-e-Azam formally joined the League on 10 October 1913, while still in London. The concept for creation of a sovereign, independent state where the majority of Muslims could live in harmony with members of other faiths was made when Allama Iqbal, while delivering his presidential address at the annual session of the AIML held at Allahabad in 1930, had unequivocally put forth his personal opinion that destiny of Muslims of Northwest India lay in forming a separate state comprising Punjab, Sindh, Frontier and Balochistan, although that was not yet the official policy of the AIML.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 23^rd, 2017.

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