The Quaid would not be a happy man

Had Muhammad Ali Jinnah, by some miracle, been alive today some 66 years after the nation he created appeared on the map of the world, he would not have been a happy man at all with what he would have seen around him. In the city that he made his second home, Karachi, and where his mausoleum stands today, violence permeates virtually every street, leaving a permanent cloud of fear to hang over our biggest urban centre.



Elsewhere too, bombings, killings and all other kinds of deaths have become the norm in a country that was created as a place where people of all religions and ethnicities could live together in harmony and move towards progress.

This has certainly not happened. The Pakistan we have today is a torn and bleeding one. This is, of course, not what the Quaid-e-Azam would have wanted. If we are to save our nation, we need to move as swiftly as possible towards the vision and the dream he had laid out for this country. Perhaps, this, too, may be the best way to counter the extremism and intolerance that has blighted our society for a long time now, resulting in much bloodshed. We have done Mr Jinnah the most extraordinary disservice possible by deliberately distorting history as depicted in our textbooks to disguise what he said and removing some of his most important parts of his speeches from them entirely. As a result, few people from the younger generations really understand what Mr Jinnah had in mind when he addressed the first Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, promising equal rights to all citizens.

As we mark the day of his birth, we need to give him a gift. This gift can come in only one form. It must be a Pakistan restored along the lines of the image he had drawn up and containing within it the honesty, integrity and ability to accept all views that he expounded throughout his life. If we cannot find the will and capacity to conjure up this gift, we will be unable to move forward towards creating the progressive nation where all people could live together and which Mr Jinnah had devoted his life to creating.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 25^th, 2013.

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