In search of Quaid’s Pakistan

Quaid sought an equitable distribution of power within united India, but was defeated by the tyranny of Hindu majority

The Pakistani intelligentsia is in a quandary in its search for Quaid’s Pakistan. To fuel this debate are his two speeches, both addressed to the Constituent Assembly, and with only a gap of two days. The one he made on August 11, 1947 is now widely quoted and freely available on the internet with numerous references. And then there is another one that was delivered on August 13, which he purportedly also made to the same Constituent Assembly and which made it to our history books and was used as a reference for decades, but lo and behold, is now lost to the digital world.

The one that he made on August 11 underlined the status of the minorities in the new state of Pakistan, and there is a lot to quote from in it: “Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.” And then: “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the State.” As he surveyed history and the unfortunate English tradition of religious and communal persecution, he said: “Thank God we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days when there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another.” These to those on the liberalist spectrum are a godsend and provide the fuel for a resurging debate on the place of secularism in the state of Pakistan.

And then there is the case of the Quaid’s missing August 13 speech that he has known to have made to the Constituent Assembly, asking it to frame the laws for the new state in accordance with the Holy Quran and the Sunnah. But there is enough elsewhere to quote from the Quaid on this issue. Addressing the lawyers of Karachi (January 25, 1948), he said: “I cannot understand a section of the people who deliberately wanted to create mischief and made propaganda that Constitution of Pakistan would not be made on the basis of shariat … Islamic principles today are as applicable to life as they were 1,300 years ago ….” He further said: “Islam is not only a set of rituals, traditions and spiritual doctrines. Islam is also a code for every Muslim which regulates his life and his conduct, even in politics and economics and the like.” He reiterated exactly the same sentiment on the eve of the celebrations of Eid-i-Miladun-Nabi (peace be upon him), just before his death.



There is more to these statements than just a plain reading will convey. It is true that Jinnah had inherited a complex state. The case for Pakistan was made on communal basis and yet here he was trying to ameliorate the divisiveness inherent in such composition within the new nation. He was conscious that disparate political philosophies of its constituting units and a composite society, despite the largest migration of communities either side, will need to be unified into a nation. Punjab and Bengal, the two Muslim-majority states, were unwilling to go through a geographical division along communal lines, but had to agree willy-nilly around the momentum that the Quaid was able to build on the political and geographical division of India, appropriately nudged in that direction by the British. The Quaid sought an equitable distribution of power within a united India, but was defeated in his cause by the tyranny of the Hindu majority represented by the Congress. The division of India became inevitable.

Politically, without Punjab and Bengal, the Muslim League had no legs to stand on. The two states, with their Muslim-majority governments, however, were quite content with their political and social compositions and abhorred communal fractures. When the Pakistan Resolution was passed, the Unionists in Punjab worked hard to distance themselves from any affiliation that emphasised communalism. On independence though, with bifurcation came the burden of history that both India and Pakistan carry as a legacy of a broken mission. The Quaid, in his new state, thus had a lot to deal with including healing wounds and pacifying injured political beliefs in a state that was founded on unnecessary bloodshed around a physical divide in Punjab and Bengal. His response while addressing each of these peculiarities seemed as polar as the diversity of challenge he faced, though the foundation of the message remained one — the inclusivity inherently founded in Islam, and the political definition of a single nation in the state of Pakistan.

These were very early days when Pakistan’s Muslim character was put to test by the clerics, of whom many notable ones had spoken against Pakistan but, now that it was a reality, hustled to make their place in it. They agitated for the institution of puritanical Islam, by first excising those who could in their right be declared non-Muslims. The Lahore agitations of 1950 and the subsequent martial law of 1953 are events that paved the road Pakistan would take. Secularism was already being blamed on the Quaid while he was alive and he had to resort to clarifying his position and counter it with the above statements.

The Objectives Resolution came after the Quaid, but was incorporated as a guideline to the Constituent Assembly as a Bill of Fundamental Rights in the state of Pakistan. Justice Saqib Nisar’s remarks in the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the 21^st Amendment are worth visiting. He brings the Objectives Resolution to the fore, treading where angels fear. He challenges the origin of the Resolution and then amplifies most realistically its constitutional perspective as well as questioning its premise as the dynamic foundation for the religious shades of our Constitution. While those may be applicable in their own right and as a popular expression of the will of the people, but to root them into the Objectives Resolution as something that the founders desired, he claims is fallacious. He asks how could the same Resolution give different flavours to the respective Constitutions of India and Pakistan.

It is time we brought this debate in the public domain. And yes, the Quaid was right in both cases in his speeches made on August 11 and 13. But that becomes recognisable only when we practise Islam in its true, inclusive form, not in its imposed Puritanism.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd, 2015.

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