A secular vision for Pakistan

The elite, like Jinnah, has yet to delve deeper into economic basis of political community it aspires for the country

The National Assembly of Pakistan last week passed a resolution endorsing Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s August 11 speech as the road map for the country in dealing with its minority communities. The resolution should be welcomed by every Pakistani who opposes the state’s use of religion as a marker of identity of its people and wants the state to guarantee fundamental rights (enshrined in Articles 8-28 of the Constitution) to the citizens without regard to their [religious] beliefs and practices. It demonstrates that a section of the political elite (represented to various degrees in all three major political parties) of the country is cognisant of the plight of its minority religious communities. Like Jinnah’s speech, however, this resolution may not cause a substantive change in either the position of the state vis-a-vis minority religious communities or the social, economic and political status of the majority among minority religious communities. The reason, it seems, is that the elite segment, like Jinnah, has yet to delve deeper into the economic basis of the political community it aspires for the country.

Take Jinnah’s speech for instance: it calls for freedom to all communities to profess their religious beliefs and establish supporting institutions in the country and seeks an absolute separation between affairs of the state and religion. These are classic liberal ideas of statecraft that emerged in the Western European context and are encapsulated in promotion of secularism as the only viable political doctrine for the [modern] state. Following the Marxist framework, the problem with ideas is that they are rooted in material conditions of life. Social groups that control material resources in a community have the power to make their ideas hegemonic in that community. In his seminal thesis on secularism, anthropologist Talal Asad has argued that the emergence of secularism as a doctrine for statecraft and secularisation as a process of regulation of social life in Western Europe was tied to social and economic transformations, characteristic of the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent emergence of new economic classes. Unlike the aristocracy of the Middle Ages, these new classes drew their political and economic power from ownership of industrial, financial and commercial capital. It was the collective agency derived from this material power that enabled these classes to present as hegemonic, secular ideas like sovereignty of parliament (against the crown), sanctity of private property and political liberties, and rights of citizens.



In this way of reasoning, secularism appears not much different from religion as both refer to a way of life for a political community based on certain shared values, beliefs and practices. They differ only insofar as they refer to two different readings of religious scriptures that guide these shared values, beliefs and practices, and are characterised by different constellation of economic classes. The significance of Asad’s thesis is that it places the question of secularism, and religion, squarely in the domain of the economy and explains secular (or religious) ideas as a function of economic and political power relations. Thus, the only viable way for secular values and ideas to seek hegemony in a society is in economic ascendency of the classes that adhere to these ideas through political mobilisation and organisation of the people in support of such ideas.

The question that follows is: did Jinnah undertake such an effort at mobilisation and organisation of the Muslim subjects of the British Empire in support of his ideas and values?

The politics of representation introduced in India by the British imperial state had led Jinnah to present Indian Muslims, despite all their diversity, as a monolithic political community. However, he erred insofar as he did not try and organise the Muslim League as a mass-based party with its roots in the Muslim subalterns. It follows from the embodied nature of ideas that such an effort would have required him to engage in a long-drawn process of negotiations with the subaltern subjects on questions of economic and social life. Instead, he spent the last 10 years preceding Partition in brokering a series of political deals with influential [Muslim] social and economic groups. Thus, the Muslim League’s performance in the 1946 elections did not reflect either the penetration of the Indian Muslim society by Jinnah’s ideas or the emergence of a homogenous community of politically conscious Muslim subjects. Rather, the Muslim League’s electoral fortune in Muslim majority areas was derived from its successful alliances with sections of rural landed elite and urban reformist clergy. It was not the Muslim League (as a party), but these and other similar groups which controlled material and ideological resources in Muslim majority areas and exercised power over Muslim subaltern subjects of the British Indian empire.

The relevance of this short lesson in our political history cannot be stressed enough for the segment of our political elite which has resolved to define Jinnah’s secular vision as a road map for the country. Their aspirations will come to naught unless they take their conversations out of parliament and into the streets, neighbourhoods, mosques, schools, markets and all other forums where there can be an engagement with the subalterns (religious and ethnic minority communities) and a new political programme evolved as a result. For this engagement to be successful and the resultant political programme transformative, the elite segment will need to do a fair amount of introspection into the compromises it has struck over the course of the country’s political life to maintain its economic privilege and prepare for a debate on the possibility of undoing this privilege. The elite segment should also resolve to confront the other (dominant, I may add) segments of the elite, elected and unelected, which have been mobilised and organised politically for decades now and have, as a result, made their ideas hegemonic in society.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 23^rd, 2015.

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