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The Rediff Special/ Akbar S Ahmed

Jinnah did not want a theocratic state run by mullahs

Fifty years ago today, Mohammad Ali Jinnah passed into the ages. Demonised for his role in carving out a separate country that cost several hundred lives, Pakistan's founder has been a maligned man. What was the real Mohammad Ali Jinnah like? Professor Akbar Ahmed dwells into the life and times of Pakistan's Quaid-I-Azam

Pakistan, Jinnah said, was like the rising moon. The crescent would be on the Pakistan flag. Jinnah could have compared Pakistan to the sun. Indeed the sun is a common enough symbol of imperial statehood in the region. Iran used it; further east in Asia so did the Japanese. The sun represents power, authority, a dominating, irresistible force. In contrast the moon in South Asian literature is a symbol of softness, mystery, magic, romance, compassion, hope and promise.

The choice of moon over sun is obviously a deliberate, perhaps self-conscious, cultural selection making a political point. It is symbolic of Islam. It also reflects the mystical and romantic side of the usually pragmatic and practical Jinnah. In this selection he is illustrating a side usually kept guarded from the public.

Once the nation was conceded, a capital had to be located. The older cities were not practical: Lahore was too close to the Indian border and Dhaka far too remote. Jinnah opted for Karachi. It was a port, it was away from the border and therefore India's armed forces, and it had space for accommodating the refugees. It was also Jinnah's birthplace. Overnight this small coastal fishing town became a major international city as hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into Karachi and the Sind province.

Jinnah's Muslim nation was not fully what he had wanted: it was 'truncated' and 'moth-eaten'. It appears Jinnah's willpower kept him going but in the last year of his life, after Pakistan had been created, he was seriously ill. He therefore focused his energies on the survival of the state, burning himself out in the effort to keep it alive. The unending problems were of such magnitude that they demanded his immediate attention (which gave his critics the opportunity to accuse him of concentrating too much power in himself, of becoming autocratic): the influx of millions of refugees from India; the horror of the communal violence in which about 2 million people-Hindus and Muslims-died; a state of undeclared war in Kashmir; a tattered defence and administrative structure, torn in two, needing to be rebuilt; the near bankruptcy of the state; and the refusal of an increasingly hostile India to send Pakistan the agreed division of assets.

Besides, the awful reality of millions of Muslims stranded in India, as 'hostages', not easily able to enter his Pakistan, a nightmare he tried so hard to avoid, soon dawned on him. The savage scale of the killing of refugees on both side shook him to the core, hastening his end. (This is precisely how Dina Wadia saw her father's death. She believed that he literally sacrificed himself for his nation. Her bitterness towards Pakistan is explained by the nation's failure to recognise his supreme sacrifice.)

Increasingly, Jinnah was opening his heart in an unprecedented manner to his people in the official broadcasts, abandoning the formal posture of the skillful but aloof lawyer. Now he shared their hopes, their sorrow, their sense of personal tragedy and their feeling of frustration at the injustices of the world. One senses his anger and outrage as he witnessed not only the machinations that would lose Pakistan the state of Kashmir but the attempts to kill Pakistan at its birth.

In the first winter of Pakistan's existence, a group of officers, in welcoming him, assured him that they were prepared to follow him 'through sunshine and fire.' Jinnah replied, 'Are you prepared to undergo the fire? We are going through fire, the sunshine has yet to come'. He was aware of the dangers. The whole structure could rapidly unravel in spite of all the faith and commitment of the supporters of Pakistan. His question whether Pakistanis were prepared to undergo the fire is as relevant today as when Jinnah raised it. Pakistanis are still going through fire.

What was Jinnah's vision of Pakistan? Would Pakistan be a modern democracy or closed theocracy? Would non-Muslims be safe in it?

Since Jinnah did not write a book or monograph, the main clue to his thinking comes through his speeches. If we put together two of his speeches in the crucial month of August 1947, when he had attained his Pakistan -- indeed the first two speeches that he made in his new state -- we are able to grasp his vision for the state he had created. The first was delivered on 11 August, when the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan elected him as their first President, the second on 14 August which is now celebrated as Pakistan or Independence Day. Together they comprise Jinnah's 'Gettysburg address' and would form the base for his subsequent speeches in the year that remained to him.

Perhaps his most significant and most moving speech was the first one. It is an outpouring of ideas on the state and the nature of society, almost a stream of consciousness. No bureaucratic hand impedes the flow because it was delivered without notes:

'Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matters what relations he had with you in the past, no mater what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make.

'I cannot emphasise it too much. We should begin to work in the spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community -- because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on and among Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on -- will vanish. Indeed if you ask me this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free peoples long long ago.'

Building up from this powerful passage comes the vision of a brave new world, consciously an improvement in its spirit of tolerance on the old world he has just rejected:

'You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place 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... 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. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.'

If Pakistanis could follow these ideals, Jinnah would be confident of the future. Jinnah made a pledge: 'My guiding principle will be justice and complete impartiality, and I am sure that with your support and co-operation, I can look forward to Pakistan becoming one of the greatest nations of the world.'

'Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic State to be ruled by priests with a divine mission'

Excerpted from Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity by Akbar S Ahmed; Oxford University Press, with the writer's kind permission.

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