The reader would have seen a lot of that hackneyed phrase, Jinnah’s Pakistan, this 11th September. Apart from being used a little too much, the term is also a lightening rod. One cannot use it without attracting someone’s ire. That is because the late statesman and founder of Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam, has been subject to much interpretation; your Jinnah might not be mine. Yet, there is startling unity in the ranks on one aspect of Jinnah: that this isn’t what he would have wanted. Regardless of how one has wished to read (or construct) the man, it is unlikely that any one of those Jinnahs-from-alternate-universes would have approved of the state of the Republic.
We are neither the Islamist state that some interpret Jinnah to have wanted nor are we the liberal, progressive and secular state others want to believe that Jinnah envisioned. Nor are we the perfect picture of a parliamentary democracy that one assumes the London-educated barrister strove for. We’re neither fish nor fowl. Except, even those with a penchant for mutants, who would’ve liked a mix-and-match, are also aghast at what we’ve come to be.
And it is also difficult to jettison him. Amongst the viable political parties, no one other than, perhaps, the ANP, has the desire (or gall, at any rate) to oppose openly something that he might have said. Furthermore, it is ironic that those who claim to follow his vision the loudest are those who violate it the most.
Yet, perhaps forgetting about him is what he would have wanted. As opposed to a theocratic political leader, he wasn’t interested in giving an immutable framework that would be above comment and criticism. He was interested in the setting up of a democracy. If the citizens of the new republic wanted a strict Islamist state, so be it. If they wanted a socially liberal country, then that is what they would have. In the years since the country’s existence, that answer has veered resoundingly in favour of the latter. But the state itself did not evolve in accordance with the wishes of the people. Which brings us to the use of that inevitable statement: this is not what Jinnah would have wanted.
what the father of our nation implied in his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan in 1947:
“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.”
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