Moving beyond mere reverence, it is imperative at this juncture of history that we take a dispassionate look at the Quaid’s legacy.
Each government and political actor that has sought to control Pakistan has engaged in the process of controlling how to present Jinnah to the public and how to lay claim to his legacy
At a young age, we are taught to imagine a personality called Quaid-i-Azam (Great Leader). It is with a praise, a grand praise, that a child begins to imagine a grand father figure (‘Baba e Qaum’ or Father of the Nation) who gave birth to a nation, not Jinnah Poonja, the lawyer born in Karachi, 135 years to this day. On 25 December 1886, Mohammad Ali Jinnah was born. On 25 December 2011, we sit down to discuss the man. Jinnah’s life can be examined and his mistakes learnt from. Quaid-i-Azam’s life cannot be examined and his mistakes repeated. The Pakistani nation-building project took on the second task. The result was that the man, his vision, his mistakes, his compromises were blurred with praise.
Controlling who Jinnah is
The institutionalisation of this process meant whoever controlled who Quaid-i-Azam was, controlled the shaping of the social and political imagination of Pakistan’s next generation. Each government and political actor that has sought to control Pakistan has engaged in the process of controlling how to present Jinnah to the public and how to lay claim to his legacy.
It is to Jinnah that the fundamentals of the nation-building process are traced for the national elite – but the inherent contestation that the question ‘what constitutes this nation?’ was about to bring up fragmented aspects of the persona of Jinnah, which was brought to conform with the particular nationalist projects of these groups.
The Islamists, a classic example of which remains how the Jama’at i Islami, whose leader Maulana Syed Maududi had written against Pakistan before Partition, created a story of how Jinnah, at his death bed, had uttered that he envisioned Pakistan as a Shariah state.
The secularists, however, held onto the 11 August 1947 speech to the Constituent Assemblies which was supposed to help seamlessly merge all identities that made up the peoples’ that lived in the post-partition Pakistan into a single unified Pakistani identity.
The trouble is both visions were produced in a historical amnesia of the cultures that made up the peoples of Pakistan and thus after about 60 years of the sustained application and flaunting of each, being Pakistani remains as fragmented an idea as ever.
Baloch wish no part of the endeavour, Sindh started the Sindh Cultural Day in response to the criticism by the national elite of President Asif Ali Zardari for wearing a Sindhi topi, the voice from Khyber Pakthunkhwa is of the revival of Pakthun identity (threatened by Islamisation) and the demand for separate provinces has come from both the Seraiki and Hazara regions.
The fact is that the voices that are raised, staking a claim in being Pakistani, found no resonance within Jinnah’s imagination of Pakistan is not something discussed openly as of yet.
But that is the exact point this article is hoping to raise.
Reassessing Jinnah’s choices
Jinnah enters politics having returned from a Bar-at-Law as a member of the Congress. He returned as a constitutionalist, committed to self-government and committed to the idea of a nation-state. But this commitment to the idea of a nation was what would trouble Jinnah in his later political career when he was confronted with the heterogeneity of the population that made up Pakistan.
Armed with the idea of the nation and Constitutionalism, Jinnah confronted the political reality that was the Indian subcontinent. He joined the Indian National Congress in 1906, the same year the Muslim League was formed. The diffused national sphere and Jinnah’s own identity as a Muslim pushed him to joining the Muslim League in 1913. By 1920, Jinnah had to confront Gandhi’s populist, street language politics of agitation and left the Congress.
The national sphere had been dominated by the Muslim-Hindu tussle and come the 1920s Jinnah chose the Muslim side. But what was important was that politics in Muslim-majority provinces was operating differently. To the detriment of our history writing, the attribution of difference was never to separate identities.
When representatives of the Muslim-majority provinces were brought on board in the 1940 Lahore resolution, it was because the resolution respected diversity. It clearly articulated that different ‘States’ would be created. Subsequently, in a small Legislator’s Convention in Delhi in April 1946, Jinnah had the word ‘States’ replaced by ‘State.’ To Bengali Muslim opponents of this, he first suggested the original text was a mistype. Proven wrong, he then promised the text had not been amended. But the change had been made, against the constitution of the All India Muslim League itself and set the founding stone for the ‘politics of centre’ to be pursued under the Pakistani state.
Moreover, a more constitutive challenge to Jinnah’s secularist credentials comes in his adoption for discourse around the Ilam Din case. When Ilam Din was sentenced to death for allegedly killing Hindu publisher Rajpal in Lahore in 1929, Jinnah took up his appeal. To the contemporary secularist reader of Jinnah, the choice of the Ilam Din case cannot but be seen as a political choice. However, unclear his personal stance on the subject might be, Jinnah’s representation of Ilam Din was part of the reason the case gained so much prominence and is repeatedly told by those towing the ‘blasphemy equals to death’ line in Pakistan.
In the same period, Jinnah also took up, unsuccessfully, the defence of Bhagat Singh and his speech in the Legislative Assembly on the subject is worth reading. Put together, defending a revolutionary and defending a religious fanatic, could mean Jinnah was detaching himself from the politics of both cases. But it would be too simplistic to concede that Jinnah was not aware of the political storm brewed up around both cases and how they would impact his own legacy.
Another criticism of Jinnah came when he replaced the Muslim League-Sindh leadership with members of the Muslim League Central Committee, even though the Muslim League-Sindh had been the first to pass a pro-Pakistan resolution issued by the Sindh Assembly under the tutelage of G.M. Syed. Jinnah’s interference in the provincial league became the reason for G.M.Syed to found the Jiyay Sindh, a Sindhi separatist group, and the act became the first to alienate Sindh from Pakistan.
The need to move beyond Jinnah
As historians, as activists and as inhabitants of territory that falls under the Pakistani state, the uncritical splendor afforded to Muhammad Ali Jinnah should be limited if we are to learn from his mistakes.
It is an important historical question to understand why, other ‘Muslim’ groups, from the mullahs to the Red Shirts and Bacha Khan (in KP) to Kalat rulers to Sindhi intellectuals to Bengalis, did not take kindly to the eventual independent Muslim state produced by Jinnah? It is also important to understand the failures of how he responded to calls of a more inclusive state in the one-year he spent as Governor General of Pakistan.
In a single year, Jinnah had pulled troops out of Kashmir, sent troops in Balochistan, dissolved the NWFP provincial assembly, and accentuated the Bengal language riots by telling them that Urdu with be the lingua franca.
These mistakes are not merely the faults of old age but of the faults in the original nationalism envisioned for Pakistan, which may be pointed by repeating the oft-quoted 11 August 1947 speech to the Constituent Assembly, “We should begin to work in that 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 the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, 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 people long long ago.”
This is a long quote that is to suggest that to Jinnah ethnicity, religion and sects were sources of division. What was unfortunate is that he did not respect them enough to let them merge together.
In so many ways, for those who were to inhabit the territory claimed by the State of Pakistan had ‘independence’ thrust upon them. At this point, the attempt to snatch their identities from them, became the very source of the divisiveness that marked the political future of Pakistan.
Jinnah became the source of legitimacy for military dictatorships and the imposition of the One Unit.
As a constitutionalist, Jinnah successfully argued for and was part of creating a separate State – but his vision to create a single Muslim nation contained flaws that history itself has set out to correct. 62 years after his death, the National Assembly, in passing the 18th Amendment, admitted the mistake made by Jinnah in changing the original Lahore resolution. As it stands, the ‘two nation’ theory on which Jinnah argued for Pakistan stands irrelevant to the social, economic and cultural futures of the peoples that inhabit Pakistan. It is for us to let the new generation learn from Jinnah’s strengths and weaknesses.
Neither of the secularist or religious presentations of Jinnah conform with the aspirations exhibited by the peoples of Pakistan nor do they do justice to Jinnah himself. As we remember Jinnah, 135 years after his birth, we see a Pakistani constitution that has moved beyond Jinnah’s vision, some for the good and some for the bad. And it has to go further still.
