As we write the Muslims of India and Pakistan are celebrating the birthday of the Quaid-i-Azam. As the man who has propelled, guided and controlled the national policies of nearly hundred million human souls, the man who has been responsible for the birth of a major State and the liberation of a major nation from economic and political bondage, the Quaid-i-Azam has already passed into history. With the establishment of Pakistan the mandate entrusted to him by his people may be considered to have been fulfilled and his historical role as the architect of our national State may be said to have reached its glorious consummation. The attainment of this objective demanded a steadiness of vision, fixity of purpose, an amount of unflagging devotion and courage that are rarely found among a people, broken and debased by enslavement and exploitation.
The history of nations however is continuum like time, and the culmination of one struggle merely means the commencement of another. The mission of our national leaders, therefore, is far from complete and the national objective we have formally attained still awaits its material content. The future of Indian Muslims who have done as much and suffered far more for Pakistan than we the Muslims of Pakistan have, is still uncertain, and the State of Pakistan has still to require the constitutional flesh and bone. Both these problems are of as great an importance to us as the achievement of Pakistan itself and their satisfactory solution will require an equal amount of vision, determination and courage.
There are already many among us, men of small minds and smaller vision, who think that the future of our brothers beyond the border need not enter our national calculations and now that we have got Pakistan, the future of non-Pakistanis is none of our business. The happenings in East Pakistan have utterly negated our thesis and proved that our kinsmen in the neighboring Dominion are very much our business that we have got to take them into calculation while formulating our national policies. We have got to ensure that these policies do not in any way adversely affect the national existence of our co-religionists in the other land, through injudiciousness or lack of imagination.
Similarly we have to ensure that both the constitutional structure and the governmental practice of the Pakistani State conform to the ideals that we put before ourselves when we embarked on our national struggle. We have not yet had a glimpse of the Pakistan of our dreams, for we are still besieged by all the ills that have plagued us in the past and the common man has yet to taste the contentment, physical and spiritual, of a free and prosperous existence. The helmsmen of the nation, therefore, of whom the Quaid-i-Azam is the greatest and the most indefatigable, have far from reached the end of their labours and the future of the nation depends as much on their sagacity today as it has dependent on their industry and devotion in the past.
(Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s editorial of the Pakistan Times dated Dec 27, 1947. The original
title was: HOMAGE)
