Why Jinnah Matters

Dr Akbar Ahmed

The debate about the nature and character of the Pakistani state is most intense today.

Some still voice the demand for a theocratic state. The Pakistani Taliban is the most extreme expression of this. But more mainstream religious groups also call for the rule of the Shari’a.

Others argue that Islam has little to do with the state.

Most Pakistanis would perhaps reflect a balance between these two positions.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah is the founder of Pakistan. His opinion is the most important in this.

Pakistan, a Modern Muslim Nation

Jinmah had created an independent Muslim state. He had restored Muslim pride, given them a sense of destiny and secured them territory. It is no wonder they idolised him and called him the Quaid-i-Azam, the ‘Great Leader’.

Jinnah’s Muslim nation was not fully what he had wanted: it was ’truncated’ and ‘moth-eaten’.

The unending problems demanded his immediate attention:

• the influx of millions of refugees from India
• the horror of the communal violence in which about 2 million people—Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs—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
• the refusal of an increasingly hostile India to send Pakistan the agreed division of assets.

This gave his critics the opportunity to accuse him of becoming autocratic.

The awful reality of millions of Muslims stranded in India as ‘hostages’, not easily able to enter his Pakistan—a nightmare Jinnah tried so hard to avoid—soon dawned on him.

The scale of the savage killing of refugees on both sides shook him to the core, hastening his end (this is precisely how Dina Wadia, Jinnah’s daughter, saw her father’s death.

She believed that he had literally sacrificed himself for his nation).

Jinnah’s Gettysburg Address

What was Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan?

Would Pakistan be a modern democracy or a closed theocracy? Would non-Muslims be safe in it?

Jinnah did not write a book or monograph. The main clues to his thinking are in his 2 speeches he made to the new Constituent Assembly in the crucial month of August 1947 when he had attained his Pakistan.

The first was delivered on 11 August, when the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan elected him as their first President, and the second on 14 August, which is now Independence Day.

Together they comprise Jinnah’s ‘Gettysburg address’ and would form the base for his subsequent speeches in the final year of his life.

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 cooperation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed.

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 Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalees, Madrasis and so on—will vanish.

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.

From this powerful passage comes a vision of a brave new world, consciously an improvement in its spirit of tolerance to the old world he had 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 cooperation, I can look forward to Pakistan becoming one of the greatest nations of the world.’

Two days later the Mountbattens flew to Karachi to help celebrate the formal transfer of power. In his formal speech to the Constituent Assembly on 14 August, Lord Mountbatten offered the example of Akbar the Great Mughal as the model of a tolerant Muslim ruler to Pakistan.

Akbar the Great as a Model Muslim Ruler…

Mountbatten had suggested Akbar advisedly. Akbar has always been a favourite of those who believe in cultural synthesis or what in our time passes for secular leadership. To most non-Muslims in South Asia, Akbar symbolised a tolerant, humane Muslim, one they could do business with.

He avoided eating beef because the cow was sacred to the Hindus.

The Rajputs provided Akbar’s armies with soldiers and generals and gave his court influential wives.

But for many Muslims Akbar posed certain problems. He was a great king by many standards, but far from ideal Muslim ruler. He was a despot. His harem was said to number a thousand wives. His drinking, his drugs and his blood lust were excessive even by Mughal standards.

Akbar also introduced a new religious philosophy, din-e-ilahi, an amalgamation of some of the established religions, with Akbar himself as a focal religious point. This was imperial capriciousness. It made the ulema unhappy.

Mountbatten knew that 6 Mughal Emperors, beginning with Babar in 1526 and ending with Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, had ruled India, giving it one of the most glorious periods of its history.

The Mughal Empire ended when the British finally killed it off in 1857. But its last great emperor was Aurangzeb.

• Babar was the Warrior King, the founder.
• Humayun, good-natured but unlucky, who almost lost his father’s kingdom.
• Akbar the Great, the man who joined together the various cultural and religious strands of India, laying the foundations for a mighty state;
• Jahangir, artistic, drunken, troubled, who ruled mainly through his talented wife, the Empress Nur Jahan
• Shah Jahan, who brought the empire to a pinnacle of artistic and architectural glory, the creator of the Taj Mahal.
• Aurangzeb, whose long reign is seen as the watershed for Muslim rule in India. He evokes divided loyalties.
  • Orthodox Muslims regard him as an ideal ruler.
  • Critics call him a fanatic and point out his harsh treatment of his father and brothers.

So Mountbatten’s choice was neither random nor illogical. Yet he could also have selected Babar, who after all opened a new chapter of history in India, not unlike Jinnah.