The Protection of Non-Muslims

Acceptance of minorities is another theme in his speeches.

Jinnah had regularly reminded his Muslim audience of what Islam maintains: ‘our own history and our Prophet have given the clearest proof that non Muslims have been treated not only justly and fairly but generously’.

Jinnah’s statements about minorities (whether Muslims in India or Hindus in Pakistan) are significant:

‘I am going to constitute myself the Protector-General of the Hindu minority in Pakistan.’ He spent his first and only Christmas in December 1947 as a guest of the Christian community, joining in their celebrations.

In that one act he incorporated the rituals of the minority community into Pakistani consciousness (a far cry from the somewhat pointed distancing of Pakistani leaders from the rituals and customs of the minorities in contemporary Pakistan.)

Although pressed for time, in Dhaka he met a Hindu delegation and in Karachi and Quetta a Parsee one, assuring them of his intention to safeguard their interests.

Even after the creation of Pakistan he not only continued to have British personnel on his staff but also actively encouraged them to participate in the life of the new nation. Sir George Cunningham, to whom Jinnah sent a telegram in Scotland inviting him to return to his post as the Governor of the North West Frontier Province immediately after independence, is an example.

Opposition to Provincialism

The other theme was the need to check provincialism, which was already rearing its head. In his speeches, for example in Peshawar and Dhaka, Jinnah stressed the evils of provincialism, which he warned would weaken the foundations of the state.

In Pakistan people assume that the movement for ethnic assertion is recent, a product of Pakistan. On the contrary, such movements existed before the creation of Pakistan, as is clear in a letter to Jinnah of 14 May 1947, from G. H. Hidayatullah, a Sindhi leader based in Karachi:

Some enemies of my wife and myself have been making statements in the press that we two are advocating the principle that Sind is for the Sindhis only. This is entirely false and baseless.

Both of us are ardent supporters of Pakistan, and we have given public expression to this. Islam teaches universal brotherhood, and we entirely subscribe to this… All this is nothing but false propaganda on the part of the enemies of the League.

A week later Abdus-Sattar Pirzada issued a statement making clear that Pakistan would be the home for all Muslim immigrants from India:

‘Sind has been the gateway of Islam in India and it shall be the gateway of Pakistan too.’

Yet Jinnah sailed into an ethnic storm after the creation of Pakistan.

In a momentous encounter in Dhaka, the capital of the province of East Pakistan (the future Bangladesh), he insisted that Urdu and Urdu alone would be the national language, although he conceded the use of the provincial language.

Bengali students murmured in protest. The language movement would grow and in 1952 the first martyrs, protesting students, would be killed. In time a far wider expression of ethnic discontent would develop at the imagined and real humiliation coming from West Pakistan and in particular the Punjab. But that was in the future. Jinnah had for the time being clung to his idea of a united Pakistan; united in a political but also cultural sense.

Diaspora: The Plight of the Refugees

The plight of the refugees, their lives forever altered, moved Jinnah as nothing else in his life. Their killing, he repeated, was ‘pre-planned genocide’. He constantly referred to them:

A few days ago, I received harrowing accounts of the terrible happenings in the Punjab and the situation, from all accounts, appeared to be so grave that I decided to come to Lahore. On my arrival here, I immediately got in touch with various sources that were available to me and I was deeply grieved to realize that unfortunately there was a great deal of truth in what had been told to me. I am speaking to you under deep distress and with a heavy heart.

Even the joyous occasion of Eid became a moment of reflection:

For us the last Eid-ul-Fitr which followed soon after the birth of Pakistan was marred by the tragic happenings in East Punjab. The bloodbath of last year and its aftermath-the mass migration of millions-presented a problem of unprecedented magnitude. To provide new moorings for this mass of drifting humanity strained our energies and resources to breaking point.

Jinnah mobilised everything at hand for the poor, especially among the refugees:

Let every man and woman resolve from this day to live henceforth strictly on an austerity basis in respect of food, clothing and other amenities of life and let the money, foodstuffs and clothing thus saved be brought to this common pool for the relief of the stricken. The winter is approaching and in the Punjab and Delhi particularly, it is very severe and we must provide refugees protection against it.

Jinnah acknowledges the generous response of the local, indigenous Pakistanis to the refugees:

But for the spirit of brotherhood shown by the people of Pakistan and the courage with which the people as well as the Government faced the almost over whelming difficulties created by a catastrophe, unparalleled in the history of the world, the entire structure of the State might well have crumbled down.

The support for the refugees was inspiring. Nadir Rahim, whose father was Commissioner of Lahore, told this author that locals and non-locals joined in, helping one another; the former became ansaris, helpers, the latter muhajirs, refugees.

These were names revived from Islamic history when those who received the holy Prophet and his companions in Madinah came to be called ansaris and those who had fled Makkah muhajirs.

My own experiences in the early years of Pakistan confirm this. My father was a senior official in the new country, the first divisional Superintendent of the Pakistan Railways in Karachi,_its capital.

The movement of refugees, troops and goods all depended on the railways. He had a large official house where dozens of refugees were camped for months and where families lived with us for years.

People seemed to appear from nowhere in our house and then disappear for ever. They looked dazed, uncertain and withdrawn. I remember in particular two men: one old, respectable and orthodox, the other young, barely in his teens. The first seemed to have found strength in Islam and his punctilious observation of ritual. The young man was asleep most of the time wrapped in a white sheet as if he were a corpse.

When he woke he had little to say. An expression of permanent sorrow was etched on his face. He wished to shut out the past. I do not know where he came from and what happened to him.

Jinnah, Pakistan and India

Jinnah wished for cordial relations with the state of India. He never changed his will, which left part of his estate to educational institutions in Aligarh, Bombay and Delhi. Hoping to visit his beloved Bombay, Jinnah also kept his property in India.

Jinnah’s view of friendly relations between India and Pakistan after partition was recorded in an interview with General Ismay, Chief of Staff to the Viceroy:

Mr. Jinnah said with the greatest earnestness that once partition had been decided upon, everyone would know exactly where they were, all troubles would cease, and they would live happily ever after.

He quoted me the case of two brothers who hated each other like poison as a result of the portions allotted to them under their father’s will. Finally they could bear it no longer and took the case to court. Mr. Jinnah defended one of them and the case was fought with the utmost venom.

Two years later Mr. Jinnah met his client and asked how he was getting on and how was his brother, and he said: ‘oh, once the case was decided, we became the greatest friends’.

Jinnah wished for a civilized discourse, maintaining standards of neighbourly courtesy, in his dealings with India. On his final flight from Delhi he conveyed this message to the new Indian government:

I bid farewell to the citizens of Delhi, amongst whom I have many friends of all communities and I earnestly appeal to everyone to live in this great and historic city with peace. The past must be buried and let us start afresh as two independent sovereign States of Hindustan [India] and Pakistan. I wish Hindustan prosperity and peace.

Seervai, the Indian writer, comments on the Indian response to Jinnah’s message:

Jinnah left India for Pakistan on 7 August 1947, with an appeal to both Hindus and Muslims to ‘bury the past’ and wished India success and prosperity. The next clay, Vallabhbhai Patel said in Delhi, ‘The poison had been removed from the body of India.“9 Patel went on:

As for the Muslims they have their roots, their sacred places and their centres here. I do not know what they can possibly do in Pakistan. It will not be long before they return to us.

‘Hardly the words,’ concludes Seervai, ’to promote goodwill and neighbourliness either then or in the days to come.’

As for the Hindu citizens of Pakistan, there was never any doubt in Jinnah’s mind that they would be protected as citizens and given full rights. Speech after speech confirmed this. When Pakistan was created, Jinnah had seven ministers in the Cabinet, one a Hindu.

In one of his first radio broadcasts as head of state Jinnah abandoned his normal reserve and opened his heart to the nation:

I am speaking to you under deep distress and with a heavy heart. We have undoubtedly achieved Pakistan and that too without bloody war and practically, peacefully, by moral and intellectual force and with the power of pen which is no less mighty than the sword and so our righteous cause has triumphed.

Are we now going to besmear and tarnish this greatest achievement for which there is no parallel in the whole history of the world by resorting to frenzy, savagery and butchery? In early October 1947 Muslims in West Punjab began to react to the horror stories coming from India. Jinnah reminded the authorities in both countries:

The division of India was agreed upon with a solemn and sacred undertaking that minorities would be protected by the two Dominion Governments and that the minorities had nothing to fear so long as they remained loyal to the State.

He urged the government of India to ‘put a stop to the process of victimization of Muslims.’ To calm the situation Jinnah flew to Lahore, which had borne the full brunt of the refugees arriving from India with their heart-rending tales, and in a public meeting urged restraint: Despite the treatment which is being meted out to the Muslim minorities in India, we must make it a matter of our prestige and honour to safeguard the lives of the minority communities and to create a sense of security among them.

On the death of Gandhi on 30 January 1948, Jinnah issued a statement that angered and disappointed many Indians because it spoke of Gandhi only as a great Hindu leader. This was unfair to Jinnah, who used the word ‘great’ three times in his brief message. Once again, we need to read Jinnah’s full statement, especially in conjunction with the one made later in which he states that the Muslims of India had lost their main support. The official version is as follows:

I am shocked to learn of the most dastardly attack on the life of Mr. Gandhi, resulting in his death. There can be no controversy in the face of death. Whatever our political differences, he was one of the greatest men produced by the Hindu community, and a leader who commanded their universal confidence and respect. I wish to express my deep sorrow, and sincerely sympathize with the great Hindu community and his family in their bereavement at this momentous, historical and critical juncture so soon after the birth of freedom and freedom for Hindustan and Pakistan. The loss to the Dominion of India is irreparable, and it will be very 42difficult to fill the vacuum created by the passing away of such a great man at this moment.

Just before his own death, Jinnah proposed a joint defence pact with India as the Cold War started to shape the world and the two power blocs began to form. Jinnah was still thinking as a South Asian nationalist. Since he had won the rights and security of his community through the creation of Pakistan, he thought the problem of national defence was over. Alas, it was not to be.

With relations souring so quickly at the creation of Pakistan, the relationship between the two countries—and therefore the two communities in the subcontinent as a whole—was set on a collision course and has unfortunately remained so ever since. As this conflict is rooted in history political parties who see an easy gain to be made readily exploit it. Had Jinnah’s vision prevailed—and found an echo in India—we would have seen a very different South Asia. There would have been two stable nations—India and Pakistan, both supplementing and supporting each other. Indeed Jinnah’s idea of a joint defence system against the outside world would have ensured that there would have been no crippling defence expenditures. There would have been no reason to join one or other camp of the Cold War. There would have been open borders, free trade and regular visiting between the two countries.

The lack of tension would have ensured that the minorities were not under pressure and, as both Jinnah and Congress leaders like Gandhi and Nehru wanted, lived as secure and integrated citizens. The fabric of society would have been different, and a more humane subcontinent might have emerged: a land truer to the vision of its leaders and spirit of its ages. In 1971, when Pakistan was broken in two, its critics jubilantly cried, ‘Jinnah’s Pakistan is dead.’ They were wrong. Jinnah’s Pakistan will be alive as long as there are Muslims who feel for the dignity, the identity and the destiny of other Muslims, and who care for the oppressed and the minorities in their midst. In that sense Jinnah’s Pakistan will remain alive forever. Muslims must learn to say with pride: ‘I am Muslim.’ They must live up to the nobility and compassion of Islamic ideals; they must carry themselves with dignity in their identity as Muslims. Most important, they must stand up for their rights; this is their destiny and they cannot ignore 43it. This is the lesson that Jinnah taught them; that is why Jinnah remains relevant today.