Pakistan: From the Rhetoric of Democracy to the Rise of Militancy

Ravi Kalia

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138498532
• eBook ISBN: 9781136516405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The essays in this volume address the central theme of Pakistan's enduring, yet elusive, quest for democracy. The book charts Pakistan's struggle from its very inception, at least in the political rhetoric provided by both civilian and military leaders, for democracy, liberalism, freedom of expression, inclusiveness of minorities and even secularism. At the same time, it demonstrates how in practice, the country has continued to drift towards increasingly brittle authoritarianism, religious extremism and intolerance of minorities — both Muslim and non-Muslim. This chasm between animated political rhetoric and grim political reality has baffled the world as much as Pakistanis themselves. In this volume, scholars and practitioners of statecraft from around the world have sought to explain the dichotomy that exists between the rhetoric and the reality. Crucial areas such as Pakistan's troubled status as a theocracy; its relationship with the US; the position of women and their quest for empowerment; the Mujahir Qaumi movement; the sharp class divide that has led to an elitist political culture; and finally, an erudite discussion of the popular topic — Jinnah's vision of Pakistan — are the focus of this book.

This volume will be of interest to scholars of history, political science, international relations, sociology, anthropology and urban planning, policy-makers and think-tanks, as well as the wider reading public curious about South Asia.

1

Jinnah’s Pakistan

Ravi Kalia

The obituaries got most of the facts right: that Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s death at the age of 71 (September 11, 1948) marked the passing of one of the most important public figures of the subcontinent in the first half of the twentieth century; that he began his political life as a moderate Congressman, with a commitment to finding a Hindu–Muslim accord; that his partisan journey over the decades from that starting point on the side of moderation to the intransigent separatism of which he became known as the Quaid-i-Azam (Great Leader) blazed a trail a large number of other Muslims would subsequently follow; that his influence was exerted not only through his stirring speeches but also through Dawn, the newspaper he founded in 1941 in Delhi, which helped him propagate the Muslim League’s point of views; that the ideas he shaped and disseminated through these channels contributed mightily to a change in the colonial political climate of the Raj; that this in turn helped bring about a great change in the subcontinent paving the way for the creation of Pakistan.¹

All true. And yet The New York Times with sound judgment noted:

“It is not clear who will replace [Jinnah], or, indeed, if he can be replaced.” Liaqat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s premier, “does not presume to the mantle of leadership long worn by his chief.” Of course, “There is a group of ‘Young Muslims’ in Pakistan, aspiring to political advancement.” But none “stands out yet as a potential Jinnah. It seems inevitable that there will be a struggle for leadership and control and the form that struggle takes may well determine the course of events in that part of the world for the next decade” (The New York Times, September 13, 1947).

As those close to him pointed out (they were very few), Jinnah in the flesh was relentlessly reserved, although unfailingly gallant, generous, and kind. He was uncompromisingly honest, as well as elegant in dress, urbane in style, and acerbic in wit. Which is to say he was a polemicist, one of the best in a heavily competitive field. As such he was always on the attack, and the attack was almost always directed against the Hindu-dominated Congress and its leaders, who insisted, with some merit, that the party represented all India.

To the extent that any notice was taken of how embattled Jinnah was, it surfaced soon after his death, ironically, over the faith that had been his political instrument but now became a source of controversy for his funeral, as well as over his last will. He was given two separate funerals: one following Shia rituals that were held privately at Mohatta Palace (built by a wealthy Sikh businessman — some have suggested it was a Marwari man — in the hybrid Indo-Saracenic vocabulary in the late 1920s who migrated to India after the partition), in Karachi; and the other according to Sunni rituals that was publically conducted, also in Karachi, by Allamah Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, a prominent (Deobandi) Sunni Muslim scholar, and attended by swarming Pakistanis — in clear view of media photographers. The two funerals symbolized not an expression of religious toleration but a political choice to appropriate the Quaid-i-Azam to the dominant Sunni strain of Islam — repudiating not only Jinnah’s personal Shia faith but also his secular political beliefs.

Fatima Jinnah, the Quaid’s sister who would live in Mohatta Palace in the mid-1960s (after her death in 1967, her sister Shireenbai occupied it until she died in 1980), had asked the Pakistan high court to execute Jinnah’s will under Shia law, since the Jinnahs belonged to the Ismali Khoja branch of Shia Islam (though it has been suggested by some scholars that Jinnah had become a Twelver Shia by confession in 1901 — but still secured in the Shia faith); in a 1970 legal challenge, however, a certain Hussain Ali Ganji Walji claimed Jinnah had converted to Sunni Islam, but the high court rejected this claim in 1976, effectively accepting the Jinnahs to be Shias. In a subsequent decision in 1984, when Sunni faith had gained ascendency under General Zia ul-Haq’s regime, the court maintained, “the Quaid was definitely not a Shia” — although without stating that he was a Sunni. The master of probate cases was unable to secure his own estate, or as a merchant of communal politics, defend his faith. Controversy over Jinnah’s faith was only a prelude to religious zealotry that unfolded after his death.²

Jinnah, Islam, and Democracy

Even the stoic and sartorial Quaid-i-Azam Mohammed Ali Jinnah would surely be troubled by the nation he created, which has witnessed the rise of religious militancy, sectarian violence, appalling illiteracy, incomprehensible power of the mosque and military, and surging popularity of jihadi culture. Adnan K. Khan, a Pakistani-Canadian journalist, is troubled by the present state of Pakistan: “Pakistanis are becoming the world’s pariahs. Since being implicated in a steady stream of violent attacks — from the London Tube bombings in 2005 to [the] failed attempt to bomb Times Square [in 2010] — it seems almost inevitable now that when the next act of terrorism happens, a Pakistani will be involved,” adding indignantly that “As a Canadian of Pakistani descent, I’ve watched this pattern emerge with a rising sense of trepidation. Thirty-five years ago, when my parents decided to move to Canada, things were much different. Pakistanis were different. They were much in demand — an intelligent, hardworking people who integrated and contributed positively to society, wherever they went.” “What a terrible journey we’ve made since then,” he lamented.³ Clearly, this is not the idea of Pakistan the constitutionalist Jinnah had in mind. But that is precisely the point: Did he actually have a clear idea of Pakistan, one that went beyond the political rhetoric of the “two-nations theory” and “Islam in danger” and “parity for Muslims?”

Jinnah was not a prolific writer and, therefore, it is difficult for historians to find clarification of his ideas in his own writings. Members of his small and scattered family have been diffident about discussing him. Still, much has been written about Jinnah and undoubtedly more is yet to come. Much of it has official Pakistani sponsorship and approaches hagiography. Hector Bolitho, a journalist from New Zealand who had relocated to England, wrote a notable biography of Jinnah, entitled Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan, which was commissioned by the Pakistan government and first published in 1954.⁴ By the time Bolitho embarked on his assignment Jinnah had died; and Liaquat Ali Khan, who had actually recruited Bolitho, proved unenthusiastic to share information. However, Liaquat’s wife, Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan, provided information and anecdotes and emotional support. Fatima Jinnah, the devoted sister of the Quaid and the Madar-i-Millat (“Mother of the Nation”), was openly opposed to Bolitho completing the biography. Perhaps to protect the Quaid’s place in history, his dwindling family has been reluctant to discuss him. When the book was completed the Pakistan government carefully edited it. For these reasons Bolitho, as much a writer as an entrepreneur, sold his notes and diaries and the original manuscript to the American businessman Charles Lesley Ames, who in turn gifted the collection to the Ames Library, named after him, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The salience of the Bolitho collection is that it contains what oral history exists from Jinnah’s contemporaries, as well as insight into the political climate of the new nation soon after its creation.

Available to historians today, but not then, are the newly published twelve volumes of British documents dealing with the transfer of power (TOPP), the Jinnah papers at the National Archives of Pakistan, and the documents of the Muslim League. The first to examine these documents were the American Stanley Wolpert, who completed a biography entitled Jinnah of Pakistan (1984), and the Cambridge-trained Ayesha Jalal, who published her dissertation The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan in 1985.⁵ The two books differ in style and purpose. Whereas Wolpert takes a long view of Jinnah’s life employing psycho-history methodology, Jalal’s work is only incidentally a biography as it focuses on the last ten years of the Pakistan movement leading up to the formation of Pakistan in 1947 and Jinnah’s shifting strategies to deal with the political constraints imposed on him by the British government, the Indian National Congress, and Muslim politics in the provinces. (A good comparison, with a clear Cambridge tilt, of the two volumes is provided by Francis Robinson, himself a product of the Cambridge School, although Asim Roy has written a much more balanced and substantive account.⁶) Introducing a carefully clothed and polished polemicist Jinnah who is in command of the Pakistan narrative, Wolpert views him as an adversary of Gandhi and the Congress, and the Pakistan demand as the outgrowth of that rivalry. “Few individuals significantly alter the course of history,” Wolpert generously concludes, adding, “Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.”⁷

But at what cost to the subcontinent?

Remarkably, Jinnah created a Muslim nation without ever marching in a political rally (although he gave speeches at rallies), spending any time in the prison, taking a blow of a police lathi (stick), having been tried for sedition by the Raj, commiserating with the Muslim masses — and in personal life, observing the Five Pillars of Islam, visiting a mosque, reciting the Kalma (the Islamic credo), making a pilgrimage to Mecca, ever fasting during the Ramadan. In fact, what distinguished Jinnah are the intensely anti-religious terms in which he came to understand his personal salvation and professional ambitions.

Jinnah emerges from the pages of Jalal’s tome as the Sisyphus of the Pakistan Movement led by the Muslim League. The Pakistan demand seemed very much like the Greek myth. Every time Jinnah found himself on the verge of rolling the Pakistan demand up the hills of Simla (Shimla), the summer capital of the Raj, some event would force him to start over. The Pakistani scholar S. Akbar Zaidi best captures the enduring consequence of the historiography of the partition of the subcontinent and the substance of Jalal’s argument:

The … major thesis in her book, one which is indeed a major revelation to most readers in Pakistan who have been fed lies by official spokesmen over the last decades, is that, Pakistan for Jinnah did not mean the partition of India. In fact, what is most revealing is that the term and concept “Pakistan” was never defined by any of the Muslim League leaders, least of all Jinnah. “Pakistan” throughout the 1930s and 1940s (even up to 1947…) remains an abstract “homeland for [Indian] Muslims” with often vague and conflicting boundaries and with a clearly undefined constitutional status.⁸

Jalal’s heterodox argument is that “The object of the Lahore resolution [1940] was not to create ‘Ulsters,’ but to achieve ‘two nations … welded into united India on the basis of equality,’” and views the resolution as an innovative alternative to majority rule, not seeking to destroy the unity of India.⁹ “What the League wanted was a confederation of India for common purposes like defence, provided the Muslim and Hindu elements therein stood on equal terms.” But Jinnah’s strategy rested on unrealistic assumptions: the British would stay in power in India for at least another decade; the Congress Party, and especially the Hindu right, would not push for the partition; and there would be no mass migration of populations.¹⁰ H. V. Hodson, the English Reform Commissioner, perhaps understood Jinnah’s strategy better than anyone, concluding in his report (1941) that most Muslims wanted the British to stay on, and interpreted the Pakistan demand to mean confederation with India. But the British government and the Cripps Mission visiting India in 1942 to solve the communal problem ignored his report, determined as they were to transfer power to the sort of unitary authority that the Congress was demanding and that the British government was hoping would secure its geopolitical interests in South Asia after the Raj. Even after Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced as late as February 20, 1947 that the British government intended to transfer authority to India no later than June 1948, Jinnah hoped that the British “would transfer power to India gradually” so as to avoid any scramble for political control in the Muslim majority provinces, over which Jinnah had only tenuous control.¹¹ Such constraints on Jinnah’s strategy hardly show him in control of the events in the last decade of the Raj. In the end when the new nation is born, Jinnah is rueful about inheriting a “moth-eaten Pakistan.”

Biographers of Jinnah have dutifully mentioned his secular inclinations and his pull to British liberalism, but none has examined the specifics of his ideas or wondered how they would have worked in a confederation with India, or in the multi-ethnic, polychrome, polyglot Pakistan. But it is worth noting that Jinnah arrived in England when John Morley’s liberalism was in full swing. Jinnah acknowledged it became part of his life and “thrilled me very much.”¹²

According to a romantic view, especially popular in the liberal pseudo-Westernized circles, the nation could have secured a secular, democratic, and pluralistic polity if only Jinnah’s ideas had been embraced and implemented by the misguided and selfish leaders of the young nation.¹³ This is simply speculation, especially so in the absence of any well thought-out plan by Jinnah, who admitted that he had not expected to see an independent nation emerge during his lifetime. His collapsing lungs in the last ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Jinnah’s Pakistan
• 2. Muhajir Politics: Ethnicity, Islam and the Muhajir Qaumi Movement
• 3. Islamabad and the Promise of Pakistan
• 4. Empowerment and Subordination of Pakistani Women through Patriarchy, Elitism, Class and Gender Discourses
• 5. Pakistan and the Dilemma of Democracy
• 6. Elitist Political Culture and the Perils of Democracy in Pakistan
• 7. Pakistan’s Pursuit of Democracy
• 8. Enlightened Moderation: Anatomy of a Failed Strategy
• 9. U.S. and Pakistan: Relations during the Bush–Musharraf Years
• 10. Pakistan: The Burden of Islam
• About the Editor
• Notes on Contributors
• Index