Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
Claiming Jinnah’s mantle: Musharraf joins the queue
The minute I entered the elegant book-lined club in central London where Pervez Musharraf was about to launch his political career, it was clear who was to dominate the proceedings – Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-e-Azam, Founder of the Nation, Father of Pakistan. In his trademark peaked Jinnah cap, it was his photo alone which was hanging prominently on the platform where the former military ruler was to speak; and his photo on the little entrance ticket they gave you to get past security.
It was his spirit which was invoked even in the name of Musharraf’s political party — his All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) was a deliberate echo of the pre-independence All India Muslim League, through which Jinnah created the state of Pakistan in 1947.
It was Jinnah’s speech of August 11, 1947 that Musharraf cited as one of the guiding principles of the APML, with its most famous lines: ”You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or 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.”
Musharraf quoted a verse too from Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher who imagined Pakistan as a place where what he saw as the true spirit of Islam – equality, peace and justice — would flourish. And it was to that idealistic vision that Musharraf appealed when he promised to fight poverty and corruption, end the domination of the feudal elite, and bring true freedom and economic well-being to the poor masses of Pakistan.
Appealing stuff. The problem is that every politician does it. Everyone invokes the spirit of Jinnah; everyone promises to improve the lot of the poor; everyone says he or she is the true democrat. Musharraf — who says he will go back to Pakistan before the next election due by 2013 come what may (and that includes possible arrest and assassination) is just the latest in a long line of politicians queuing up for Jinnah’s mantle. The problem is who are we – or more to the point – who are Pakistan’s voters – to believe?
It is a problem that cuts to the heart of Pakistan’s current political turmoil. Who are the true democrats? The progressives? The representatives of the poor? The inheritors of the poetic idealism of Iqbal, and the more pragmatic constitutionalism of Jinnah who used his background as a lawyer to create a country?
Start at the crudest caricature of Pakistani politics today. On one side, you have the “forces of democracy” in the two main parties – the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the late Benazir Bhutto and the main opposition Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. On the other, you have the military which have dominated Pakistan for much of its life and which has grown ever more powerful after taking the lead in providing emergency relief following Pakistan’s devastating floods.
Killings of Ahmadis unleashes fresh soul-searching over Pakistan’s identity
In a country which has suffered many bombings, the killing of more than 80 people in two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore last week has unleashed a particularly anguished bout of soul-searching in Pakistan, going right to the heart of its identity as an Islamic nation.
When he heard the news, wrote Kamran Shafi in Dawn, “I ran home and put on the TV and burst into tears, first of rage and a seething anger; and then of complete and utter helplessness and sadness. Shame on us.”
“Tell me – is this a country that we can be proud of?,” wrote Kalsoom on the blog Changing up Pakistan. ”Pakistan was supposedly established as a homeland for Muslims, to free them of discrimination. This same country now allows persecution to continue not just unabated but often by the writ of the state.”
“I am ashamed and disgusted.”
As always happens at times of crisis, commentators called on the spirit of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who in his first address to parliament in 1947 appealed for religious tolerance. “You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this state of Pakistan,” he said. ”You may belong to any religion or caste or creed. That has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
“Is this Jinnah’s Pakistan? No,” wrote Raza Rumi on his blog. “We have gone too far and pessimists are now saying that the process of destroying Pakistani society is irreversible. There is still hope that we shall overcome this menace if Pakistani public opinion is fashioned to look a little deeper inside and not find all sources of evil in Washington or Delhi. The electronic media has a critical role to play but lack of self-regulation and introspection is missing. If anything, we find more and more analysts and commentators siding with the militants.”
“The battle for Pakistan’s survival cannot be lost,” he said. ”This is the only country we have.”
@G-W
The awakening of the People comes from education, education as well as the freedom of expression in a country. The misuse of media by some individuals or a group of organisations must in today’s time be overseen by the independent organisations. Today the media in some countries is controlled by very sinister forces and this is not healthy for a country which is not yet a Nation with all its manifestations. The individual Turks like Nadeem Paracha do have an important role to play in the society. Equally,it is harmful to preach for a secular system to the man in the street in a so named muslim State without any explanation as to what is missing in the Islamic way of life. The jornalists have the same reponsibility as the common man to uphold the laws of the country. Perhaps the country needs to reform its laws which discriminate against a certain part of the society.
Rex Minor
India, Pakistan : re-opening the wounds of Partition
Was it necessary to divide India and Pakistan ? Was Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, really the obdurate Muslim leader who forced Partition along religious lines in 1947 or was he pushed into it by leaders of India’s Congress party, especially first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
A new book by former Indian foreign minister Jaswant Singh re-opens that painful, blood-soaked chapter whose price the region is still paying more than 60 years on.
Singh, a leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, challenges the widely-held belief in India that it was Jinnah’s insistence on a separate homeland for Muslims that forced the breakup of India and the mayhem that accompanied it.
Jinnah, an impeccably secular leader, didn’t start with this, he argues in the book “Jinnah – India, Partition, Independence.”
What Jinnah said, in the tumultuous years before Britain finally left the subcontinent, was that he wanted ”space in a reassuring system” for Muslims so that they didn’t get engulfed in a Hindu-majority India, Singh says.
A federal structure that would have given Muslims a certain amount of autonomy, a sort of a Pakistan within India, may well have worked. But Nehru shot it down, believing in a highly centralised polity , influenced as he was by the prevailing Western, European socialist thought of the time.
On one side India goes and attacks a totally peaceful state, the state of Hyderabad on the false pretext that it had a majority Hindu Population and on the other takes over Kashmir a totally Muslim majority state. Look at the dichotomy.
In Hyderabad the Nizam was most secular, he may by chance profess Islam as his religion privately. Patel told Nehru “don’t make the mistake of a referendum in Hyderabad as the Hindu will vote for The Nizam”, they were so happy with him and the composite Hyderabad culture, hence most clandestinely they invade an unarmed state and capture it killing people by the thousands.
In Kashmir they sing a completely different tune. India follow only one policy: Might is right”. So much for India’s secularism and democracy. It always wants to trample on people’s wishes. What kind of a democracy is this.
Like US States, others must want to be a part of you not you impose yourself on them whether they like it or not. How long will people of India suffer and pay for the stupidity of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru?
@Umair and others… Dividing a place for two religious buildings need not necessarily divide the people. In the same state there are many religious places where hindus and muslims have their places of worship sharing the same walls.. Mathura and Banaras are a case in point. There have been very few riots at these places… perhaps not so much because of religious harmony but because of the fact that religion is a BIGGG business and nobody wants to go out of business there. The salesmen of salvation in Mathura and Banaras realized it soon after Ayodhya episode and have not paid even the lip service to the right wing BJP’s rhetoric of so called cleansing of these places.
As for Ayodhya, temple holds the same emotional attachment to the right wing BJP as Kashmir to Pakistan leadership… they will rent out for its construction but would be the last people to want it resolved since that takes away their one and only bargaining chip. It is now for the people to see through and beyond their game.
India has had it’s 9 minutes of fame where many of them actually started to believe when their leaders proclaimed super power status. I believe commonwealth games fiasco has shown the mirror to the naked emperor. Problem is, now every kid and everyone else is saying that the emperor has no clothes, but the emperor is still not ready to look down.