The promise of a secular Jinnah

Whether Jinnah wanted an Islamic state or a state for Muslims is as contested a subject as it gets. I will try to substantiate the latter by taking examples from his personal and political life, values, ideals, public statements and practices.

Jinnah went to London in 1892 to become a barrister. He took an active interest in the British political system and was influenced by English culture. As a fan of western liberalism, he was impressed by Prime Minister William Gladstone. While in London, he supported the Parsi Indian nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji [SB1]who ran for the British parliament and became the first Indian in the House of Commons. Jinnah, upon his return to India in 1896, started his legal practice in Bombay. He took a liking to Rattenbai, the daughter of a Parsi millionaire and married her in 1918, despite opposition. This goes to show he was not a rigid religious zealot or a bigot.

A firm believer in Hindu-Muslim unity, Jinnah initially joined the Congress to work towards that goal. He aspired to be the Muslim Gokhale, a prominent Indian liberal. On the establishment of the Muslim League in 1906, the Quaid dismissed its agenda drawing a comparison with British conspiracy to divide and rule. Later in 1913, he joined Muslim League and got Lucknow Pact to his credit in 1916. Jinnah was bestowed with the title “Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity” for his selfless efforts towards uniting people of India on one platform irrespective of their religious identity.

Even though ironic, it was actually Gandhi who first created division on the basis of religion and later became a beacon of secularism. He first used the religion card to support the Khilafat Movement and recruited Muslim fundamentalists and Hindu conservatives in the Congress which Jinnah was strongly opposed to and asserted that “it must lead to disaster.” He finally resigned from Congress in 1920 out of frustration over the divisive religio-political policies of Gandhi and Congress. Jinnah then used the platform of the Muslim League to propagate this vision of Muslim-Hindu unity and Indian nationalism.

Mohammad Ali Jinnah supported the “Inter-Faith Marriage Bill” and banned child marriages. Moreover, he was a part of the Fabian Society (The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow.) in England. Jinnah was impressed by Mustafa Kemal Attaturk who was a secular dictator, so much so that his daughter Dina nicknamed him “Grey Wolf” which was essentially Attaturk’s title. He was an Anglo-Saxon man at heart and his lifestyle is a clear manifestation of that.

Jinnah found himself in a quandary when on one hand, he wanted inter-faith unity rooted in Indian Nationalism and on the other, he needed to defend the interests of the Muslim minority of India. Eventually, he had to choose the latter after contemplating the power deficit that Muslims would have hypothetically faced in a united India under Hindu rule. The Quaid had realised that the Indian Muslim conundrum was not as much religious as it was political. Since he had already seen the indifference of the Hindu-led Congress towards Muslims’ demands, the Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution and laid the foundation for the creation of Pakistan.

Ayesha Jalal in her book, “The Sole Spokesman,” argues that Jinnah wanted to use Pakistan as a bargaining counter only and that in the later stages it was Congress that insisted on Partition while Jinnah was against it. According to her, Jinnah’s vision of Pakistan did not entail partition and it was not a Pan-Islamic call, rather a “secular polity with political choice and safeguards.”

When a Muslim Leaguer chanted the slogan “Pakistan ka matlab kya, La Ilaha Illallah” at the last session of the All India Muslim League, the Quaid-i-Azam refuted him and said: “Neither the Muslim League Working Committee nor I ever passed a resolution [called] ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya’ - you may have used it to catch a few votes.”

Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah expressed his desire to keep religion and state separate in his famous speech; “You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free to go to your mosques or to any other places 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.” In his address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 11, 1947, calling religion a personal matter, Jinnah assigned each citizen equal value, rights and responsibilities; “You will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the state.”

There are many examples of Jinnah appointing non-Muslims to important offices after the De Jure birth of Pakistan. One of them is Jogendranath Mandal who served as the country’s first minister of law and labour and also was the second minister of Commonwealth and Kashmir affairs. Sir M Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmedi, served as the first Foreign Minister of Pakistan. Jinnah warned against the threat of sectarianism. In a public meeting on March 21, 1948, he said: “Provincialism has been one of the curses; and so is sectionalism -Shia, Sunni, etc. You should think, live and act in terms that your country is Pakistan and you are a Pakistani.”

In contemporary Pakistan, religious bigotry, discrimination, extremism, sectarianism and violence are not only normalised but institutionalised. The weaponisation of religion by the state has become a Frankenstein that will not spare anyone, if not neutralised. Today, religious minorities cannot hold important official positions and they are shunned by the state. In our false and inflated sense of religious self-righteousness and pride, we have arrogantly disowned intellectual greats like Abdus Salam, Atif Mian, Pervez Hoodbhoy and others over religious differences.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan that persecutes people on religious grounds is not what the Quaid had envisioned and he would be very displeased to see where we are now. Jinnah did not struggle for a haven for Muslims only to witness the Muslim majority become the oppressor instead. Religion is for individuals, not for states. A state cannot have a religion since it is itself a socially constructed entity. Any social contract that brings people together should be based on the safeguard of equal rights and opportunities for all, regardless of petty racial, ethnic, linguistic or religious differences.

When states acquire a religion and legislate upon such divisive lines, incidents like the Sialkot mob lynching of Priyantha Kumara become inevitable. The only hope for a better, peaceful, inclusive, welfare-oriented future lies in the separation of religion and state. Blasphemy laws should be scrapped from the constitution as they aggravate the prevalent religious intolerance. Pakistanis have to be trained in a secular, democratic tradition and taught the wisdom in accepting and respecting diversity and tolerating differences of opinion. In this regard, awareness about the right of Freedom of Thought, Speech and Expression is indispensable.

--Areej Fatima is a graduate student of International Relations, a social activist and an independent analyst. She can be reached at: areejfatyma549@gmail.com