Jinnah’s legacy

Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s 136th birthday

and the Christian community’s Christmas yesterday were commemorated/celebrated under a pall of gloom, uncertainty, fear and insecurity that has the country in its grip. Without getting into the controversy of the nuances surrounding what kind of Pakistan Mr Jinnah envisaged, the minimum consensus probably acceptable to most if not all schools of thought is that he wished for a democratic welfare state without discrimination against any section of the people, especially minorities, and in which religion would be the private affair of the individual citizen and have nothing to do with the business of the state. In the context of the religious divide that preceded and accompanied the partition of the subcontinent as it achieved independence, many partisan and motivated schools of thought have sought valediction of their own interpretations of what Jinnah wanted Pakistan to be in one or the other of Mr Jinnah’s statements over the years, none of which suggest that he went beyond basing himself on the most egalitarian principles enunciated in Islam. He certainly made clear that Pakistan would not be a theocratic state to be ruled by mullahs with a divine mission. Yet 65 years after it came into existence, Pakistan resembles Jinnah’s vision only in the breach. Jihadi terrorism seeks precisely to turn Pakistan into a theocracy based on the narrowest possible interpretation of religion, rooted in the Wahabbi/Salafist purist, literalist tradition that most other schools of thought in Islam disagree with, especially in the subcontinent, home to a vibrant, tolerant, inclusive Sufi culture. These fanatics and their fellow travellers want to finish off all other denominations within Islam, whether Barelvi (Sufi shrines have been attacked over the years), Shia (declared deserving of being murdered), or religious minorities (Christians celebrated Christmas while cowering in fear, Ahmedis and Hindus are suffering attacks, graveyard desecration, forced conversions and marriages, etc). How would Mr Jinnah have viewed our present state and predicament? And how did we come to this pass? Mr Jinnah’s enlightened, modern, moderate views on the kind of state and society he wanted Pakistan to be were overtaken soon after his death by the pressure from the mainstream religious lobby to overturn Mr Jinnah’s vision. The first blow may have been the Objectives Resolution in 1949, but this opened the gates to a steady, irreversible turning of the state first and foremost into an increasingly religiously oriented entity. General Ziaul Haq delivered the coup de grace to the remains of Mr Jinnah’s project and went further in facilitating the rise of religiosity throughout society. That and the Afghan involvement caused whatever dams or obstacles remained in the path of the extremist jihadi ideology to be burst or cast asunder one by one. As a result, today’s Pakistan is under siege from the fanatical terrorists. If any further proof of this assertion is needed, the assassination of ANP’s senior Khyber Pakhtunkhwa minister Bashir Bilour should clinch the argument beyond doubt. ANP’s Chief Minister Hoti and party head Asfandyar Wali Khan have in the midst of their grief at the fall of their close comrade, appealed to the political forces throughout the country to consult each other on the way forward. The ANP’s view is that it is time the political forces and the other institutions of state come to a consensus on the need for decisive action against the terrorists. This means not sitting passively in defensive mode waiting for the terrorists to wreak their havoc but to actively seek out and destroy the terrorists’ sanctuaries in the wild and woolly tribal areas while proactively rooting them out of the cities and the rest of the country through sustained, coordinated intelligence and police work, backed up with the firepower where needed of the paramilitaries and even the regular army. Without this political consensus behind the effort, the military may not feel inspired to go the whole hog, despite the losses it and the other security forces are suffering at the hands of the terrorists. Political ownership and a strategically coordinated effort is the only way whatever is left of Mr Jinnah’s legacy can be rescued from the pit of oblivion it is threatened with.