Dear Mr. Jinnah

Dear Mr. Jinnah,

I don’t think I ever got down to thanking you for your efforts in helping form Pakistan. I was born thirty-six years after you and a team of dedicated, patriotic and self-less leaders inspired the Muslims of India to separate themselves in pursuit of an independent nation. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives so that future generations like mine can live in a sovereign state. Thank you.

Things now aren’t as great as you visioned them to be though.

The religion you made the basis for separation is now divided within itself. It’s being abused, sabotaged and exploited by everyone who has the capability to do so. Islam meant peace. Now, it’s being cited as the root of everything otherwise.

The poor, helpless people whose rights you fought for aren’t poor or helpless anymore. They have become poor-er and more helpless.

You remember the overly rich and greedy people of your time? They still roam dauntlessly, sucking the blood of the common man and giving him nothing in return but grief, sickness and death.

There is no faith. There is no unity. There is no discipline.

The Creative Process of Founding a State

 

 

I

This paper suggests that the creation of a State by its very nature is not the work of one man. It is a joint product of a number of historical forces. The great man –the Quaid-i-Azam – who played a dominant role was himself conditioned by certain historical forces. There was not one Jinnah but at least two. There was the Jinnah of the early phase, which lasted until late thirties or even very early forties. The Jinnah of this phase was almost entirely constitutional or the rational or the westernized and aloof Jinnah. Jinnah in his second phase has been transformed by the current of Muslim mass support for the idea of a separate Muslim state.

The other major conceptual component of this paper is the idea of the founder of a state as distinct (analytically) from a leader of a nationalist movement like Gandhi or a visionary or a dreamer or a philosopher like Iqbal. These qualities of combining values and institutions are demonstrated in the personality of the founder of a state like the Quaid-i-Azam. Finally, we should try to distinguish between creating a new state on the structures of old or existing institutions, and creating a revolutionary state. In the former certain new values are grafted on the old or existing institutions. The result is dialectical struggle between the power of entrenched institutions in absorbing or subverting new values and the capacity and vigour of new values in transforming old or existing institutions. In the case of a revolutionary state, new values create new institutions.

A Set of Rare Pictures of The Quaid-e-Azam

Why The Quaid-e-Azam Left Congress

In 1913 the Quaid-i-Azam joined the All India Muslim League without abandoning the membership of the Congress of which he had been an active member for some years. But this membership of the two organizations ended in December 1920. On the occasion of the special session at Nagpur the Congress adopted a new creed which permitted the use of unconstitutional means and decided to resort to non-violent non-co-operation for the attainment of self-government. The new policy and programme in essence envisaged withdrawal of the students from schools and colleges, boycott of law-courts by lawyers and litigants as well as the impending elections to the legislatures under the Government of India act 1919 either as voters or as candidates.1 The new philosophy of the Congress had been shaped almost entirely under the influence of Gandhi who had, by then, emerged as a commanding figure in Congress politics. Although there were many prominent Congressmen such as C.R. Das and Lala Lajpat Rai who did not subscribe to the programme of non-co-operation2, Jinnah was the only one in a crowd of several thousand people who openly expressed serious disagreement.

Quaid-e-Azam Par Buhtaan Laganay Walay [Urdu article]

!!!قائد اعظم پر بہتان لگانے والے

The Quaid: A Brilliant Statesman

Pakistan, the beacon of hope for the Muslims of South Asia and beyond, was created under the leadership of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. He was not a traditional politician but a great leader, brilliant statesman and a master strategist, who fought the case for Pakistan so well that he did not only frustrate the designs of the British that wished to see the subcontinent united at one form or another till the last moment, but also made the brute Hindu majority believe that division of the subcontinent had saved it from some bigger catastrophe. He had united the Muslims of the subcontinent and waged struggle for a separate homeland for Muslims to rid them of brute majority’s exploitation and repression and also to enable them to lead their lives according to their faith and culture. This twin-objective is, in fact, is the ideology of Pakistan.

Our leaders should emulate Quaid-i-Azam who had united the people who were earlier divided on the basis of sects and ideologies. The Muslims of the subcontinent had reposed full confidence in him and accepted his concept and perception of the new state – Pakistan. Today, the myriad political and religious parties, intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals have variegated views and perceptions, and there is ongoing debate for the last 62 years about the purpose and rationale behind the creation of Pakistan. Different schools of thought interpret Quaid-i-Azam’s speeches to serve their ends, but Quaid-i-Azam had envisioned Pakistan to be a modern progressive state, rooted in the eternal values of Islam, and at the same time responsive to the imperatives of constant change.

Moments of joy with Jinnah

By S Khalid Husain

‘Packard’! the cry would go up, and we would rush to the roadside as Jinnah’s yellow Packard glided by with him, immaculately turned out as always, in the backseat.

This was New Delhi in early 1947, and the place: the India Gate grounds – where we played cricket every evening. We, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim schoolboys from St Columbus, would prance and frolic, as Jinnah watched with half-amused smile. His finger would then rise to his lips and the prancing and frolicking would immediately cease.

Early 1947 was the period Mountbatten had just become viceroy, and was ‘waging’ negotiations with Congress and Muslim League leaders at a hectic pace. Jinnah’s Packard would often be seen driving to, or from, the Vice Regal lodge, the viceroy’s residence, as would also Liaquat Ali Khan’s black Mercury, or Nehru’s limousine. We would rush to the roadside every time any one of these cars was spotted and, frankly, not too respectfully, prance and frolic. Jinnah raising his finger to his lips would silence us, Liaquat Ali Khan gave us what clearly was a ‘not amused’ stare, Nehru would put on his famous faraway look, as if we were not there.

Iqbal & Jinnah on Palestine

In 712 A.D. Hajjaj bin Yusuf Saqafi despatched Muhammad bin Qasim at the head of an expeditionary force to punish Dahir of Sind. That Hindu Raja had shown recalcitrance and behaved with impunity when warned not to neglect the safe passage of Hajis along the coastal strip of his territories. The young arab general won the first Muslim foothold on the Subcontinent. But it was a long time before torrent after torrent of Muslim conquerors from Afghanistan and Central Asia swept down the passes of the North-West Frontier. Thus, established Muslim rule in the Subcontinent continued in varying power and glory for about a thousand years. For in 1707 A.D. when Aurangzeb died, almost all India was under Muslim sway.

Early in the seventeenth century the British came to the Subcontinent by sea, appearing as merchants, and, favoured by Mughal generosity, they established trading posts mostly on and near the western coasts. A century and a half later they were in the thick of the power struggle going on the replace the declining Mughal authority. Through conspiracy, force and fraud, they grabbed, annexed and transacted Muslim principalities and Muslim territories wherever they lay, in Bengal in the east, in Oudh in the north, in Mysore in the sourth and in Sind in the west. The first big blow came 50 years after Aurangzeb, in 1757, when Nawab Sirajuddaulah lost the day against the English at Plassey in Bengal, and the last one 150 years after Aurangzeb, in 1857, when the last Mughal emperor, Sirajuddin Bahadurshah Zafar, lay prostrate at Delhi, watching helplessly the massacre of his children and appearing as a rare-show in the bazaars of his capital before being exiled to Rangoon in Burma where he died and was buried.

The British rise to power in the Subcontinent was marked by two perennial factors: first, their inveterate hostility to Islam and the Muslim which they shared with the other Christian countries of Europe since their defeat at the hands of Sultan Salahuddin in 1187 A.D. and, secondly, the ready and steady cooperation which the Hindu, having been ruled by the Muslim for a thousand years, extended to the British. Thus while the British built up and boosted the Hindu in every field and by every means, they put down and ruined the Muslim everywhere and in alt possible ways; and the Hindu, paying off old scores, has often on the side of the British and pitted against the Muslim. The most heinous outrage that this British-Hindu combine perpetrated was the sale-deed of Kashmir. In 1946 the British struck a deal with Gulab Singh, a Dogra Hindu of Jammu, to give him possession of that beautiful land, with its 80% Muslim population (now about 6,500,000) and its area well over 180,000 sq. km., for a cash payment of 15,000,000 rupees. A people and their homeland transacted as a common piece of landed property. It was an enormity, a most monstrous crime against humanity; Allama Muhammad Iqbal, himself of Kashmiri stock, cried out some eighty years[1]

Wood and stream and field and ploughman, And a nation into the bargain,

Without o’er a scruple or shudder,

All they sold for filthy lucre,

Thank you Mohammad Ali Jinnah

By Ali Sukhanver

December 25 of every year reminds me of a marvelous philosophical saying; Life is like a tennis match. If you want to win, you must serve well, return well and play coolly. Always remember that the game begins with Love all; this saying freshens my mind with the memories of all those who conquered this world with the sword of love and affection, particularly of the Holy Christ and Mr. Mohammed Ali Jinnah., no doubt two immortal personalities; one who brought the heavenly message of benevolence and kindheartedness for the whole humanity and the other who gave a new life to the ever-crushed and ever-trampled Muslims of the Indian Sub-continent. He proved that it is not the history which makes the people immortal; it is their determination and the commitment to their goal which transforms them into the eternal.

Mr. Mohammed Ali Jinnah gave the Muslims of the un-partitioned India a separate identity and an undeniable recognition. In July 1942 a journalist from the American press asked him whether the Muslims were a nation or not. Jinnah replied in his typical tone full of resolve and determination,

“We are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and traditions, aptitudes and ambitions, in short, we have our own distinctive outlook on life and of life. By all cannons of international law we are a nation.” 

Is the dark, long night about to end?

“Few individuals significantly alter the course of history,” wrote Stanley Wolpert in the preface to his book on Mr Jinnah. “Fewer still modify the map of the world. Hardly anyone can be credited with creating a nation-state. Mohammad Ali Jinnah did all three.” By 1940, the mystical bond linking Jinnah and the people was so profound that nobody could challenge Jinnah’s leadership of the Muslims of India. He was their sole spokesman.

Beverly Nichols, who first met Mr Jinnah on December 18, 1943, called him a giant, the most important man in Asia. “India is likely to be the world’s greatest problem for some years to come, and Mr Jinnah is in a position of unique strategic importance. He can sway the battle this way or that as he chooses. His 100 million Muslims will march to the left, to the right, to the front, to the rear at his bidding and at nobody else’s… that is the point.” Without Jinnah, it is safe to say, there would have been no Pakistan. Rarely, in the history of human endeavour, have so many owed so much to one, single, solitary person.