As discussed below and was dealt with in the article in this space last week, of Pakistan’s four immediate neighbours, three have chosen to be governed by whichever faith most of their citizens were following. Afghanistan and Iran have adopted extremist Islam as the governing philosophy – with the former opting for Sunni extremism, and the latter for extremist Shiism. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is building a Hindu nation by adopting what it calls Hindutva. It has also changed the name of the country to Bharat. Why did Pakistan not go in this direction?
To answer this question, we need to go back into history and discuss the origins of Pakistan as a nation-state. The movement for the expulsion of Britain from the Indian sub-continent was led by a group of Indian leaders, Hindus and Muslims, who were educated in British institutions and mostly studied law. The most prominent of these was Mohandas Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Both belonged to small business communities in the Western part of British India. Gandhi was from the state of Gujarat and Jinnah form across the border In the Province of Sindh. Having studied law, they returned to India but did not join the legal profession. Jinnah worked for a while as a lawyer and built a successful practice in Bombay, now called Mumbai, for a while but then switched to politics. While Gandhi wanted Britain to leave the large colony over which they had ruled for centuries, Jinnah wanted to protect the rights and cultures of the large Muslim minority.
Had Winston Churchill who had led Britain during the Second World War continued as his country’s prime minister, he would not have accepted the Indian leadership’s demand for independence. But he and the Tory Party that he led lost the elections in 1945, and Clement Attlee of the opposition Labour Party became the prime minister. From the time he took over as the country’s leader, he declared his intention to quit India. To get Britain out of India, he appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten, a distinguished member of the British Royal Family, to become India’s last Viceroy and plan to hand over the governance of the large colony to the Indian leadership.
Mountbatten arrived in New Delhi with the mission to transfer the government to the Indian leadership but that turned out to be a more difficult task than he believed would be the case when he accepted the assignment. The Indian political system was divided into three large groups: the Indian National Congress, (INC), the All-India Muslim League (AIML) and the Akali Dal (AD). The INC was dominated by the leaders belonging to the large Hindu community which in the late 1940s was estimated to number 300 million or 75 per cent of the total; close to 25 per cent were Muslims; and a small number was made up of the Sikh community based almost entirely in the province of Punjab. The INC wanted monopoly of power once the British went home while the Muslim community wanted to protect its way of life in independent India which would be dominated by the more numerous community.
Jinnah, the AIML leader, proposed sharing of power between Hindus and Muslims but the formula he proposed was not acceptable to the Hindu leadership. That led him to demand the establishment of a country that would serve the social, political and economic interests of the Muslim community. Were such a country to be founded it should be called Pakistan, suggested Rahmat Ali, a Muslim student enrolled in Cambridge University. Pakistan, of course meant the “land of the pure”, but the political entity Jinnah wanted to found had nothing to do with the Islamic faith. That was the reason why Pakistan’s creation was opposed by Jamaat-e-Islami, led by Maulana Maududi who wanted Pakistan to be the central state in what he wanted to establish as the “Muslim Ummah” made up of the countries with Muslim majorities.
However, from the very beginning, Jinnah made it clear that he was seeking to establish a Muslim state, not an Islamic state. This he made clear in a speech he delivered on August, 11, 1947 at the Constituent Assembly which was to draft a constitution for the new country. He spoke of an inclusive and impartial government, religious freedom and equality for all. It was made clear that Jinnah had worked hard not to create a country with a state religion. In such a country, there cannot be serious departures from the practices made explicit by the state religion. Even in such a state, the government permits religious practices of other communities besides those who belong to the state religion. It does not persecute believers in other faiths or those who have no faith at all.
Jinnah died soon after the creation of Pakistan. His successor, Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated in 1951 while he was speaking at a public park. These two deaths left serious political space which eleven years after the creation on Pakistan was occupied by the military. In October 1958, General Ayub Khan assumed control of the country and imposed martial law. In 1962, he gave the country a constitution that did not give special status to religion in governance. In fact, the main feature of the constitution was considerable power given to local councils. They were part of a multi-tiered system in which the members of the lowest tier, called the Union Councils, were directly elected by the people.
Ayub Khan had three military successors who together ruled the country for 33 years. All but General Zia Ul Haq were secular minded. But even Zia’s attempt to bring religion into governance was weak and did not survive his death in a plane crash in 1988.