Read Online B005OWFTDW EBOK by John Freeman - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Freeman
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where you are, whom you are meeting. The style of portrait will give clues as to how your host interprets the intentions of the founder, a lonely, ascetic and, by all accounts, brilliant, British-educated lawyer.
In most nations, there is energetic debate about the philosophy of the founders; sometimes over who among a group of prominent men was the true maker. There is no doubt about who was responsible for the birth of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. It was Jinnah who had argued for Pakistan, and who stood beside Mountbatten in the new legislature in Karachi to accept a message from King George welcoming Pakistan to the Commonwealth as a new independent nation. But there is ceaseless argument over what the founder intended, and the identity of Pakistan – secular nation or Islamic state – has been in dispute among its citizens ever since.
What did Jinnah envision? Did he wish for a homeland for Muslims, a secular country where they could practise their religion without discrimination, and where others could too? Or did he want Pakistan to be an ideological state committed exclusively to the practice of Islam? Did he even want a separate country from Hindu-dominated India? Maybe not. As historians comb the archives, and a small but increasing number of Pakistanis watch with envy as India surges ahead, it has become fashionable to argue that Jinnah used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.
An astute tactician, Jinnah never explicitly answered these vital questions. From 1938, he fought for Pakistan as a principle but provided few details, a tactic that allowed him to appeal to many kinds of Muslims – landlords, religious leaders, the urban elite, bureaucrats, villagers. There is little argument, however, that Jinnah was personally indifferent to his religion – he drank, smoked, ate pork. He was so unaware of the religious calendar that he planned the inauguration-day banquet for Pakistan as a luncheon even though it was Ramadan and the guests would be unable to eat. (It was eventually changed to a dinner.)
In his first speech to the newly independent country, Jinnah sounded the themes of a secular man. Like some upper-class Pakistanis today, he could not speak Urdu, the national language. In his patrician English accent, his voice ravaged by his daily habit of more than fifty Craven A cigarettes, Jinnah said: ‘You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place 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.’
When he took charge as Governor General in the new capital, the brutally hot seaside town of Karachi, he was terminally ill with tuberculosis and lung cancer. He died eleven months later aged seventy-one. He did not write an autobiography, and had few confidants. His wife had died of ill health ten years after they married. His constant companion, his sister Fatima, had little of substance to say during his life, although later she tried to keep the secular flame alive during a brief career as a politician.
The first year of Pakistan was marked by the staggering bloodletting that accompanied partition. The exchequer was empty. Experienced Muslim bureaucrats, some of whom had ruled large swathes of territory for the British in India and Burma in great style, arrived in Karachi to find not even desks and chairs for their makeshift offices.
Jinnah’s physical decline prevented him from taking on the usual role of founding father: galvanizing the people. He spent his last weeks sequestered in the clear air of remote Baluchistan, his body a skeleton of less than eighty pounds. When his doctors agreed to fly him back to Karachi so he could die in dignity, Jinnah lay in the plane gasping for air from oxygen canisters. The ambulance that took him from the airport to Government House
In most nations, there is energetic debate about the philosophy of the founders; sometimes over who among a group of prominent men was the true maker. There is no doubt about who was responsible for the birth of Pakistan on 14 August 1947. It was Jinnah who had argued for Pakistan, and who stood beside Mountbatten in the new legislature in Karachi to accept a message from King George welcoming Pakistan to the Commonwealth as a new independent nation. But there is ceaseless argument over what the founder intended, and the identity of Pakistan – secular nation or Islamic state – has been in dispute among its citizens ever since.
What did Jinnah envision? Did he wish for a homeland for Muslims, a secular country where they could practise their religion without discrimination, and where others could too? Or did he want Pakistan to be an ideological state committed exclusively to the practice of Islam? Did he even want a separate country from Hindu-dominated India? Maybe not. As historians comb the archives, and a small but increasing number of Pakistanis watch with envy as India surges ahead, it has become fashionable to argue that Jinnah used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.
An astute tactician, Jinnah never explicitly answered these vital questions. From 1938, he fought for Pakistan as a principle but provided few details, a tactic that allowed him to appeal to many kinds of Muslims – landlords, religious leaders, the urban elite, bureaucrats, villagers. There is little argument, however, that Jinnah was personally indifferent to his religion – he drank, smoked, ate pork. He was so unaware of the religious calendar that he planned the inauguration-day banquet for Pakistan as a luncheon even though it was Ramadan and the guests would be unable to eat. (It was eventually changed to a dinner.)
In his first speech to the newly independent country, Jinnah sounded the themes of a secular man. Like some upper-class Pakistanis today, he could not speak Urdu, the national language. In his patrician English accent, his voice ravaged by his daily habit of more than fifty Craven A cigarettes, Jinnah said: ‘You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place 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.’
When he took charge as Governor General in the new capital, the brutally hot seaside town of Karachi, he was terminally ill with tuberculosis and lung cancer. He died eleven months later aged seventy-one. He did not write an autobiography, and had few confidants. His wife had died of ill health ten years after they married. His constant companion, his sister Fatima, had little of substance to say during his life, although later she tried to keep the secular flame alive during a brief career as a politician.
The first year of Pakistan was marked by the staggering bloodletting that accompanied partition. The exchequer was empty. Experienced Muslim bureaucrats, some of whom had ruled large swathes of territory for the British in India and Burma in great style, arrived in Karachi to find not even desks and chairs for their makeshift offices.
Jinnah’s physical decline prevented him from taking on the usual role of founding father: galvanizing the people. He spent his last weeks sequestered in the clear air of remote Baluchistan, his body a skeleton of less than eighty pounds. When his doctors agreed to fly him back to Karachi so he could die in dignity, Jinnah lay in the plane gasping for air from oxygen canisters. The ambulance that took him from the airport to Government House
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