Nehru, the real founder of Pakistan

Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founder and the pantomime villain of India’s partition, appears to be more revered in the ‘old country’ than in the one which calls him ‘Quaid-i-Azam [Great Leader].’

A new biography by India’s former foreign minister Jaswant Singh has sought to restore his reputation in the Hindu-majority state by blaming India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru for the split and praising Jinnah as a secular federalist.

Its publication has divided Singh’s Hindu nationalist BJP and he has been expelled by the party for his ‘heresy.’ But it is Pakistan, rather than India, which needs reminding of what Jinnah stood for.

According to Mr Singh, Nehru was the villain of the piece - by undermining proposals for a more federal India, which set out devolved government for the Muslim majority areas now part of Pakistan and Bangladesh, he paved the road to partition on which more than a million people died.

Had Nehru not been so centralist in his outlook, Jinnah would have stayed within a confederal India, and Pakistan, the source of so many terrorist plots around the world today, might never have drawn breath.

The scheme which Jinnah supported as late as 1946 envisaged an India comprised of three groups: One, including the provinces of Pakistan together with a united Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, a united Bengal and Assam as another, and the remainder of Hindu-majority India as the third and largest. Each of the blocks would have powers over all internal matters, with defence and foreign affairs reserved for the centre.

Had it been accepted, the Kashmir dispute which remains one of the greatest sources of instability in the world, would not alarm us today, and the Pakistani Army which has undermined democracy and fuelled the rise of Islamic militancy would be a mere bad dream.

When the deal was undermined by Nehru’s manoeuvring, Jinnah carved out his Pakistan, and laid out a vision which would be a model for the Islamic world’s autocratic and dictatorial governments today.

In his speech to Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly, Jinnah told his new compatriots: “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 cast or creed, that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

My late friend, the Parsi National Assemblyman Minoo Bhandara, sought to amend Pakistan’s constitution to include this commitment to a democratic, secular state, but failed. Instead, and in defiance of Jinnah’s wishes, Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution, states: “Islam shall be the state religion of Pakistan.”

Today, this rejection of Jinnah gives comfort and cause to those who torch Christian churches, attack Ahmadi and Shia Muslims and ‘tax’ Hindus and Sikh merchants who chose Pakistan at partition.

The veteran Parsi commentator Ardeshir Cowasjee told me in Karachi last week of his campaign to overturn a scheme to require all prospective buyers in new housing developments to state their religion and even their sect within Islam. He said it was part of a plot to screen out all those not considered ‘true believers.’

It wasn’t what Jinnah had in mind, but then a prophet is rarely recognised in his own land.