Pakistan Day

March 23 is Pakistan National Day which commemorates the day in 1940 when the idea of a separate nation was conceived. Seven years later, the nation gained independence as a sovereign state, and as a moderate Islamic country whose philosophies are based on peaceful ideals. Pakistan-Australia relationships have, historically, always been positive and progressive in a diverse range of economic, social, and sporting ties. I was fortunate to be in Pakistan for its National Day in 2002, six months after 9/11 and the evacuation of aid workers in the region. Below is an edited extract from “Kashmir on a Knife-Edge” (2011) detailing Pakistan’s rise to independence.

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Awoken to a twenty-one-gun salute, Jorja experienced Pakistan Day for the first time, celebrating the founding father of Pakistan, Mr. Muhammad Ali Jinnah. It was a public holiday as Pakistanis rejoiced in their freedom from India. During lunch, hotel staff educated Jorja on the meaning of their national day.

In the time of pre-partition India, before 1947, Jinnah, a brilliant lawyer, rose to the forefront of the struggle for a Muslim nation as India negotiated its independence from Britain. He was Muslim and proud of his ancestral heritage. He had a dream. The dream was a simple one: that Hindus and Muslims had a right to two separate nations within the subcontinent and were entitled to self-determination. The dream, steeped in ideologies and political rhetoric, gained many enemies at Jinnah’s insistence of a separate Muslim state.

Early in his political career, Jinnah was chiefly concerned with achieving independence for a unified India. Increasingly, however, he worried that British oppression would be replaced by Hindu oppression and continued subjugation of India's Muslim minority. In 1919, Jinnah turned his focus to Muslim interests. Over the next two decades, he became determined to continue the vocal ideas of Muslim poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal that Indian Muslims would someday have their own nation.

Iqbal, in his famous Allahabad address in 1930, began the dream. Jinnah made it a reality. By the late thirties, Jinnah, who had become leader of the Muslim League, convinced that a partition of India along religious lines was the only way to preserve Muslim political power, continued Iqbal’s dream. The demand for a separate nation for Muslims was primarily the result of religious nationalism, not of racial, linguistic, or territorial nationalism. In 1940, the Muslim League adopted the Lahore Resolution calling for separate autonomous states in majority-Muslim areas of northeastern and eastern India. Iqbal’s dream of a Muslim nationhood was at the macro level. Jinnah’s expression of Iqbal’s dream was at the micro level. Iqbal’s visions were ideological; Jinnah’s were grounded in realities. Iqbal provided the intellectual justification while Jinnah provided the political and territorial justification. The two addresses complemented each other and together they presented a composite and integrated concept of Muslim Nationhood that constituted the cornerstone of the Pakistani demand. Even so, the micro approach brought the concept within the realms of ordinary people. It helped establish emotional rapport between them and Jinnah’s leadership. This enabled the Muslim League, despite all odds, to sweep the polls in the 1945-46 general elections, taking seventy-five percent of the popular vote and eighty-five percent of Muslim seats. Jinnah’s approach had helped to make Muslim Nationhood a political reality that was difficult to ignore in any future constitutional settlement of the Indian problem.

Jinnah had listed five factors warranting the recognition of a Muslim Nationhood and the establishment of a Muslim state. In an address to the nation, he elucidated some of these factors, saying that Hindus and Muslims belonged to two different religious philosophies, social customs, and civilizations based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. They had different heroes, he said. Very often, the hero of one was a foe of the other and, likewise, their victories and defeats overlapped. Jinnah’s ideal concept of Pakistan was a call for an indivisible Pakistani Nationhood. All inhabitants, of all races, colors, or religions were to be fully-fledged citizens with equal rights, equal privileges, and equal obligations. While this seemed to oppose his views of Muslim Nationhood, he argued that the notion of full citizenship for all, for Muslims and non-Muslims, was in harmony with the Islamic pluralist tradition.

In 1946, against the rising tide of ethnic unrest, Jinnah demanded partition of India. Britain, eager to make a clean break with India, finally relented and Pakistan was born. Jinnah, however, did not live to see the development of his fledging country. He died of tuberculosis just thirteen months after the formation of Pakistan. Nevertheless, people agreed that Mohammad Ali Jinnah had significantly altered the course of history, modified the map of the world, and created a nation-state. To Pakistanis, Jinnah was revered, and became known as Quaid-e-Azam—Great Leader. He was their Washington, their de Gaulle, and their Churchill.

Islam came to provide the overarching set of values that constituted the ideologies of Pakistan, the source of public morality, social philosophy, and ethos. For Pakistan, the Objectives Resolution in 1949, an integral part of the Constitution, ensured these ideologies. The Objectives Resolution recognized, not the followers of a particular faith, but the people irrespective of their faith.