Pakistan: False Foundations

There is only one way out. Muslims should strengthen Jinnah’s hands. They should join the Muslim League. Indian question, as is now being solved, can be countered by our united front against both the Hindus and the English. Without it our demands are not going to be accepted. People say our demands smack of communalism. This is sheer propaganda. These demands relate to the defense of our national existence. The united front can be formed under the leadership of the Muslim League. And the Muslim League can succeed only on account of Jinnah. Now none but Jinnah is capable of leading the Muslims.

—Sir Muhammad Iqbal (1938)1

We maintain and hold that Muslims and Hindus are two major nations by any definition or test of a nation. We are a nation of hundred million and what is more, we are a nation with our own distinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, names and nomenclature, sense of values and proportions, legal laws and moral codes, customs and calendar, history and tradition, and aptitude and ambitions. In short, we have our own outlook on life and of life.

—Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1944)2

Islam is not only a religious doctrine but also a realistic code of conduct in terms of every day and everything important in life: our history, our laws and our jurisprudence. In all these things, our outlook is not only fundamentally different but also opposed to Hindus. There is nothing in life that links us together. Our names, clothes, food, festivals, and rituals, all are different. Our economic life, our educational ideas, treatment of women, attitude towards animals, and humanitarian considerations, all are very different.

—Muhammad Ali Jinnah3

Pakistan is teetering on the brink of becoming a failed state. As the Taliban continues to use the territory of our supposed ally as a sanctuary, a Pakistani version of the group has sprung up to wreak vengeance within Pakistan itself. Horrifying massacres and suicide bombings which would have been unthinkable a decade ago have become commonplace. The political system blunders through scandals, corruption, and popular illegitimacy. Foreign policy has become a duplicitous and confusing riddle with the government promising one thing while non-state actors agitate for another—above all, for yet another war with India. What’s worse, this unstable country is not only a breeding ground for jihadist terrorism, it is armed with nuclear weapons. In short, Pakistan is more of a clear and present danger to the United States and the world than Iraq and Afghanistan ever were.

Adding to the confusion and misunderstanding surrounding Pakistan, its government continues to hold to an absurd public narrative of being a victimized and abandoned hero. Typical of this narrative is a 2008 speech by then-Pakistani President Zardari in which he traced modern terrorism to the Afghan-Soviet war, declaring, “We are not the cause of the problem of terrorist, we are its victims. We are an aggrieved nation, not one that has caused grief. We have fought this battle largely alone.”4 What Zardari’s speech neglected to mention was the central role Pakistan has played in training, funding, directing, and supporting jihadists before, during, and after that war. Current Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has continued to stick to the narrative, deceitfully claiming in Washington, D.C. that “Pakistan is neither the source nor the epicenter of terrorism as is sometimes alleged.”5

While most Western analysts would readily point out the convenient gaps and easy hypocrisy in Pakistan’s official narrative, many would agree with Zardari in tracing the Afghan-Soviet war as the root of Pakistan’s looming failure. As we shall see in this chapter, however, the roots lie much deeper—in fact, they lie in the very foundations of Pakistan. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is and has always been bound up in its very essence and identity with the cause of jihad.

Western observers unfamiliar with Pakistan’s origins and history are often led to believe that virulent Islamic ideology is an artificial import. Operating within Western assumptions, they fall into a binary logic where Islamic militancy is associated with military usurpation while hopes for reform are connected to the rule of law and democratically-elected governments. As the history of Pakistan demonstrates, though, democratic politics there have always been mired in arbitrary decision-making and Faustian bargains with Islamic radicalism. Civilian leaders have been just as responsible as their military counterparts for the institutionalization of jihad. To gain a proper understanding of Pakistan’s predicament, as well as the threat it poses to the international community, we must go back to its foundations.

TWO-NATION THEORY AND THE PARTITION OF INDIA

At the start of the 20th century, there was no Pakistan. The Indian subcontinent was under the political administration of the British Raj. The majority of the population was Hindu, with a sizable Muslim minority. Toward the end of the 19th century there was a growing call among the Indian people for greater say in their own affairs. In 1885 the Indian National Congress (INC) was formed with the objective of getting more educated Indians involved in the government. Over time, this objective developed into a call for independence from the United Kingdom.

As interest in independence grew in the Raj, an ideology began to take hold among well-educated Indian Muslims called the two-nation theory. This theory held that the people of the Indian subcontinent were defined primarily by their religion, not by language or ethnicity. Muslims in the Raj, according to this theory, shared more in common with Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula than they shared with the Hindus whom they lived among. Therefore, proponents argued, it wasn’t enough for India to become independent. It would also have to be split apart, with one nation for the Muslims and another for the Hindus. The two-nation theory had two significant and influential champions, men who would later come to be regarded as founding fathers of Pakistan: Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The primary political vehicle for the two-nation theory was the All-India Muslim League. Founded in 1906 by urban Muslim elites keen on defending their interests, the League would become vital in the real-world application of the two-nation theory.6 Iqbal was the first President of the League, and also the first to fully articulate the two-nation theory during an address to the League in 1930:

I would like to see the Punjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Sindh and Baluchistan amalgamated into a single state … the formation of a consolidated North-Western Indian Muslim State appears to me the final destiny of the Muslims, at least of North-West India.7

Jinnah, who joined the league in 1913, would turn Iqbal’s tentative hope into a robust political platform—even going so far as to claim that “religion alone is a cohesive force for the idea of nationality.”8

Jinnah’s conception of national identity is open to several serious objections. While religion is certainly a crucial element of national identity, in no other modern nation on earth is it the sole element.9 Furthermore, his division of India into Muslim and Hindu populations completely ignored Christian and Sikh minorities. If it was impossible, as he argued, for Hindus and Muslims to share a national identity, why should Sikhs and Christians be consigned to places within Muslim or Hindu nation-states? If Muslims and Hindus could not possibly reconcile, how could Muslims in geographically distinct areas form a coherent whole? As later events showed, the practical realities behind Jinnah’s assumptions about nationality were ticking time bombs.

Jinnah and the two-nation theory might have come to nothing were it not for World War II. By 1940, the Muslim League was adept at playing both sides—siding with the Indian National Congress when it came to extracting concessions of autonomy from the British, then currying favor with the British to support their interest in a sectarian partition of India.10 During the war, the Muslim-majority Bengal was a gateway to be defended to keep the Japanese out of India. Jinnah and the Muslim League cooperated willingly with the British while the Indian National Congress (INC) launched a tone-deaf and fruitless “Quit India” campaign.

As a result, the INC’s leaders spent much of the war years in jail, during which time the Muslim League filled the positions of responsibility they vacated. By war’s end, the League had increased its political power as well as its prestige and credibility with the British. Although the Muslims of India were not particularly supportive of the League (1937 election results showed Muslims voting along lines of ethnic and political interests rather than on the basis of religion),11 the British had grown receptive to the League’s position regarding a partition.

After the War, Jinnah and the League were in a strong position to advance their interest in partition. Learning its lesson from 1937, the League focused its 1945-6 election campaign almost entirely on Islamist rhetoric.12 The approach successfully generated religious fervor among the people, winning 75 percent of the Muslim vote (about 15 percent of the total population was eligible to vote). This confirmed the League as the unequivocal representative of Indian Muslims and persuaded the British to grant their central demand for a separate nation-state.13 The Socialist government which came into power in post-war Britain was particularly eager to expedite the withdrawal from India. In 1947, the Raj was ended and the nation of Pakistan was born.

Jinnah’s role in the creation of Pakistan was absolutely essential. After the 1945-6 election, he was seen as the foremost champion of the Muslim population. Since 1940 he had been adamant and inflexible in his insistence on a separate country for Muslims as the two-nation theory demanded. But at the creation of Pakistan in 1947 Jinnah was already gravely ill with tuberculosis. He would be dead just over a year later. Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy in India, later confessed that if he had known about Jinnah’s illness he would have delayed the partition of British India.

The political success of Jinnah and the League masked a complex reality. The leaders of the Islamic separatist movement, Jinnah included, were primarily secularists who had gained power among the masses with the cry of “Islam in danger.”14 As the movement for partition gained momentum and practical success, it was forced to become theoretically as well as actively and rhetorically Islamic.15 Then, as the abstract demands of the two-nation theory became a territorial and political reality, religious fervor devolved into violence and chaos.

Since the two-nation theory placed religion above all else in the formation of the state, British authorities were left with little more than census data when it came to the practical partition of the Raj. New national frontiers were drawn up according to relative percentages of Hindu and Muslim populations. Accordingly, the ancient provinces of Bengal and the Punjab found themselves joined together in a new Pakistani nation. Separated by 800 miles of Indian soil, with only the bare name of “Muslim” connecting them, these two distinct territories were expected to coalesce as a single nation.

Upon creation of Pakistan, Jinnah gave voice to his curious vision of a liberal, secular state that was nevertheless founded upon religion. He declared to his new people:

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 place of Pakistan, you may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.16

By contrast, Muhammad Iqbal realized from the very beginning that Pakistan’s foundation in religion meant that religion would be essential to its very survival and identity:

Your solidarity rests on the strength of your religion. When faith slips away, where is the solidarity of your community? And when the community is no more, neither is the nation.17

Of the two founders, Iqbal was the more perceptive and prophetic—but without Jinnah there would never even have been a Pakistan.

However, the record shows quite clearly that Jinnah was a hypocrite. The “Great Leader” of Indian Muslims was not even a practicing Muslim himself. He did not attend mosque regularly, and was not even familiar with the basic rituals for prayer. He did not keep a fast during the month of Ramadan, and, despite being extremely wealthy, he did not perform the hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca required at least once of practicing Muslims). Jinnah kept up a smoking habit of about 50 cigarettes a day, drank alcohol, and ate pork. To make matters worse, at least from the perspective of Sunni Pakistan, his family was Ismaili Shia.18

When he was 42, Jinnah fell in love with the 16-year-old daughter of a Parsee friend of his in Mumbai, Rattanbai “Ruttie” Petit. Over the objections of her family, they married when Ruttie turned 18. Although she converted to Islam in order to marry Jinnah, Ruttie continued to dress western-style in public. Jinnah was mocked by orthodox Muslims at the time, who said he had abandoned Islam for the sake of an infidel woman.

Jinnah’s family also reveals his very tenuous connection to Islam. His grandfather was a Hindu convert. His only child, daughter Dina Jinnah, grew up to marry a Parsee Christian who later returned to Zoroastrianism. Their son, Nusli Wadia, is a businessman in India. He has two children who are Zoroastrian Indians. The family of the father of the Islamic nation-state seems to have no remaining connection to Islam. Dina herself remained in India after the partition and later moved to New York City, where she has lived for many years. In 2008, she sued for the right to inherit Jinnah’s expansive home in Mumbai.

Amazingly, in Dina’s lawsuit she even claimed that Islamic law did not apply to her father’s estate:

According to Dina, her father was a Khoja Muslim and this sect followed the Hindu law and not the sharia. Hence, the Hindu Succession law that leaves property to his daughter would be applicable and not the Islamic law where the deceased’s sibling also have a right over the property.19

From his life, it is clear that Jinnah’s use of the two-nation theory was opportunistic. He had no difficulty participating in “infidel” British culture in order to obtain a law degree, with which he became very wealthy. He certainly fought to retain his connections to Indian society, such as Jinnah House in Mumbai, when it suited him to do so: he wrote a letter to Jawaharlal Nehru begging him to preserve the house. Not a practicing Muslim himself, Jinnah used Islam and the two-nation theory to gain political power and make a name for himself as the founder of Pakistan. But while Pakistan’s founder may have been a secular man, its future lay in the embrace of Islam at its most radical.