'Constitutionally' Different Neighbours

You took a lot of words - some long ones, too - to say something which is as simple as the follows:

The Pakistani crowds screwed up.

They got carried away by their religious prejudice and followed false messiahs like blind goats.

No matter what spin anybody puts on it - a screw-up is a screw-up.

And unless the crowds see it for what it was - they will continue to roam around dazed.

There was no need for such a technical jargon. Simple things are simple afterall.

Both the countries started off on different planes. As pointed out by the author, the untimely death of Jinnah made things worse for Pakistan because after him there was nobody who could steer the country to any particular direction. That was not the case with India where Nehru lived for quite long and by the time he died, he had cast the die on which future India was to develop.

Secondly, Independent India arrived after a careful planning and struggle of almost half a century. The concept of Pakistan was newer and it took birth suddenly. The picture of independent India was fairly clear in the minds of the leaders much before she actually got independence. Whereas , for Pakistan, it was not sure till the end whether it will take birth at all or not. It arrived suddenly.

Thirdly, Pakistan did not inherit a strong and robust bureaucratic setup from the British the way India did. This was its major weakness. It was , is and is likely to remain a loose federation of different set of peoples, though united under one flag but disunited otherwise.

Fourthly, Pakistan had a choice between a Democratic State and an Islamic State whereas India had no such choice. It had to survive as a democratic state.

And lastly, the British controlled India through their army. Post independence, the same legacy/temptation must have continued in both the armies. Since India was very large for Indian Army to control, the Indian Army did not work on that area further. But Pakistan was smaller in size and could be controlled, Pakistani Army went ahead to control it and still continues to do so.

Savial Hussain,

Is this a research paper or what (which you have submitted to some refereed journal for publication ?). Your language is the typical academic research type.

The summary ?
``in 1947, muslims(especially the elite) guided by the intellect of JINNAH & OTHER ELITE in india put their bet on the wrong horse``

By the way, Jinnah thought that he understood HINDOOOOO psyche very well just because he was associated for long with hinduuu congress.

But what was his understanding of the MUSLIM psyche especially of the muslim elite like the nawabs, the feudals , muslim salariat & the general muslim masses ? He always travelled 1st class in railways. why ? ......to avoid any contact with the masses !

A well known Marathi Author who had the oppurtunity to interact with Jinnah in the last 10 years a number of times has mentioned in one of his books that Jinnah`s reading habits was limited strictly to 2 areas (1)indian politics (2)Law. He was practically zero in other dimensions of humanities.

Muslims expected such a 1 Dimensional Brain of Jinnah to guide them thru the crucial years of 1940s ? Jinnah had a very clear idea as to HOW TO CARVE OUT PAKISTAN OUT OF INDIA. But practically no CLEAR IDEA AS TO HOW TO BUILD A NATION ?

Some of his post 1947 ramblings talk about seeking guidance directly from islamic faith itself !!!! completly nebulous reasoning !

good points sanjay,

i always pointed to the first three you mentioned for why pakistan has been ``screwed up``, but the reason i gave for the army being so much in control is that due to the near war conflict situation that pakistan has had with india, the institutions in pakistan have been more stongly effected and have been yunable to cope with it. whereas in india due to the first tree reasons mentions, institutions were stronger and survived.

hence the pakistan army is the only institution that constantly thrived and was the primary institute and the one strong enough to challenge the politics of the country.

only in the past 5-6 years has there been any strong movement to promote constitution building.

SAVAIL, good article but you went into too much detail. chowkies are well aware of current affairs and political issues and thier legal impacts on scoiety. good effort nevertheless

uba mian...

``Jinnah`s reading habits was limited strictly to 2 areas (1)indian politics (2)Law. He was practically zero in other dimensions of humanities.``

I don`t agree with this view- having read the correspondence and personal letters of Quaid-e-Azam, I can safely say Jinnah`s other reading habits included English Literature (especially Shakespeare`s plays which he had performed as a student) and British Political Philosophy (John Morley, Edmund Burke and John Bright being those who quoted most often) ... but much of what he said indicates that he read of a lot of John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and Alexandar Hamilton. Furthermore his favorite book for a very long time was H C Armstrong`s ``GreyWolf``- the biography of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Furthermore... evidence suggests that he followed keenly newspapers from all over the English speaking world, which were mailed to him every week ... and which he preserved in form of scrapbooks.

Sanjay ...

I`d say that is a very apt analysis and very well worded.

#4 PP


....but the reason i gave for the army being so much in control is that due to the near war conflict situation that pakistan has had with india,...

I think this was the effect and not the cause of Army taking over control in Pakistan.

Pak Army created an artificial war-like threat vis-a-vis India so that it can rule over. Though no such real threat existed earlier or exists today.

PS: A Book - Divided by Democracy- by two very eminent politician-turned-writers- one from India and Pakistan develops that entire theme that Sanjay has referred to in #2.

#6 ML


Chalo...kahin tau hum tum ko pasand aaye... Now its your turn.... aab kuch aaisey baat keh key dikhaoo ki lagey ki wah! kya baat hai !!! Try it...you can do it surely...you just need a try....

Clue :- Think something which you dont want to think..Say something which you dont want to say..

By and large I have to agree with what Sanjay has said. But maybe I would like to add two more points.

Firstly, democracy is really a middle class educated classes business and India`s middle class was rather bigger than Pakistan`s. Perhaps for the same reason Bdesh has been rather more successful with democracy. In Pakistan the tribal culture and feudal set up has been too strong and even when democracy has prevailed, it has been corrupted by these classes.

Secondly, I know this is going to raise Manto`s hackles MKG had some role to play as well. It was he (and his followers) who began the process of going to the masses (unlike MAJ pbuh) and thus in the Indian half, some rapport was built between the political class and the masses which perhaps never got to develop in the West Pak. By contrast in E Pak, there were populist politcians like Fazle Haq, Bhashani and Mujib who were able to reach out to the E Pak masses.

Regards

Re #7

Sanjay,

i wont argue with what you say even though i disagree, cause i aint got no eviidence to prove my point.

#10 MAJUMDAR/#11 PP

MAJUMDAR

You have raised some good points.

As regards public rapport of Mr.Jinnah was concerned, it is mostly said that he was not very keen on creation of Pakistan..he wanted to use it as a bargaining tool only. As far as I know(may be I am wrong), Pakistan was not his idea. It was in the last stages that he settled for it. So may be during his lifetime, he did not feel the necessity of going to muslim masses and create a rapport which would help in stabilising a Muslim Nation( the way Gandhi & Co did). He was more interested in getting them their fair share in power balance in Undivided India rather than a separate country.

But at #11 PP do you really think that Military has taken over in Pakistan due to a threat from India??? If that was the case, why did Musharaff overthrow NS when Pakistan had become a Nuclear Power and there was no question of war between the two countries. The widely accepted belief is that Pakistani army uses India as a bogey to put a claim and continue to be in power. But, whatever the Indians may say in discussions forums or at personal level, India as a country didnt/ doesnt want a war with Pakistan.

Of course,you may think otherwise. But we need to know your thoughts.

Re: # 2
[.... it was not sure till the end whether it will take birth at all or not. It arrived suddenly...]

yeah - congress called jinnah`s bluff and the rest, as they say, is sweet history....Thanks to my man Nehru.... he just dumped the hot potato of muslim communalism in jinnah`s hand and jinnah had no idea where to go from there - he just flipped and flopped like a fool - one day secularism, the next day islam..... the guy was completely out his elements .... :))

ooof, what a lot of long words to say a few simple things. Here is a journalists straightforward account. I think it has more information than all of the blather above. I specially liked the quote below. It eerily foreshadows the ouputs of soft islamists like tahmed and many others on this forum.

[quote]
The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?

``Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion.``

I ventured to suggest that the term ``democracy`` was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?

``Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning,`` said Jinnah. ``It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the poor.``

This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.

``Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century.``

This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides ``social justice`` -- the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. ``The land belongs to the God,`` says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the ``true Islamic principles`` one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation`s laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because ``the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy.``
[quote]

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http://iref.homestead.com/Messiah.html

The Messiah and The Promised Land

Margaret Bourke-White was a correspondent and photographer for LIFE magazine during the WW II years. In September 1947, White went to Pakistan. She met Jinnah and wrote about what she found and heard in her book Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India,Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949. The following are the excerpts:



Pakistan was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the influx of minor government officials. There was only one major government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on what his critics called his ``triple crown``: he had made himself Governor-General; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League -- now Pakistan`s only political party; and he was president of the country`s lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly.



``We never expected to get it so soon,`` Miss Fatima said when I called. ``We never expected to get it in our lifetimes.``



If Fatima`s reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother`s was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah`s deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his achievement in creating the world`s largest Islamic nation.



``Oh, it`s not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!``



The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?



``Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion.``



I ventured to suggest that the term ``democracy`` was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?



``Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning,`` said Jinnah. ``It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the poor.``



This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.



``Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century.``



This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides ``social justice`` -- the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. ``The land belongs to the God,`` says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the ``true Islamic principles`` one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation`s laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because ``the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy.``



What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?



``America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America,`` was Jinnah`s reply. ``Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed`` -- he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles -- ``the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves.`` He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. ``Russia,`` confided Mr. Jinnah, ``is not so very far away.``



This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah`s mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America`s military interest in other parts of the world. ``America is now awakened,`` he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. ``If Russia walks in here,`` he concluded, ``the whole world is menaced.``



In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam`s thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. ``Surely America will build up our army,`` they would say to me. ``Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in.`` But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. ``No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan.``



This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan`s own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.



Jinnah`s most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....



No one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of him as a ``savior of Islam.`` In those days any talk of religion brought a cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began sweeping the country he was hailed as ``the embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity.`` The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of Jinnah`s closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great unifier in the fight for independence. ``Perchance it is written in the book of the future,`` ran one of her tributes, ``that he, in some terrible crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality`` as the hero of ``the Indian liberation.``



In the ``terrible crisis,`` Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality, not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi`s civil disobedience program. Nehru says that Jinnah ``disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who filled the Congress`` and was not at home with the new spirit rising among the common people under Gandhi`s magnetic leadership. Others say it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi`s program. One thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.



In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years` existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.



The trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible, a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive for power. ......



Less than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah`s Olympian assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made public. ``The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold`` was the answer given to inquiries.



Only those closest to him knew that the ``cold`` was accompanied by paralyzing inability to make even the smallest decisions, by sullen silences striped with outbursts of irritation, by a spiritual numbness concealing something close to panic underneath. I knew it only because I spent most of this trying period at Government House, attempting to take a new portrait of Jinnah for a Life cover.



The Quaid-i-Azam was still revered as a messiah and deliverer by most of his people. But the ``Great Leader`` himself could not fail to know that all was not well in his new creation, the nation; the nation that his critics referred to as the ``House that Jinnah built.`` The separation from the main body of India had been in many ways an unrealistic one. Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world`s jute supply; the processing mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed.



With his burning devotion to his separate Islamic nation, Jinnah had taken all these formidable obstacles in his stride. But the blow that finally broke his spirit struck at the very name of Pakistan. While the literal meaning of the name is ``Land of the Pure,`` the word is a compound of initial letters of the Muslim majority provinces which Jinnah had expected to incorporate: P for the Punjab, A for the Afghans` area on the Northwest Frontier, S for Sind, -tan for Baluchistan. But the K was missing.



Kashmir, India`s largest princely state, despite its 77 per cent Muslim population, had not fallen into the arms of Pakistan by the sheer weight of religious majority. Kashmir had acceded to India, and although it was now the scene of an undeclared war between the two nations, the fitting of the K into Pakistan was left in doubt. With the beginning of this torturing anxiety over Kashmir, the Quaid-i-Azam`s siege of bad colds began, and then his dismaying withdrawal into himself. ....



Later, reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan`s territorial and economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr. Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no bigot, he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and now that his new nation had been achieved the bigots were in the position of authority. The leaders of orthodoxy and a few ``old families`` had the final word and, to perpetuate their power, were seeing to it that the people were held in the deadening grip of religious superstition.

Majumdar...

I don`t think that is an accurate assessment atleast of ``MAJ (PBUH)``... perhaps credit could be given to Gandhi for mobilising the masses but by no means can one argue that it was alone.

There is a book that Permanent Black publishers in India have published which discusses the early politics of Jinnah (its by an Australian researcher Ian Bryant Wells) and it argues that even before the Pakistan movement (there is no question that it was a massive people`s movement and even the worst critics admit that Jinnah`s personality attracted rich and poor alike) - Jinnah`s politics did not- as is commonly assumed- ignore the masses.

The first popular march in Bombay`s history which disrupted a ceremony honoring Lord Willingdon... was led by Mahomed Ali Jinnah... this was a good two years before Gandhi took to the streets ... MKG was still Qaiser-e-Hind at this point - unwilling to take on the British. For this may I add there is still a hall named after Jinnah ... called the Jinnah memorial Hall ... in Bombay... often referred to as J M Hall .. Similarly the only people`s march against Simon Commission was also organised by Jinnah ...

For these two events the British government wanted to ``deport`` Jinnah the ``dangerous Bolshevik`` (this is what the British refer to him - please read Ian Bryant Wells` ``Ambassador of Hindu Muslim Unity- Jinnah`s early Politics- I`ll quote the page numbers tonight) to Burma... imagine that.

Re: # 12
[...he wanted to use it as a bargaining tool only...]

That`s what YLH tells us..... I guess - congress saw an golden opportunity to get rid of the cr@p once and for all, and agreed to his formula of partition... jinnah didn`t see that coming - clever as he was, he was no match for hindu bania, it seems.... :)

Even if jinnah had lived longer - it would have been a miserable experience.... it`s one thing to deal with the good-natured and feet-on-ground hinuds, much as he despised them, but it`s another thing to deal with crazy mullahs and high-faluting feudals of pakistan..... they would have ate him for lunch..... good thing he died as soon as he could :)

he probably already knew it - he wanted to live his last days in Bombay.....