Our political leadership: poacher turned gamekeeper

In its origin, rationale, nature, course, and leadership, the Pakistan movement was democratic. During the last phase of the freedom struggle (1937-47), the leadership at the top and at the lower cadre was democratic, whatever may be said of the intermediate cadres. Quaid-i-Azam Jinnah, who, more than any one else, influenced the course of Indian Muslim politics during the decade preceding the birth of Pakistan, was a democrat to his fingertips.
He believed in democratic ideals, in constitutionalism, in evolutionary methods. Jinnah's was a tried and tested leadership even before he was called upon to organise the Musalmans and regenerate the Muslim League. He had represented his constituency in the central legislature for almost two decades by then; he had carved out a niche for himself in the pantheon of nationalist and Muslim leadership; he had served as the spokesman of both the Congress and the League on various occasions.
He had started out from a modest beginning, and gradually working his way up in the course of about three decades. This he did through sheer hard work and dedicated service, and through means, fair and legitimate. During the late 1930s and 1940s, he was Muslim India's supreme leader.
By the late 1930s the Pakistan scheme had been enunciated and had also found quite a few influential advocates. Several intellectuals were advocating its adoption ever since, and Jinnah was also being continually pressed and persuaded by, among others, Iqbal himself in 1937 to come out in favour of it, to pronounce it as the goal of the Muslim League as also the ultimate destiny of Muslim India. But Jinnah's approach was cautious and democratic: he would not commit the national organisation to it unless there was sufficient public opinion among Muslims in favour. Thus he delayed its adoption as Muslim League's, indeed, as Muslim India's, supreme goal till March 1940.
In other words, the Pakistan ideal was not something that was imposed from above. It was an ideal which the Indian Muslims had debated and discussed for no less than a decade. It was, moreover, an ideal which the Indian Muslims had, especially during the late 1930s, increasingly come to recognise not only as the embodiment of their deeply felt urges and aspirations, but also as the only answer to their situation in India. In an obvious reference to the Muslim outlook during this period, Jinnah, while addressing the Aligarh students in late 1940, said, "When I addressed you last year, the Lahore Resolution, popularly known as Pakistan, had not been passed but I noticed that you were anxious for the declaration of the ideal embodied in the Lahore Resolution. In other parts of India, I had noticed the same feeling. What I have done is [only] to declare boldly what was stirring the heart of Muslim India."
Indirect corroboration of this assertion was provided by Philips Talbot, formerly US Assistant Secretary of State and then a visiting scholar at Aligarh University, in his talk at the Quaid-i-Azam Academy, Karachi in February 1987. He revealed that Jinnah, Liaquat, and other League leaders used to visit Aligarh often during 1939 where they would hold long discussions on the partition proposals, and that it was during these discussions that they hammered the Pakistan scheme out of the myriad proposals presented at these periodic meetings.
"Pakistan" was thus an ideal that had been arrived at through a process of discussion and deliberation - ie, through a democratic process. The hesitation, the caution and the tardiness, if at all, that characterised Jinnah's adoption of the goal is an index not only to the inherently democratic approach of Jinnah, but also to the process of building up a consensus on the proposed ideal. Interestingly, the Pakistan demand was justified in terms of the postulates of both Islam and of Western political liberalism.
The Muslims, though vaguely aware of the existence of "the spiritual essence of nationality" within themselves as early as the closing decades of the nineteenth century, had yet basked in what Professor Barker calls as "unreflective silence".
The Hindu onslaught, especially during the late 1930s, finally wakened them from this mood. Rising bewildered, and reclaimed from their psychological wilderness, they searched their inner social consciousness in an attempt to find coherent and meaningful articulation to their cherished, but as yet undefined, yearnings. To their great relief they discovered that, to quote Iqbal, Islam working "as an ethical ideal plus a certain kind of polity" had endowed them with a moral consciousness of their own.
Furnishing them with "those basic emotions and loyalties which gradually unify scattered individuals and groups", it had worked, as "a people-building force" and had "finally transformed them into a well-defined people". Scattered though they were across the length and breadth of India, they had yet developed the will to live as a nation, on the basis of their "social heritage", to barrow a Toynbeean typology.
Their sentiments of nationality had flamed into nationalism. And nature had, moreover, endowed them with a territory which they could occupy and make a state as well as a cultural home for the newly discovered nation. In the ultimate analysis, it were these two pre-requisites, as laid down by Renan, that provided the Indian Muslims with the intellectual justification for claiming a distinct nationalism for themselves.
In addition, the goal, as defined by the Quaid, was related directly to the life, the anxieties, the likes and dislikes, the hopes and aspirations of the Muslim masses. He attributed the authorship of Pakistan to the door of "very Musalman"; such was the measure of democratisation the Pakistan idea had received and achieved at his hands.
Furthermore, it was demanded on the basis of the universally accepted principle of self-determination. This principle, enunciated by President Woodraw Wilson, was invoked to solve the problem of nationalities in Europe after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War.
This is an accepted democratic principle, which any influential minority in a larger entity which, however, is concentrated in some specific area could invoke to rid itself of the domination of a permanent, hostile majority in the larger context. An indirect invocation to this cardinal principle occurs in Jinnah's first pronouncement on the Pakistan ideal - ie, in his Lahore (1940) address.
Therein, he asserted that his proposition was intended to facilitate "our people to develop to the fullest our spiritual, cultural, economic, social and political life in a way that we think best and in consonance with our own ideal and according to the genius of our people ..."
To revert to the democratic nature of the Pakistan movement. Pakistan is often considered, as for instance by Leonard Mosley, Penderal Moon, H. V. Hodson, Margaret Bourke-White and other writers on the last phase of British raj in India, as a "one-man achievement". During the course of the movement, it is instructive to note, the Quaid never even for once resiled from his essentially democratic outlook and approach. In the first place, he refused to become the life President of the All India Muslim League even when such an offer was made.
Secondly, whatever he did, whatever decision he took, he did with the concurrence of the Working Committee and/or the Council. Not only did the Council of the All India Muslim League met regularly; it also used to meet in emergent sessions whenever anything important came up for deliberation and discussion. Never did Jinnah, for that matter, commit the Muslim League to any scheme, proposals or plans without consulting the High Command and the League Council.
The movement was conducted on democratic lines, and through normal democratic processes. Pakistan was not something to be conferred by the British, or conceded by the Hindus - but something which the hundred million Musalmans of India were to wrest in their own right, through their own inherent strength.
Pakistan was not only established through the democratic process but, more important, it was also conceived as a democracy. "I do not know what the ultimate shape of the constitution is going to be, but I am sure it would be a democratic type, embodying the essential principle of Islam", the Quaid averred in his broadcast to the people of United States in February 1948. The other leaders of the Pakistan movement also believed in democracy and had always upheld the democratic cause.
Unfortunately though, democracy was not allowed to flourish in Pakistan, for one reason or another. She was made to undergo long spells of Martial Law and political disruption, thus wasting some fifteen years (those characterised by direct military rule) in the first forty-one years of her career.
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had the charm, the talents the training, and, above all, the charisma to salvage Pakistan and put it on a firm democratic footing after the 1971 traumatic nightmare; but, then, as Khalid bin Sayeed says, he "was primarily motivated by animus dominandi ... the aggrandisement of his own power ... to control every major class or interest by weakening its power base and by making it subservient his will and policies". He claimed to be a statesman but made Pakistan his patrimony, with himself as "the Rajah". Thus Pakistan was reduced to a "democracy of dictators", to use Bhutto's own picturesque phrase.
After all the endless turmoil and series of crisis, what really saved Pakistan for democracy was, incredibly though, the overwhelming penchant for it, not so much among the political elite which was found to be generally out to compromise, but the general populace whom an Iskander Mirza here and an Ayub there would pronounce unfit for democracy.
This penchant was reflected in, among others, the passion for elections, whatever the constraints, whatever the rules of the game, and however limited the choice they were offered. In any case, after the long night of authoritarian rule, the November 1988 elections represented the first glimmering of a glorious dawn and the eventual triumph of democracy. Above all, they indicated that contrary to what had been usually, but cavalierly, trotted out, democracy does suit the genius of Pakistan.
Interestingly, despite the 1999 political disruption, due chiefly to Nawaz Sharif's animus dominandi approach and Nawabzada Nasrullah Khan's GNA's one-point agenda for Nawaz's exit, Pakistan finally returned to full fledged democracy in 2008, after several periodical hiccups.
Pakistan was achieved through the democratic process and it could develop politically, socially and otherwise only through democracy. Long years have been wasted thoughtlessly, and it is time to settle down, to sheer hard work and build Pakistan along democratic lines. The present democratic venture since 2008 must therefore be supported at all costs, no matter whichever party/parties one had voted for during the last, six elections. Not to speak of building up Pakistan as a modern welfare state, even her sheer survival calls for a democratic order.
Pakistan is a multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-cultural country, and in such a kaleidoscopic landscape national integration could be accomplished, if at all, only through a democratic polity and the democratic process. Hence the democratic roots of Pakistan must need be strengthened at all costs, and any deviation from the democratic path resisted. The armed forces' apolitical, but constructive stance during the recent political crises since 2008 indicates a healthy trend in their thinking and behaviour as well. Finally, it is worthwhile to remember that our basic loyalty should be to the national unit and what unites us as Pakistanis is greater than that which divides us into parties.
(The writer, HEC Distinguished National Professor, has recently co-edited Unesco's History of Humanity, vol. VI, and The Jinnah Anthology (2010) and edited In Quest of Jinnah (2007), the only oral history on Pakistan's founding father).