The well-known efforts on the part of those of our ‘intellectuals’ and ‘philosophisers’ who want to redefine Pakistan ideology, to invent a Quaid-i-Azam of their liking and choice, do not seem to be coming to a halt. These intellectuals and philosophisers, though regard themselves, rather aggressively, as the most genuine of Pakistanis, are committed to prove or establish that ‘Islam’ had nothing to do with the creation of Pakistan. For this purpose they passionately contend that Quaid-i-Azam’s vision of Pakistan had been a ‘Secular State where religion would have nothing to do with the matters of the State and Society. This precisely was what the participants of a “Bol” programme were trying to say in their tribute to the Founder of Pakistan. Nazir Laghari went as far as to charge Chaudhry Mohammad Ali the first Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan (that came into being on March 23, 1956 under the country’s first constitution) of having tried to censor the ‘controversial’ speech of the Quaid delivered to the Constituent Assembly on the 11th of August 1947, three days before Pakistan came formally into being. It is this speech of the Quaid that the detractors of the Two-Nation theory have banked upon almost entirely to establish the Secular credentials of the man whose struggles had led to the creation of Pakistan. This speech had been delivered in a special context. It was not intended to redefine the ideology of Pakistan. It was addressed to the minorities living in those parts of the sub-continent that were to constitute Pakistan. It was designed to tell these minorities that they had no reasons to feel or conclude that their lives and rights would be at the mercy of the Muslim majority, that they were to enjoy similar citizenship status with similar privileges and securities as their Muslim countrymen, and that there would be no discrimination between the citizens of Pakistan on the basis of religion. This assurance had been necessitated because of the fear of a severe backlash to the unprecedented scale of killings in East Punjab and Bihar. The Quaid in this speech, far from redefining the ideology of Pakistan, had sought to define the character of the Islamic State that he had intended to build— a state in which social justice was to be delivered to every citizen of the country be it a Muslim or a Non-Muslim.
The Quaid was not a demagogue that he would cancel out all the statements he had made prior to the august 11, 1947 speech— the statements in which he had time and again laid great stress on the idea that Muslims were a Nation and had a right to have a state that reflected their beliefs.
To a Beverly Nichols’ question in 1943, he had said:
“If we are going to have a country of our own, I don’t’ find any reason why we shouldn’t have laws there, that are embedded in our Faith.”
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