Pakistan: It Could Not Succeed Unless India Failed

This is the third installment in Kapil Komireddi’s series on Pakistan. Click here to read the rest of the series.

On 14 August 1947, Pakistan came into existence as an improbable state, its territory, split into two “wings,” separated by 1,500 miles of India, and yet the geographically disconnected populations bound into a single nationality on the basis of their shared faith. A few days before that, Jinnah addressed the country’s putative Constituent Assembly. “[A] united India could never have worked,” he told the gathering. Then, almost as an apology, he allowed the Indian in him to resurface and doubt that Pakistani assertion: “Maybe that view is correct; maybe it is not.” What followed was a shocking repudiation of everything that led to the creation of Pakistan.

In a calm, measured tone, Jinnah told the new nation that religion was not the determinant of Pakistani nationalism. In fact, it was immaterial. It was religious divisions, he claimed, that had hindered India’s chances of early independence. He continued to describe himself as an Indian. “Indeed, if you ask me, [religious disunity] has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence, and but for this we would have been free people long, long ago.” Then came the real shocker: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State… We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens – and equal citizens – of one State.”

About 7 million Muslims were making their way to Pakistan at this point – not because they viewed it, as official Pakistani narrative suggests, as the land of hope, but because they feared becoming victims of the retributive violence in India that the creation of Pakistan had resulted in. Jinnah’s speech must have struck them as a cruel joke. His idea of Pakistan was no different from the Congress’s conception of India, and it could have been replicated within a united India, even one with a strong center. Why did he have to uproot so many people? Even Jinnah’s admiring American biographer felt compelled to ask if the founder of Pakistan was “pleading for a united India — on the eve of Pakistan – before those hundreds of thousands of terrified innocents were slaughtered, fleeing their homes, their fields, their ancestral villages and running to an eternity of oblivion or a refugee camp in a strange land?”

Partition had turned the subcontinent into a slaughterhouse. People who had lived in peace – or, at worst, were cordially estranged – for at least a millennium turned on each other with irrepressible fury. Trainloads of corpses traveled in both directions. (One of those dispossessed by partition was Rahmat Ali, the Punjabi oddball who had coined the name Pakistan. Having advocated for Pakistan so fiercely, Ali decided to settle down in England.) This was Jinnah’s legacy to India. But what of his legacy to Pakistan?

His speech plunged Pakistan into an identity crisis. If faith was irrelevant to Pakistan, what exactly united West Pakistan with East Pakistan? What constituted the two “wings” into one nation? The other obvious problem was Kashmir. Pakistan’s locus standi in Kashmir rested entirely upon the fact that a majority of Kashmiris shared the faith of the Pakistani state. But if, as Jinnah said, religion was no business of the state, what was the basis for Pakistan’s claim on Kashmir? Jinnah’s foundational speech had been the strongest possible case for the dissolution of Pakistan. But as his subsequent actions show, he quickly realized his folly and consciously reintroduced Islam as the sustaining force of the state: In less than 2 months after the speech, he had authorized a jihad in Kashmir, inaugurating the first Pakistan-India war 60 days after the Partition – and putting Pakistan through its first experience of defeat at the hands of India. The one advantage of Pakistan that Jinnah was acutely aware, and proud, of was the strategic location of West Pakistan. He glowed with joy as he told Margaret Bourke-White his plans to tap the U.S. treasury by highlighting the threat of Russian invasion. Pakistan, she wrote presciently, sought to “profit from the disputes of others.”

Other than that, she felt Jinnah “had no real national programme for Pakistan except the incitation of fanatic Moslem zeal.” She observed prominent Pakistani leaders discussing the possibility of sending a “liberation army to Palestine to help the Arabs free the Holy Land from the Jews.” Pakistan was bankrupt, at least half a million had been slaughtered in the exodus that marked the Partition, Punjab was littered with “huge transient camps full of landless farmers,” millions of acres of land held by feudal landlords needed to be redistributed, and a constitution had to be urgently framed. But the leadership of Pakistan, in a theme that would be replayed dozens of times over the next several decades, was too consumed by internationalism, and was only too happy to conjure up grievances to feed its hungry people.

But the primary challenge to Pakistan’s sense of itself came from India. Jinnah had fought for Pakistan on the premise that Muslims and Hindus could not coexist in one nation. India’s success at forging a nationality out of its diversity stood as a towering repudiation of the idea of Pakistan and, merely by being itself, impeached the logic of partition: Pakistan could not justify its creation as long as India accommodated religious diversity. It was not enough that Pakistan turned into an explicitly Islamic country: for its creation to be truly vindicated, the country it was hacked out of should have turned Hindu.

The tragic irony of Jinnah’s struggle for Pakistan was that, far from emancipating India’s Muslims, it empowered India’s Hindu chauvinists. (It is impossible, in fact, to imagine a man who has caused greater harm to India’s Muslims than Jinnah.) It exonerated the demonization of Muslims as untrustworthy Fifth Columnists, and it legitimized the project to turn India into a Hindu state. Once a homeland for India’s Muslims had been established, some Hindus argued, what they had left behind was, logically, a homeland for Hindus. This was a powerful argument, especially after the carnage of partition. A lesser man would have succumbed to it – just as Jinnah had in Pakistan – but not Nehru. He was determined not to turn India into what he called a “Hindu Pakistan.”

Having realized that the quest for a Muslim nation that the idea of Pakistan embodied had failed – or was bound to fail – Jinnah sought to bequeath the appearance of a strong state. Power, and the accoutrements of power, would fill the vacuum created by the lack of ideas. Jinnah spent those first violent months of his country’s painful birth writing to Ambassador Mirza Ispahani in Washington to find a limousine and aircraft befitting the governor-general. “What about my car?” an impatient Jinnah asked Ispahani in December of that blood-soaked year. “I want the car very badly.” The distance between his priorities and the plight of the people he governed could not have been greater. When he died, just over a year after Pakistan’s creation, he had left behind all the trappings of a state, but not even the trace of a nation. The end itself was Sophoclean. Cancerous flames had flared up in his lungs, and he was forced to spend his last months marooned in the mountains of Ziarat. During an emergency shift to Karachi, the military ambulance in which he lay dying broke down on the highway to the capital. He was too weak to climb into his limousine. The heat was oppressive. Flies swarmed around his face. He gasped for air, his life “ebbing away, drop by drop, breath by breath.” Refugee camps stood on either side of the road. The date would cast a shadow: September 11, of 1948.