It is time to pause, moan about the wretched decade that has passed, groan about the cheerless one which is beginning — time to take fresh stock of the Quaid’s vision.
In plain Mr Jinnah’s dream of Pakistan Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense but in the political sense as citizens of the State, in which we could belong to any religion, caste or creed without impinging on the business of the state.
Enter, on Mr Jinnah’s frail shoulders, a new son of the soil, Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif, who claims he will deliver the Quaid’s promised land. We’ve heard that one before, we say, but give the man his due. How can things get any worse?
Indeed, they can. If the Shariat Bill is passed, the carefully codified statutes of our traditional law, upon which the Quaid staked the future of this country, will come to be judged on the basis of an ill-defined jurisprudence that has, for hundreds of years, been gathering dust in the heads of religious dogmatists. Their unfettered application would release a dust storm that would cover the Quaid’s venerable law with a blanket of obscurity that few will be able to penetrate. The State envisaged by the Quaid will be struck with a force as destructive as an earthquake. The obscurity of the bill makes it impossible to imagine what the ruins will look like. But they will be ruins all the same. Mian Nawaz Sharif could not do much worse than make this Shariat Bill the supreme law of the land.
Or take the Quaid’s parting words of advice: If we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should work in cooperation, forget the past, bury the hatchet, work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges and obligations.
It is true that the drama of Benazir Bhutto, who also promised so much but delivered so little on the Founder’s dream, has dissolved without a whimper. But she retains the support of 37% of the Pakistani electorate. Will Mian Sahib bury the hatchet and work together with her in a spirit of cooperation?
Mian Sahib has said that he would personally like to see the leader of the opposition and her deputies work with him amicably in Parliament. But there are seven judicial cases seeking to disqualify her from sitting in the assembly. Her husband is in prison. Her party is hounded from pillar to post in the province of Sindh. There are rumours the President is preparing four additional cases against her. Is this any way to lay the foundations of the democratic, consensual society which the Quaid believed so necessary for the welfare of his country? Where are the rights, privileges and obligations the leader of the opposition so deservedly craves?
Finally, although we have lost one half of the Quaid’s Pakistan, we have yet to undertake a post-mortem of the debacle of 1971. In that tragedy, there were clear lessons for all. For one, it is a reminder that military rule is a disastrous substitute for even an imperfect, unstable representative government. It also indicates that without decentralisation of power to the provinces [the Pakistan Resolution’s states], there will be no end to the instability in store for us.
The conspiracy to manufacture a collective amnesia of the events surrounding that period continues unabated. The full publication of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report will doubtless uncover many sordid skeletons in our stately cupboards.
Is Mian Nawaz Sharif powerless to scuttle this conspiracy of silence? How can we allow these criminal distortions of the Quaid’s dream to continue unchecked? The Prime Minister has the peoples’ mandate to tell us the truth and practise it. He must purge our textbooks and our minds of the lies and confusions which abound. The Quaid belongs to the people. Mian Sahib must rescue him from the clutches of dictators, bureaucrats and religious obscurantists before they succeed in completely demolishing the man and obliterating his vision.
We have not taken the road charted by Mr Jinnah. And that has made all the difference.