by MAKHDOOM ALI KHAN
An engagement with the Constitution of Pakistan is like being in love. It is never without anxiety. There is always a lingering concern. The fear of failure is constant. And if the forever falls apart, one never stops thinking of the what-ifs: what if a moment had been seized, a hesitation overcome, a turn avoided and a road taken? The momentary may have become permanent. The bleak, sublime. A life awry may have found a happy course. Yet, we are where we are. Yet again, we cannot stop wishing that it was different. Better.
It began well. In a little over seven years, one man, by the force of his personality, imposed his will on the politics of India, succeeded in creating a country and securing independence. It was a quick and unexpected happy ending. That in any event is the official story. Let us stick with that.
Like many such quick and happy endings, the troubles began almost immediately after. Many of these were foreseeable and measures perhaps could have been initiated to address them. But like in all such matters, those consumed by the pursuit of the ideal had little time for the mundane. There was perhaps also the realisation that sorting out the prosaic may unravel the poetry. And then there was the possibility that the inevitability of partition may force enough concessions, out of those opposed, to make it unnecessary. Whatever the reason, the attention to detail which the tedium of life thereafter inevitably entailed did not detain them.
That the very issues which made him seek partition would dog the state of Pakistan could not have been unobvious to the astute lawyer that Mohammad Ali Jinnah was. The genesis of his disagreement with Congress leaders, though eventually wrapped in a religious slogan to give it popular traction, was constitutional — not religious. He opposed the Nehru Report because it advised scrapping of separate electorates, encouraged vesting residuary powers with the Centre, favoured weaker provinces, and opposed weightage for minorities. He proposed a federal constitutional framework with a weak centre, residual legislative powers for the provinces and constitutional guarantees for the fundamental rights of minorities.
The Fourteen Points articulated by Jinnah made constitutional demands. Half the points conspicuously made no reference to religion at all. The remaining half were also more constitutional than communal. Some of these had a religious tinge, no doubt. There were none, however, which could not be accommodated within a secular, federal, constitutional framework.
It was to rally his people and, provoked by challenges to his authority to speak for the Muslim community, that Jinnah later started moving away from this constitutional position. He began to argue that communal harmony could not be produced by a constitution or secured by courts. At the same time, it was no secret that the maximalist religious position was negotiable if minimum constitutional guarantees were provided.
As late as the arrival of the Cabinet Mission in 1946, he was prepared to trade the demand of a separate homeland for entrenched constitutional safeguards in a federation with a weak centre. When constitutional accord became impossible, the constitutional grounds were downplayed. Communal disharmony and religious antipathy were played up and partition along religious lines was justified.
With Pakistan, it should have been the end of the story of discord. It was not. It should have not come as a surprise that the nationalists in Pakistan would make constitutional demands for their provinces similar to those that Jinnah had made for the Muslim community and the protection of its language, culture and identity.
The Muslim League had not given much thought to post-partition constitutional issues. There was no blueprint of a constitutional design. The Government of India Act, 1935, with some changes had to serve the purpose. It was inadequate to accommodate nationalist concerns.
The immense popularity of Jinnah was not enough to contain nationalist sentiment even during the one year that he survived. With him gone, disagreements became more acute. The insistence of Jinnah to be the sole spokesman for all the Muslims of India was essential for the success of the Pakistan movement. His dynamism was magnified by the lack of qualities in the team around him. Now this lack of qualities became a serious liability. There was no one who could speak with similar authority.
The difficult task of nation-building fell in the hands of largely second-tier politicians. Some of them had no constituency in Pakistan. Their increasing reliance on the state services to push their agendas brought them into politics. These uninspired politicians and their bureaucratic surrogates were not up to the task of transforming a political movement into a functioning political party, translating ideals into structures of the state and creating a nation out of linguistically and culturally heterogeneous and geographically distanced nationalities.
Here was a country where the population of the Eastern wing outnumbered that of all four provinces in the West. The capital of the country, the seat of the Supreme Court, the principal civil secretariat, the General Headquarters, the centres of economic power and the elites who dominated these state apparatus and commercial enterprises were all in the less populous Western wing. The judiciary, the civil service, the armed forces had been a part of the colonial administration of control.
Dawn for more
(Thanks to Razi Azmi)