Muslims in aftermath of 9/11

UNTIL a year ago Islam and Muslims were not only secure but vibrant in America and much of Europe. It is not quite the same now. In some instances life for Muslims living in the West has become difficult, and governments in Muslim countries have come under new pressures since the events of September 11, 2001.

What exactly did happen on that day? A dozen or so Arab Muslims hijacked three American airliners, took control, smashed into two tall buildings in New York city and a section of one in Washington, D.C., demolished the structures, and killed three to four thousand persons working in them. The loss of life and property was heavy enough to cause Americans stunning shock, profound agony, and then anger.

But more was involved. Never since the War of 1812 (with Britain) had any hostile foreign force ever hit mainland America. And now a small group of men from the Third World had had the audacity to strike the richest and the mightiest nation on earth. How insulting, nay humiliating!

The attackers were not a bunch of “naughty boys” or hoodlums. Nor did they lust for blood, taking delight in the act of killing. They killed to register a dramatic protest against a perceived American policy of dominating, exploiting, and oppressing Muslim peoples directly or through puppet regimes. Those who planned and managed this operation were allegedly affiliated with fundamentalist, extremist organizations, such as Al Qaeda.

These organizations regard America particularly, and the West generally, not only as corrupt and degenerate, but also as enemies of Islam. The West, therefore, deserves to be destroyed or, at minimum, repudiated in the thinking and lives of Muslims. Thus, if there is a battle between Islam and the West, the lines have been made graphic more by Islamic fundamentalists and extremists than by western governments or intellectuals. The western media has jumped into this battleground because the exchanges here make a good story that recruits customers. A qualification may, however, be added: sections of the American media, being pro-Israel, are in some measure hostile to Arabs and, coincidentally, to Muslims.

How are the American people, politicians, and government acting towards Muslims? While the vast majority of the people here disapprove of terrorism, they are unconcerned with Islam and they are not anti-Muslim. The events of September 11 and the following war against terrorism have awakened them, perhaps for the first time, to the Muslim world as something to think about. Almost seven million persons living in the US call themselves Muslim. Nearly half of them are native-born blacks. They do not appear to have attracted the adverse attention of non-Muslim Americans.

Of the three to four million Muslims of foreign origin, a few thousand may have suffered harassment, abuse, or physical violence at the hands of individual non-Muslim whites. But it cannot be said that any widespread persecution or even discrimination is being visited upon Muslims in this country at this time.

The police and security agencies are probably keeping an especially watchful eye on Arab-looking individuals (that might include many Pakistanis) at airports and other transportation centres. They have arrested several thousand Muslims who were living and working in this country unlawfully. They have placed under surveillance and, in a few cases, interrogated or even detained, some of the leading activists in Islamic organizations that funded and otherwise promoted Muslim causes and campaigns abroad.

President George Bush, his advisers, and party leaders in Congress are informed enough to know that Islam and its ordinary followers pose no threat to the West. Islam is doctrine, law, ethics, and worship. In all of these dimensions it is closely related to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Islamic injunction against interest and the accumulation of wealth would remind one of the admonition attributed to Jesus that it would be no easier for the wealthy to enter paradise than it would be for an elephant to pass through the eye of a needle. Followed in practice, such ideas would destroy western capitalism. But fortunately for that system neither Christians nor Muslims implement them.

Considering the matter at another level, if the Saudi women are hidden away from men, and if all must pray five times a day, western interests in that country are in no way jeopardized. The more the Muslims immerse themselves in spiritual exercises, and the more they stay away from managing worldly affairs, the more incompetent, and therefore the more amenable to western domination and exploitation they become.

The observations of western scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington to the contrary notwithstanding, the alleged conflict between Islam and the West is unreal, bogus. Revolutionary Islam, as understood by persons such as Allama Iqbal, is securely tucked away in books. It forms no part of actual Muslim practice.

One may argue also that it is rather the West that thwarts the Muslims’ interests and freedom of action, and threatens their way of life. This is true, but it has nothing to do with the fact that they call themselves Muslim. Western powers have controlled, and continue to dominate and exploit, non-Muslim as well as Muslim countries. During the first half of the twentieth century, American corporations literally owned the larger part of the economies of Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and several other Latin American (all of them Catholic) countries. This is an encounter between the powerful and the weak, the proficient and the incompetent, in which the former prevail. Religion has had nothing to do with it.

A small minority of Muslims will say, however, that since the West is evil, they (the fundamentalists) must fight it. This is a duty laid upon them by God, and it is called “jihad.” They do not have modern armed forces at their disposal and, therefore, they must resort to other techniques, including the one that western spokesmen have begun to call “terrorism.”

Terrorism should not be confused with various kinds of war, including “wars of liberation” or freedom struggles, which are recognized categories of conflict. War may peripherally include acts of terrorism, but that does not change its essential character: it remains war. Terrorism, strictly speaking, is violence directed against non-combatants for the purpose of intimidating their political authorities to concede the attackers’ demands.

Before speculating how the “war” between the militant fundamentalists and the West will go, a couple of other observations may be in order. First the Muslim militant misunderstands the relevant Islamic injunction. Jihad means endeavour or struggle, but its instrument need not be the sword; it may be speech or writing. Second, resort to the sword is not to be made without regard to the condition of its blade and your skill in wielding it — that is, your war-making capacity.

During a 12-year period of adversity in Makkah the Prophet (pbuh) made no resort to violence in spite of the severe persecution to which he and his followers were subjected. During his ten years in Madinah, the first three wars (Badr, Uhad, and Khandaq) were wholly defensive. The ones at Hunain and Khayber (one preventive and other punitive) were undertaken when Muslim military capability had become substantial. Islam does not call upon Muslims to go out and fight “infidels” if the odds are all stacked up against them.

Muslim scholars must explain to their own people and the outside world that the Quranic injunction to wipe out the “infidels” relates to specific enemies (the “kuffar” of Makkah and other hostile Arab tribes) at a given time and place, and that its implementation is not to be taken as an eternal obligation.

If the militant extremists figure that sporadic attacks on western persons and property will break western power and hegemony, they are mistaken. If the United States and its allies think that they can eradicate terrorism by killing Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their kin — not to speak of innocent bystanders — in Afghanistan and elsewhere, they too are wrong. Terrorism is here to stay; it cannot be wished away. The IRA in Ireland, the Red Brigade in Italy, and the Basques in Spain had their days of heightened activity, and of late they have been quiescent. It is now the day of Muslim militants but with the passage of time, as their grievances subside to a tolerable level, they too will quiet down, and then other oppressed groups will take their place.

Terrorists do not limit themselves to hitting foreign targets. Hindu fundamentalists in India and extremists in Pakistan and some other Muslim countries have killed fellow citizens and destroyed their homes, because they belonged to a different religious or ethnic group. They are just as ready to kill those who do not subscribe to their ideology and models of governance. The governments concerned should, of course, suppress these killers, but that is much easier said than done.

The task before these harassed governments is just as difficult as that of the western powers to end international terrorism. Those to be restrained live hidden lives, their organization and planning are covert, and their professed mission may have a certain measure of popular support. The effort to restrain them must, nevertheless, be made with as much vigour as possible. Deals with them, and efforts to use them against the regime’s other adversaries, will be counter-productive, as it was in the case of Afghanistan where America armed, funded and used large groups of jihadis in its proxy war against the Soviet occupiers.

Many commentators urge the West to locate the “root causes” of terrorism and remove them, implying that it will then go away. Let “justice” be done to the Palestinians and the Kashmiris and the militants among them will stop their violence. This is sound advice. But note also that justice is so very elusive. With rare and brief exceptions, great power and justice have not gone together in history. There is another complication to consider. The spread of modern technology has brought the means of violent resistance within easy reach of the oppressed. Unlike their ancestors, they don’t have to be meek. Even the semi-literate can learn to make a bomb, not to speak of more destructive weapons. Our children and grandchildren are destined to live in an increasingly dangerous world.

A year of hopes belied

A YEAR ago today the world watched in horror as the Twin Towers collapsed and the Pentagon heavily damaged. That day Hollywood became the news: images previously seen only in the movies were shown live on TV.

But even in that initial state of shock all those watching 9/11 knew it would bring great change. While some felt it offered the hope of a better world, others, particularly Muslims, felt fear. One year on, most of the hopes have been dashed, most of the fears realized.

One year on, the world remembers the many victims of 9/11. The images shown on television screens across the globe that day will remain engraved in the memory forever — trapped people waving desperately from the upper floors of the towers, others jumping to certain death. So too the poignant phone messages replayed on TV from those trapped inside to their loved ones outside. 9/11 was dramatic, its scale awesome. But for thousands of families in America, Europe, Asia and many other parts of the world, it was first and foremost a personal tragedy: the loss of loved ones. Nothing should detract from the sympathy for those families. Their grief is immense, and all decent human beings must share it.

They must also share the sadness at the loss of hope and realization of fear that have followed in the year after 9/11. For if the world was a worse place on 9/11/2001, it is an infinitely worse place on 9/11/2002.

The tragedy of 9/11 offered the hope that the American people — blissfully ignorant of the world beyond their borders — would finally take an interest in it. It offered the hope that the US, both the people and the government, would try to fathom why they were subject to such a monstrous attack, and would address the root causes of anti-American hatred.

Unfortunately, before Americans even had a chance to consider the question, their president gave them the answer. Nineteen people plotted and trained for years then killed themselves, according to Bush, because they were ‘jealous of our freedoms’. The naivety and ignorance betrayed by that explanation is mind-boggling. Incredibly, it is one that the American people seemed to accept.

Few in the US made the connection between 9/11 and American policy in the Middle East, Iraq, Chechnya and other zones of chronic Muslim suffering. Few grasped the rage generated by American double standards: upholding democracy, freedom and human rights when it suits them, supporting authoritarian regimes and turning a blind eye to abuse and persecution when it does not. With no attempt to understand the frustrations and anger behind 9/11, the US did nothing to address them.

9/11 offered the hope that the Middle East conflict — probably the greatest single source of Muslim resentment against America — would be resolved, or at least that America would play a more active, less partisan role in doing so. America did become more active in the region — but only when the situation had deteriorated to the point of full-scale war. US involvement comprised primarily of admonishing the Palestinians and giving a blank cheque to the Israelis.

Far from being neutral, Washington supported Israel’s repeated reoccupation of the Palestinian territories. It condemned Palestinian suicide bombers and Yasser Arafat (for failing to curb them), but not the Israeli oppression that produced those bombers. It sympathized with the Israeli victims of Palestinian rage, but said nothing about the Palestinian victims — often children — of Israel’s ‘targeted assassination’ policy, or of the poverty and malnutrition that afflict thousands of Palestinian families as a result of the siege imposed by the Israelis. Instead of reforming American partisanship in the Middle East, 9/11 led to more of the same.

September 11 raised the fear of massive civilian casualties in Afghanistan as the US tried to ‘smoke out’ Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda militants. Ironically, it also offered the hope of long-term reconstruction and stability in Afghanistan. The former was realized, the latter forgotten. Thousands of innocent Afghans perished in the war against terror, many more were injured and displaced from their homes.

A nation in mourning for its own dead, the US showed scant concern for Afghan victims. In the vacuum that followed the collapse of the Taliban, international military and financial assistance could have brought peace, stability and recovery. Failure to provide those has resulted instead in warlordism, lawlessness, renewed poppy cultivation, and continued suffering for Afghanistan’s war-ravaged people.

9/11 offered the hope that the US would abandon the course of self-interested unilateralism it had pursued since George Bush took office and adopt multilateralism. Bush’s threat to the comity of nations, ‘you’re either with us or against us’, soon put paid to those hopes. The US practised unilateralism with even greater vigour. It became more, not less selfish in the pursuit of its interests. And it did so with a sense of righteous indignation, as if the tragedy of 9/11 had given it carte blanche to do whatever it wanted.

September 11 raised the fear that debate, the right to question and criticize, would be quelled. So it turned out. Within the US, anything short of unflinching support for President Bush was construed as unpatriotic. Both media and opposition exercised rigorous self-restraint and gave Bush a free hand. Outside the US, the international community did slowly overcome its 9/11-induced reverence of the White House and dared to criticise American policy, but received short shrift.

September 11 raised the fear that in the quest for national security all manner of human rights and legal norms would be waived aside. That too proved correct. Whether in the case of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, or the thousands held on immigration charges, or the many others held simply on suspicion of terrorist activity (with neither proof nor trial), again and again, Washington sacrificed justice at the altar of the war against terror. Other countries, notably Britain, followed suit.

September 11 raised the fear of a ‘clash of civilizations’ with the West pitted against the Muslim world. That was realized both internally — in communal and ethnic relations within western countries — and externally, between western and Muslim countries. However hard one tries, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that Islam and Muslims became the new target of reviling. The venom and prejudice shown against the Muslims was much greater than that once showered on the communist or Nazi ones.

September 11 raised the fear that governments facing legitimate freedom movements would use combating terrorism as an excuse to crush them. Ariel Sharon was quick to adopt ‘Bush-speak’ to describe Israeli policies: Palestinians were ‘terrorists’, Arafat was the other face of Osama bin Laden, Israel had the right to do whatever necessary to ‘protect its people’.

India’s BJP government adopted the same ploy to deal with the Kashmiri fighters, while Moscow painted the Chechen nationalist movement in the colours of ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’. Everywhere the terrorism ruse worked: the world turned a blind eye to Israeli, Indian and Russian state violence.

September 11 raised the fear that George Bush would not be able to cope with such a massive national crisis. For Americans (apart from on day one when Bush disappeared) that fear proved unfounded: most are full of praise — and wonder — at their president’s handling of the crisis.

The rest of the world rates Bush’s performance quite differently. His ‘axis of evil’ speech sent alarm bells ringing across the world. It, and his continued warmongering on Iraq, pose a far bigger threat to global security than Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda.

The world did indeed change after 9/11. The irony is that only the negative changes predicted one year ago has come about: there is precious little positive change. Looking to the future, fear rather than hope is the predominant sentiment.

September 11 and Europe

AS America is in the midst of the anniversary of 9/11, it’s worth recalling how Europe dealt with the problem of political terrorism — and won.

From the 1970-1990s, Europe was assailed by a variety of violent extremist groups — what the North American media calls ‘terrorists.’ I try to avoid this pejorative term because it inhibits thoughtful analysis and has often been used as a propaganda weapon by the powerful against those resisting injustice.

For example, when I was covering South Africa in the 1980s, Nelson Mandela’s ANC bombed restaurants and buses packed with civilians. South Africa branded the ANC a ‘terrorist organization.’ Yet abroad, Mandela and his ANC were hailed as ‘freedom fighters.’ Former Afghan ‘freedom fighters,’ like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, are today scourged as ‘terrorists.’

In Europe, during the 1970s and 1980s, Palestinian groups staged high-profile attacks to gain international attention for their then little-known cause. The Irish Republican Army, largely financed by Americans, waged a bloody campaign to unite Belfast with Ireland. In 1993, the IRA detonated a huge truck bomb in London, causing nearly $1 billion in damage, the most costly terror attack until the 2001 World Trade Centre outrage.

Italy was terrorized by gangs of murderous Marxists and fascists, culminating in the 1978 kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. West Germany battled for a decade against left-wing fanatics of the Baader Meinhof gang, Red Army Faction, and other groups seeking to destroy democracy and capitalism. Spain continues to be hit by bombings and assassinations by Basque ETA separatists.

Here in Paris, I vividly recall the massacre on the rue de Rennes, where shoppers were sliced into bloody ribbons by flying plate glass after Lebanese detonated bombs in one of the city’s busiest shopping areas. France suffered two decades of agonizing attacks by assorted Mideasterners, North Africans, Corsican separatists, Abu Nidal’s killers, Carlos the Jackal, and government assassins from Israel, Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Serbia.

Unlike post-9/11 United States, Europe did not indulge in self-pity or nationalist frenzy. Europeans became hardened to random, bloody attacks. There were few calls in Europe, such as we now hear in the US, for vengeance attacks and extensive military operations against foreign nations. Europeans realized they faced a long, hard struggle in the shadows. After two decades of political violence in Europe, most of its perpetrators were defeated or reduced insignificant

By contrast, 9/11 was a titanic, single shock to generally unworldly, self-absorbed Americans, whose nation had been untouched by war or terrorist attacks before. Most Americans had little idea how deeply their government was involved in other nation’s affairs, or how much the US had come to be hated across the Mideast. This was the first time America would have to pay what the British imperialists used to call, ‘the price of empire.’

Europeans understood three important things Americans have yet to grasp. First, police and intelligence forces must be the spearhead of a war against terrorism. Military forces are blunt instruments that should only play a minor role, defending borders and key installations. Better airport security — not a preemptive invasion of Afghanistan — would have spared the World Trade Centre and Pentagon the attack that came on September 11 last year.

Second, it was not necessary to curtail liberty and civil rights to wage a campaign against political violence. Better security coordination, not less freedom, is the answer. Fortunately for the Europeans, there was no John Ashcroft to threaten their rules of law and common decency. Europe did have its share of closet proto-fascist politicians, and a few warmongering politicians who urged military crusades, but these mountebanks were largely sidelined or ignored.

Third, during the ‘terror years,’ Europe’s media generally behaved in a more responsible, balanced, and critical manner than much of today’s US media, which, since 9/11, has too often promoted panic, fear, and hatred of Muslims and Iraq in America. The European media had its share of ‘news fabricators, but they were nowhere near as influential as the big guns of America’s axe-grinding neo-conservative and right-wing media. Further, Europe’s press, which is politically varied and avoids the growing uniformity of views in American media, did not rush to offer itself as mouthpieces for government propaganda, as has some of the US media.

The results of public manipulation and fear are painfully clear. The US media has convinced a majority of Americans they are totally innocent victims of evil forces, and that Iraq was behind 9/11, though there exists not a shred of evidence. So Americans clamour for war against Iraq.

Over 75 per cent of Europeans oppose attacking Iraq, in spite of efforts by right-wing British media to fan war fever. In fact, the common view here in Europe is that the Bush administration has run amok and is a greater threat than international terrorism or Iraq.

American conservatives like to accuse Europeans of being wimps in the so-called war against terrorism. Europeans, who understand war and colonial conflicts far better than Americans, learned from 20 years’ painful experience that patient police work and diplomacy, rather than flag-waving and military breast-beating, have been and will remain the way to overcome political violence. —Copyright Eric Margolis, 2002.

Natural-born storytellers

GOOD storytellers have always seemed like natural charmers, but now there is hard science to prove it.

New genetic research that traces the roots of spoken language back to a “Linguistic Eve” in Africa shows how genes may have conferred a romantic evolutionary advantage.

The finding, published last month in the British science journal “Nature”, shows how a single genetic mutation occurring between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago might have left some early humans better able than others to spin engaging stories and sing beautiful songs. That prowess, in turn, would have made them more likely to acquire sexual partners and spread their genes, says the study’s lead author, Svante Paabo, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The study supports a novel theory by Richard Klein, an archeologist at Stanford, that the emergence of behaviourally modern humans was set off by a major biological change, most probably the acquisition of genetic traits giving humans the ability to exert the sort of fine control over throat and mouth muscles that is needed for rapid speech.

The new study _ the product of an interdisciplinary team of archeologists, linguists, geneticists and biologists put together by the Planck Institute _ promises to foster warmer feelings between long-feuding social and natural scientists. —Los Angeles Times

Jinnah and democracy

AMONG the foremost Indian participants in the final phase of the struggle for freedom in India, Jinnah was indisputably the most fervent believer in a constitutional approach. The origin of his belief in constitutionalism may be traced back to his early political training and background.

For one thing, law was his first passion in life. For another, while still a student in England (1892-96), he, like most colonial students of the time, came under the mesmeric spell of nineteenth century British liberalism; its exponents and leaders won his admiration, its principles his loyalty, and its institutions his life-long commitment.

By this commitment Jinnah would stand unswervingly and squarely — to the end of his life. Indeed, among the Indian leaders who worked for the dissolution of what was till 1947 the British Indian Empire, few were as democracy-oriented as Jinnah. And when he decided on a career in politics, this commitment, along with his penchant for law, inexorably led him to electoral (and parliamentary) politics and to joining the only political party at the time — the Indian National Congress. The Congress itself was committed to internal democracy, which it practised scrupulously, democratic politics and constitutionalism at that juncture.

A person who opposed (and even condemned) direct action and extra-legal but extremely paying methods in terms of political dividends, who stood steadfastly by the rules of the constitutional politics, who climbed the rungs of the leadership ladder through elections — whether at the party or at the national level — such a person could not have possibly opted for any other path in an age of revolutionary thoughts, ideas and activity, demagogy and emotional slogan-mongering. He would perhaps have succumbed to the lure of radicalism had he not been deeply imbued with an abiding faith in democracy — its raison d’etre, approach, methods, and as a way of life. Interestingly, his faith in democracy went beyond mere commitment.

Since democracy and electoral politics are entwined, his rise and role as a parliamentarian represent, as it were, the extent of his commitment to democratic norms and principles. He was indeed a great parliamentarian, one of the greatest of his times. For some thirty years during 1910-47 he was a member of the imperial council and its successor, the legislative assembly of India, and fought for India’s liberation from the parliamentary platform, rather than on the streets, striving all the time to corner the British in their own game and under their own rules. According to Stanley Wolpert, he had also made the greatest contribution to parliamentary democracy in undivided India.

All through his political career, he stood for consensual politics. This had led him, for instance, to negotiate the Congress-League, Lucknow Pact in 1916, draw up the Delhi Muslim Proposals in 1927, and formulate the famous Fourteen Points in 1929. Although the Lahore resolution was passed on March 23, 1940, he did not make it the supreme goal of the Muslim League and of Muslim India till a year later when he found that the Muslims “were anxious for the declaration of the ideal embodied in the Lahore resolution”. He waited until he realized that the resolution represented the yearning and aspirations of Muslim India. “What I have done is to declare boldly what was stirring the heart of Muslim India”, he told the Aligarh students on March 10, 1941.

Pakistan itself was conceived, justified, fought for, and spelled out in democratic terms. For one thing, it was demanded on the basis of a universally accepted democratic principle — the right of self-determination — which any sizable and influential minority or sub-national group within a larger geographic context, but demographically dominant in some specified areas, could invoke to rid itself of the domination of a permanent, hostile majority. And before invoking this principle, Jinnah had successfully argued the case of separate Muslim nationhood in terms of the distinguishing traits, both at the macro and micro levels, that transform an aggregate of population into a nation, as adumbrated by Lord Bryce, and by Ernest Renan in his essay on ‘Nationality’.

For another, Pakistan was sought to be established, not through a British fiat or Hindu concession, but through the democratic process of ascertaining the wishes of the Muslims. “We want the verdict of the electorate, such as it is constituted, of Muslims, whether they want Pakistan or whether they want to live here as an abject minority under the Hindu Raj”, declared Jinnah on October 18, 1945, during the critical 1945-46 elections which were to decide the fate of the Pakistan demand.

Earlier, on October 10, 1945, he had affirmed that “if the Muslims’ verdict is against Pakistan I will stand down”. That means that he stood by the electoral process as the court of last resort, as the litmus test, all the way, even at the height of his political career as Muslim India’s sole spokesman.

As a corollary to his faith in the parliamentary process, Jinnah strongly believed in the sanctity of the vote, and always exhorted the people to exercise their right to vote the way they liked, but with caution and on the basis of principles they believed in. During the 1945-46 elections he said, “Your votes in favour of the Muslim League candidates are not for ... individuals but... for Pakistan”.

But even in those elections he spurned offers of opponents to withdraw for a consideration. When, for instance, Abdur Rahman Siddiqui brought in an offer from Hasan Ispahani’s opponent in Calcutta to withdraw on payment of his deposit money of Rs. 250, Jinnah retorted angrily: “Pay money? Indirectly bribe a candidate to withdraw? No, never. Tell him at once that his offer is rejected. Hasan will fight him.”

Likewise, during the crucial Sindh elections in December 1946, when he was approached for sanctioning a further sum of Rs. 50,000 for the campaign, Jinnah told G. Allana “in a firm tone”: “But remember one thing. I don’t want you to pay a single rupee to any voter as bribe to vote for us... I prefer defeat to winning election by adopting dishonest and corrupt means”.

Jinnah believed in the supremacy of law and condemned any abridgment of constitutional and civic rights. In raising his voice against such abridgment, he made no difference between a friend and a foe, between one community and another. For instance, he protested against the internment of Annie Besant (1917) and the Ali Brothers (1914), the detention without trial of Sarat Chandra Bose (1935) and Vithalbhai Patel (1931), and the promulgation of the Rowlatt Bill (1919).

He believed that “no man should lose his liberty or be deprived of his liberty without a judicial trial in accordance with the accepted rule of evidence and procedure”. He stood for extending powers to the judiciary instead of to the administration, and for a separation between these two pillars of the state.

Though he was the founder and head of state of Pakistan, Jinnah refused to forestall the shape of the new state’s constitution by giving an outline of it himself.

He was, however, confident that “it will be of a democratic type, embodying the essential principles of Islam”.

In order to get to the inner-most recesses of Jinnah’s thought, this must be read with his unequivocal declaration that removes any cobwebs of misinterpretation that might be sought to be woven around his reference to Islamic principles. He cautioned, “In any case, Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state — to be ruled by priests with a divine mission. We have many non-Muslims — Hindus, Christians, and Parsis — but they are all Pakistanis. They will enjoy the same rights and privileges as any other citizen and will play their rightful role in the affairs of Pakistan.”

This Jinnah said in his broadcast to the people of the United States in late February 1948. Likewise, in his broadcast talk to the people of Australia on February 19, 1948, he had said: “Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it. Islam demands from us the tolerance of other creeds...” This he had emphasized time and again, beginning with his August 11, 1947, address to the Constituent Assembly. Therein, he had declared that “everyone ... no matter what his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and obligations... We are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.” (In the context of this edict, the Musharraf regime’s reversion to joint electorate, in place of separate electorates imposed by Ziaul Haq through a fiat, is a step in the right direction.)

Finally, it augurs well for Pakistan that its rulers, whether civilian or military, whether out of a genuine commitment or for merely window-dressing, swear by democracy. But democracy is like a sapling that must be nursed and nourished till it puts down roots in the soil, and the choice for democracy gets rooted in the consciousness of the people. That it has, by and large, is evident from the penchant for elections among the people.

What has been sadly lacking, though, is that the leaders have proved themselves unamenable to democratic norms and principles. Otherwise, Pakistan today would not have presented the anti-democratic spectre of two major parties one headed by a permanent life-chairperson and the other by a de facto life-president.

Unless these parties are prepared to subject themselves to genuine internal democracy, the prospect of a vibrant democratic Pakistan will remain a distant dream. Cosmetic elections within these parties, if only to meet the electoral requirement, does not bode well for a democratic destiny for Pakistan either. Which means, the dire need is that merely swearing by democracy by those at the apex of the political pyramid would not do. Political parties must exorcise the personal cult syndrome, and should restructure themselves in terms of their hierarchy, leadership and approach in accordance with established democratic rules and practices.

After all, if charity should begin at home, democratic reform must necessarily begin at the top.

The writer was founder-director of the Quaid-i-Azam Academy, and authored “Jinnah: Studies in Interpretation” (1981).