Elections and ‘Ideology of Pakistan’

The Election Commission’s returning officers, drawn from subordinate judiciary, have been taking vicarious pleasure in applying Articles 62 and 63 of the Constitution to determine the qualifications/disqualifications of candidates on the touchstone of Islamic teachings, asking irrelevant, often stupid questions.

They include “have you ever stood outside a girls’ college?” “Are you properly circumcised?” “Have you ever tasted pork?” “In case you land in a situation where the only drink available to quench your thirst is alcohol, would you drink it?” Of course, those asked these questions knew the only way to avoid trouble was to give the required answer. But noted columnist and a PML-N candidate from NA-60 Chakwal had no such choice. The district returning officer decided to reject Amir’s nomination papers for allegedly advocating free availability of alcohol in one of his weekly columns he writes for a national daily, and flouting the ‘ideology of Pakistan’ in another. Amir has challenged his disqualification in the Lahore High Court.

The candidate could ill afford to express his honest opinion on the first issue, and hence preferred to stick to the contents of his column to insist he did not endorse alcoholic beverages. “I really don’t know from where the RO has got this impression,” he told an interviewer, “as I have not written anything like this.” Earlier, he had tried to explain to the RO that he writes his column in English which is translated into Urdu for publication in an Urdu paper by somebody else, but the officer wouldn’t listen. Apparently, he was impressed by a fatwa issued by one Mufti Jamilur Rehman declaring that Amir did not qualify to contest the election because of his “thinking and deeds.” If they continue to have their way, such self-appointed muftis will be seeking even more stringent controls on freedom of expression in a country we are told was created in the name of Islam. To that later.

First, the drinking issue. Interestingly, retired chief justice of the Lahore High Court, Dr Javed Iqbal – son of Pakistan’s national poet credited with enunciating the idea of a separate homeland for the Subcontinent’s Muslims, and a well-recognised authority on his father’s work – has a different interpretation of the relevant religious injunction. Not long ago, he publically argued in a TV interview that drinking is not prohibited, getting drunk is. His reading of the issue is open to question but the citizens’ freedom to think and debate issues according to their lights is not, must not be, acceptable.

As regards invocation of the ‘Ideology of Pakistan’, it calls for getting our history right. Notably, all major religious parties, especially the Jamaat-i-Islami and the Jamiat-i-Ulema Pakistan (successor of Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind), vehemently opposed the creation of Pakistan, making spiteful remarks both about Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the country he struggled to create at the head of a popular movement. They had a philosophical argument to oppose the new country: that Islam being a universal religion could not be confined within the boundaries of a nation-state. Indeed, Muslims living in India then or at present can be as good practising Muslims as those living in this or any other Muslim country. In any case, the claim of the present religious parties and their supporters that Pakistan was established in the name of Islam, far from being valid, is negated by historical evidence.

The fact of the matter is that as late as 1946, the Muslim League too was willing to remain within a loose confederation of independent India provided the Muslim majority got constitutional safeguards against losing their political and economic rights to a Hindu majority. That would not have been an aberration. There is the example of Lebanon inhabited by diverse communities. To ensure that all communities get due representation in the three state institutions the Lebanese devised a constitutional arrangement reserving the president’s office for Maronite Christians, that of the prime minister’s for Sunni Muslims and the position of parliament’s speaker for Shia Muslims while the deputy speaker is always a Greek Orthodox Christian.

The League accepted the ’46 Cabinet Mission Plan that offered a power sharing arrangement, guaranteeing parity in Muslim and Hindu majority provinces. But the Congress leadership, favouring a strong centre, let it be known that it could change or modify the plan “as it thought best” through its majority in the Constituent Assembly, which is when the Muslim League decided to go back to its demand for Pakistan. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, while the Islamic parties stood in opposition, the founders of the new country aimed to form a separate Muslim homeland, rather than an Islamic state, so as to secure the Muslim population’s political and economic rights.

So how and when did the term ‘Ideology of Pakistan” make its way into national discourse? Although the state was created first and in a weird later development its objectives set two years later in the ‘Objectives Resolution’, ‘ideology of Pakistan’ did not figure either in the 1956 constitution nor the one framed by General Ayub Khan military regime in 1962. It was the next military dictator General Yahya Khan, a heavy drinker and a notorious womanizer, who entrusted the task of writing an ‘Islamic constitution’ (which never materialised) to Justice Cornelius, a Christian by faith but a self-proclaimed cultural Muslim. More to the point, the term Ideology of Pakistan is a figment of the imagination of General Yahya’s Minister for Information, Broadcasting and National Affairs, retired General Sher Ali Khan, known for his pro-Jamaat-i-Islami leanings. He introduced and publicised the idea. It is pertinent to recall here that after a meeting with the ever inebriated general, the then JI chief Mian Tufail had made the unforgettable remarks that he saw the love of Islam shining in the military ruler’s eyes.

Another military usurper, General Ziaul Haq, employing religion to perpetuate his rule, introduced the controversial Articles 62 and 63, from which the ROs have been deriving the right to sit on judgement on the candidates’ faith. Indeed, political parties had the opportunity to remove these provisions when they undertook an exhaustive exercise to sort out several vital issues via the 18th Amendment or the ones that followed. But they ignored the subject. The reason is not difficult to fathom although the stated explanation is the concern that the religious parties would have raised objections, preventing consensus passage of the amendment. The real reason seems to be fear of getting dubbed as anti-Islam. As a result, the space for rational discussion and debate, as Ayaz Amir’s case demonstrates, has shrunk to a dangerous level. It is time to reclaim that space from those who want to use religion to control thought in a country whose creation they opposed in the name of religion.