October 7 marked the 61st anniversary of the first military takeover in Pakistan. It was on this day, in 1958, that General Ayub Khan, hand-in-glove with the then President of Pakistan, Iskander Mirza, imposed the first of Pakistan’s several martial laws to come. Five days earlier, on October 2, India observed a seminal event: the 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi—Bapu to his adoring aficionados and ‘father of the nation’ to those still acknowledging his larger-than-life role in the freedom struggle, leading to the birth of India as a sovereign state. Three weeks before that tryst with history, on September 11, the Pakistanis remembered their Quaid-e-Azam (the great leader) Mohammad Ali Jinnah on what was his 71st death anniversary.
For both divided nations of South Asia, these are important dates on their national calendars, especially those related to the birth or death of their founding fathers—towering figures that bravely led their long march to freedom. But both nations, in their own ways, are guilty, consciously or inadvertently, of not honouring the shining legacy of their historic leaders, if not, to be brutally frank, disfiguring and abusing that legacy.
In Pakistan, they assaulted both the democratic and secular credentials of Jinnah, and do not seem to regret the sacrilege, at least not to date. Jinnah was an astute democrat who waged an open and legal battle to win the right of statehood for his Muslim followers of India. He prided himself on being the ‘pleader’ of Indian Muslims for their separate nationhood and never pretended to be their ‘leader’.
However, within 10 years of his demise, Bonapartist autocracy, with its stranglehold on Jinnah’s Pakistan, assiduously de-constructed his democratic legacy. General Ayub not only abrogated Pakistan’s Constitution but also uprooted the country’s democratic roots by bringing in his own brand of, what he and his henchmen eulogised as, ‘basic democracy’.
Further down the road, under General Zia-ul-Haq’s world view of a radical Islam, there was an attempt to re-construct Jinnah as an Islamist. So regimented was the officially kosher narrative of Jinnah that his portraits in his favourite three-piece western suits were removed from public places and replaced with those showing him in achkan (long coat) and shalwar (loose pants).
Jinnah’s seminal address to Pakistan’s first Constituent Assembly on 11 August 1947—three days before the birth of Pakistan—in which he relegated religion to a citizen’s personal domain and mandated that all citizens of Pakistan will be equal irrespective of their faith—was removed from official archives. It was off-limits in every official narrative.
Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, was a sad reminder to Indians, still anchored to his humane persona of a man of ahimsa whose example inspired global titans like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, that it was taking place in an India where faith and religion are increasingly hogging the national narrative. It’s historical record that Bapu wasn’t in Delhi for the birth of India on 15 August 1947, because he had rushed to Calcutta, to put out fires of Hindu-Muslim riots then engulfing Bengal. To his credit, Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy—who subsequently became PM of Pakistan but has been reviled by Islamic zealots for what they considered his secular credentials—fused ranks with Gandhi in pushing back the flames of communal riots.
Lord Mountbatten, Independent India’s first Governor-General, paid the seminal tribute to the Mahatma for his valiant resistance to fanaticism: “In the Punjab we have 55,000 soldiers and large-scale rioting on our hands. In Bengal our forces consist of one man and there is no rioting.” Gandhi, the apostle of peace and communal harmony, was killed because of—in the words of his assassin, Godse—his “persistent policy of appeasement towards the Muslims”. Godse justified his heinous crime by adding, “He (Gandhi) has proved to be the Father of Pakistan.”
Gandhi died a frustrated man, as did Jinnah. The two of them hadn’t anticipated the bloodbath that baptised the birth of India and Pakistan as independent states. Both titans dreamt of India and Pakistan living as peaceful neighbours. Jinnah was categorical in telling the Wall Street Journal that he wished the two to live like Canada and US with open borders.
At his prayer meeting in Calcutta’s Park Circus, on 21 August 1947, after he had superbly doused the flames of communal frenzy—with 7,00,000 in attendance—Gandhi had flags of both India and Pakistan flown side by side. A day before he was killed, Gandhi told a Pakistani visitor of his intent to travel to Pakistan without a passport; frontiers made no sense to him. Today, in Gandhi’s secular India the room is constricting for its minorities.
There are elements in the ruling class who are suggesting to minorities that they can’t be equal citizens. And fringe elements are trying to idolise Gandhi’s assassin, wanting to erect his statues.India and Pakistan are locked in an unending game of one-upmanship on Kashmir, which would have horrified their founders. Gandhi and Jinnah will have a hard time recognising the states they founded. They would hate to be citizens there.