I am breaking my own sanity filter to set things right. As this is on a phone keyboard, it is not possible to go into any depth on these very complex issues. They DO NOT lend themselves to the kind of headline type of sensationalism that is in evidence.
The Muslim League was not driven by the country's Muslim theological leadership. Right from 1906 onwards, it was that segment of Muslim leadership that feared elimination of their community as a socially competitive social group that led the League and formed it's agenda.
Contrary to latter-day Hindutvavadi WhatsApp University educated pop historians, Jinnah did not set the agenda for the League. It had already been set by the oddly named founder of what finally became Aligarh Muslim University, that precisely addressed the potential widening gap between Muslims and Hindus in vying for opportunities in the service and professional sectors opening up where the Muslims had already fallen behind. It was set by Iqbal, who provided the emotional foundation for remembering their separate nature from the masses of India. Jinnah literally acted as their advocate.
This definition of themselves as separately constituted may be agreeable or disagreeable to us individually - I find it hateful - but this is what the League took up as its agenda - not a level playing field, but one favouring the Muslim community in their desperate bid to catch up with the Hindus, the Sikhs, the Parsis, all far ahead.
The political context has been alluded to.
This was a period marked by the alliance of the Ali Brothers with the Congress, united in the support of the Khilafat, of the towering personality of Maulana Azad, leading the Muslim clergy into steadfast support of the freedom movement, of, above all, the heroic figure of Badshah Khan, leading the frontier tribes into secularism and non-violence, in an astonishing tour de force of leadership that was not matched even by Gandhi at his peak.
And there was Gandhi, who had worked out the politics and the demagogy of the situation by himself, and startlingly reinvented himself as a traditional folk leader, with all the trappings that helped the Congress get the bulk of the largely disinterested Indian population into the struggle.
These were the factors that led the League to emphasise the separate nature of their community, a segregation that was, they felt, a critical factor in giving themselves a chance at achieving parity.
This is why the present - and all past - Pakistani administrations have stridently sought from their outset, insistence on parity. Even when patently ridiculous, they insist on parity.
So there it is.
Pakistan was never formed as a theological Islamic state, but as a secular democracy that would repeat the value system of the majority and not betray the essentials of Islam.
It is the enormous gap between the narrative so far and what people encapsulate and represent in their posts that keep me out.
@SecularNationalist
