If the Quaid came home

Originally published on Aug 14, 2025.

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It’s a bit of a tired theme: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, briefly returned from the pearly gates, walks around the country he’s created. He sees violence, corruption, poverty, extremism, and an unlawful regime lording over it. Perhaps, nearly 80 years on, freedom means something else.

He’s shocked, regrets what he’s founded, and calls it a day — or becomes a vehicle for some conservative columnist to tell the public what they should be doing instead. Only, the question lingers: would the Quaid have been all that surprised by what he’d seen?

Because Jinnah witnessed violence, corruption, poverty and extremism under an unlawful regime for most of his years. And that’s without touching on the constant defeats that rutted his path: his family business collapsing around the time he returned from London; Gandhi elbowing him offstage as India’s most promising politician by 1920; the civil liberties he championed crushed by the British Raj; and the Nehru Report setting fire to Hindu-Muslim unity — the work of a lifetime. His own.

In fact, the odds against anything resembling Pakistan were brutal before 1946: the Unionist Party’s obese landlords ran Punjab; Sindh was in the grips of Gandhian arch-feudal Soomros; the frontier was ruled by Congressites outright; and Balochistan wasn’t even on the provincial map.

Lesser men, almost all men, would have surrendered; yet others would have haggled for scraps from within the Raj’s cage. But Jinnah had long understood that freedom was a terrible, vital business: not so much the absence of pain, but the choice to endure it for something essential to being alive.

For freedom’s sake

After all, beyond those dry law books, Jinnah was an idealist — no freedom fighter isn’t. His friend, Sarojini Naidu, called it right as early as 1917: “Never was there a nature whose outer qualities provided so complete an antithesis of its inner worth.” If he was skinny, it concealed “exceptional … endurance”; if he was aloof, it hid a “naïve and eager humanity”. If he seemed too rational and practical, it was only to “disguise a shy and splendid idealism”.

It’s also how he changed map of the world — by keeping his eyes fixed to the eternities. As has been said of British premier Disraeli’s career (whom Liaquat Ali Khan enjoyed comparing to Jinnah): “Failure, failure, failure, partial success, renewed failure. Ultimate and complete victory.”

But such victory can never be complete: if indeed the Quaid came home, he’d have found freedom in recession. We know this not from speculation, but from decades of documentary record.

Interestingly, most of that record is nowhere to be found on August 14: beyond a few bumper stickers, Jinnah seems to have become much too radical, and thereby much too dangerous, for his own country to contend with.

Jinnah vs the state

For starters, consider liberty: is a citizen free if they can be tried by a military tribunal? Said Jinnah in 1919, “I am a firm believer that no man’s liberty should be taken away for a single minute without a proper judicial inquiry.” The Supreme Court disagreed last May, and chose to cite Ayub Khan’s laws rather than the founder’s speech.

That brings us to the judiciary itself, the crown jewel of any free republic. But are the judges in a position to safeguard the people’s rights, now that the executive has snatched away their powers via the 26th amendment?

“Powers which are going to be assumed by the executive, which means substitution of executive for judiciary, such powers are likely to be abused,” said Jinnah. He had said prior, “Instead of giving the powers to the executive, I would rather that the power was given to the judiciary … because in my opinion, it is a lesser evil than the executive.’

The unity regime has thought the opposite: stripping the courts of suo motu powers, choosing its own chief justice every three years, and reducing the entire judicature to a popularity contest. The regime may think, as the British once had, that Jinnah doth protest too much. London’s Edwin S. Montagu once asked him acidly, “Have you ever known any proposal come from any government which met with your approval?”

And yet the Quaid wasn’t instinctively opposed to the state: he viewed a free country as one where the executive was in charge — just not its armed forces. He warned a future chief of general staff in 1947, “Never forget that you are the servants of the state. You do not make policy. It is we, the people’s representatives, who decide how the country is to be run. Your job is only to obey the decision of your civilian masters.”

Yet what of said people’s representatives? As blanket convictions stream in and lawmakers are flung out of the assembly, it’s hard not to remember the Quaid’s words when Satyendra Chandra Mitra, a member of the Central Legislative Assembly, was slapped with preventive detention: “Here is a man who was arrested under a most obnoxious law which gives the executive absolute power to imprison a man on suspicion without trial … How long are you going to prevent him from what he is entitled to do?”

And if the state cried law and order, he replied, “Is it to be performed in spite of the will of the people … by retaining a most reactionary and oppressive measure …? I maintain sir, that if the government were really responsive to public opinion, all the revolutionary organisations and anarchical organisations that you are now talking of and which you want to arrest and to destroy…will disappear.”

This was part of a broader, daring stance — that violence and disorder stem not from uncontrollable populations, but unresponsive rule. Jinnah may well have been addressing Balochistan when he said, “Why do these educated young men take to bombs? Have you ever thought of it? … The way to prevent bombs being thrown is to meet the people, respond to their feelings, their sentiments and their legitimate and proper aspirations.”

It most certainly isn’t to punish those who raise their voices for a better world, as we’re seeing today: journalists thrown on stop lists and anchors taken off television. Yet again, the barrister from Bombay was clear: “I say, protect the innocent, protect those journalists who are doing their duty and who are serving both the public and the government by criticising the government freely, independently, honestly, which is an education for any government.”

Back to the Raj

In sum, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s starting point was freedom. As the late lawyer-historian A.G. Noorani wrote, no parliamentarian spoke as sharply to the British “or their Indian stooges” as Jinnah: “There was no nationalist more fervent than he; no stronger champion of freedom from British rule.”

Because freedom was the end in and of itself. That seems hard to believe these days: as we recently read in these pages, Faisalabad’s anti-terrorism court handed down scores of convictions over the 9 May riots by reasoning the law was well-drafted and wide-ranging: arch-imperialist Lord Macaulay, “the first law-giver of the subcontinent”, had authored it after “the famous mutiny of 1857”.

It’s already been questioned why the court would compare itself to its colonisers, and the PTI to yesterday’s rebels. But as a scholar of the Raj — if not of our own freedom movement — the learned judge would also know what Macaulay had written when those rebels were fired from cannons in Peshawar: that “their heads, legs, arms, flying in all directions was read with delight”. Reflected Macaulay, “I could be very cruel just now if I had the power.”

The learned judge would also know that these weren’t the emotional outbursts of a jolted regent, but sober policy directions, steeped in the racial superiority of an alien overclass. All things considered, Macaulay thought us unfit for self-rule anyway; that what we could really “have [is] the next best thing — a firm and impartial despotism”; and that the British carried with them “all the noblest virtues of a sovereign caste”. By jingo, chaps.

In fairness to Faisalabad, the anti-terrorism courts quote Macaulay instead of Jinnah in the same way the Supreme Court leans harder on Ayub’s Pakistan than the Quaid-i-Azam’s. As the song goes, it looks like freedom but it feels like death.

All of which is to say that if Jinnah indeed came home today, the story of his life points to anything but a lament, a lecture, a sad retreat in the rain. What it points to is, frankly, audacity: that no wall can’t be breached — the Congress, the provincials, empire itself; none yielded willingly, and all looked permanent until the moment they fell. But fall they did, and Pakistan was born.

So we continue. And we keep the faith.

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