Religion and politics

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Religion and politics
By Kunwar Idris
Sunday, 13 Jun, 2010

THE Supreme Court the other day had a word of praise for the parliamentary committee on constitutional reforms’ keen eye in detecting that the word ‘freely’ had been deleted from the text of the Objectives Resolution.

In its original form, the resolution required the state to make adequate provision “for the minorities freely to profess and practise their religions and develop their cultures”.

It was Ziaul Haq’s doing. Not that alone, he had also tampered with Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly on Aug 11, 1947 by deleting the following sentence: “You may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that has nothing to do with the business of the state.” Benazir Bhutto reinstated it when she became prime minister in 1988.

But the damage done by Zia’s forgeries has not been undone. The amendments to the constitution, the laws enacted and policies pursued since 1973 to suppress religious dissent have made Pakistan, as the world media views it, an ideological nursery and recruiting ground for extremists who freely operate at home and across the globe.

Worse still, public officials, if not organs of the state, tolerate and some even patronise militant outfits, particularly so in the heartland of Punjab.

The Supreme Court in the course of arguments on the legitimacy of the 18th Amendment observed that only the people could amend the constitution. Implicit in this observation is the logic that the people must know when they vote that the parliament they elect would also be acting as a constituent assembly. Reckoned thus, neither the parliament of Ziaul Haq nor that of Pervez Musharraf had the people’s mandate to amend the constitution.

Nor does the parliament that is now in existence. The general elections of February 2008 were based on a political pact (the NRO) which has since been held illegal by the Supreme Court. Going back in time, even the members who were elected to the National Assembly of united Pakistan in 1971 had no right to enact a constitution after East Pakistan broke away. Only a new mandated assembly could have done so.

It would therefore be in the best interest of the country, its world image and the critical role it is expected to play in the troubled region if the ongoing legal battle was to end in a political agreement on polls for a new constituent assembly. Our amended and re-amended constitution is no more than a jumble of the ideas and ambitions of Z.A. Bhutto, Ziaul Haq, Pervez Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari. It does not represent the will of the people nor the aspirations of the regions constituting the federation.

National life has undergone a sea change since 1973. The people and regions must be enabled now to vote for the basic principles on which the constitution must be based.

The charter that Jinnah gave to the first Constituent Assembly on Aug 11, 1947 and the Objectives Resolution that it passed on March 12, 1949 could still serve as foundation documents. But the new generation must be given an opportunity to determine whether there is any conflict between Jinnah’s commitment that religion will have nothing to do with the business of the state and the Objectives Resolution envisaging a constitution in which Muslims would be enabled to “order their lives in the individual and collective spheres in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam”.

Apparently there is none. But only the people’s vote can overrule clerical assertions to the contrary.

In the debate on the Objectives Resolution, no Muslim member saw any such conflict — not even Mian Iftikharuddin who was an avowed socialist. He thought the resolution “offered to the world an alternative system of a society based on social justice”.

The then foreign minister, Zafrulla Khan, went to the extent of urging the opposing Hindu members to “insist that the ideals set by Islam before the Muslims and indeed before the mankind [sic] in all these spheres should be fully carried into practice”.

They weren’t persuaded. All of them opposed the resolution. So liberal was the thought process then that Zafrulla, despite his known heterodox beliefs, was named to head the committee that was to lay down the basic principles of the constitution.

The constitution was not to come into being for seven more years but the Objectives Resolution seemed to have given impetus to a feeling that 25 years later culminated in secularism being made a pillar of the Bangladesh constitution. Bangladesh also outlawed politics based on religion. The appellate court there has now ruled that both these features, dropped by the BNP government of Khaleda Zia, should be reinstated in the constitution.

Here in Pakistan we have seen the Islamic ideals of the Objectives Resolution degenerate into violent extremism ever since the resolution was written into the constitution by Ziaul Haq. He didn’t view its contents as the freedom fighters Liaquat Ali Khan and Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar and intellectuals Dr Ishtiaq Haroon Qureshi and Dr Omar Hayat Malik had seen them. It has been a steep descent from Liaquat’s idealism to Zia’s trickery, from rational scholars to indoctrinated savages.

Zafrulla Khan, the resolution’s most vocal and reasoned spokesman then said: “The conception that religion and politics occupy distinct spheres is born of [a] failure to grasp the full significance of religion” which, according to him, was “the highest possible development of spiritual, moral, physical and intellectual features” while politics was but one aspect of human relationships.

How then can we see religion and politics in that relationship? Zafrulla, himself a judge, showed the way. “The ultimate guardian and safeguard of political institutions,” he said, “is an independent judiciary” and in an Islamic polity “no office was invested with greater dignity and independence than that of the judge. The impartiality of the judiciary is secured by express commands in the Holy Quran”.

We should place this dilemma before our Supreme Court. It looks close to answering that call.