Sooner or later Pakistan will have to give up its obsession with religion and appeasement of extremist forces. Only then will Pakistan stand as a respectable nation in the comity of nations
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| Illustration by Abro |
Source/Credit: Daily Times
By Yasser Latif Hamdani | October 30, 2017
Previous few articles in this space have dealt the idea that if Pakistan’s constitution should be based on fundamental human principles of equality and fair play, as expressed by the founder of the nation, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, on 11 August 1947. He clearly said that religion of a citizen would be his business alone and not that of the state.In my previous articles I also explained in these articles the complex set of events that led to the partition of British India into Pakistan and India. What is clear to my mind is that there is no ideological or religious rationale for having a constitution in Pakistan that distinguishes on the basis of citizenship members of different faiths. I have repeated it before and I will repeat it again — whether a Pakistani is a Muslim or a Christian or any other faith — the state should obviously not concern itself with such a question. The matter of religion is an issue between man and god.
That is why when our wannabe Islamic Napoleon Zulfikar Ali Bhutto took it upon himself to resolve a 90 year “theological” question of the Ahmadi community, he did untold damage to the country. The question of citizenship and self identification cannot be resolved through tyranny of the majority in the national assembly. A national assembly is not the council of Nicaea but it is the representative of all members of a nation. There is no provision, even in this hyper-Islamised constitution, that defines Pakistani as only a Muslim. On the contrary any person born a Pakistani, no matter what his religion might be or lack thereof, is an equal Pakistani.
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