Published in the Express Tribune blogs on August 20, 2017
If Muhammad Ali Jinnah came back from the grave and saw the
sorry state of the country he
had created, what would he say?
He would be shocked to see that the Pakistan of 1947 had
been broken
into two, with East Pakistan (where his beloved Muslim
League was founded) no longer a part of Pakistan.
He would see a country on the brink of an economic collapse,
with the dollar (which was equal to the rupee in value in 1947) now
worth Rs107.
He would see fruits
and other edibles from New Zealand and other countries selling at prices beyond
the reach of
the common man in a land which once had the potential of being the granary of
Asia.
He would see an innocent nine-year-old
child killed by
vehicles in a large rally led by a discredited politician. Moreover, he would
see the poor victim being labelled a “martyr” for democracy by the heartless
beasts who were responsible for his death.
He would be amazed to
hear calls for putting the Constitution under abeyance, he who was the greatest
constitutional lawyer of his times.
The magnitude
of corruption would
have shocked him, as he had said time and again that it was necessary
to eliminate corruption for the new country to progress.
He
would be shocked to see the hooliganism of the rowdy and undisciplined lawyers
who attack judges.
He would be appalled
to see
the poverty of
millions of Pakistanis who do not earn enough to feed their families and who
desperately try to survive on less than a hundred rupees a day.
It would break his
heart to see the state
of our schools,
where most teachers are absent except on the days when they turn up to collect
their salaries.
And he would be
filled with horror at the state
of our hospitals,
with the poor waiting in long lines to be attended to by ill-trained doctors,
while our corrupt leaders rush abroad to get treated for the slightest of
ailments.
He
would see the huge palaces and mansions of the rich and the corrupt, but with
beggars streaming our streets and roads, and he would be filled with despair.
He would see that
those who opposed the creation of Pakistan (and who
called him “Kafir-e-Azam”)
are now the guardians of its ideology (as defined by them). As a result,
intolerance is so high that even he would not be considered by such people to
be a Muslim.
He would see
Christians and other minorities being routinely charged with
blasphemy (and
being burnt alive). He would see Muslims being killed because their beliefs are
different from those of their killers, who believe that only they are true
Muslims.
He would
remember what
he had told the
citizens of the country he had created:
“You are free; you are free to go to your temples. You are free
to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of
Pakistan. You may belong to any religion, caste or creed—that has nothing to do
with the business of the state.”
He would see girls as
young as 11-years-old being married off to men old enough to be their
grandfathers. The jirga system, the punishment of women for the sins of
their male relatives, helpless women being stripped naked, gang-raped and made
to walk in public would have shocked him to no end.
He would see rampant
loot and plunder of the country, with shameless members of provincial ruling
parties passing legislations to
prevent the National
Accountability Bureau (NAB) from investigating their corruption.
And he would see the
city of his birth (Karachi) sinking under heaps of garbage and its residents
being slowly poisoned by air and water
pollution.
And
Jinnah would have wept because present-day Pakistan is so utterly and so
horribly different from the country he had wanted it to be.
https://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/55211/if-jinnah-could-see-pakistan-today-what-would-he-say/
