The first resolve: Head of the All India Muslim League (AIML), Muhammad Ali Jinnah, speaking to party members in Lahore on March 23, 1940. Jinnah was presiding a party session in which the AIML passed a resolution that demanded the creation of separate federations based on Muslim-majority regions in British India. Jinnah resolved to achieve such an arrangement because, he explained, Muslims as a cultural and political polity were distinct from India’s Hindu majority.

A new resolve: Jinnah became Pakistan’s first Governor General in August, 1947. Here he can be seen delivering his first address to Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly. In his address, he resolved to make Pakistan a modern Muslim-majority country where Muslims could advance their economic and cultural aspirations but where communities of all faiths would be facilitated and protected. He said all will be equal citizens in the eyes of the state “because the state has nothing to do with one’s personal religious beliefs.”

To demonstrate his resolve of creating a multicultural and pluralistic Muslim-majority country, Jinnah asked the government’s Hindu minister, JN Mandal, to chair the first session of Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly.

From August, 1947 till September, 1948 Pakistan and India shared the same currency notes. Pakistan had emerged as an independent domain of the British Crown, which is why the notes had King George VI’s image on them.

Another resolve: Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, speaking at the Constituent Assembly in 1949. He was reading out an Objectives Resolution drafted some months after Jinnah’s demise in 1948. The PM announced that Pakistan’s future transformation as a republic and Constitution was to be ‘Islamic.’ The government’s non-Muslim members accused the PM of deviating from Jinnah’s original resolve. But he insisted that the country’s non-Muslim communities need not worry because the future Constitution will be democratic and will safeguard the rights of minorities.

A 1949 Pakistan Railways poster. It was part of the government’s initiative to instil in the people the fact that the Pakistan state had meagre resources.

Between 1950 and 1952, Pakistan’s economy enjoyed a sudden boom when the demand for its agricultural goods grew in the US due to America’s war in Korea. As this 1952 article on Karachi in the National Geographic states, Karachi became a boom town because most of the goods were being exported from the city’s port.

The economic boom saw the emergence of Pakistan’s first-ever five-star hotel. It was built in 1951 in Karachi and was called Hotel Metropole.

Angered by the government’s ‘slowness’ to implement the ‘Islamic’ aspects of the Objectives Resolution, religious parties Jamat-i-Islami and Majlis-e-Ahrar used economic turmoil in the Punjab province to launch a violent anti-Ahmadiyya movement. Controversial Punjab chief minister, Mumtaz Daultana, is often accused of ‘facilitating’ the agitation. The movement was demanding the ouster of the Ahamdiyya from the fold of Islam. Dozens were killed and property belonging to the Ahmadiyya was set on fire. The government called in the military which crushed the movement. The demand of the religious parties was rejected.

During the anti-Ahmadiyya movement, the government and the military distributed a pamphlet authored by Islamic scholar Khalifa Hakim, titledIslam Aur Mullah (Islam and the Mullah). In it, Hakim paraphrased poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s views on clerics to emphasise that the religious parties were at odds with Jinnah’s and Iqbal’s ideas about Islam. The pamphlet was distributed across the Punjab province.

SOURCE:   https://www.dawn.com/news/1322255