Not every day do we encounter a spirit discussing a country’s future. This is a particular case. And in attendance is Mr Jinnah’s spirit (you heard it right!). Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a cigarette-smoking, wine-loving, ham sandwich-gobbling lawyer, spearheaded the Pakistan movement towards its formation in 1947.
As a paramount leader of the Muslim League between 1913 and 1947, Jinnah is hailed as the father of Pakistan. With its formation in 1947, Jinnah became the governor-general of Pakistan until his death.
Jinnah’s Pakistan: “moth-eaten”?
In his statement on 4th May 1947, Jinnah noted: “The question of a division of India, as proposed by the Muslim League, is based on the fundamental fact that there are two nations – Hindus and Muslims – and the underlying principle is that we want a national home and a national state in our homelands which are predominantly Muslims and comprise the six units of Punjab, the N.W.F.P., Sind, Baluchistan, Bengal and Assam.
This will give the Hindus their national home and a national state of Hindustan, which means three-fourths of British India.” However, the further partition of Punjab and Bengal had given Jinnah what he dismayingly called the “mutilated, truncated, and moth-eaten Pakistan”.
On August 11, 1947, Jinnah addressed the new nation and informed its leaders: “If we want to make this great state of Pakistan happy and prosperous, we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor… If you will work… together in the spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste, or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make. You are free, you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or any other place of worship. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state… We are all citizens and equal citizens of one state.”
The initial political years of Pakistan’s formation
Despite this turn-around in the nation-making logic, the seeds of communal hatred that spewed through the making of the postcolonial nations of India and Pakistan had already killed over a million people and displaced over another fifteen million people across borders. More unfortunately for Jinnah, he did not live to see the country he came to create. A year later, in September 1948, Jinnah died at 71.
What followed in Pakistan, thereafter, was a contested re-thinking of what Pakistan meant in the absence of Jinnah’s word. What followed from then on was an elite capture of the state. The military-bureaucratic apparatus, which sustained the relations between the Metropolitan British empire and its multiple Indigenous elites, had already enabled a state that would merely benefit the elites.
Hamza Alavi calls Pakistan an “overdeveloped state”—a state that is too powerful in its origins, with its military-bureaucratic apparatus, and continuously works to subordinate the nation’s social classes. Elsewhere, Alavi writes: “Whereas in Europe, nations were constituted into states, in postcolonial states, the problem is inverted—states have to be transformed into nations.”
Soon after the formation of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, the first Prime Minister, was assassinated in October 1951. Thereafter, Pakistan was controlled and replaced by one bureaucrat with another. Muhammad Ali Bogra, Ghulam Muhammad, and so on held power in Pakistan’s initial years.
Within the 11 years of its formation, Pakistan had already replaced seven Prime Ministers and four Governor Generals. Only in 1958, with a military coup of General Ayub Khan, there was relative political stability. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, infamously called Pakistan’s rulers “Daftaries”—civil servants working as heads of government.
Background on Jinnah’s spirit in official papers
I first came across a séance (i.e., an event in which attempts are made to communicate with spirits) invoking Jinnah’s spirit a few years into his death in Venkat Dhulipala’s Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India.
A revisionist work in its outlook, Dhulipala sought to challenge Jalal’s thesis on Pakistan as a “bargaining counter” and several others who argued Pakistan as an “insufficiently imagined” nation. In Creating a New Medina, Dhulipala draws on a treasure trove of archival data (including newspapers, both in Urdu and English) to make a coherent argument that the idea of Pakistan was debated and discussed sufficiently and wholly.
The book seeks to reveal many things; a puzzling document is placed within Jinnah’s Papers. A short document of a special séance held on March 13, 1955. Elsewhere, Dhulipala recounts:
Towards the end of a rather long day of research in the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library in London, I stumbled upon a rather unexpected document in the private papers of Qaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah (Dhulipala, 2014:1).
The handwritten document, with its ink fading, was the record of a special séance with Jinnah’s spirit held on 13 March 1955, nearly seven years after his death and eight years after the birth of Pakistan. The séance was conducted against the backdrop of Pakistan’s first constitutional crisis, by a spiritualist hired by a government officer, a certain Mr. Ibrahim who was at hand to direct the questions.
Ali Usman Qasmi, a writer on Pakistan’s belongingness, has made it available for the public to look at upon Mr. Qamar uz Zaman’s consent to provide him with a copy of the document. The file (referenced here as F-1067) contained this in the Jinnah Papers.
The spirit of Jinnah finally speaks.
Three people are in conversation. Mr. Ibrahim, a certain someone, who has organised the séance. There is the spirit of Jinnah, which is given a cigarette to smoke. And the spiritualist.
After the initial pleasantries between the spiritualist and Mr. Jinnah (the spirit), Mr. Ibrahim (an officer of the Government of Pakistan) is permitted by the spirit Jinnah to speak with him. Mr. Ibrahim’s first question is: “Would you like to smoke a cigarette?” A cigarette is lighted and fixed in a wire-stand upon an affirmative answer.
Mr Ibrahim adds: “Sir, as a creator and father of Pakistan, you have done your best to bring it up on proper lines, won’t you guide the destiny of the nation now? To this, Mr. Jinnah responds: “My dear friend, it is not for me now to go to Pakistan and guide the political situation there. I see here flashes of evil pictures about Pakistan. I think the political conditions there are most unhappy. There are the Heads who have in them selfishness, and none at all is eager to be selfless there”.
Mr. Ibrahim presses further: “Don’t you think there is a good and prosperous future for Pakistan?” To this, Jinnah says: “I don’t think so. Prosperity of a country depends on the selflessness of people who controls its destiny.”
Mr. Ibrahim asks, what is it that you want present rulers to do? Again Mr. Jinnah notes: “Only in one word I shall give my opinion. I have already said that just now: ‘selflessness, selflessness’ That is the only advice I can give them now. It is easier to acquire a country, but it is extremely difficult to retain it. That is, in a nutshell the present position of Pakistan to gain which river of blood flowed”.
Dismayed at the situation and political conditions, Jinnah’s spirit advised the Pakistani citizens to “be non-selfish and be dutiful to [their] country. Avoid quarrel and cultivate peace”. In his last advice to Government servants, Mr Jinnah (the spirit) asked them to be “dutiful”.
[if you wish to read the whole conversation, check the document here!]
Concluding thoughts
This is one of the most bizarre narrations of séance that has found its way to the official archives. And no one had noticed it until Dhulipala. Why was Jinnah’s spirit invoked? Who thought of it? What could they achieve from it? Only one can guess.
But, if it were to have made its way into the official papers, then it can also be discerned that it was both performed and preserved (as documentation) at the highest levels.
Despite its somewhat illogical mechanisms (a séance session, that too!), it is still worth considering. Pakistan subsequently descended into turmoil, with multiple military coups and brief democracies and, again, military rule. Several writers have attributed Pakistan as a satellite state of America (at once) and (now of) China.
Others have attributed the problem to the nexus between the Ulema, the Political elite, and military rulers, who compete to hold onto power. Several others have attributed the problem to its identity—a negative image of national identity based on what India is not. But the problem could be all of these things together, working in tandem with one another and reinforcing each other.
In spite of all this, Mr. Jinnah’s appearance as a spirit provides a refreshing outlook to what may have gone wrong with Pakistan.
Cover Photo by Frames For Your Heart on Unsplash